The end of another long day

It was one of those days, missing money, bridge closed for a bicycle race. What was supposed to be a quick trip to Petitcodiac turned into another 12 hour day. Anyway, I'm home and I'm going over the pictures from yesterday's shoot.

There's some really great stuff, so get settled this is going to take awhile. First off, I hope no one is suffering any ill effects from the dusty basement. And there's a lot of pictures with this update, so if you're on dialup, you might want to go for a stroll or something while it all loads up.

The end of the makeup session for the Bile Demons.
Moe arrived too late and didn't get any shots of me doing the makeup,
but luckily for everyone, Andrea MacDonald was there to
document the whole thing - I'll be adding that eventually.

This is Dan in makeup, by the way.

And here we have Draper.

And for a first, an actual shot of me.

I gots a broom! Screw you Harry Potter, mine's bigger!

And we arrive on location...

And we scare the locals a little bit.

Bile Demons are also very good hairdressers.

I'm not sure, but I think he overdid the hairspray and
is trying to wipe it off, and Heather looks rather amused by it.

Ooh, the scary basement of Bile Demon death!

Eww, Bile Demons actually leave Bile on things?

Another failed attempt to make Blacklights cool again.

Yeah, Bile Demon Bile (tm) is really dish soap..
What else did you expect?

I like these shots. I'm the Hulk.

And our actors lounge in our luxurious lounge/laundry room.

My first attempt to use reverse acting. Basically we do the shot in reverse,
because it's safer, then I reverse it, so it's now playing it the right direction
and hopefully it looks like Heather is actually grabbing and
stopping that sword before it hits her in the head.

I don't even know which one this is, Draper or Dan.
I think it's Dan.

Some more reverse acting excitement!

For only pennies a day, you can sponsor a poor
starving Bile Demon, just like little Gary here.
He just wants your love...and perhaps your liver.

"So, you think it shows at all?"
"Nah, barely noticeable at all."

This is Heather moving in realtime - she's that fast!

This is actually kind of creepy looking.

"That is the camera. Do not look at the camera!"

"Oh hey, come look at the camera."

This guy will eat your entire family for breakfast.

And this is Heather's reaction to:
"That was your last shot, dude...you're done."

And in comes Jordan, Heather's double.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...and something about killing Bile Demons.

Dan takes a moment to mentally prepare himself for what lies ahead.
And that's Kim, by the way, my newly appointed Production Assistant.

Dan and Jordan contemplate the best way to kick someone in the groin.

You can almost see the look of "She's going to do what to my where?"

You know, out of context...this is kinda strange looking.

"And now you get to chop him up with an axe."
She does look pretty happy about it, doesn't she?

And this, is officially the coolest picture ever.
If this was of Heather, it would without a doubt be the movie poster.

More action and axe chopping danger!

Meanwhile Draper,
who has been up for probably 20 hours at this point,
starts to fade on us.

"And don't talk back to me, or I'll smack you again!"

Yes, that is Bile Demon Bile (tm) once again,
splattered over the shot list.

And Draper's done.

We're all done...actually.

No sooner said, then this happens.
You really shouldn't rip it off like that...

My first thought when I saw this was, Dan has a look on his face like:

"Actually, that stuff in the mayonnaise jar we found
under the stairs there, wasn't so bad."

"Really? Can I have some?"

"Uh...On second thought..."

And I will leave you with this one last
heartwarming Bile Demon Picture.

That's pretty much how it all went. Only this makes it look like so much more fun. I was talking to Draper afterwards about the fact that there are people who do shoots like this 6 days a week, sun up to sun down - I have no idea how they survive. This was a pretty painful shoot, well worth it since it looks like all the footage is going to be awesome.

It's funny when I mention I do this and people's first reaction is "Oh, that must be fun." Well, in some ways it is, but don't think for a second we're all sitting around having a gigglefest the whole time. That rarely happens, this is damned hard work. It's stressful and sometimes physically painful - so why do I bother with it? Why not? When was the last time you got to wear monster costumes and play with real weapons?

