It is with great sadness that i have to announce that Nick DaSilva is dropping from the project. He has not been able to recover from the delays we suffered last year (summer 2008) and since then, was not able to make time for Time Flies and complete the final animation work. We still have to close the last legal details with a formal contract termination letter, and i have spent some personal money as a result which has put me a little bit in the red. I say sadness though because in spite of my obvious frustration with him and the fact that this project has been on a stand-still since September 2008 because of him, he did allow me to get this project started in earnest, introduced me to Rafael (the artist) and Cris (the co-producer), and i am definitely closer to my dream now than before i met him. So let bygones be bygones, and move on. Thanks Nick, and maybe, when this project is completed, you may want to distribute it.

As a result, i do get back full control of the project, which is both a good thing, and a bad thing. I have to figure out how i am going to complete the final animation work, and once completed, how i am going to distribute the result, and hopefully, make some money out of it to recover my costs. I'll cross that bridge when i am there, but for now, i have to figure out how to complete the project.

This means two things. First, as per the original contract, we were bound to make a piece that would last about 60mn more or less. I had never been quite comfortable with the result, and i had to cut a lot of material, aggressively edit dialogs, and even speed up some parts to shave precious minutes throughout the film. My first cut clocked in at almost 100 minutes. I did a lot of work and got it down to 74mn before making one last pass down to 62mn. At this point, i am free to revisit some of the constraints, and hope to create a new version at about 80mn. That way, i can "unspeed" some of the parts, and spend a little bit more time in a few crucial moments i have regretted cutting down for the past year. I did produce a 74mn work-copy, which i showed to many friends, and i saw it from beginning to end myself a good 4 or 5 times in the last year, so i have a more objective view now on what i feel i did wrong in the name of cutting the time down.

That work is definitely time consuming, but i know exactly how to do it as i have done it once 100% by myself already. What i have no idea how to do is the second thing, the final animation. To produce my work-copy, i used a basic tool that looks and feels like the animation features of Power Point, meaning i can animate from one slide to another, with basic zooming and panning capabilities. You can see the result in the two clips i have posted on YouTube and this site's home page. It's a very cool tool (Imagematics' Still Motion) which i recommend to anyone looking to make still-image animated projects using Macromedia Flash as a delivery platform. I will definitely use it for other things at some point, but in order to produce the final work, this is definitely insufficient, especially when targeting a 1280x720 resolution that this needs to be in. For the HD folks out there, that's the resolution for 720p.

So there i am, trying to figure out how i can get this animated work done. I have looked around a local school, but didn't find someone i liked. If you are an animator, or know someone who is, and want to work on this project (no or very little money, and hopefully, lots of glory), then please do contact me through the link at the top right on the homepage for this site. My second option is to actually learn a tool such as Adobe AfterEffects and do the animation work myself. If you know a better tool, or know AfterEffects well and could point me to good resources online to learn it, then i'd be very grateful.

So there you are... The project is back on track, the legal issues between Nick and i resolved, and i am very happy and excited again... But that doesn't mean the project will be completed soon. I don't see myself out of this until at least next summer. So it'll take time, but i am not giving up. Thanks all for your support.