Tired and sore, but well worth it...

Well, it's over...

Not the movie, but tonight's shoot. It was a hard week of prep, very long and tiresome, but in the end - damn, if we didn't pull it off. First off, I really...REALLY have to thank everyone. Man, I've done a lot of films over the years and have expected a lot from my actors, but tonight was one of those nights were everyone pulled through 38,ooo%.

Heather, thank you so much for enduring the way too long shoot. Can I actually say here why you now need a stunt double/stand in?

Draper, the ultimate energizer actor - literally takes a beating and keeps on ticking. I put the poor bastard to the test, stuck him in prosthetic makeup, in a way too cumbersome costume and made him take a beating from a woman.

And Jordan, the newest and last minute addition to the project (and Heather's stunt double/stand-in) did an awesome job, it was a total trial by fire and she passed like I really don't think anyone else could have.

As a quick aside, can I say Draper has the most awesome job in the world - and without pay?!? Who else gets to be mauled for 5 hours by two beautiful women for no good reason?

So what we shot tonight was The White Room scene. A scene where Malice has her final showdown with The Resurrectionist. It was bascially a pretty brutal and one-sided, fight scene. I'm not a fight scene director by any means - this was one of the hardest and most tiring things I've ever done in the last 9 years of filmmaking. I've not yet edited the footage, it's pretty raw looking right now and will require a lot of editing and post work, but I'm pretty confident we got it.

I've got a few pictures, not as much as usual since my usual photographer is on the road doing a documentary right now, so I had to make due. I took some stills from the footage and some stuff from the cameras that I had friends taking at certain points, I'm posting it here - BUT! I'm not showing the face of The Resurrectionist right now, you get a pretty good impression of what he might look like, but for some reason I really wanted to keep it out of sight for now.

So here's how it all progressed:

I've been working on the basics for a couple weeks, trying to choreograph a fight scene and all. I'm busy with other work too, so trying to juggle all this is a task in itself - luckily I can pick the greatest actors in the world, so I'm good as gold on this. I got a location, a nice empty, large room to shoot in. We shot against 2 10x10 backdrops - which help the post process to really bleach out the shots.

It don't look like much, but it did the trick.

From there I sussed out the fight itself, it comes from a very popular TV show and is meant as an homage (but not in that annoying Tarantino kind of way). Draper and I plotted it out, I did storyboards until 3 last night, spent about 5 hours on it. Sorted it all out as best I could. Met with Draper around 2:30 this afternoon and from there we went, we talked about it, had coffee and whatnot then started in on the makeup. That was fun.

Here's Draper coming along in makeup.

First off, the contact lenses...What a bugger. They're huge and irritating, but we forced them in, as much as Draper is unaccustomed to having his eyes poked, we did this in about 15 minutes, maybe less. Oh, and then we dyed his hair.We got him in costume, because pulling on the shoulder piece would ruin the makeup, so he sat in this for a very long time.
I'm going to refrain from showing the makeup progression in order to "hide" the look of The Resurrectionist.

We arrived on location a little late, about 20 minutes late - but still before shooting time, so we're still kinda good. Heather and Jordan showed up right on time - thanks for being patient while we setup and you waited, by the way.

These are some stills from the footage. Bear in mind, there is an immense amount of post to be done to these images. I was hesitant to show them, but I thought it's been awhile since I posted some filming pictures, so I'll do it with that disclaimer and hope for the best.

2nd shot of the night, Heather looking to kick some ass.

Pulling a punch..

And beating down the bad guy...Actually, this is a pretty quick shot and I will point out: that's not Heather. This is Jordan doing her best to beat the crap out of evil.Ooh, he's pulling his hood back finally!

Don't touch me! We have a very strict sexual harassment policy.
Well actually it's more like an encouragement, if you know what I mean.

Punchy, punchy.

And more punchy, punchy. It was a this point we realized we can get
away with sloppy editing and fight choreography so long as there was a butt shot.

End of the night, a quick posed shot of Draper and I.

And Draper taking a quick suckerpunch from Jordan.

That's pretty much it, I'd like to show more, but it's getting late and I'm near dead. Overall, it was a great night. Thanks again to everyone, you all did a great (and even that's not a good enough word) job. It was a hard shoot, and a lot to expect after a bit of a hiatus, however we managed it. It's done, that hump has been...um...gotten over, we'll just say that and be done with it. We're done with this.

It's unusal for me to be so tired and actually feel like I accomplished something, normally I'm tired because I ate breakfast - in this case we really went to the mountain, and ended up kicking it over and beating the ever loving crap out of it.

Heather, Draper and Jordan, thanks guys - awesome job from everyone. It's all uphill from here...yes, I know what I just said. We're way more then 3000 miles from Graceland, iffen you know what I mean.

'Night kids. This blog was brought to you by FireBall.

And if it made no sense, still and even moreso...brought you by FireBall.

Keep in touch, I'll be updating in the next few days after editing. And please, although I'm not a "comment" kind of guy, I'd like to see how many are reading this blog, so please again, post a short - hell, even blank - comment if you will after reading this. And forgive the sloppy typing, really my grammar is okay, my typing not so much.

Good night, and may you be in bed and alseep before crappy late-night TV comes on.
FOX

A little more headway

Well, things are really starting to pile up on me, to quote the song by Dan Reeder, "I've got all the f-ing working I need", (which incidently is the only lyric to the "Work Song") cleaned up for a PG rating of course.

But oddly enough as it piles up, it suddenly becomes simpler - well, not simpler, but clearer maybe. Things start finding their own place on their own and then suddenly everything kind of makes so much sense it almost seems ridiculously easy. Or perhaps it's the early onset of senility.

In any case here’s what’s transpired that’s making my life easier. If you’re following along at home, you may know we start shooting next week, and after that 2 more shoots to go and I can start to pretend I have a life again.

The main stress factor of all these 3 scenes left is the fight choreography, which is a little tricky for certain reason I won’t get into. However, I sat down tonight with Draper, whose ass it getting kicked in 2 of 3 fights, so I figured who better to discuss this with. I tried coming up with ideas on my own, nothing, he tried as well, nothing - we got together, watched a very nice little fight scene from a certain TV show that shall remain nameless, but we both agreed was a very sweet and brutal little butt-whooping (I’m going to see how many different ways I can say that). And then suddenly the entire thing was done, in less then 5 minutes we had a very doable, very exact fight choreography with a possible running time of 1:30 to 2:00 minutes. And if you think Malice looks like a badass, wait until you see her in action.

