Leaving The Nest

Had a quite "work-stuff meets the outside world" related day today. The copies of issue 113 of Cinefex, the visual effects fanboy's magazine, finally hit London today. The reason I'm quite excited is that the tiger I helped make is on the cover. The actual cover image we re-rendered a couple of months ago just for Cinefex. I hesitate to say the extra weekend's work for one extra high resolution image was worth it given the stress it caused but Mittens (that's the name we gave the sabre-tooth whilst we were doing the film) does look pretty good, even though I say it myself. You can at least see the millions of hairs and all the detail we put into the teeth, eyes and so on. I've worked on films that have featured in the magazine but I've never done a cover before and it's quite a feather in a company's cap to be asked to do it so we're all secretly quite pleased, hidden behind the front of cynical apathy of course.

I also got the first final (a shot declared finished and ready to go into the film by the director) on Hellboy 2 today. It's one of the tricky ones too which makes it extra gratifying. The new trailer went up today and an older, edited version of the now finalled shot is in it. It's the aerial shot of the stone giant at about 1:41 in. The rest of the shots should get to final status quite quickly now we're hoping. It's been a lot of work to get these shots done but there's light at the end of the tunnel now and I think I quite like it. When you've been staring at the same thing for months you lose all critical faculties but given the size our little team I think we've done a pretty decent job. See what the punters make of it I suppose.