Abandoned, not finished 
Well, there’s a ton of stuff left that I’d give another couple polish passes to (stiff creature animation and motion blur glitches on the bats in particular), given unlimited time and lack of a day job, but I’m pretty pleased with the end result (although I reserve the right to do some touchups before midnight tonight):
All sorts of details in my WIP thread here.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=284657
This is the first (but not the last!) FXWars Challenge that I’ve entered. I learned a ton and really had a chance to work on my direction, timing and camerawork skills.
I wanted to establish the mood, environment and character relationships very quickly, so I started the piece with a rather heavy-handed metaphor (the spider). The piece moves literally from a bug’s-eye to bird’s eye view and the single continuous shot (with about 27 separate element plates) was terrifying to pull off in this time frame. Got me in the mood for the holiday, though!
The piece was created in Maya (mentalray & software renderers depending on speed), After Effects, Photoshop and Garageband for the score. The characters in the carriage are live action cards, and the castle and portions of the hill are a matte painting – everything else is 3D.
I had a nasty flicker on my grass plate that I wasn’t able to completely get rid of (ran out of rendering time), so I decided to drive the gamma of the entire piece with its flicker and call it stylized 
In the end, I decided that David Oro’s excellent concept art had a ton more personality than my modeled version, so I used his original art to make a 2.5d matte painting with a couple of modifications.
Many thanks to everyone for the encouragement during the challenge, and best of luck getting to the finish line.
Thanks for looking at my work.
–T