So we continued to discuss other aspects of the movie, and finally came upon the ending of the movie which involves a potentially awesome showdown between Malice and Mal’Vash - who happens to be a 20 ft tall computer generated, armor plated, demon king. I’ve been putting off thinking about this because it just seemed too much brain power was needed, but I was pretty much thinking out loud and suddenly it just spilled out - this totally weird and almost shocking way to end the final fight.

I sat down, plotted out the White Room Fight Scene, there’s really only 9 points to it, like I said, very simple. Then I started really thinking about the Final Fight, it’s about 31 points - I basically do a step by step of the scene in point form, such as; 1 - Mr. A picks up the sword and turns to face Mr. X. 2 - Mr. X lunges and Mr. A and misses, passing him on his right side and falling on his face, Mr. A moves with him, turning to stab him in the back as he hits the ground. Basically like that, when shooting you can focus on these single points rather then the whole sequence, makes it much easier I think.

So there, I now have two major battles (literally and figuratively) plotted out. One potential fight has been reduced to a very one-sided “incident”, not to diminish it’s importance, but making it simpler actually makes a little more of a statement about some changes in one of the characters.

And to top it all off, this afternoon, while doing work for another project, I was spending a few hours going through some royalty free music when I found this one piece. It is incredibly creepy and cool - and was exactly everything I wanted for the main theme of the movie. I debated about having something custom made, but upon hearing this - no contest, this is it hands down, without a doubt.

Now the soundtrack is a way off, but having this main theme in my head, almost gives me a little more sense of direction for certain aspects of the final parts of the movie. In any case, what once felt like months of work, now feels like a week or more...I’m really hoping it’s not the senility thing.

The New and Exciting FireStore FS-4HD

As you can probably see by the picture down below, my new FireStore digital drive finally arrived and we're ready to film again!

Look, it's Happy Fun FireStore!

Well, not just yet - still a few things to work out. I managed to (hopefully) secure the last of my locations for the remainder of Heather's scenes, and I'm pretty happy with them, should be able to get exactly what I was hoping for out of them. We'll be shooting The White Room scene at the old Bascillica (is that spelled right?) Rec Centre - which is now known as Murphy's Community Centre (and to correct all those folks saying it was bought by the "Murphy's", you're wrong, very wrong - it's Ray Murphy of Murphy's Pharmacy), and we'll be filming the finale of the movie there as well - if we can work out the details.

One of the pluses about filming there, besides them being very accommodating and opened minded, is that for the fight scenes I was wondering about getting hold of some gym matts (you know, those big, flat blue things from high school?) and they have piles of them there all for us to use. So another problem solved. The only downside is I have to rent the space, not a huge expense, but one I wasn't planning on - however, since paying for something tends to make it a little more secure, at this point in time I'm more then happy to.

As far as the "work out the details" I mentioned before, concerning the shooting of the finale of movie. I have 2 choices. I can cut it up into 3 sections, which means 3 shooting nights, or I can do it all at once. The 2nd choice is my favorite, since it'll prevent and major inconsistency errors - if we shoot in one place on 3 separate occassions, who knows how much it could change from shoot to shoot. And if we shoot there once and for whatever reason can't get back in - we have to reshoot the first scene - so I'm leaning way towards the 2nd choice.

So how does this work with filming at the Centre? Well, the area I want to shoot in is normally set up with tables, about 50 of them, so they'd have to take them all down and put them all back in place afterwards(doing this only once is obviously a much easier chore then 3 times) and since I have to rent the place, it'd be the difference of a lot of money.

Now the only catch to all this - filming at night, in this location - all at once means an overnight shoot. I wasn't told outright to go away, I was rather happy that they were willing to entertain the notion and that they try to see if someone who works there would be willing to stay there all night with us. So I offered, in addition to rent, to pay this poor person's wage for the duration. I figured it was really the only logical and decent thing to do, especially considering I've got no other options at this point.

So we're still working on that, the overnight shoot, which would signal a very huge turning point in the shooting of this project. I'm hoping it happens, it'll be a lot of work and very tiring probably, but there's really no other options right now and right now is when it has to happen.

That's pretty much it for now.

Scenes from a library

In the midst of doing several different things at once for this project and a couple others, one thing that’s been a huge breakthrough for me has been the way I do my character animation. I recently did a little work into learning how to make more elaborate rigs with which to animate my 3D characers. I may have mentioned this before, if not, the “rig” I’m talking about is the skeletal system that animates the 3D model much the same way a real skeleton kinda helps you move around - more or less, there’s probably a better way to describe it...but, what can you do?

This will help me for at least 3 projects I’m working on, the 1st being the contract work I’m doing, the 2nd Dan Caseley’s animated movie (which is going to look so much better now) and of course, The Monkey Rodeo. I’ve done the new rig a few times now and I pretty much have it down, still a few bugs to work out, but I understand the basic principals enough to slap together a rough version for some minor animations.

The point of all this being, yesterday I went to work building the 3D model version of the live action area from The Library Scene. It was pretty simple actually. I own the props, so it was just a matter of some quick measurements an with an hour or so I had a pretty decent mockup of the live action part of the scene (Malice standing in the doorway area, in case you forgot what I was talking about from the last couple posts). Took a little to adjust the lighting just right, still working on that actually.

And finally the last part was a little CG version of Malice - which was very quickly and roughly done. Trust me, up close it ain’t pretty, but from a distance, it looks pretty damned good if I do say so my damned self. I was even able to (again very quickly) slap a rig onto the model, so I can actually do some fairly elaborate movement with the model when the time comes. So now, since I have this, and it looks much better then I originally planned, it allows me to make some of the CG shots a little more elaborate - since I now have a decent background model to work with.

So, despite how muddy the file looks, that’s because of the conversion into this player format, hopefully you can get a bit of a sense of how it’ll look in the scene. I won’t be getting any close to the model then this, changes are the simpleness of it will be obvious the closer the camera gets.

This is the live action - very quickly touched up for
the purposes of showing you how it will look
in the final version.

And a long view of the CG version - you can see from this, there still
needs to be some work done - only the colours really,
everything else I'm happy with.

And in other news

I finally got to test the setup for The White Room fight sequence (thanks to Pete Murphy for the loan of his camera) and I’ll be damned if it isn’t going to look awesome. The test was under less then ideal circumstances and still came out exactly like I’d hoped. In the actual setting, I’ll be shooting it in a 20x20 ft room, at least - and by the way, if you know of any 20x20 rooms with a 10 ft ceiling, please let me know as all my locations are very quickly falling through.