It's partially for the experience of just doing something completely different for a change. And yes, it is fun sometimes. Although, I'd much rather be having "fun" in a nice clean room then a dusty smelly old basement - but you catch my meaning. Let's face it, you dress up for no good reason as a monster and go lurking in someone's basement...you might get your ass thrown in jail for being some sort of weirdo. BUT! Make a movie while you're doing it - now that's a different story.

Not sure where I'm going with this last little rant. It's 12 AM now, I'm tired. I'm going to drink some Canada Dry from a can and play Tomb Raider. Seems kinda boring after all this. However, if I dress up like Lara Croft and...never mind, there's no context humanly possible where that's exceptable.


I just noticed when I published this, I started at 9:49. That took some time to do.

One more scene done, and one small update.

This is just a very quick update after a very long day, up at 7:30 AM to start finishing up and done by 7:30 PM after filming for roughly 6, could have been 7 1/2 hours.

Once we were near done we took some shots of Draper Bulger and Dan Caseley in their Bile Demon costumes. I wanted to post something really quick, I'm in for an early night as I have an 11 AM meeting in Peticodiac about some soundtrack music for another project - a meeting with Ralf Cassidy Bindels, soundtrack guy extraordinaire.

So until I go over all the footage and pour over all Moe's pictures - here's some Bile Demon goodness to tide you over.

Here's Dan as the Uber Bile Demon

And the rest...well, you figure it out.

That's it for now kids, more later.

2 years in the making

I don't think I can recall the exact date I started pre-production on this project, but we're pretty fast approaching the approximate date we started shooting. I think it was sometime mid-June of 2005 we started. Maybe July, I really can't recall it's been so long.

Still got a long way to go to though. As I believe I've mentioned many times, this coming Sunday is Heather's last shoot for the movie - I'm sure she's beyond thrilled to finally see the end of all this.

This is without a doubt the longest running project I've ever done - and will more then likely signal a massive decline in my movie making. I've a few more project already on the go that I'm doing for and with other folks, my own stuff though will turn more towards animated projects, mainly because it'll be much easier in terms of organizing.

So that's it really, I was just thinking how long this has been in the making and how much longer it will be.

After this, 5 more scenes, which are going to all look awesome, I've had so much time to rethink them visually to make them more interesting. These scene are the exposition scenes, which have a tendency to be boring and slow things down. I'm hoping to fix that by really going overboard on the visuals to make them as interesting as some of the other stuff you'll be seeing.

Rarely is anyone's favorite scene in a movie one of the exposition scenes, I'm hoping that this movie will change that.

The League of CG StuntMen

I started working tonight on one of the (many) computer generated stuntmen for the movie. I’m kind of writing this while I’m working on it, so if it seems disjointed or perhaps annoyed by times, it could be because it’s not working terribly well.

First off, I started with some front and side posed images of the actor who the stuntman will be based off of. In this case it’s Steve Gillespie. The stuntman will only be used for a couple shots, but they’re very necessary shots – for instance when Malice slams a hand into his chest and sends him flying nearly 30 feet through the air into a wall.

The pictures were taken, when we were filming the other night, by Moe. They’ll be used for textures and reference. Normally the textures are a huge deal, in this case, because I so cleverly had Steve wearing all black it’s not such a big deal other then the hands and face.

Leaving all the technical parts aside, which are rather tedious and boring in this case, I started literally from the ground up, shoes, pants and finally torso and arms for the basic suit (and technically untextured parts).

Here's a hi-res wireframe.
(still pretty low-res by average standards)

Just what's called a "clay render".
No texture, just a greyish neutral colour.

And with a rough basic texture.

Now this is being modeled for distance shots, so it’s a little angular and exaggerated and fairly simple. If it was for something more closeup, like some of the other computer animated characters, it’d have more much detail and whatnot. I normally would’ve added the pocket flaps and buttons and whatnot, but it really isn’t visible from the distances I’ll be using – so why bother?

*At this point I’ve been working on the model for about 2, maybe 3 hours, or about 3 episodes of X-Files. That’s how I’m measuring all this, by the way, per X-Files episode, Season 2 specifically.

