Already tired...

Nothing like starting out a new work week exhausted. I had to get into Indigo Films here very early this morning to get in before the editor arrived. With my commute, that means leaving my house by 5am.

My workload for the past few weeks has just been crushing, what with current projects, new projects, spare time projects, etc.

To help understand why things are so crazy, let me take this opportunity to explain what I do for a living. I am a broadcast designer, which means I create graphics for video and/or television. I am a freelancer, but my primary gig for the past four+ years has been Indigo Films in San Rafael, California. Indigo creates programs for cable networks like Discovery and A&E, so the work I do ends up in shows on The History Channel, Travel Channel, National Geographic, The Science Channel, etc. For the past year I have been working almost entirely on the History Channel shows. There is a fair amount of 3D work called for, but mostly it's maps. History Channel *loves* its maps.

Now it looks like I have a new gig making maps for JAK Films, which is the LucasFilm subsidiary that was put together to make the Star Wars prequels, but has since been retooled to produce documentaries. I had my first interview out at Skywalker Ranch a couple of weeks ago, so that project will be picking up next week.

I have another project doing graphics for a cooking show, but that's a pretty small slice of my time.

The big crush right now is Indigo Films. I am crurrently juggling three 2-hour, HD shows for the History Channel. There is one on the story of Boudica (warrior Queen in Roman-occupied Britain), one on the story of the U.S.S. Constellation and its role in the Slave Patrol, and a show on Vampires. The Boudica show is going into the online edit starting tomorrow, and I am having to render out all of my maps at full resolution. This has been a monster--I've been rendering for a month solid. I did all of these maps in 3D using Lightwave, and that is something I don't want to do again anytime soon. The way they evolved made them very cumbersome, so every map is made of from up to six layers, and there are 26 total maps. So it has been a logistics nightmare, and we have very few machines to render them on, and Lightwave has been buckling under the strain. For the Constellations show we are currently editing act 6 of 9, and I have been feeding maps in as we go along. (Those maps are easier, as they are flat and being done entirely in After Effects.) On the Vampires show, I am doing background illustrations for the interviews, which were shot in front of greenscreens. So there is a lot of color-matching and keying work for that project.

So for this Thanksgiving, I will be giving thanks when I can just get the Boudica maps out the door, assuming I survive until Thursday!