I set this up in my living room, and if you’ve seen it, you know there’s not much room for a 10 foot wide, 10 foot high backdrop, so I settled for 7 feet high - with 1000 watts of light not 5 feet from it, as well as the camera. This caused some glare on the actor, and some shadow on the backdrop. The glare, well, not much I can do about that, but be aware of it while shooting, the shadows are taken care of in post, so no worries there.

This was actually a bit of a longshot this whole setup, it was something I’d just sort of made up thinking it should work, never really having done something like this before I really wasn’t sure. I had to cut some corners, financially speaking, because certain part to a proper backdrop like this are very expensive. Like instead of white backdrops, I had to take unbleached backdrops, the difference is $40, not much for 1, but I needed 2 - and the difference is unnoticeable in the final version.

Hopefully this scene will come together relatively soon, the delays I’m experiencing trying to get started again are starting to annoy the hell out of me - and before anyone asks, it’s shipping delays and lack of finances that are causing the problems, which is just a matter of patience, not much anyone can do about that sort of thing.

So that’s it for now, there might be another update if I make a breakthrough in something in the next couple weeks, otherwise the next thing you’ll probably be seeing in the next 2 weeks is some stuff from The White Room.

Demonic Postwork

I thought I’d put this together to give you look at just how I put computer generated characters into a shot. Luckily this one shot I'm working on is only 18 frames, maybe less. Reason being, it’s the first time you’ll see the Wyrm Demon onscreen so I want it to be a bit of a shock at first - plus it doesn’t really need to be longer. Sometime a really quick flash of a shot it all you need to really make it work.

To get off track - because mentioning the quick flash of a shot reminds me of something. In the movie The Man With The Screaming Brain (yes, it’s nearly as bad as it sounds, but it was written by , directed by and starred Bruce Campbell, so what can you do?), there was a scene of someone falling down the stairs, which is a pretty easy shot if you got a good stunt man. I guess they did, but at one point they used a dummy - which I guess is near unheard of in this day and age, but it was only used for a total of 7 frames. It didn’t show up as a dummy and was such a quick thing, but having that one little shot that didn’t look like something a stunt man could do really helped. Anyway, back to the point.

The shot is simple enough, just a quick glimpse of the demon lunging towards the camera. The background was shot way back when we shot the rest of the scene. So that’s my starting point. One thing I did when adding it into the scene was to try to recreate the basic geometry to the original scene - or at least where shadows might interact. I just use this for a visual reference and for the lights in the 3D model to cast shadows where they’re needed. After this I set the lights up as best I can to get the same light as is in the live action shot. *The shots might look a little blurry, there’s a reason for that I will get into when the time comes.

The original shot.

Now with some basic 3D models overlapping where needed. The model of the car is very basic, not used for shadows (it'll have more detail's probably in the final version), but for adding in a bit of a reflection of the demon as it passes. Hard to get things exactly right, but this shot is so quick I’m more worried about what you see then what you don’t see - so this model is good enough for what I need it to do.
Once that’s done I bring in the demon and get him all squared away.

There’s no lighting as of yet.

And now with some lighting. Looks a little better,
but right now there’s no texture at all to the demon.

And there we go. This is the basic texture. I’ll actually be doing at least one, maybe two extras passes that will be composited with this footage to make the demon a little slimier and shinier.

So to start the whole process I animate the demon doing it’s thing, once it’s all rigged for animation then it’s just a matter of an hours work of fiddling to get exactly the movements I want. Then I’ll break the shot down into different passes.

First Pass: a shadow pass. Underneath everything else in this shot are the shadows. The shadows will definately need some tweaking for the final version.

Then I composite this with the original shot.

They look a little wonky, particularly the one from the orange light, it doesn't quite look natural - it'll definately be fixed for the final version.

Second Pass: This is something I don’t normally do, but this shot kind of requires it. I could probably get away without doing it, but I wanted to just to add a little more to it. And that’s a reflection, logically when the demon passes by the car he should be somewhat reflected, so like I said, I could probably get away with it since the shot is so fast, but what the hell. I might as well at least see how it looks.

The reason it’s against a black background is because it'll make it easier to composite into the live action shot. It’s not perfect by any means, but it will hopefully add another layer to the shot that makes it that much more.

See...

So that’s the background taken care of. You can see that’s it’s basically a matter of working my way up through the shot. Since the shadows and the reflections are more or less underneath or behind the main model, they get to come first. I actually had to adjust a few things specifically for the reflection, because the background street light was cranked up a bit more then it should be for the shot of the demon itself, so I could get a little bit of a bright edge to him on the left hand side, however, when seen from another angle it was way too bright. Also, the shininess of his skin was a little too much again for the reflection angle, so tweaked those 2 things until I got a basic reflection that I was happy with.

Now we’re left with just the demon itself to worry about. He’ll be rendered in a series of passes as well. The reason I do all these separate passes is for easier control of the final composition. Very rarely does a 3D shot match exactly the quality of a live action shot, it needs to be adjust, colour corrected and other things. Doing the shot in layers allows me to go in and adjust each layer as needed before I get too far and find out it’s not going to work. For instance, even the shadow pass has to be adjusted. I have to blur is just a bit, then lighten it, so it looks a little more natural.

Third Pass: the demon itself finally. This is obviously the most important pass, otherwise it’d just be an empty shot. Since this will be the main shot of the demon, he has to be perfectly finished, textured and everything, he actually should be finished before I even start any of this.

This is a pretty good start. He’s pretty much done. If I wanted, I could do his shadows as a separate pass as well, but it’s not really needed here. So I’m going to leave it at this.

I might as well point out at this point, one of the things that makes the Wyrm Demon work is the texture of his skin. It’s a bit complicated to explain, but it’s a process called Sub-Surface Scattering, or SSS. It’s used to create the appearance of a skin-like material, makes it look a little more real.

Best way to describe it is like this - if you’ve ever taken a bright light and placed your hand over it, your skin kind of glows around the edges of a bit. That’s because the light is actually going into the upper layers of your skin and the light is bouncing around a bit. Well, there’s probably a more technical and correct way to describe it, but that’s all I got. So if you still have no idea what I’m so terribly trying to describe, look at this.

WITHOUT SSS

(there actually is a small amount of sub-surface scattering
in this picture, just dialed way back)

WITH SSS

So the difference? That’s all I’m getting at, so moving on.

Fourth Pass: the mask. You probably seen this before if you’ve been reading this blog all along. All this is for, is to remove the actual 3D element from the live action background element. With this I can colour correct and adjust the brightness and contrast and whatever I want, without effecting the original background.