And now for the hands. I’m actually debating at this point as I look at the “textured” version of the model, I might actually do a rough texture to add the buttons and pockets, and even something to the shoes.

The hands will be fairly simple, again because of the size they’ll be onscreen.



The most important part – the head. This is going to be the hard part. I think I just past the 4 episode mark.

Luckily Steve has a pretty symmetrical face, and very distinct, so if it’s even slightly off it’ll be pretty obvious…Actually, that’s not really a “luckily” sort of thing, it’s a pain in the ass, but it makes it easier to decide when I’m done.. This is the part where texturing the model become really important, because it’s the only part that really sells the model when you see it onscreen. That’s also what makes it the hardest. If there’s something not right looking about the face, it just doesn’t work. And of course from there it’s the quality of the animation too.

Not terribly impressive is it? It never is at this point.

So there it is. It does look a little funny, but remember it’s just a simple model. However, I still may do some work with it, add some detail to the hair, which seems to be the weakest part. So I added a few little sticky out parts here and there, it’s a little too symmetrical for now, I’ll work on that later I think, just wanting to see if it works for now.

Overall, this isn’t too bad for only a few hours work, for a model that will really only be seen in 3 or 4 shots. Yes, it does look a little weird, but that shouldn’t be noticeable.

What will really help sell this is of course, as I mentioned earlier, the animation. Rigging it will take some time, and I do have other things on the go for tomorrow – and prepping for the Bile Demon scene, hopefully I’ll get a chance to work on it again pretty soon.

I did a quick scene render, just to get a scene oh how the model will look once it gets into some of the final footage. You can see it's actually pretty good - the only real giveaway is that I don't recall Steve standing around in this pose too often.

The final version will have much more work done to it to make it match as well. Anyway, there you go - an almost finished CG Stuntman.

Bile Demony Goodness

I've set the date for this scene finally and am awaiting word back. It'll be Heather's last scene for the movie - aside from perhaps a few closeups I might need to fill in a few blanks (sorry you had to hear about here, Heather) - but they'll be tight closeups, shot against a dark background so I can then manipulate then to put them into the appropriate shots. There'll be three or four shots at best.

In the meantime I'm working out the details of the Bile Demon scene. The location is hopefully the same, I have yet to get word back or confirmation either way. I started a little while ago working on some of the props and armor the demons would need. Most of it has been long since taken care of, but with the addition of the Uber-Bile Demon, I need to create some cheap, cruddy looking armor - which is nearly done.

And as well, I thought it would be a good idea to create from more foamcore weapons duplicated. The swords the Bile Demons use are replicas of the the Uruk-Hai swords from Lord of the Rings.In case you're wondering: yes they are (1) very heavy, (2), sort of sharp and (3) 32 inches long. Because they're so heavy I was concerned about the actors swinging them about. Now they won't be swinging them over their heads like a dead cat in every shot, but there are certain shots were I'd like it look as though they were swings these HEAVY swords as though they were nothing - and of course there's that safety issue as well. So, more formcore weapons it is.


Since I'm in a taking-pictures-from-the-internet-to-show-you-what-we're-doing, sort of mood. I thought I'd show you the Bile Demon prosthetic that out actors will be wearing. On the left is the natural uncoloured version, this is what I have to work with. And on the right is what it couple potentially look like. All depends on how I feel. I'm thinking more green though, seems to suit something called a Bile Demon.
And then we have their funky contact lenses they'll be wearing. Sorry for the small image, it's all I could find.
And then we have these delightful gloves for them. The sad part about these gloves is how much of a pain it was to order them and then how cheap they are. They look good here, and actually do form this angle in reality, but there's no underside to them, just a cruddy little fabric glove for your hand and an equally cruddy little elastic for your forearm...What do you expect for $12 I guess.
From there we'll feature the Spike of Valania again, already pictured a few time throughout the blog. The only other weapon in this scene is an axe which gets swung at Malice's head...not really, it's a movie!

