38 Days, 11 Hours, 23 Minutes...

...until I have to turn in my thesis, or so the timer I installed on my desktop tells me. Is that a bad idea?

This is going to be the toughest 38 days of my life, I think. Mounting pressures of post-grad opportunities and polishing my reel have all but halted my progress on this project. There's no two ways about it -- I'm way behind where I should be. All I can do at this point is keep ploughing ahead, knowing that I'll get it done, somehow.

The plan now: finish the damn blocking, lock down every camera and work out the entire piece to the frame. I'd like more flexibility, but I need to give Loren a frame-accurate version to score, and I'm determined to get that to him on Friday.

In addition to the huge amount of animation to be done, I'm looking at a ton of little loose ends that all had to be dealt with "at some point," and I'm all out of some points. So I've made a list of all of these that include little details left over from the earlier stages of the pipeline, and this weekend I'm going to hammer on them until I'm done. At that point, I can start rendering all the background stuff so I can figure out how big a problem that will be, and meanwhile animate my ass off.

Worked out one detail of how to animate the tube in all the later shots -- yet another rig, but at least this one's easy. Create a straight joint chain up the middle of the tube, with the root at the bottom. Create an IK Spline from the root to the base. At that point, pulling the controls by the root of the curve will slide the entire tube down, and flex it however I want. I'll probably just use straight out clusters to control it, though I guess for the shot where it's swinging loose I could create a dynamic curve.... yeah, right.