Big chunk of shot-by shot color correction that I had to do before I could add the effects. Then an unfortunate crash lost me a chunk of time (Combustion isn't the most stable program on my system). Must remember to save the workspace in a timely fashion. I think it may have been a good thing though, as it showed me a nifty feature of how to limit the life of something on the timeline. And yes, that is a good thing.
Digital blood is a right bitch. It's the color. Darker than you'd think, almost a chocolate color. Particle emitter, rotoscoped by hand because the action is so fast and difficult to track. Problem is once the particles are emitted, they live their existence based on the point where they were spawned, and I can't find a way to track them to anything. That would be fine in a static shot, and it would look normal; this is a handheld shot that has a whole lot of motion.
There is however a nifty way of setting the parameters of the emitter; for instance I can edit the lifetime of the object that is emitted. In this case, it means that I can have blood spurt from a wound and have it kind of disappear. It sounds illogical, but it goes by so fast it's more of a sketch than anything. It really surprises me how sketchy something can actually be and still work as long as the color is right, or if there is some reflectivity, that has to still be there.
Problem is when you have an emitter, the things that it emits are lit in a specific way which may not match what you're going for. They're a lot like animated sprites. There is an amount of fiddling you can do (like tinting), and most of that fiddling is keyframable. Given enough time, I could probably make it look perfect. Realistically, I'm gonna settle for unobtrusive.
Gonna go back up now and try to finish it.