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

Daily Highlight - 29th September 2009

Daily Highlight. 14th September 2009

BREAKING NEWS BULLETIN

Today while helping out on the set of our friend Johnathon Dupont's film, "Ghost In the Machine", Elliott managed to take a nasty fall...while holding the camera. As anyone who knows Mr Montello personally, he can be a force of destruction to anything or anyone around him, himself included. We though this was an appropriate send-up of the one man wrecking-ball. (P.S. The camera will probably be ok)

Daily Highlight - 23rd August

Daily Highlight. 10th August 2009

Daily Highlight. 9th August 2009

Daily Highlight. 8th August 2009

Breaking the fourth wall

Hiydee ho Zomblie fans

As many of you are aware we are currently in reshoots and pickups for Zomblies, and one such important reshoot is that of the scene within a bunker complex.

For one scene, the main characters come around a corner to a hole in the wall created by a bomb impact. So how do we create a hole? The obvious answer of "blowing a hole in an actual wall" was out of the question, this was a location, not a set, so we don't think the site owners would have been too impressed with that. Plus it was designed to withstand a 10-megaton explosion...

We considered doing it digitally, but knew it just wouldn't do the scene justice, we wanted it to be a practical effect. After throwing around some ideas, we thought the best way would be for something to block out all but a small hole of light, and we could simulate the daylight pouring through with some cleverly placed Redheads (800w lights for those of you not down with "da lingo").

One tiny problem though, money. We had none.

The fake wall had to be big enough to be a wall in the location; block out light completely; be portable; but most of all, acheivable on a true rebel film maker budget.

The answer?

Carpet. Yes, carpet. That furryish stuff that is probably slumbering below your feet as you read this. Carpet can be MASSIVE (if you get a big enough cut of it), will block out light and can be rolled or folded to be portable. It can be easily hung up too using luggage straps.
For added effect we wanted a half-crater of debris to be around the foot of the hole. This would be done by making an inital ring of sandbags, then having well placed rubble laid upon it.
Using a scale 3d model (which I had convieniantly prepared earlier) this is a mock up of the setup we wanted in the location.




We sourced the carpet from a friend whose girlfriend's parents happened to getting rid of theirs. Though not initially big enough, we cut it to the correct sizes and sewed it back together using fishing wire.

We had the seeds sewn in place for our fake wall but there was still a problem, it looked like a large piece of carpet with a hole in it, not a wall. This could be solved by under exposing, but then all detail in the rest of the scene would be lost. We needed to make this carpet look like a real wall.

Que a trip to the local recycling center and a donation of paint made by art suppliers Deco Craft in Totnes.

The carpet was painted in a way that would match the grungy decor of the other walls within the bunker, then we added little touches to really sell it.

We painted around the hole itself to make it look burnt and scorched, and where the joins of the stiched carpet pieces were still obvious we added white to give a sort of calcium deposit effect that is usually found on walls of this sort.

We attached bits of metal conduit and grates that we gathered from the skip to make the wall look like it had a function and fit in better with its surroundings. And, just for added flavour, some signs and a light on it. Once this was all complete, we hung the 15foot beast up outside our house to test whether or not it would work.




Our conclusion: Yes.

The one thing we still thought the scene needed though was something more atmospheric, so used a smoke machine to make it appear as though it was flowing out of the fallout of the hole.

So in all, we had managed to make a convincing fake wall, complete with bomb destruction.

And the cost? Pretty much zilch. Indeed the only things that cost us any money was that of the fishing wire used for sewing it together, and the white sheet placed on the hole itslef to soften the light.

But did it work on set?




Hell to the mutha fuckin' yeaaah it did

Nenikekamen

In between the hectic and tight schedule we have to completing Zomblies, you wouldn't think that we would have time to shoot an entire short film for the hell of it would you? Well that would make you both presumptuous and wrong.

Let me start at the very beginning, as it is a very good place to start.
It all happened when there was the great snowfall in early February across the UK. For us in Devon this was especially exciting as it NEVER snows here, let alone snow that settles, but alas, we had deep settled snow.

One evening we were driving to Exeter, at this point most of the snow had begun to melt away, but we noticed the roads to Exeter we still glazed with thick layers of snowfall.
Skip to 10am the following morning, when Dave announces to a rather sleep impaired me "Lets go film something in the snow"

From this we began our pre-production, and I use this term loosely as all it consisted of was making a "Rodriguez List" (i.e. a list of what we had available to us) and throwing around a few ideas of what story we could make. After half an hour of discussion and a few cups of coffee, we decided to utilize the Chain-mail and other medieval clothing we had and to make a short about an injured Knight delivering a message through the snow. As our list of actors we went through were either otherwise occupied or hungover (it was a Sunday morning after all) I volunteered to assume the role of the Knight.






So off to Exeter we drove, and shot our first film in the snow (which proved to be rather arduous with regard to equipment) and two hours later we were done.

From waking up and planning, to actually getting it shot, home and in the shower was a total time of just 7 hours, but post production was a different story all together.

Though the snow itself as a backdrop looked fantastic and added so much production value, what we wanted to really sell it was falling snow.

After about a week of R&D, I managed to create a particle system that I felt correctly emulated snow. To this I added animated wind daemons, with a randomized noise modifier to give it the realistic sense of wind flow.

A separate snow system was made for each separate shot, as we wanted the movement of the snow to parallel the emotions of the shot, and almost make it a visual interpretation of the character's own feelings. After all of these were ready to go, the epic task of compositing was ready to go.



All the shots were motion tracked so that the 3d camera for the snow would match that of the real camera correctly. A near and far clipping plane was rendered of each shot, meaning a "near" pass would only capture up to a certain distance, and the "far" would only render was was behind that. This way, when composited into the shot, it would give the sense that what was closer to the camera would be in front of the actor, and what was far would be behind them.

Then came the most epic task of all; the Rotoscoping.
For the snow to be correctly composited, and for the near and far renders to work, the main character (i.e. me) would have to be rotoscoped in every single shot. This task was shared by every member of the Realm team and took many late nights to finally finish.

In conjunction with all of this going on, a fantastic colour grade on the footage was completed by Tim (of which he will talk more about later).

Then all that was left was the final sound mix and score (written for us by the awesome Rob Westwood )

Then all was put together, rendered and voila, it was finished, all except for a name.



We decided upon Nenikekamen, which is ancient Greek for "We are victorious"
It derives from the tale of Pheidippides, the messenger who ran from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to deliver this message, and died almost immediately afterwards. As it is a tale of the idea that sometimes delivering a message can be so important, even at the cost of your own life, we found it resonated perfectly with the themes of our of story.

Anyway, have a watch (in HD if you can!) and let us know what you think

Enjoy!

Shaz