Since yesterday:

Rendered shot 1. Samples weren’t high enough, so there’s significant noise. Currently re-rendering with higher samples and image planes to shuffle out & denoise in Nuke. I have a test comp with projected grass, clouds, and a temporary sky (I don’t have a 2D drawn sky quite yet). There were a few dropped frames from the farm, which is why the comp jumps on a few frames.

Tried to render shot 2. Lots of dropped frames from renderfarm, eventually figured out that only the render nodes (not the MT machines) would render the scene. The only difference between this shot and the previous one, which rendered fine, is that there is no filecache after point deforming. I’ve cached out the final renderable geo, but remote uploading 12GB through Filezilla is time-consuming, so I won’t have it rendered quite yet.

Thinking about timing for delivery:
Shot 1 is currently rendering and has the composite more or less set up (needs final sky plane and some DOF).
Tomorrow, I’ll get shots 2 and 3 rendered and comps set up. They have no camera move, so comp will be very quick.
Shot 4, which is easy, and shot 5, which is complicated, will get rendered out on Saturday.
The most difficult shot is #6 and the easiest is #7, so those will be rendered on Sunday.
This leaves Monday as buffer time to finish compositing (or rendering if a crisis happens) and start the edit and Tuesday to finish the edit and get the delivery in. All seems doable.