There were far fewer computer problems with \bThe Item\b than there were with \bAnnie May.\b With \bAM,\b there were more computer crashes due to buggy software, but by The Item, they had mostly been cleared up. A notable exception would be the shot with all the monga bouncing down the hall. After animating one monga by hand, I took the scanned and painted frames (someone else had painted them), and made alpha transparency masks for each frame so I could use them in LightWave. In LightWave, I modelled the hall, then rendered the scene with a single monga bouncing down the hall. Then I used those frames as a background, and re-rendered with an offset monga bouncing a little sooner. I repeated this process until I had a bunch of monga. This may not seem too hard, but time and time again I got errors, saying "not enough memory," but when I resumed where it had left off, it would go fine for a while before giving the error again. What I eventually deduced was that LightWave was not clearing the images from memory as it used them, instead piling up images until it ran out of memory. This bug was fixed in a later version.
Despite how this sounds, there is actually less possibility for errors using a computer-based system than traditional hand painting. On computer, cels are \babsolutely transparent,\b while acetate cels are not. On computer, it is not necessary to us a brighter palette of paints for lower-level cels to compensate for the cels that are on top of them.
IÆm currently looking into a method of drawing cels directly on the computer, bypassing paper altogether. This would save money, storage space, and cause fewer errors such as registration errors or dirty glass on the scanner.
\b\c04Sound & Music\c00\b
On all previous projects, the video was rendered as Quicktime movies for timing purposes, then output on a 3/4" VTR with frame-by-frame control. We then added the sound and voices on one of the two tracks, and music on the other. Now, everything can be composited on computer using software like Adobe Premiere and a non-linear digital video suite. The sound effects occupy one track, the dialogue a second one, and the music a third, and more if needed. This method allows us to output a much cleaner and sharper picture and clear, stereo sound, much better than what was possible before, and \bThe Item\b has been remastered in this way.
