What can I say, the expected end of an outstanding seven weeks of class. But let’s get into the making of “Three Pigs Of the Apocalypse”. Stephanie Chen, Shaurya Seth, and I set out to tell our re-imagining of “The Three Little Pigs”. The Big Bad Wolf is represented by three current events: civil unrest, environmental chaos, and the advent of technology. Using a 3D modeled and rendered environment allowed us to take video clips of these current event s and set them into a world a little different than our own. 

The challenge of this particular project was not of content or technical skills but that of geography as the groups was spread out between 3 different time zones.  Never fear though, with the advent of technology,…pun intended, and with the help of Zoom and Google Drive it was like we were sitting in the same room. This whole process went pretty smoothly.

So what were the biggest issues you might ask, well for one Adobe Premier Pro has a nasty bug in it that causes persistent crashes. After loosing a day due to this and a few hours of research an answer to the cause of these crashes emerged, .avi. Premier Pro has an issues with it’s .avi compiler/converter. This would cause dropped frames and the software would try and recover from this in loop causing the playback window to freeze and eventually crash the program. Thankfully, having worked on files with many components before, my incessant need to save constantly was a life saver. After finding the issue I converted all the media to .mp4 and replaced the clips and voilà no crashing!! Adobe, I’m calling you out here, this issue has been logged for OVER a year now and there is no official response anywhere on the internet ( I know cause I viewed all the internet in search of a solution), Adobe you need to fix this problem.

It took 72 hours of rendering to complete the 3D modeled environment. We also had to troubleshoot an issue with embedding the video into the modeled environment. The solution finally came by using After Effects to extract each individual frame and use those frames as the source file for the embedded video.

As with any creative process your biggest friend is problem solving and perseverance. So without any further diatribe by yours truly, enjoy the show.