It took me forever to find a even this quality image of the axe, I guess it's not much of a big seller. It's not sharp or anything, it's dull as it could possibly be. But, what's really cool about this axe, is that it was actually very prominently feature on Angel, I believe it was Wes's Bavarian Battle Axe, or something like that. I thought it was cool anyway.
What else? There's very little CG in this scene - always a plus for me. But there will be some very funky visual effects for a couple shots. This is one of those scene with a lot of real props, which I think makes it a little more fun and easier for the actors. We'll even have some actual Bile Demon bile...I won't tell you what it really is.

There'll be a big funky Soul Lock on a wall. Don't worry if you're sitting there thinking "Uh, okay...he said Soul Lock as if I should know what he meant...I feel uncomfortable and awkward now." I made it up anyway, it's not real or anything. It's just a fairly elaborately strange looking symbol that will appear on a wall. It's an easy effect, but should look pretty cool.

How it works is this: a Soul Lock is attuned to one person's soul, usually the individual using the lock - therefore they should be the only one capable of opening it. However, like all locks they can be picked, and Malice just so happens to know how. It looks like nothing more then an occult-ish symbol drawn on the wall. What it is really is a small portal, a portal to a void that the user can place a smallish object in. In this case, a very important artifact has been hidden away behind this Soul Lock.

I think that's it for the most part as far as props and fun stuff. This will more then likely be my last update until I shoot next. I hope to have lots of stuff to post in the week following though - maybe even a little video or two.

Some photo-fantasticry

Okay, that's not a real word. Nor is it even a slightly good word, but it does describe this post quite well, whether you like it or not dammit.

I'm writing this while my laptop goes through the painful procedure of converting the 108 pictures taken during the shoot the other night. So far all I can see are all the images from the room itself, should be more then enough - and that will be a fun time in itself recreating that whole room in 3D.

So, while we're all waiting for the photo-fantasticry to happen (I have to add that word to my spell check now), I might as well mention some new minor developments in the movie. This won't require you to rethink you world views or anything, not that important or earth shattering. Just some thoughts I had after looking at the footage.

More and more I had issues with cleaning up every shot to make the overhead lights look off with any sort of realism - there's a bit of a glow from them in some shots that is impossible to remove. (I see some pictures of Draper being converted now...Calm down, you'll see them eventually - just keep reading) So I can up with the idea of adding more to the front end of the scene - don't worry Heather, doesn't involve you at all.

I decided to help set the scene better to have more of a lead up to the final showdown by following the security guard into the place and perhaps giving the viewer a little more of a sense of what this building is, why it's abandoned - and even make an excuse for the lights being on. We simple show the guard hitting a breaker, then a few cool scenes of lights flickering on. Hopefully it won't slow things down, or cause the movie to take too much of an abrupt turn.

So now I can stylize the lighting a little better, still a lot of work, but the whole scene will end up with a very odd feel to it. I'm going to very quickly remove my actors from the shots, recolour the background to be a little dimmer and blue, bring up the glow from any lights and blur it a bit while leaving the actors relatively untouched - a little colour correcting, but not too much. Should give it a bit of a peculiar, almost shot-against-a-green-screen sort of feel...I really have no idea if this will work - but I did get the idea from Heroes, so that makes it cool.

Well, onto the pictures. By the way, they're not in any order that I'm really aware of.

Blurry Draper has a ball!

This is why I bought doughnuts...
Don't eat dirty balls you found lying around.

Steve looks slightly concerned about something in this picture...
Perhaps it was finding out that Heather had to stab him in the gut
after slamming him into a brick wall.

AHHH! It's the MOTHMAN!

Haha, look everyone! Will got drunk and fell down again.

And then Draper just had to add insult to injury.

Okay, so I'm waiting for more to convert now. So far so good. As you can probably see, those of you who weren't at the shoot - we had quite a few folks there. Draper as usual was there. Kim Johnston was helping out behind the scenes - just an extra set of hands and eyes, always good to have that around. Steve Gillespie in his first scene, although it's his last in the movie - he the big bad guy who's buggering everything up. And Will Beckett, who gets killed.