This brings us to why the images look blurry. There’s a specific quality to the images produced by a digital video camera. It may look fairly crisp when you’re watching it. But when you actually take a still image and look at it you can see it’s not really. The edges tend to bleed quite a bit. However with 3D that doesn’t happen naturally. In fact it produces extremely crisp images, too much for it to match any of my live action footage.

It’s pretty easy to adjust though, in the options to render an image you can adjust all sorts of things, the only one I’m really concerned about here is the sharpness, which is fixed by adjusting a filter to more match the quality of the live action footage. In doing this is it blurs the whole image, causing even the live action to blur - that’s not a problem since it’ll all be masked out in the end.

Fifth Pass: extra shine and glow. This is pretty simple. A normal texture has the parameters to be shiny and to what degree and all that. The basic skin doesn’t really give a high shine - at least not without effecting it to the point where you might encounter too much glowing glare here and there.

So I do the basic skin material so it looks as best as it can, then I’ll add the extra shine to get that slimy look in another pass, again it makes it easier to control it without re-rendering the whole thing. The orange light in the foreground is actually pretty low - to match the real lighting. For the shine, I’ll increase it way too much, and the same for the background street light.

And that’s it. Once all this is done - and it takes quite a while to render all these passes - it’s just a matter of compositing them all together, making a few adjustments here and there (it's a much longer process then it sounds, but you get the point) and finally I get this:
I should point out, these are pretty rough. There’s still a fair amount of tweaking to do for each pass. I’m not really happy with the way the shadows are coming out, so they’ll need to be fixed. As well as the shine, it’s a little sloppy right now, I just wanted to put this together to as a bit of a step by step example. There’s obviously a lot of steps I left out, like actually modelling and texturing - but those things are more for a tutorial or something, and incredibly boring, just so you know.

I guess the reason I would never do a tutorial on this sort of thing is because I’m making it up as I go. I honestly have no idea if any of my techniques are even slightly close to being “professional quality”, but at the same time, I really don’t care. I’m just doing this for fun and in the end it looks pretty cool, I’m not too worried about how I get there, whether or not “there’s a much faster and easier way to do that”. I’m sure there are faster and easier ways, sure it’d be nice to understand more about this, but for right now I’m not really all that concerned about it. Although, if this were my only job on this project, I would be very concerned, however I’m more interested in being efficient with my live action actors then my computer generated ones. The CG ones don’t get tired, cranky or have lives, so they’ll take as long as I damned well please to do their scenes.

Anyway, in the end, there’s 4 shots in total with this guy, so I’ll have to do this each time for each shot. The only difference being in the other 3 shots the demon isn’t interacting with the background, so there’s no need for a shadow pass, or a reflection pass. This does cut down on the amount of work and time for each shot. In total, all 4 shots, from creating the model, texturing, rigging, setting up the lighting and all the elements for the final composites - should take about a full week. Considering how relatively simple these shots and this character are, imagine how long it’ll take for some of the more major characters with actual dialogue and way more screen time.

Ugly Little Monster...well, Big Monster actually.

In the midst of working on various part of various projects, I’ve been rushing to get The Monkey Rodeo: Malice back on the go and so far it’s going rather well. I’ve been getting props, equipment and whatnot together, testing this and testing that to see how things are going to work out. Even working on some CG elements that I’ve left alone for some time.

One thing in particular is a weird little demon featured in one of the opening sequences. Like everything else this guy went through a whole pile of redesigns, I thought I’d actually settled on this strange spider-taur like creature, half human, half spider with a face that would split open with this gross looking tube-like thing coming out of it. It looked okay - but the more time I spent on this gross tube thing the better it looked and the crappier the actual demon looked in contrast.

So my only choice was the make the tube thing the actual demon. It’s sort of a Wyrm Demon, at least that’s what I’m calling it. It’s you're basic temporal slug with lots of teeth that exists in extra-dimensional space, popping out now and again to feed. It’s only in 4 shots in the entire movie so it didn’t need to have that much work put into it, still needs a bit of work, but I have to admit I’m really pleased with the result.

It’s a very simple looking thing, but visually it’s kinda gross and would be rather startling to see if it was slithering up behind you on the street. Normally I wouldn't post a picture like this, as it's really one of those things I'd like to keep under wraps until I'm ready to show the final movie, but it's not a major character in the film and hopefully it'll serve to whet folks' appetite for the final product.



This is just a quick render, I’ve done no post work to it, aside from adding a bit of a shine to it. I wanted to test how slimy I could make it look. In a couple days I should have it all set to put into each of it’s shots. On shot in particular is going to be a little tricky, still have yet to put any thought into that one yet.

See, this guy here gets a little frisky and tries to eat someone, only to be decapitated by Malice (also, one of the design needs was to have something with an obvious head of some sort, while this design doesn’t, it does have a huge mouth that will chop off just as well as a head would). I’m not sure how it’ll look in the decapitated state, I have a few little tricks I’m going to be testing out for the first time for this shot. So I’ll be sure to post some info about that when the times comes.

Until then, we should be shooting in a week or so, so make sure to come back and see what’s going on in the exciting world of indie filmmaking.

Filming to resume soon...hopefully.

After a very long hiatus from filming, it’s beginning to look like we should be returning to it very soon. Things were slightly rushed, but better rushed then taking too long - which this project has already. It was really a matter of being able to afford it, there were certain elements (props, costume pieces and equipment, etc.) that I needed to have in order to shoot certain scenes properly.

I’ve more or less sectioned what’s left between my two lead actors, Heather Panton and Derek Martin. I’m treating both of their scenes as if they’re two separate projects, especially now since I’ve completed the few scenes they had together. First off we’ll be completing Heather’s stuff, there’s only 4 scenes left, and almost no dialogue - which is a huge relief for her I’m sure - although 3 of the 4 are fight scenes.

First up we’re doing “The White Room” scene, which is kinda hard to explain, but visually speaking it’s just the two actors wailing in each other in this overbright white environment, with this continual flow of debris floating up around them. Sounds a little more dramatic then it will look onscreen though. Since the rest of the movie is very visually dark, I wanted something for the final showdown between Malice and The Resurrectionist to be different. It’s a fairly straight forward scene to shoot at least, so that’s good.

Next up will be “The Bile Demon’s Lair”, which could be a huge pain in the ass, but I’ve got a good feeling about it. It involves Malice entering the basement of an old abandoned house to retrieve an object called “The Spike of Valania” which is guarded by a small army of Bile Demons. While in the context of shooting there’ll only be two Bile Demons (Draper Bulger and Dan Caseley), there’ll be some creative editing and split screening to make them look like several demons. Again, this is pretty straight forward, we have a bit of a lead up as Malice walks through the basement until she finds the Spike and has to fight off the demons to escape with it.

It’ll be a long day, I’m planning on that at least. We’ll be starting quite early, as I have to do both Draper and Dan in demon makeup. And even though it’s not the final scene of the movie, it’s pretty much the biggest live action moment - so of course we’ll be documenting the whole thing with pictures and an actual documentary. It’ll follow right from Dan and Draper arriving and getting into makeup, to arriving on the scene and the whole shoot and even the aftermath of removing the makeup and winding down. Should be kinda fun.

Then it’s the “Abandoned Building” scenes. There’s actually several, but I’ve sectioned it up to make it a little neater filming-wise. There’s a lot of cuts back and forth from scene to scene at this point, but that doesn’t change anything when we’re filming. This one has presented the biggest pain the ass, since getting just the right location has been horrifically difficult. I thought we found the perfect place, but man, was I wrong there. So since then I’ve been sort of looking, but nothing has really jumped out at me. Over the next two weeks that’s going to be one of my main things.

Everything else for this scene is nearly taken care of, I have two new actors to the project who have to be settled in - I don’t see too much of a problem there though. It’ll be chopped up into 3 basic segments, based on the actors involved. Overall there’s only 4 actors in the whole thing, but never more then 2 in the same sequence at the same time.

Once all this is done, then I’ll be moving on to the remaining 5 scenes with Derek, those are fairly easy scenes to shoot, just dialogue. So they have the potential to be a little boring, so in the downtime I’ve had up until now I’ve been thinking of ways to really make them visually more interesting. More props and funky sets, something that should give the actors as well a little more to work with.

If all goes well, and to be honest it rarely does but we can always hope, Heather’s scenes should be completed by the end of March, roughly 6 weeks I’m thinking. Then I’ll probably take a quick break as I work out the remaining 5 scenes with Derek and then it’s onto post.

We’re approaching the 2 year mark pretty soon. Actually we may have passed it, I really don’t recall when I specifically started this carnation of the project. I think I mentioned in the very first post that this was originally supposed to be just a 8 minute short, all shot in one night...things change.

That’s it for now, I just thought I’d update the blog with this info, since it’s been some time since anything has really happened. So I’m hoping in a couple weeks I’ll be updating again with some pictures and extremely interesting and provocative anecdotes...or something like that.

Finally...

I think I hate designing things, I’m much better at actually modelling or drawing them. I’m too picky I think. At first when I’m done, I look at it and think “That’s the most awesome thing ever!” then 30 minutes later, “Wow, does that suck.”

However, after throwing out design after design I finally settled on something I think works for the set of The Library. I had this thing in mind originally that looked very much like a real library, just really freaking huge and slightly ornate looking - while I was cool with it, my computer really hated it.

So my next idea was that whatever it was, it needed to be something fairly simple, but still funky and unique looking with some amount of detail. And of course it needed to be set up in such a way that would allow for the chase sequence between The Black Book of the Skull and the Jim-Jim (if that sounded odd, you haven’t been paying attention).

So I did a few different things, had a few of them halfway modelled then scrapped them because the more detailed it got, the lamer they began to look. I even began researching a few different styles of architecture I could steal ideas from and mix and match...ultimately...lame.

To digress for a second (this’ll make sense in a bit), I frequent a few computer graphic websites, usually for inspiration or ideas, or whatever. I stumbled across this tutorial ages ago and thought it looked cool, tried it, didn’t work (didn’t have the right plugins for the software to make it look as cool as it did in the tutorials) so I passed it by. The tutorial was for making this ice-like material, a sort of shard of ice or something like that. I thought “that’d be cool to put in somewhere”. I thought about adding it to a character, didn’t seem to make sense though after a fashion.

I tried it again, got annoyed and moved on again and this time I finally gave up on it. Then I had this idea - after spending 2 days modelling a really elaborate set and then scraping it too - to make these book stacks that just kind of floated in the empty space of The Library. Since the scene is supposed to be set in a sort of other-worldly supernatural library, I figured why not. Can’t hurt. 1st problem solved.

And this way each stack is sort of a separate piece, so when I’m rendering the chase sequence, and stacks fairly far from the camera won’t need as much detail as the ones closer. 2nd problem solved.

The last problem was making something that would feel like there was a force keeping the stacks up, making them float. So I went back to the ice shard/crystal thing. And while I didn’t have the right software to do what the tutorial was getting at, I improvised and I’ll be damned if I didn’t come up with a really cool looking crystal shard looking thing.

This is the second render of the shards, bit of a glow added to it - not too shabby, I’ll probably do more work for the final shots, but even this looks pretty good. So after that little bit of fun I went to work on the shelves themselves, which are going to be very simple.


I thought, why bother with these really freaking detailed and elaborate stacks. If I was some crazy wizard dude and needed to store my books, just a regular old set of wooden shelves would do it, oh, and I’d have to stick these giant glowing blue crystals on the underside of it to make it float. Because you have to have floating bookstacks.

A rough version of the nearly, almost - but definitely going to use them - bookstacks.


The texture mapping is a bit sloppy and there's no books in the shelves, and...well, there's a million miles to go on this, so don't look and this and go "Ah, this movie will suck because this model is so lame."

And so finally, I settled. Now it’s going to be some time before I properly finish these badboys all up. Each one is going to be exactly the same. Just some wooden looking shelves, but painted on certain parts will be some glowing symbols and whatnot (because again, if I was a crazy wizard, I’d do the glowing symbols thing). Each one will have a different model of the crystal shard on the bottom of them, as well as different books - doing all the books is going to be a big pile of fun.

As well, I’ve been playing around with some...well, the best way to describe this is, really simplistic AI. Not AI in any true sense, but that’s the best way to describe it without going into tech-talk mode. I need to have the air around the stacks filled with floating books, some huddling around each other, some wandering aimlessly - various floating books behaviour. So I went to work a couple days ago learning how to do that stuff.

All I have to do it model a couple different books, fairly generic, then I can make flocks of them and they will float in and about the bookstacks. I don’t have to animate anything, it’s all done by the software. Each set of books will have a “behavior” assigned to it, they’ll know where they can and can’t go (so they don’t pass through the stacks or each other) and then when it looks varied enough - we have an entire weird-assed looking library.

Here’s a rough version (very rough) of a single bookstack, along with several books floating around it. This is as far from the final version as possible. The books are facing the wrong direction and their movement is a little wonky, the textures are messed up, but I thought it’d be cool to see - since this is the first video ever for this blog.



