A Major Snag for “The Barrier”

I made good progress this week, but “The Barrier” has hit a barrier. I am almost done the initial versions of all the scenes, but the problems with Xtranormal, I am not sure I can finish the movie.

Xtranormal

I used a program called Xtranormal to create the video. Saturday morning I discovered that they would shut down the website and program at the end of July. They say they will be restarting, but don’t when. Some comments I’ve seen posted suggest that it likely won’t restart.

I don’t see any possibility that I can finish “The Barrier” before the deadline. I will try to get it as far along as I can.

I use Xtranormal Desktop, which will still “work” after July 31, but I won’t be able to output the videos. That doesn’t make it very useful. On their FaceBook page, several people suggested that the company could modify the Desktop version so it would work after the shut down date. I added a similar comment. I hope they do that. I’m not too keen to switch programs at this point.

Progress Update

Prior to this foo-fa-ra, I made good progress. I got eight scenes done. They were a bit shorter; one was just 19 seconds long. I added about 9 1/2 minutes and now have just under 81 minutes done. As of today, I have done 51 of the 59 scenes I had planned. Some of those will be fairly easy to do, but the rest are scenes that will be more difficult. I might be done next week, but I can’t count on it.

Seven of the new scenes are from sequence eight of the movie. The movie has nine sequences. That sequence focuses on the presentation of the development proposal to the development committee. There were several challenging scenes. Most of the scenes occur at the same location in continuous time, but I broke it up into four scenes to keep it simple.

The four scenes together run about six minutes. I have eight characters in the scene. That slows the program down quite a lot. I think I got some really good action. That is, action in the sense of movement, since I wanted to evoke ideas through some subtle movements.

I have my fingers cross and hope that I can still pull this project off.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog