Hey all!

If you've been following us on Facebook or Twitter, you would have seen a flurry of progress on the film in the last few months. We fixed up lots of cameras, revitalized Conrad's textures, revisited the grass dynamics from the trailer, debugged LOTs of render issues, designed some of the motion graphics, and are at the point where almost the whole film runs through the final render/composite pipeline.

However, that progress stopped about a month ago. The short version of the story is that in November I opened up my schedule so I could work on the film nearly full time, with the goal of largely finishing post-production for mid-April. A trade-off was that we no longer had access to my client's render farm, so there was a build-out of a new one that we're paying for with most of what was left of the IndieGoGo donations. After a flurry of activity, it became clear that there was far too much left to do before I ran out of runway.

Unfortunately, we've had to put Shadows in the Grass on hiatus for a while so I can keep the lights on.

I'm making myself available for some freelance VFX and software development work, and hoping to produce commercial versions of a few of the tools I've been building for this film to sell as plugins for VFX software (e.g. Maya, Nuke and After Effects). I'm hopeful that this will provide a small amount of passive-ish funds so I can keep working on the film until it is finished.

In the meantime, if you donated $20 or more and haven't received a patch and some stickers please send us an email with your current address. These are the only rewards we will have until we are actually done the film, so I want to keep spreading them around!

Wish me luck!

This week we dropped the first 50 envelopes of rewards in the mail!

Everyone who has updated or confirmed their address in our system before Jan. 1, 2019 (via a special link in emails we sent out) should be getting some swag in a few days.

Left stamps are for Canadian addresses, middle for American, and the right for those further away.

These are the patches that we added very late in the IndieGoGo campaign that we retroactively decided to send to anyone who contributed at least $20 (and the stickers that we couldn't resist making with the same art).

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We've just sent out an email to everyone who donated at least $20 with links to update/confirm your shipping address. It would be super keen if you could look for this email and confirm your address; then we can mail out our first rewards!

If you don't see the message, please check your spam/junk folder. If it is in there, please mark it not spam and add updates@shadowsinthegrass.com to your address book so you get the next ones.

If you donated at least $20 and can't find the message at all please contact us so we can sort it out. We've had a few of them already bounce back so we know a few of your won't get our messages (hopefully you see this here or from IndieGoGo).

In general we're going to be using this email list as our main method to contact you now instead of IndieGoGo. We might send out another reminder from IndieGoGo through because spam filters (Google's in particular) are giving us a hard time.

Thought you should know that we've hit another milestone:

We've completed slap-comps with results from the final light/comp pipeline on (mostly) the whole film!

This video is one massive marathon session in which I do the actual slap-comps of the last few scenes in the film.

This means that we have layouts, animation, basic lighting, rendering, and compositing all at least started, and most of the remaining work is iteration of those. It is a huge milestone for us because we're finally working on what will ultimately be the final film. There are a few stragglers, but they are one-off shots that we will pick up later when similar shots are nearing completion.

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We are pleased to tell you that post-production is continuing on this project, and things are picking up momentum behind the scenes. Our fantastic animator, Brian Vowels, has made huge progress in completing 90% of the animation on the film, and Matt and I are slowly checking off our to-do lists as we see more and more of this post-production puzzle come together.

We have also started preparing some of our base reward offerings, so we hope some of those will land in your mailboxes in time for the film reaching completion. We will also be contacting those of you at the various "Colonist" reward levels, who still wish to have their likeness featured in the Hypatia’s crew roster.

We wanted to share a few quick behind the scenes glimpses at the animation process so you can see Conrad coming to life:

Anticipate more updates from us soon, and thanks again for your continued support.

~ Mike and Matt