Highlights

Finished the remaining shots in the “Soyuz Flight” scene for our pilot episode.

Assembled other scenes. I updated the titlecards for these. This is an internal document that won’t be part of the regular release, but it will of course be in the source release, so I’m taking a bit more care formatting these. I decided to update the “storyboards” used in the titlecard to their current appearance. Obviously, this means they aren’t the actual storyboards I started with, but just stills of the current shots. But I think this is a clear way to illustrate what is included in each scene:

Assembled the whole episode.

Made corrections to remaining animation problems throughout the episode.

At the end of May, we are very close to finishing the visual side of the animation production (there are a few shots in SF-SoyuzFlight that I might or might not want to tweak after reviewing the updates, and there is a possibility of a slight retime with SR-SoyuzRollout, as some of the shots feel like they cut off a little early (but that requires re-rendering and re-compositing to correct, as I didn’t leave myself enough margin).

Other Production

I purchased a shotgun microphone which makes it practical to shoot videos outdoors, which I’ve tried on three video logs this month. I think I prefer this to the indoor location. I’m also considering the possibility of using this approach for what I’m referring to as “topical” videos — a new direct-to-camera series, where I address specific project/industry related topics, rather than just giving weekly reports. This would be content I’m producing for audiences, to promote our PeerTube channels, rather than just a byproduct of logging.

It’s possible that I might want to use different settings for different topics as a kind of visual mnemonic. The indoor location is comfortable, and I’ll have to use it on bad weather days for my logs, but it’s not very neat framing, and it’s constrained by the size of the room (I’d rather back the camera up a bit, but it’s as far back as I can easily place the tripod — outdoors, I have plenty of room to get an ideal orientation and position, especially if I’m not relying on the built-in microphone).

It seems consistent with our overall project goals to attempt to promote a successful PeerTube channel and platform, rather than relying on legacy video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, which are definitely showing their age. This is still a pretty bold position, though. I’m not sure how successful we can be at promotion without also waking up my old YouTube channel, as it is still very dominant with the general public. PeerTube remains pretty fringe. I want to change that, but I’m still waffling over the best way to achieve this.

I’ve been getting better at delivering these. I don’t strictly use a script, but I have bullet points in my notes. I have done it with no script at all, as I am relaxing a bit with the camera. But I do think notes give better results.

Some creators seem to value the “authenticity” of doing stuff like this uncut, but I much prefer to edit out the pauses and off-topic diversions. I have been known to ramble on occasion!

Business / Packaging

This month, I ordered samples of Amaray-style multi-disc packages in short runs. I use these for a number of internal applications, including my annual project archives, but a major motivation was to decide on a supplier for the “Limited Edition Open Movie” release of “Lunatics!”/”No Children in Space”, which is currently planned as a 4-disc set.

Although Millenniata’s Blu-Ray format was licensed by other manufacturers, notably Verbatim, there does not appear to be anyone still making their 4.7 GB DVD format discs. There is still leftover stock, but the prices have been climbing, and they now tend to be around $4-5 per disc. Although this would still be viable for single-disc tasks like mastering and archive copies, it greatly changes the calculation for short-run publishing. I have to consider that a run of 200 units with M-Discs is about the same as a 1000-unit order of commercially-pressed DVD-ROMs.

If I can’t justify the press run, and I’m not making individual discs to order, I probably need to rely on the best-quality dye-based DVD-Rs that I can find, rather than M-Disc DVDs. It’s a bit awkward to figure out the correct price-points and “Cost of Goods Sold” (“COGS”) for something like the limited edition release I’m planning. The thing is, I can make the math work if I could plan on selling them all, but if I print 100 copies and then only sell a few, I’ll lose quite a bit of money, which makes the whole exercise seem a little pointless.

I don’t want to get political, but none of this is being helped by the overall reckless market instability in the USA. We’re seeing a lot of inflation, and DVDs and cases are, of course, petroleum products, as well as being shipped. So this may get worse.

IT Work

Upgraded our YunoHost platform to address the “Copy.Fail” kernel bug in Linux, although we should not have had any exposure.

Upgraded PeerTube to address a more serious application root escalation. This one, I found had been used against our site, causing an unwanted extension to be added to PeerTube. There does not appear to have been any other damage from this.