Half of the original footage has been fixed up already, most of the easier shots, now I’m working on some of the more painful shots where I have to mask out chunks of Heather’s hair. Now I have to finish The Librarian (very close to being done, but you won’t ever see it here for the sake of the final version), as well as all the extra stuff here and there. Just to give you a bit of an idea of what going on in this scene, I did a couple 360 turnarounds of The Black Book of the Skull and the Jim-Jim.





So that's about it for now.

Planning in advance

(This is actually an old blog, I just never got around to posting it until now - because I'm just that busy.)

Planning in advance. This is probably the first and foremost thing I should remember about making movies...of course, I never do.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t - mainly because of certain changes that happen long after a scene is shot and there’s no chance for a reshoot. What I mean is planning a shoot specifically for the addition of special effects (of any sort).

First thing is the camera has to be locked down, this really isn’t an option (unless of course you have camera tracking software - or at least the money for it) - by locked down I mean just sitting on a tripod or at the very least, not moving - which could also mean lying on the sidewalk or something.

Second thing is shooting a blank version of the scene. Basically you shoot your version with the actors or props or whatever, then just in case (depending on the effect) you shoot an empty version, or a version without a certain actor or prop (a clean plate in special effects talk...I think).

Otherwise you end up with a lot of work ahead of you. Of course, you can’t really plan ahead when you don’t really know what the effect is going to look like, or how it’s going to fit into the scene. A great example of this is a shoot I just encountered, it’s a very simple scene and actually the 3rd scene shot for the movie.

The scene involves Malice wandering along towards home after a night of fighting evil and she gets hit by one of her killer headaches then knocks her off her feet. Simple enough, originally it was just going to be Heather physically reacting to a pretend headache, with a sound effect thrown in to help the idea along. Then I got the stupid idea to make a visual effect out of it. Which wasn’t a horrible idea entirely, just hard to implement after the scene had been shot.

The effect is pretty simple, I got the idea from Batman Begins, if you’ve seen it you’ll know what I mean. It’s the effect used whenever someone came into contact with the hallucinogen. The background of the shot would sort of shake in and out, while the focal point remained more or less fine. I did my own version of that, not perfect, but it does look kinda cool. So now can the problem of fixing the footage to make this work.

There’s only 3 shots where I need it (so far at least, I may have forgotten there another one or two somewhere else in the movie). They’re all close together in the movie, scene 31 and 32 - the last 2 scenes right before the 3rd and final act of the movie. The first one I worked on is one where Malice gets up off the ground after being hit by one headache, sits down to recover and gets hit again. This one was fairly easy, I already had a blank version of the background, so I added the shakey effect to it at the right place, then using the old rotospline masking technique I seem to love to much, removed her from the background, added the two together, now we have her layered overtop the slowly vibrating background. No problem.

Then there was another, which had her lying on a couch. This one was pretty easy aside from not having a clean background, I had to make one, add the effect - and since Heather wasn’t moving - made a mask to remove her from the footage then added her and the shakey background together and the effect was done.

Then came one shot I’d forgotten about. Or at least forced myself to forget about. There very first shot had her fully in the shot walking out from behind a planter in very dark lighting and casting two very obvious shadows. When I first looked at this, I had no idea how to make it work. I couldn’t cut at the last minute from one version to another, because the shadows wouldn’t match exactly.

So, I made my clean version, easilyy enough and started from there. I had to remove her from the shot at the very least - at least for the last 20 frames. No problems there. But I also had to remove her from the shadows on the ground. So, out with the rotosplines to create a new shadow. Now I have a clean background, with a shadow, timed perfectly and everything. So far so good.

I still had the problem of removing her from the area with the original shadows. I traced along certain lines already in the shot to make a hole overtop the entire area where her shadow passed, then had to cut out over about 100 frames worth of her lower legs as they passed through this area.

Incredibly enough this all worked out. I’ve worked at doing some major cleanups before on some shots, but nothing this extensive. This is the first time I’ve worked at removing the actor and the shadows, replacing the shadows and then putting the actor back in. It works though, I’m fairly impressed by it myself.

The reason I mention all this terribly fascinating stuff is this:

Funny to think how much stuff you’ll never really see as far as effects go in a movie. I recently saw a list of Emmy nominated movies for the Special Effects category. Of course, Dead Man’s Chest is in there (you’d have to beyond dead and stupid not to realize those are some of the best FX in a movie ever), and some other effects movies and finally Casino Royale. Don’t get me wrong, loved the movie, best James Bond movie ever (another topic of conversation of course). But the visual effects? I don’t recall seeing anything near the same level of effects as say Dead Man’s Chest - now obviously there wasn’t going to be a guy with an octopus for a head in a James Bond movie (maybe the older ones, but not this one). What I mean is it didn’t SEEM like a special effects movie (unless of course Daniel Craig is really an 80 year old woman - in which case, damned good effects), it had explosions, and stunt work but those aren’t what this category is normally about so I can only assume from that, given a demo reel I just saw lately, that it’s one of those movies where the effects aren’t so much meant to stand out, but to STAND IN for something else.

For example, this demo reel I saw featured a shot from the Harrison Ford movie Firewall. And all the scene had was Ford pacing behind a desk in his office overlooking the city...? That was an effect? Then I saw the original footage and it was just of Ford behind a desk in front of a green screen. I can only assume it’s easier to have someone create an entire digital city and back wall of an office then shoot in a real office overlooking the city.

Given all that, it makes me wonder sometimes when watching movies just how much you’re not really seeing. The name Visual Effects, doesn’t just apply to stuff you’re supposed to see and go “Wow, giant transforming robots are cool!” But instead just watch the movie and not realize it was shot in a studio somewhere and not really on the streets of Venice. This is all obvious of course, movies have been doing it for years - but once you start seeing just how much isn’t real anymore you’ll be surprised. And so long as Natalie Portman is real, I’m pretty much cool with it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Hey,

It's been a very quiet last couple weeks, which in some ways is a very good thing. I start some contract work next week, so things are about to get extremely busy.

Movie-wise things are still moving forwards, just in different ways then usual. As far as The Monkey Rodeo is concerned, to anyone curious, yes it's still happening and the remaining scenes are definately going to reflect the extra time I've had to work on them.

As well, in the background of all this I've been working on an animated short with Dan Caseley, it's a short story he wrote and I'm doing all the visuals. It's called Mr. Toesley and the Love Powered Space Machine. It's about a grumpy old man and his cat who live in a town called Happy (unfortunate for them). It's been slow going with so much else going on, but I've made some great progress in the last couple weeks. That hardest part about it so far has been creating a character that looks annoyed and angry but by the end has to look the exact opposite.

