November 3rd - Creating Stablebase

Hey hey Zomblies followers,

Has been a while since I've done a proper blog post, but as you may have seen from aforementioned posts, we have just finished filming our LAST scene in the film. It feels like it t'was but yesterday when Dave, Eve and I thought, "You know what might be a cool idea to do..." but alas that was 2 years ago, and Zomblies has been an incredible experience since.
But that's enough of my melancholy reminiscing, as Tim mentioned in his post yesterday I would be talking in-depth about the set of stablebase.

Stablebase, as the production designer, was probably the biggest challenge for me to date on the movie. Simply because everywhere else we had had a location that was either perfect, or needed some touching up to be suitable for what we needed (the bunker for example). Stablebase was different, it was something that would have to be done from almost scratch, or having to completely re-dress a room to what we need, and in this case that was to be an operations room, full of military and research personnel, manning radars, computers and interactive maps. Also required were boardrooms, offices and a building that looked like it could be a base and/or facility of some description.

Where the hell was I to find such a place? How was I going to make this happen in the incredibly tight timescale we have?

My saviour came in the form of south Devon college.



The site located in Paignton, which is also where we live, is an open and modern building, filled with technology, and conveniently painted in a neutral colour scheme which gave us more to play with.
An added bonus is that the building, until 3 years ago, was the Nortel Facility, so it maintained the aesthetics and layout that would be perfect to us.

Now for the interesting part, creating the sets. The main room we would need, and where most of the scenes in stablebase took place was that of an operations room. This was a room that required a lot of technology about, large screen displaying various information such as maps, radar readings and security camera footage, you know what i'm talking about, just think of "Hunt for Red October"

Yep, I'm still pretty sure Sean Connery is my real dad

The room we chose to transform was an ordinary computer area for the students, but it had such a great dynamic to it, with the curved wall, the pillar, and the arrangement of the desk around the perimeter of the far wall.

What I really wanted to do was be able to have 3 screens across the curved wall, displaying vital information that could be crucial to the plot. Building curved LCD panels would prove to be too difficult a task. My solution for this was utilizing 3 digital projectors, two displaying pre-rendered videos, and one displaying just a white rectangle, so we have the flexibility in post to place in the information we need following the storyline, via the method of a luma-key.

The other computers in the room had a similar setup, Elliott created a series of different videos to look like that which you would expect in such a room, some displaying a radar sweep, others random lines of text to seem like it was processing information and others of a similar vein.

With all that we managed to transform a room that looked like this



Into this -




Prop's wise, one of the things used to dress the set to give a greater sense of technology were wooden boards embedded with LEDS, and having small sections of lighting gels applied to them. This made them look on camera like servers that may control the equipment, as well as injecting some more colour into the shots.

The prop that took the most time was the map control unit. I wanted it to be a fairly advanced piece of technology, as the film is set a few years into the future, but not something that would be too radical and unbelievable. What I came up with is the idea of glass panels that were "multi-touch" surfaces (the way an iPhone is) and not too dissimilar from those in Spielberg's Minority Report, but of a less advanced stature. I used 3 small panes of glass, held in place with brackets designed for shelving. To give them some illumination, I want to use cold cathode tubes, but due to lack of time (and funds) I found a great alternative by using LED's at two ends of a drinking straw. These were all wired up in a circuit and attached to a metal base. In post we'll be adding animated elements to the glass that will correspond with how it is being touched and the functions it was designed to perform.



Also created a similar prop to be a control panel during the "Board Room" scene.




Thats all from me for now, sorry about the long post, but there was a lot to talk about! This has been one of my favourite film shoots so far, apt as it's also the last for this movie.

Until next time!

Shaz

November 2nd - Lighting Stablebase

As you're probably aware, we've just had our last ever* proper** shoot for Zomblies.

:(

I'm not going to go on about what this means right now, except to say we had some fatastic performances from a pair or pros and some excellent additions to our long list of extras- I think anything I have to say about the end of filming is going to have to be summed up when we've actually finished post on the film... plus Dave tells me off for making my posts too long.


Left to right; Chris Dane as Frank Marshall, Jon Dupont as Quentin Tarantino, Lauren Shein as Ann Provice, and Jen Monaghan as Business Woman. Two of these roles were made up for this blog post.

So, lighting! Stablebase, unlike the Bunker, was a joy from start to finish. Far more time, a much easier location to film on (running water! teamaking facilities!) and some slightly more spangly kit for me to use, courtesy of our Olympic Adventure.


I was stuck for a witty caption for this shot. Stablebase!

Our location (which Shazzle Bazzle will be talking about tomorrow) had an eclectic mix of lighting, which could have made for a nasty headache for me in my dual roles as lighting and colourist, but with a bit of careful jiggery pokery and deliberately offset white balancing (5600K blue? MAKE IT MORE BLUE), I think we've managed to utilise any enviromental lighting we couldnt disable in combination with our bespoke setups and practicals to good effect. It's nice to learn a couple of lessons via good guesswork as opposed to grumpy retrospect (Bunker Reshoot day one, I'm looking at you).


This level of acting demands a fee of... one million dollars

So, there's a brief look at Stablebase- there's an in depth from Shaz tomorrow. I'm just doing pretty pictures and vague facts today.


Holding orange gels in front of the sun is best suited to your tallest, most heat resistant crewmember. Or you could just shoot at golden hour.




