I’m now coming to the end of the trilobite animation – the voiceover was done last night and I just need to cut it into the video, tidy things up, add sound effects and polish up the whole project. Ok- that sounds like a lot, but it’s not too bad – the thing was well planned shot by shot before we started.

At the end of last week I did the first edit and located all the shots that didn’t quite work. I managed to spend time on Friday re-doing those shots and got the render farm going on them over the weekend. I’ve now sort of tracked down the problems with the rendering (machines kept disappearing from the rendering, and sitting around doing nothing). I’ve not solved the problem properly, but I’ve realised that if I turn the computers on in the right order, they generally work OK!

Anyway, by cutting the rendering resolution from High Definition to standard definition, I seem to have reduced render times hugely (by 10 or 20 times strangely – I was only expecting 4 times shorter renders). It’s a bit of a disappointment having to do it, but it has meant that I can re-do shots if they go wrong and I have time to add in extra shots if I need to so the advantages outweigh the problems.

I’ve also managed to spend some time re-doing shots for the yacht safety video animation (which does have to be done in HD) and that’s rendering now.

Because the last couple of months have been so hectic I haven’t turned back on my advertising on Google, so I’m not actively looking for new work. What that means is that when I get back from Mexico, I’ve got an animation for a castle in Stafford, two newsletters and an article for PC plus to do at the beginning of Novermber, and another animation waiting in the wings which may or may not happen.

In addition, I want to finish off my long-awaited documentary on space travel, look into making a children’s animated series and switch all my work from my current overloaded computer to the shiny new 8gb quad core machine currently rendering my animations.