ZOMBLIES.com BLOG

Update brought to you by Jonathan Coulton!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Shaz) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:59:00 +0000

November 11th - Zombie Rotoscoping..

noreply@blogger.com (Coz) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:57:00 +0000

Elliott edited this for me and I haven't actually watched it through yet, so apologies if he's made me sound like I'm saying anything daft..

November 5th (Bonfire Night) - The Realm Way!

noreply@blogger.com (Evie) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:38:00 +0000

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Daily Highlight - November 4 - 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:37:00 +0000

November 3rd - Creating Stablebase

noreply@blogger.com (Shaz) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:15:00 +0000

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

TimothyBevan@gmail.com (Tim) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:32:00 +0000

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 30th - Stablebase

noreply@blogger.com (Shaz) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:46:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:43:00 +0000

October 26th - Costume Heaven

noreply@blogger.com (Evie) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:05:00 +0000

October 23rd - It's been a while...

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:17:00 +0000

So, Hey...

Everything has been a little bit the wrong side of crazy these last 10 days, but we are now able to tell everyone what we have actually been up to:

Anyone who has been watching the news in the UK recently will have heard of the 'Artists taking the Lead' programme run by the Arts Council of England. In a nutshell - the Council have awarded a grant to an artist from each of the 12 UK regions, commissioning them to produce a piece of work for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

We were tasked with travelling the country - shooting a film in each region to broadcast quality. And an interview with the head of the project. And a five minute summary film to be shown at a press conference infront of the Secretary of State...

And we had exactly 9 days to produce these 14 films, including shooting, editing, vfx, grading etc. ..

On the 10th day (yesterday) there was a press conference, with a simultaneous web-release of the films. To our surprise, the films were also shown extensively in regional and national broadcasts across BBC, ITV and C4 ;)

You can check out the films on the Artists Taking the Lead website or see below for the 5 minute summary:

More daily updates this week - building up to the last ZOMBLIES film shoot next weekend! Exciting times - we have a lot to catch up on, designing new lighting setups, graphics interfaces for the prop pc equipment, costumes, props and more!

Stay tuned!

October 19th - Realm on the Road - Adventures in London

noreply@blogger.com (Coz) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:21:00 +0000

It's been a manic week or so in the world of Realm, now things are starting to calm down again updates will become regular once more. If you have anything you would like to see or questions you would like answered - please get in touch.

Normal service will resume shortly!

October 13th - Realm on the Road; Day One

noreply@blogger.com (Shaz) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:20:00 +0000

October 12th - RMU's are GO!!

noreply@blogger.com (Shaz) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:50:00 +0000

October 11th - What goes in to an RMU?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:02:00 +0000

10th October - New Website!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:26:00 +0000

new car branding and business cards call for a new website! nothing flashy - but it's better than the 'coming soon' site that has been up for 2 years....

http://www.realm-pictures.com

9th October - Dave's beast of a machine!

noreply@blogger.com (Evie) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:14:00 +0000

7th October - Bithday Wishes and a branded car!

noreply@blogger.com (Evie) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:48:00 +0000

6th October - Video Storyboarding

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:44:00 +0000

5th October - Storyboarding!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:26:00 +0000

Dave talks for a ridiculous amount of time about storyboarding for zomblies

October 4th - RMU's and the long journey ahead.

noreply@blogger.com (Evie) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:43:00 +0000

3rd October - Back on Track!

noreply@blogger.com (Evie) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:32:00 +0000

Daily Highlight - 29th September 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Shaz) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:27:00 +0000

Daily Highlight - 27th September

noreply@blogger.com (Evie) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:45:00 +0000

Sorry about the sound at the end...you don't miss much! I promise. xx

26th September - Greenscreen Zombies!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:36:00 +0000

25th September - Celebrations and 3D tracking

noreply@blogger.com (Dave) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:59:00 +0000