*Until Dave decides we're doing another shoot next week

**Barring any inserts.. see also, asterisk 1

October 13th - Realm on the Road; Day One

Daily Highlight. 14th September 2009

Daily Highlight.9th September 2009

A blog post about roto that's so exciting it caused a member of the team to LITERALLY FALL OFF HIS CHAIR- but which team member, and why? Watch the video to find out...

Daily Highlight 1st September

The following video is meant to function as a companion piece to recently uploaded Episode 6 and about to be uploaded Episode 7 of the Zomblies Documentary, detailing the two seperate bunker shoots; today's daily update is a short tour that'll hopefully give you a bit more of an insight into the geography of the bunker and what it's like to film in.

Documentary Episode 5

Part 5 of the documentary is now up, and this time we're focusing on the zomblies themselves; our extras.

Colour Grading

Colour Grading is basically the process of taking an image as it's recorded- (usually referred to as something like "straight out of camera"- and making it, in simple terms, pretty. As an example, here's a still from Nenikekamen, as it was shot;



And here's the same still, with the colour grade applied.



Virtually everyone will agree the second image is by far the more visually appealing of the two, and this is for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, the contrast of the shot has been "crushed"- basically, the blacks are more black, the whites are more white, resulting a far punchier image.

Secondly, individual parts of the frame are tweaked to draw attention to specific details- in this case, I've tried to draw attention to the eyes, since it's a close up of a face, and hey, so much of the acting is in the eyes. Plus if you've been following the blog, you'll know Shaz isn't a professional actor and needs all the help he can get*.

Thirdly, the colours themselves have been tweaked to try and highlight and suggest certain things; many colours on the palette have been pushed slightly toward blue, to suggest a feeling of cold to the viewer; the trees in the background have been made slighlty more green, to make them more visually appealing and seperate them from the snow/shadows more.
Shaz's face and chainmail have been pushed too, normalising his skin tone a bit, bringing the blood on his face out a bit, making his chainmail a bit lighter and more blue, and overall seperating Shaz from the background.

Here's another before;



and after;



Working on Nenikekamen is the first time I've actually Colour Graded something, and much as with the rest of the short (see Shaz's earlier post; we shot this in two hours, on a whim) it was a learning process; a steep one, but one that'll really pay dividends when we start in earnest on post-production for Zomblies; colour grading is an enourmously powerful storytelling tool that can very subtly influence an audiences perception of a scene; I'd waffle on some more about it, but there are already alot of quite stellar articles on the topic that would probably be a better introduction; I'd reccomend reading everything under the Color tab on Stu Maschwitz's blog (ProLost) if you're interested in knowing more, along with a couple of very interesting articles on places like Outside Hollywood et al.

*Only kidding, he's actually not that bad!

Muzzle Flash 2

I know what you're thinking; it looks exactly like what Miami Vice would have been if Colin Farrell had less hair and just shot at nothing in particular, at night. In Devon.

I said the other day we'd give you a quick test video of our solution for replicating the light produced by muzzleflashes, and explain what we're doing, so here goes- this footage is straight out the camera, and has had nothing done to it with the exception of the sounds being added in a bit of really lazy late-night foley. We threw it together in five minutes to get a quick feel for what it'd look like in a proper scene; and the conclusion seems to be "pretty cool, actually, thanks". But enthusiasm aside, there's still alot to do before we can use it in the final film.

The biggest problem we have with our system is that using a incandescent bulb means that no matter how fast we trigger the flash, it will last for anywhere between 4-7 frames, due to the warm-up/cool-down time of the filament, when we'd actually like it to last for 1-2 frames, ideally. We can get arround this by slicing frames out in post, which works suprisingly well on most footage (a moving camera actually helps hide this, rather than hinder, as you'd think), but that means we can shoot a scene we're happy with, get back to the edit bay and find out that slizzicing a couple of frames away either side creates too drastic a jump in the footage. We're looking into LED bulbs as replacement for incadescent ones, since theyre either on or off with no lag, but even they have issues, like a much colder colour temperature than our ambient tungsten- not to mention that they're pretty expensive. We'll work something out though, rest assured.

We still have to input an actual physical flash into the footage in post, too, but this isnt really a problem, per-se. Other than that, problems with the system are pretty trivial; you can see wires on the floor behind Dave in the footage, but they're going to be camofluaged and hidden for the bunker shoot; similarily, we'll have to paint out the bulb in some shots. Anyway, I think that's it for now, other than to give you a quick shot of the system itself, in case you haven't worked out how we did it yet;



That's one of our prop rifles, with a bayonet attachment.That's "bayonet" as in "bayonet fitting", the UK standard lighting socket, for those of you across the pond- jokes are always drastically funnier if you have to explain, them, right?

Basically what we've done is to replace the flash hider with a bulb socket, and run cabling through the barrel of the gun to the ejection port, with a switch just below the actual trigger that allows the actor to trigger the flash- the cable is then fed up the actors clothes and out the bottom of the trousers where it can be hidden at floor level; with the aid of a cable basher working offscreen the actor can still run around without looking like he's tethered to a generator by means of an extension cord. Which he basically is.

We'll be adding a breaker into the system just behind the actor, for safetys sake, before we do this in the bunker- that way if someone stacks it while running with the gun, they'll detach from the wire and at worst, just break the gun, as opposed to a scenario where they electrocute themselves and/or are unable to disentangle from the wiring; and we wouldnt suggest anyone thinking about trying this does so without really heavily thinking through their plan, because mains voltage, here or in the states- well, you get my point. Electricity is not friends with you; wiring it into a metal gun then running around with it is not to be taken... lightly.

Puns.