November 3rd - Creating Stablebase
Tuesday, November 03, 2009 by Shaz
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
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"
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
Labels: Film Making, production design, props, Shaz, Stablebase
Shaz at
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
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