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

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.10th September 2009

How will Team Realm follow up yesterdays blog post, in the denouement of which Elliot spectacularly fell off his chair? Why, with an even more entertaining post involving muzzleflashes, the bee gees, airborne toiletries and somebodies leg. But whose leg, and why? Watch on to find out! Also featuring the first installment of the The Sigourney Question.

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.

Daily Highlight - 28th August 2009

It's just me and Elliot in the office currently, and apparently we have colours to grade and effects to compost or something (apparently we're making a film or something crazy like that); rest assured however, as a carefully planned update was organised days in advance, so we didn't have to take any time out at the last minute and throw together a badly thought out-



- oh, wait...

Normal service might resume tomorrow when Boss Reynolds returns.

Daily Highlight. 22nd August 2009

If you were to create a lazy metaphor about the Digital Revolution that incorporated Realm Pictures, we'd be somewhere near the front, storming the Tsar's palace with molotovs- everything we do here is digital. However, we've got alot of love for actual film- it's expensive, but it's the gold standard as far as image quality goes- so it was quite an interesting experience to be asked by Ashley Wing if we'd like to shoot some 16mm test footage with him. We leapt at the chance, convincing Dave to dress up in a 30's detective style* to complement the 16mm Black & White, and trudged down to the basement, where I tried to light it in a dramatic, moody noir fashion.

If you've shot always shot digital- stills, or video- switching back to analog is a strange, frustrating experience; it's like having a crutch kicked away. You can't instantly review images, so you'd best hope you understand ISO/ASA and exposure readings or you're going to end up with negatives comprised of fail- it's sad how complacent the LCD screens on the back of our digital kit can make us. Needless to say, we haven't seen what the footage (measured in actual feet! 100ft for roughly 3mins...) actually looks like yet; Ashley is waiting on it to be devloped. But here's a quick still I shot at the same time, trying to emulate the 16mm's exposure settings.



We'll see how the footage comes out- fingers crossed we didn't do anything stupid like expose the film- and then I'm sure it'll work it's way into a daily update soon enough. 60 second noir, maybe...

*There's a 40% chance I'll come down for breakfast in the morning and find Dave dressed this way anyway, so it wasn't a difficult task.

Daily Highlight - 14th August 2009

We totally planned this weeks in advance.

Daily Highlight. 9th August 2009

Daily Highlight. 7th August 2009

Lighting The Bunker

When I was asked if I wanted to live and work alongside the rest of Realm and be the teams Gaffer, I decided to take the role straight away. On reflection my decision was mostly made because of a misunderstanding; Dave promised me I'd be "working with lots of Hot Redheads", and I didn't realise at the time this was industry slang for an 800W light.

By the time I'd moved into Realm Manor and discovered that the kit box in the basement actually contained a bunch of battered lights and their stands and not a series of nubile, flame haired women, it was pretty much too late to change my mind, so I set about trying to learn my new craft; up until now, I've been primarily a stills photographer, and virtually all the artificial lighting I'd done was using small on/off camera strobes and bigger studio strobes, with the occasional modelling light; basically, none of the stuff you'll see in motion pictures. Still, I reasoned, it can't be that hard, and I'm a fast learner for this sort of stuff, right? Go team optimism! Roll on my first gigs as Gaffer; Bunker Reshoot One and Two; two seperate scenes in the film, shoot on two different days a week apart. And so-

Bunker Reshoot One Visual Representation:



It's pretty safe to say I didn't enjoy my first gig as lighting director, but in retrospect I can definitely say this is for one reason and one reason only; time constraints. I won't go into details, since It'd make too long a post, but basically we scheduled too much (and I went to Dave "Yeah, that'll be fine! We can totally do that.") in pre and paid for that on the day. I used over 300 cable ties and ruined my dainty girly fingers from all the heat of the lights, and the whole day got slowly more and more stressful as I felt the looming fear that I'd ruin the whole production single handedly by lighting it awfully and then EVERY ONE WOULD HATE ME FOREVER AND I'D GO TO AN EARLY GRAVE ALONE AND UNLOVED but as it turned out the footage actually looked pretty good, so it's all ok. However; never again.



Bunker Reshoot Two Visual Representation:



Everything we do here at Realm is pretty much a learning process, and so there isn't much resting on our laurels before we roll onto the next challenge and try to increase our quality as film makers, but- for now- I'm pretty happy with Bunker Reshoot Two. There's quite alot of cool shots and setups (and some nice stuntwork to boot) in there, and as always we dont like showing too much that's still work in progress, but...



