I guess the ol' project isn't quite as dead as I thought.  I recently received a phone call from an old client of mine, Seth Deming.  During the course of our discussion, he unknowingly (I think) gave me some encouragement to keep going on Plagarus, and I guess I took it to heart.  So, here is some extra work I've done.

Here is the run-down, nitty-gritty:

I was never pleased with the opening of Part 2 as it stood.  This was the main reason I never got around to posting it.  It was dreadful.  The audio quality (something persistently pointed out by the viewers for Part 1) was about as bad as it could be, yes, even worse than Part 1.  The voice acting was rushed and didn't have enough nuance and the scene involving the protagonist and the snake robot repair salesman, Ackla, was just not what I wanted it to be.  In fact, I consistently cringed in horror as I watched it and often skipped it because I couldn't bring myself to endure the spectre of its very existence.  I could never bring myself to the inevitable embarrassment of having to upload such a piece in its current state.

So I've decided to bite the bullet and redesign the set and completely redo the entire opening scene of Part 2.

Here is some progress on Ackla's apartment set, about a day's work so far:

The challenge with designing sets for this particular movie is that the protagonist, Lethgoshis, is almost 8 feet tall, whereas the rest of the characters are about average human height. This presents challenges in designing the sets, as many of the doorways have to be big enough to accommodate the height of Lethgoshis while at the same time make sense stylistically.  Also, camera angles have to be carefully contrived whenever Lethgoshis appears in a shot with another, shorter character.  (I call this challenge of putting two characters of greatly varied height in the same shot "Chewbacca-Yoda Syndrome".)

In this case, this apartment complex services a number of alien races, and so, I imagine that the building designers probably tried to accommodate as many species as they could. I can get away with the ultra tall door here, but elsewhere, it may present a problem.

And here is a refined flip/jump that I'm trying to get a rather ungainly Lethgoshis to accomplish.


I'm completely redoing most of the work I've done so far on Part 2, simply because my skills have improved as well as the tools in Blender have gotten more sophisticated, allowing new techniques to be used. Therefore, Part 2 will hopefully be a great improvement over the original version, as well as slightly longer. I'll be rerecording the dialogue as well, once I get a useful microphone.  This will be the most expensive thing I could do in the movie.

Dan