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I Have Finished Animating Moria's Race

September 28, 2023


Jewish tradition has a prayer ceremony every morning called "Shaharit". Basically you sit ( sometimes stand ) for about 2 hours, reading a bunch of text in Hebrew from a book. Once a big Rabbi was asked "Why, if god loves us, we should suffer through this immense boredom every morning?". His answers was "It's true that it tends to be boring. And it's long. And you feel like suffering the entire time. But what a good feeling you get right when it's over.".

I feel this right now. For the past 3 and a half years my main project has been Moria's Race. A 25 minute long short-film made entirely with Free Software, about a little rebel girl that tries to prove everybody that she has a skill in driving cars.

Few days ago I've animated the last shot of it. So the movie is technically finished. Even though it's not. I still need to do credits. I need to finish rendering the damn thing. Perhaps I can go over some of the most problematic shots and make them a bit better. I also need to set a concrete release date and put it into a second trailer of the film, which I already have half-edited.

To celebrate the ending of the animation process I allowed myself finally to watch a movie. Thus far I only saw the new Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio. But I hope soon to watch a lot of good things in cinema.

It is currently rendering frame 43 of shot 40 in the 16th sequence. The movie has only 17 sequences total. And there are still 18 shots to be rendered total. A few shots need to be touched a little. I know about at least one shot that will need an entire re-render, because of a pose of a character making his chest go through an object. It's not very noticeable, but it bothers me enough to actually do a re-render. So at least 19 shots to go. There are a few shots where Moria's hair glitches. Some are fixable by 2D paint-outs. But I believe some will require me to do a re-render ( maybe ).

It is currently showing 11 minutes on average per frame ( the number may change significantly between shots ). If we take into account the 19 shots with an average length of about 100 frames, we are talking about 2 weeks of render time. Which looks like the movie will be finished-finished at about my birthday on 30th of July.

But sadly I'm skeptical that I will be satisfied with the end result by 30th of July. As I already said there are shots that are rendered but have problems. Like Moria's glitching hair. So I tend to believe that the film will actually get out toward the end of August or even the beginning of September. Which is good, since I don't want to compete with a bunch of block-basters that usually come out at Summer.

Look forward for the second trailer that will come out soon and will have a baked in final release date of the movie.

Happy Hacking!!!