For the past month, i have spent a couple of hours here and there to learn Adobe After Effects CS3. After 10h or so of reading through online tutorials, and playing a little bit with the tool, i am starting to gain some confidence that i actually can do the job. There are lots of things i don't like about this product, and even if i have found it to not be very stable and perform somewhat slowly, there is no denying its power.

So i am moving along. I have made a small montage of a couple of panels we have, and i am pretty happy with the result. The question of course is that spending 2-3h a week on a Saturday evening, it's going to take me a long time to get this finished. By my early estimates, i think i can animate a panel in about 30mn on average. There are about 400 panels. If i can spend 5 hours a week on average, it will take 40 weeks!!! I was really hoping that we could have been done by Halloween 2007, but you know what happened. Instead, i am now looking to Halloween 2009. I started on Halloween 2003, so that will be 6 years. Like the proverbial tortoise, i worked a few hours every week on average (some weeks more than that, and some weeks less that that of course), never giving up, and after several years, i hope to have something to be proud of.

And of course, none of that could have happened without the dedicated help of all the actors who participated in this project (i blogged about it here), and Rafael Ventura (one of his site here) who did create all those 400 panels. Without this debt i have towards you all, i don't think i would have had the energy to go through the "battle" with Nick regarding the contract, and continue this project. Thanks so much.