That's a mostly ungraded 8 second clip from the first bit of the sequence, a minute or so long one-shot of Dave's character re-entering the flaming bunker after almost falling casualty to a friendly airstrike- it's had a quick tweak done to the contrast curve and a very, very slight push on the orange/yellows, but nothing serious yet; I'm pretty confident it's going to look awesome once we're done. It's always nice when something looks tasty straight out of camera, because it means you've done your job right. Plus, since I'm also the colourist, it means I have a bit less work in post (yay, only everything else left to do).

So, lots of little lessons learnt, and the benefit of good scheduling and planning underlined once again- now I've got to start prepping for our lighting challenge, the forward operations StableBase at the start of the film. I have to give a quick shout out to Marto Zaple and Ollie Mockford who were absolutely stellar in helping with all the wiring, carrying, gel wrangling and so on that went into making these setups happen- there's no way I'd have been able to pull any of it off without those two to rely on, and both have my eternal gratitude.

Until next time...

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.

Muzzle Flash

As you've probably gathered by now if you've been following the blog, we're heading back to the abandoned nuclear bunker we first shot in July pretty soon for reshoots, and that means a few days filming in an enviroment that contains; A) no natural light and B) no unnatural light either. So, uh, no light.



It pretty much looks like this actually

One of the things I really wanted to do for the bunker was dynamic muzzleflashes- for the rest of Zomblies, getting the gunfire to look convincing isnt much of an issue; on a bright Tor or even a slightly damp forest, one of the characters rifles won't throw out enough light to overpower the daylight and noticeably effect the enviroment too much, and a lot of the getting the gunfire to "look" right is character reaction and soundmix as much as muzzleflash; but in a dark underground bunker, a huge burst of burning cordite is going to throw some pretty dramatic shadowing and illumination all over the place, and be completely unmissable. Not only does this look awesome, it's the sort of effect that really ramps up production value.

So when we sat down to work on plans for the bunker, as Realm's Gaffer - getting muzzleflashes done was more or less the top of my to do list. We tried real blank ammunition as our first port of call, but despite how awesome this looked through our own eyes there are lots of issues with using actual ammo;

1: It's pretty loud. And we're filming in an enclosed space.
2: It's potentially dangerous; blank ammo, even cinematic blank ammo, is still a safety concern for those firing and those being fired upon. And we're filming in an enclosed space. In the dark.
3: Muzzleflashes tend to last less than a 48th of a second in real life; at a cinematic frame rate of 24FPS and 180deg shutter, this means the camera wont always catch a muzzleflash.

Faking the light digitally went straight out the window too. We definitely wanted the dramatic light and shadow you can't get through anything short of doing it in camera, for real.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we hit on a solution that gives us real light and shadowing, and still allows us to run about in the dark relatively safely- I'll detail this in full in a couple of days in another post, but for now... here's a big clue as to how we did it, from the first SFX/VFX test.

WUBSITE COMPLEET

After a 36 hour + coding and content marathon, the new Zomblies.com is officially up and running!

We've added alot of new functionality to the site, via facebook, twitter, the rss feeds, etc not to mention a new documentary episode and a sneak preview vid (embedded at the bottom of the menu); we've also got an actual About Us section that I'm sure will be expanded on soon, along with a couple of the other tabs.

We'll probably be making a couple of little tweaks over the next few days, but nothing too drastic, hopefully... mainly just correcting sleep-deprived mistakes; we actually coded for the last 12 hours by just throwing various objects at our keyboards and hoping they hit the correct keys to write javascript. This resulted in a mostly functional website.

And now, sleepy time...

Operation Enduring Coding

For those of you viewing the site at the moment, an update:

Me, Shaz and Dave have been coding since roughly 7 last night, GMT- it's just after 10AM now, so we've been going for 13 hours, through the night. Every hour I play Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey loudly at Dave to remind him that I hate him, and then I curse myself for suggesting we ever re-do the website.

Our major issues currently are that the embedded flash preview (below the menu on the right) doesnt work in IE (because IE is made of fail), and that we still havent done the About page. There are also a few other bits of miscellaneous coding to do, but hopefully we're on track to have the site actually finished by the end of today. Also anything not on the main page isnt fully coded, so that'll be jigged around, but thats a quick fix- once we've finished the main page.

Anyway, check back later, and we should have a finished site (at last!) and a proper relaunch.

And then we'll go to sleep.

Realm Pictures: Sleep Is For The Weak*




*like, next week.