I was informed about broken video playback on our PeerTube site by a viewer. This appears to affect certain videos which are still in object storage. I believe one of the object storage backends on the site must be broken. Since it was already my intent to change all videos to local storage and the migration apparently did not work, I will have to re-upload the affected videos and delete the old ones. Unfortunately, simply replacing the video file doesn’t work. I think the problem is that PeerTube can either move a working video from object storage to local or replace a non-working video on either, but it can’t replace a non-working object storage video with a local storage video. So I just have to create a whole new record and delete the old one. Fortunately, I do keep offline copies of our videos, but it does mean digging through my old archives to locate them. There’s perhaps a dozen videos affected, I believe.

I suspect this was a long-standing problem, rather than a result of the recent upgrade. I think it’s just the first time someone had looked at these older videos in a long time.

May 2026 Production Timelapse

Rather exciting production work this month, as I’ve reached the point of putting the whole episode together, visually, as well as finishing up the work on the SF-SoyuzFlight sequence.

In May 2026, I got to the end of the animation for our pilot episode, “No Children in Space”, and started assembling the episode. This makes the visual side of the project nearly complete (I was still working on a few items at the end of the month and may go through another iteration). The focus will shift to completing the audio side of the project, now.

00:00 Titlecard
00:05 SF-SoyuzFlight Animation Revisions (Blender SF-1-anim)
02:09 SF-SoyuzFlight Rendering (Blender SF-1-cam)
03:10 SF-SoyuzFlight Compositing (Configuration) (Blender SF-compos)
05:28 SF-SoyuzFlight Scene Assembly Edit (Kdenlive)
05:59 Testing Extra Music
06:46 Testing FMA Inserts (Music Cues from the Free Music Archive project) with “Chasing the Tigers” by Butterfly Tea, changed to “Return to Heaven” instead.
08:22 Soyuz Flight Exteriors (SF-4) Re-Rendering (to conform EXR streams to Ink & Paint layers)
09:43 Soyuz Flight Exterior Compositing
10:20 Updated SF-SoyuzFlight with Composited Shots
10:46 Corrections to SF “Ride Animation” Oscillations (to make movement more consistent between characters)
11:12 Console Display Animation (this rig failed, due to dependency graph (“DepsGraph”) limitations)
13:17 Re-Located Animations on Timeline to Match Console Instead
14:11 Revising SF-1-A Sunbeam/Dust Shot (made several iterations on this, which required the full animation/render/composite cycle to test, from 5/19 to 5/22)
21:17 Eyeblink Transition (Inkscape, Kdenlive), used at the end of the Sunbeam shot to transition to Georgiana blinking/squinting
21:58 Revising the Squint/Turn Animation to Start from Squint
22:53 SF Scene Assembly… Again
23:33 SF Titlecard Changed to Use SVG (Inkscape, Kdenlive), SF Assembly Finished?
24:35 LA-Launch Scene Assembly (Kdenlive), including updated Storyboard Titlecard in SVG
25:16 SU-SuitingUp Assembly / Titlecard Update
25:57 PC-PressConference Assembly/Titlecard Update
26:46 TB-TouringBaikonur Assembly/Titlecard Update
27:27 SR-SoyuzRollout Assembly/Titlecard Update
28:13 TR-Train Assembly/Titlecard Update
28:51 Updated SF Storyboard Titlecard (to be consistent with the others, since I decided to update the stills I used)
29:19 Whole Episode Assembly (first with animation throughout).
30:42 Whole Episode Assembly 2 after Reviewing 1st Attempt (mainly fixed problems with the episode-level edit).
31:52 Fixed Missing Lipsync for Sergei in PC-PressConference (“Thank you”)
32:59 SU-SuitingUp and PC-PressConference Compositing Renders (rendered SU-1-compos, SU-2-compos, PC-compos).
33:36 Shell Script to Merge Slug EXR Stream Renders (this method avoids expensive rendering of unused camera angles)
34:30 Finding and Fixing the “UFO” in the LA-3-A elevator shot. It was my billboard Moon getting inked. Changed the layer.
35:12 Fixed Missing Lipsync for Hiromi (“Come on Georgie, I’ve got some apples”) and Georgiana (“No, I don’t want any”)
36:07 Fixed Bad Eyeline Animation for Porter-1 (his pupils rolled out of his eyes due to head movements, added keyframes)
36:48 Re-Rendering Corrected LA-3-A Shot
37:28 Rendering Slugs for TR-3, Cameras 1-3 (the ones that use multicam workflow).
39:44 Corrected Errors in the SR-SoyuzRollout Storyboard Titlecard (some were out of order).
39:49 TR-Train Remaining Compositing (other shots in TR-3, TR-1, TR-2, TR-4).
40:15 Hacked the Updated Image Stream Names into TR-Train Kdenlive source file (easiest way?)
40:56 TR-2-A Compositing Correction (the Ink & Paint renders weren’t aligned, due to frame range errors)
41:12 TR-Train Scene Assembly
42:13 SR-SoyuzRollout Assembly (I’m still considering the timing on this – but it’s June 1st now).