It's a fairly large project, all the characters are human (normally I've done weird little monsters, which is much easier) and there's several of them. In fact I'm creating what amounts to an entire small town - most of the background townsfolks are all very similar looking, but it's still a huge task.

Angry Mr. Toesley

Too much coffee Mr. Toesley

It's still in the works, I'm awhile off before I start animating, but I thought since I won't have much to post here for at least another month I'd show you what else I'm working on. And then everything will be back to normal and hopefully maybe even better then before.

Shooting postponed big time

Well, not to make this sound like a pity post, but filming has been shut down until April or May at the latest now.

Why? Because someone broke into my apartment and stole my camera. That's about it. I went out for coffee around 10 this morning, came home about 40 minutes later and noticed a window beside my door had been smashed - which is kinda sad considering the pane right next to it actually had no glass at that point so I'm no sure why they didn't just use that. Anyway, stupid criminals aside, at first nothing looked wrong, not muddy footprints even - so I guess they were polite enough to wipe their shoes first.

I thought at first it may have been my landlord's handyman, for whatever reason he'd smash I window I don't know, just the most logical thing that made sense at the moment. I asked my landlord, nope wasn't that - so I chalked it up to a failed break-in attempt because nothing seemed disturbed in the apartment, other then Scully (my cat) but she acts weird sometimes anyway. Then, about 10 minutes later I was struck with the thought: "What about the camera?"

And sure enough, there it wasn't.

Now, what makes this a little on the sketchy side is that whoever this was, one or several, had to pass by everything else in the apartment before finding the camera tucked away in a dark corner. At this point you think, inside job - not to be too melodramatic about it. But I seriously doubt it, since the camera is normally never sitting there and it's obvious nothing else was disturbed.

I call the cops, showed up in about 10 minutes. All the while I see a city truck parked outside. Turns out someone also broke into the dentist's office next door (and they have a security system that apparently never went off), and when the cop showed up the city truck pulls into the driveway with him - with a TV someone found hidden in the bushes in their driveway, not less the 3 houses away. I assume the TV came from the office, no one's there today so I have no idea what happened over there.

An stupid me without apartment insurance. Some of us have to learn the hard way. In any case, the camera isn't irreplaceable - it was on it's last legs really. I'm more annoyed about the storage drive, luckily all the footage was taken off the drive so nothing there was lost - it just means I have no means of shooting the rest of the movie now. I do start work in about 2 weeks, so I will be able to afford to get things back up and running if all works out, but I won't have enough to buy a new camera until March at the earliest.

So, everyone involved in the movie who reads this; Take a break, and don't worry about filming any time soon.

Homemade Steadicam...and not much else

It's been quiet, no filming going on, not even really working on anything. Since I'm taking time off I decided to actually take time off instead of working on another part of the project. Well, that's not entirely true. I did do some location scouting and built a homemade steadicam.

I'd seen articles and plans on how to make steadicams several dozen times over the years, I've even looked at buying them - ultimately I never bothered with any of it. The homemade ones all seemed too much work for no real results, the pro ones just seemed way overpriced for what small use I'd really have for them (not much of a handheld fan since it buggers up any FX).

So a friend of mine, Derek Martin (Grayson, in the movie) sent me an email with a link to another persons site claiming to have a $15 steadicam. I checked it out - it was pretty McGyveresque. Then I figured, what the hell - it cost me more then $15, I neither had the luxury of the same stores this guy did or US prices, still only about $25 so no real complaints.

Finding the right parts without the hassle of running here and getting this drilled and going there and getting this cut and rethreaded was a bit of a pain in the ass. The whole point of something like this is the ease of finding the parts and assembling them - because the ultimate finished product is of only so much use so it's a little ridiculous to put that much effort into it. It's like, why bothering travelling all the way on horseback to a hidden village in Tibet for a special coffee cup, when you really don't drink coffee all that much.

So after a couple hours running around, I found one store that had all the parts, had to go to get two pieces of galvanized steel drilled and that was it. And that's about all the effort needed to make a weird looking t-bar thing with a barbell weight on one end. Not a perfect steadicam, but it actually does make a difference in the quality of handheld shots. It's not "balanced" in the sense a real steadicam should be, more like it's just weighted down to keep down excess wobbling and given a different axis to hold the camera on that helps also.

Overall, it's not too bad, do I have much use for it? Not really. I have a few shots where I can use it and it will help. I'll probably design a few shots to use it just to make use of certain sets and locations. Who knows, I might become more accustomed to it and use it more often, although I'm seriously considering this being one of the last movies I work on - live action at least.

Otherwise, the problem of a lost location that caused a major setback in shooting is more or less taken care of. I've found a place, very similar to what I had before - only this one offers a much wider variety of shots and angles. I've yet to actually secure it for shooting, but I've got a better handle on what needs to be taken care of first before I go in and shoot. So in the new year I'll be working on that and hopeing by mid-January we'll be back up and running and we'll finall wrap this thing up.

And that's it, this is probably the last post for sometime until things get back up and running.

More FX stuff

For the last couple weeks since there’s been no filming going on, I’ve been working on some special effects and post stuff, as you may have noticed obviously. In particular I’ve been muddling through The Library scene, trying to prep the footage for the addition of the computer generated elements - by “prep the footage” I mean cleaning it up and whatnot.

I’ve also been working at creating some of the smaller computer generated elements. The Book of the Skull prop now has a digital counterpart, as well as the Jim-Jim prop, and I’ve been fiddling with some designs for the Library set and the Librarian himself.

I thought I’d do a quick breakdown of how much work goes into a single shot, by showing it layer by layer.

