Too much Film, not enough celluloid

This last week Troy and I have accomplished several large recording sessions for a sound effects catalog project I've been putting together for some time now.  We're still very early in the project, but while I've been working on that I've also managed to finish the 11 video reels to run at this martial arts event in Los Gatos on the 28th that I'll be running a projector and managing all the video and photos for.

Plenty have asked and I have consistently told all that when it comes to video editing Premier really is the easiest to adapt to in terms of a fully featured NLE.  Coming from Sony Vegas, which is a great tool even back in the earlier versions where I spent a lot of my early days editing clips together of video game captures for my friends and I doing Machinima stuff, to moving upward into a package like Premier Pro and After Effects.  After the event is over I'll post again with some depth about working on the project.

This weekend I managed to get the major ground work done designing the Arcade top and the sides.
I sent my client a rough template I had built using the vague description he'd given me.

Keep in mind I'm working the template to this design.  I lined everything up in Illustrator, and the edges can be cut to the shape of the top.

The Logo text is just a placeholder to see if he liked the idea of naming his arcade, and the name could be whatever he wants.

I got my client's feedback and am currently working on updating it to the details he specified.  He decided he wants a much fuller "collage" of characters from all kinds of games to completely cover the top, and to lose the logo idea. 

So now i'm just working on gathering and placing as many characters I can.  I may try to break up the design a bit more with some tech shapes that fill in the middle and give some more lines to work with character orientation and placement now that the logo is gone.

Resuming my old short skit storyboard too.  I'm hoping to have this done by the end of April as I'm just working on it here and there in my free time.  The intended running time for the short should be somewhere around 2-3 minutes.

Setting up a storyboard plot in Photoshop from scratch was fairly easy though getting to the organization took a bit of work:

 Each of those master folders has a folder for each cell or frame.

Each frame folder allows me to contain my elements separately so when I go cropping each frame out individually I can just delete the other frames from the PSD file, and import all the relevant elements into After Effects to build quick pre-viz animations with, and allow me to choose what I want to show in terms of aspect ratio, shot details (orange) , and camera movement (blue), or actor movement (green).

Let's see if anyone can guess what's going on just by looking at the frames below:

I'm hoping to get some friends to help put this together soon.  The paid projects come first so I'm working to get them finished so I can make time for these.  I'll try to keep regular updates coming. though I may start splitting the updates into individual project blogs.  As always, feel free to leave comments, criticism, feedback, tech support, links, hot links, polish sausage and just about anything else you can imagine... gosh, I'm hungry.