"It looks like he's going to a party, but he's not, his brother is going to die..."

Our Yannis quote of the week.

As we've pretty much reached the end of the modelling process we had quite an important status meeting to start planning our next steps!

Kaitlin has taken another look at the shots and made some final tweaks and colour coded them to show which shots include music, dialogue and sound effects. Her and Amit will also be setting up the master files which will be key to making sure that our workflow is streamlined and that we're not scrambling around at the end.

Ritchie and Amit have almost completed the texturing for the mariachis and the goats. Ritchie mentioned that he ran into  bit of trouble with the aligning some of the textures / patterns on the goat. So far he's working on drawing them in on Photoshop and Mudbox - with much better results via Photoshop.

Amit has suggested that he work in both platform together. So by using Mudbox as a rough guide to sketch were the patterns need to go so they are aligned, these can be exported into Photoshop, tidied up and updated in Mudbox. Simples (we hope).

We're all a massive fan of Amit's process so he'll be pulling together a short style guide for us all. This will make sure that we're all on the same page and that all the assets and characters look like that belong together in the same scene.

We look our first look at all the models together again to make sure they were all the same stylistically.

We have decided that they look awesome.

Assets, assets, assets

Sushma, Kaitlin and Bimpe will also start rigging will also start this week, and Yannis will be working on the blend-shapes for the troll. As the troll has quite a bit of dialogue we've decided that this will need someone to focus their attention on it. Natasha has also kindly offered to pull together a lip sync sheet for this

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, it'll allll be kicking off next week... we're heading in to rough animation territory! As Sushma has had the most experience she'll be leading this and attempting to impart her wisdom!

We'll be working in teams of 2 on a scene to support each other, Kaitlin had a good idea of pairing the 2D animators with the animation virgins so that each subgroup has some level of experience.

The look of love.