First we start off with a clean plate - the original footage, totally untouched. You can see that around the outer edges of the doorframe the walls are still visible, as well as a sliver of light from the crack in the door. So first off they’ll have to be removed.
Since the shot was locked off (on a tripod and unmoving) it’s pretty easy to create a mask to block out those areas and just turn them into dark patches (which is what I want). Here you see the mask.
Instead of just using black, I actually took a 10 second clip off the camera with the lense cap still on, so instead of a jet black, I get a grainy black - which matches the footage more accurately so it doesn’t seem too weird to the eye. And combined with the mask, we get this:
Now, at the very end of the shot, which is 272 frames long (30 frames per second), you can see the Malice crosses over in front of the door. That won’t work, so I created a rotospline mask copying her movements across the door, this mask is a full 272 frame video clip since it’s masking out the motion of an actor (I think I explained this process before so I’ll skip it here, if you want, search around here for some more info on it).
Here’s a still shot of from the mask of Malice crossing in front of the door. Luckily it only requires a small part to be masked out over roughly 30 frames, so the mask doesn’t have to be completely accurate, just where the sliver of light needs to be removed.
The two masks are then combined, the still frame and the rotosplined mask to create this. Just a still image of the final composite. Not really much to see so far.
And now you can see the when Malice crosses in front of the door it works like it should. This is just the first step, All I’ve done is clean up footage at this point (note that I actually already cleaned up the burned out pixels if you recall those little buggers).
Now that’s done, I need to add the computer generated element - which is the digital version of The Book of the Skull. First I had to scan in the entire book from as many angles as possible, model it and finally turn out this. Here’s a side by side comparison of the two books, the real one on the left, the digital one on the right. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough for what it’s needed for - the digital one will require some post work to make it match the quality of the footage.
So, we start be setting up the scene. I purposely shot the scene with the pedestal empty in order to insert the digital book later - you might have noticed that actually. Here’s a quick render of the shot with the book added in. The block you’re seeing under the book is used for camera matching - in order to get the same angle and whatnot of the original plate - so the book ends up being shot from the exact same angle. Camera matching is a long, sometimes painful, process I won’t get into.
From there I do a rough animation of the book flying up off the pedestal and hovering for a second before flying off, which Heather had to try and react to. So then I refine it a bit more, trying to make it match what’s going on in the scene, in this case instead of having Heather react to a sequence of things going on to match the “to be added” book, I just walked her through it knowing I could just add the book and make it match with her actions instead. So I just told her to look up at a spot that made sense to her, then when I added the book I just lined it up as best I could to make it appear as though she’s actually looking at it.
Then we do a final render of the book animation. The textures, lighting and an added motion blue make it look much better. I won’t go into the process of how the book was actually made, I might do that at some other point for another digital prop or actor.
Now that I have my final book animation I still need to composite it into the shot. And since there’s a few things that need to be done to the footage to hopefully make it match a little more seamlessly, I have to create a mask for the book itself.

This is pretty easy, I just render another version of the animation, removing the lights, background and textures so I get a quick mask version of the footage. Also, the reason I render the animation against the original footage, is because otherwise you tend to get a bit of a “glow” surrounding the computer generated parts.
And since the book has to appear to be on the pedestal, another quick mask and a still frame one are added to block out the pedestal.
So with a complete mask for the book I add it with the cleaned up live action footage and this is what we get. You can see the shadows and whatnot of the book are just way to harsh to make it feel like it’s actually part of the original shot.
So I do some quick touch ups, adding some noise to simulate the same noise the live action footage has, adjusting the colour balance and brightness and contrast to get as close as I can. Not always easy to do and it doesn’t always work, so sometimes you just have to settle for “as close as I can”. The changes may be a little too subtle to be noticed here, but blown up on a large scale, it'd be really noticable.
That’s pretty much it, there’s a few other things I’ll add in - like a bit of a bloom off the lantern to help bring the elements together a little better, that’s really it. Otherwise this is the process I go through with every shot that require a clean up and then additional computer generated elements. Not "Hollywood" perfect, but still not terrible looking.

By no means is this an easy or simple process, nor is it something only a “professional” can do. I am by no means a professional, it just takes a buttload of patience and practice and of course the right software certainly doesn’t hurt. I get the impression sometimes that folks who don’t really understand this side of moviemaking just pass this sort of stuff off as “oh, it’s all done by computers” - well, that might be true, but it’s a bit like assuming cars can just drive themselves around. Computer generated imagery, whether it be matte paintings, or digital actors and props, are not something that just pop out of computers, it takes an incredible amount of work to make it happen.

Having said that, I don’t mean to imply I have more talent, dedication or knowledge of this stuff then anyone else, obviously I don’t - otherwise I’d be so rich I'd pay people to write this blog for me while George Clooney and I sit on my private Caribbean beach with my supermodel girlfriends. I just have way too much time on my hands, that’s pretty much it. And a touch of OCD doesn’t hurt either I suppose.

Special Effects stuff

I've been playing around, testing some ideas and whatnot to make the 3D models a little more realistic looking. Or at the very least, not look like total crap. The modelling itself isn't so much the issue, that I'm becoming pretty used to - it's the final, sort of detail stuff, that gives it that extra something something.

So, I decided to put this together to show just how it more or less works.

First, this is the basic model for the face of the Titan, it's unlit at this point and looks pretty dull and flat, but you can see the basic structure of the model.

And here it is with the texture, while it looks better, still not terribly impressive because there's still no lighting, nor does it really have any depth to it.
So here with some actual lighting, you can see a bit more of the details of the model. Here you can really see how smooth the mesh of the model is, doesn't really make him look like he's made of stone.
And now with the texture again, looks much better, still a little flat though.
This here is what's called the "bump map" and it's pretty much what it sounds like. It creates bumps and whatnot to make it looks like there more detail to the actual model. This is faked though so while it gives the illusion of detail there still really isn't any.
The texture and the bump map combined make it look much better. Now this is the stage I've been at for the longest time, still not 100% thrilled, it was missing something. Since he is supposed to look like he's made of stone, the actual model itself needs to be a little more jagged and whatnot.
That's were this comes into it. I just started playing around with this, it's kinda techincal, but bascially it's this; it's called a "displacement map" which again is pretty much how it sounds. You take a black and white image, the black part will appear sunken, while the white appears more raised - this effects the actual model. And combined with the bump map (which it is in this picture) is gives a much more detailed and stone-like effect to the model.
So now we end up with this. This is everything combined, the texture, bump, and displacement maps as well as the lighting gives it a much more realistic look - as well as a stone faced looking giant statue god kind of thing can be realistic.

And these are the 2 images used to do all this, this is the bump map, also used for the displacement map as well.
And the actual texture, or diffuse map.

This isn't the final version, you can see in a few place a couple problems that still need to be worked out in the the displacement and bump maps. I'll probably do another version of both maps and try to get a more stone-like appearance out of it. And more dramatic lighting would help, however that's not an option in this character's case since he has to match footage shot in broad daylight.

This is the process each character model will go through before it's finally animated and added into the final movie. In some case certain set pieces will use the displacement map as well to simulate more detail. The main reason being, if you tried to model this kind of detail it'd take forever, probably bugger up a million times over and would just be hell to animate - ultimately unless you're a real pro at this, it would never quite look the same and probably cause your computer to crash just by looking at it.

That's it for now.