It’s late night here at the VFX production office at Energia here in Tampere, Finland. For me I’m doing the late night shift by myself as Luke stayed even longer earlier today after we had both done about 16 hours on. I don’t know when he left but I hope he is sleeping well. He deserves it for sure. I’m currently spending my time putting a snazzy weapons effect together and then I have to get back to a series of shots that need my attention before being broken out and put into render. Tuomas has left for the day and continues model clean up and fine tweaks on one of our hero ships. Even though some of the shots we are doing have visible errors in the models we are pushing forward regardless to see how the renders turn out “over all”. This will help us to evaluate priorities on model fixes, lighting, render speeds and other factors so that when we “finalize” everything we will know from top down that everything is good to go. Sometimes you just can’t tell if you are going to get a problem until you render it out in motion and this is the stage where we are doing just that. We are progressing forward from here on in on shots building them up to finals and rendering them out in full. This requires all hands on deck and shift work so that we don’t burn out and no one is picking up an excessive amount of slack. This is combat and every one carries their own weight and then volunteers to take on more so that when we all get to the top we have enough energy to walk back down hill and do it all over again should it be required and everyone knows that once the first shots are fired in combat, the best laid plans go out the window usually. However, command and control keeps things in check and that’s where I come in. This is getting more difficult to do with people on different schedules. Still its something that’s required and I need people to meet deadlines because I have deadlines myself. Chain of command being what it is.