At the end of May, I was still working on a 3rd assembly edit with all the corrections mentioned above.

May Video Logs

Video Log 2026-05-07: SF Animation Rendering

This week, I’m rendering what I think is finished animation for the Soyuz Flight sequence.

Also, I got a shotgun mic to record my voice audio outdoors, which I think works okay. I was also able to caption this one with Vosk speech recognition and a little editing in Kdenlive.

00:00 Intro
00:07 Finished Animation / Starting Rendering for Soyuz Flight Sequence
00:59 Sorted out my issues with the NLA editor
01:49 After SF: lipsync in TR, geometry problem in LA, assembly and review of whole episode
02:17 Aligning subtitles
02:24 Retiming and music changes
02:37 Need for more ambience and foley for gaps in music
02:51 Original sound recordings for effects
03:11 IT work to get around ISP IP blocking (Squid proxy)
03:31 Conclusion
03:50 Setting up my new shotgun mic for recording (used in this log).

Video Log 2026-05-16: SF Rework with Extra Music

An active week of production, working on the Soyuz Flight sequence. A few problems came up, requiring some rework:

00:00 Intro
00:12 Reviewed Renders and Compositing
00:23 Sunbeam shot did not work as planned
01:07 Shroud separation requires we animate exterior lighting
01:40 Screen video texture animation rig not working, due to DepsGraph limitations
02:55 Workaround: shifting animation in/out points to match video texture
04:01 Too much animation! Re-timing with extra music
06:28 SF-4 spacecraft exteriors out-of-date: updated nodes, re-rendered, and composited
07:00 Plans for fixing the SF-1-A sunbeam shot
08:47 Conclusion
08:56 Tree frog hanging out on the studio door

Video Log 2026-05-21: Slow Iterations of Sunbeam Shot

This week’s video log is very short, because all I’ve really been doing is tweaking one shot that takes a long time to render and check.

00:00 Intro
00:09 Sunbeam Shot Iterations
01:08 Estimating Iteration Time (4 hrs render + 1 hr composite?)
02:59 Conclusion
03:05 Busy Little Bumblebee

Back inside tonight, because it’s rainy and also night.
I did this one without any script, off the top of my head, and it shows a bit. One point probably needs a bit of expansion: I said it takes an hour to do compositing after rendering. That’s not really true if I run the composite on the server, but if I have to make changes, I might go through cycles, and it takes a good fraction of an hour to move the EXR files across my LAN. So “about an hour” includes a lot of this fiddling around as well as the actual compositing.

Video Log 2026-05-28: Whole Episode Assembly & Fixing Stuff

This was a very busy week for animation, and I am very near to finishing animation, rendering, and compositing to get to “picture lock” on the episode. This week, I put it all together for review, identified problems, and fixed several of them.

00:00 Intro
00:22 Finished Sunbeam animation (SF1A) and eyeblink transition
01:18 Assembly of SF sequence and then whole episode, for review.
01:44 Updated storyboard titlecards for sequence edits
02:21 Problem with relative linked images in Kdenlive
03:14 UFO in the Elevator shot LA3A is the Moon. Fixed.
04:08 Missing Lipsync in PC-PressConference (still!). Fixed.
04:33 Re-rendering and re-compositing PC-PressConference (and also SU-SuitingUp).
05:05 Lipsync in the Train sequence fixed. And also an eyeline problem with porters.
05:34 Not using Papagayo for lipsync here. Just simple jaw movement with no specific phonemes.
06:11 Re-rendering and compositing TR-Train sequence planned for tonight. And another assembly edit.
06:33 Conclusion – close to “Picture Lock”
06:53 Prairie Grass, Flowers, and Trees

Filmed in a different outdoor location for this one. Trying out some options. I might use different spots for different topics in the future.

 Share this post on social media.