So of the others in the background you're seeing are Heather Panton - obviously. Her double, Jordan Berzins, in case you're wondering "Wow, is Heather that important she needs a double?" Well, sort of - but she is 5 (?) months pregnant so there's not much choice. Also there's Jason Birt - the guy responsible for Heather needing a double (I seriously don't mean that to sound bitter, I was going for a slightly more funny thing there).

Anyway, more pictures.

Does this make you feel funny in the head looking at it?

Yet another really dangerous prop. I stabbed by thumb with this thing.

Another awesome makeup job!

That is what you call "Pissed Off Looking."

Just look at those expressions of awe and wonder
as they watch the magic of movie making!

Hey, now's a good a time as any to point out I started another blog - for those of you who look as excited right now as Jason and Jordan do while you're reading this. It's just for myself really, as an exercise in self-indulgence I thought I'd use it to keep track of some of my other projects. I think there's a link to it at the bottom of this page - don't look now though, you'll miss something exciting, better wait until I'm done here.

This scene was just to justify why I bought all those weapons.

I'm not making a movie by the way, I'm doing a documentary to prove
that under the guise of movie making, you can get people to do
completely ridiculous looking things...Including re-enacting scenes
फ्रॉम He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

So there you have it. Not really a whole lot to see really, mainly because the bulk of this scene is post work.

I'll also point out, not pictured in any of these picture, but very present on the scene, was Moe Chandler - it was her who took these, just in case you didn't realize what I was hinting at there.

Alright I guess that's it for now. I've been working out the details on Heather's last scene for the last couple days, hope to get that started pretty soon, then it'll be another vacation from the movie for me for about a month or so while I get everything ready for the last 5 or so scenes.

One more down.

Well, last night actually wasn't too bad. It was a little hectic and stressful, but overall I think we got enough footage to end the movie.

Aside from some massive continuity issues, which I'm learning to live with, I don't really have too many complaints. Although I'm sure if I tried I could come up with many. I took a very brief look over all the footage - not going to bother posting anything right now since it needs a huge, world-sized amount of post done to it all.

Rather then light the room and deal with shuffling lights all night long, I decided to leave the overhead lights on and try to clean it all up afterwards and make it look a little darker in the room. Only reason for that was because of time. We probably would've been at this for 3 or 4 more hours if we had to contend with shifting lighting.

I keep going over in my head how much work this last scene is going to be, and if it's worth it. I hope so is all I can come up. Doesn't sound that confident, I think mainly because I broke my brain and it's hard to even remember how to spell most of the words I'm typing right now. (By the way, thank god for that auto-spell check thing or this would be a mess.)

I might post some stuff eventually with some rough visuals after a fashion, but for right now I'm pretty busy so I'm not sure when I'm really going to get around to working on this. I'll probably start processing the shots to find the right look, cleaning it all up and whatnot, see if there's much we missed, how much has to be made up out of CG to make it work - all that fun stuff.

That's pretty much it, thanks again to everyone who helped out - it probably would've been slightly hellish if even one of you hadn't shown up. I'd like to give you all more praise, but I'm too tired right now.

No news is...good news? If you say so.

Well, nothing new to report. However, things are about to get hectic over the next 3 weeks. Maybe 4.

On May 16th, we're all set to shoot the finale of the movie. And there's a million and half little things I need to try and keep in mind on order to pull this all off. It's a fairly large shoot, for what it's worth. We're going in at 7:00 PM and not coming out until we're done, which might be roughly around 2:00 AM.

I'm hoping it all goes pretty smooth, I'm going to be doing some FX tests over the next week when I can get a chance - my paying job is taking up a massive amount of my time, but is going quite well. I have to finish a little FX test for a shot that was added to compensate for my lack of preparation from a previous shoot. Malice now has magical healing abilities, better then Wolverine it seems. So I'm adding in a quick little shot to show a cut on her face healing up. Should work, did some crappy little tests, but I want to do a decent one to really get a feel for it and I'll probably post it here.

As well there's a lot of other things to prepare for. For instance, there's a part where Malice throws an axe at a giant CG demon. Well I can't very well let Heather lob the real thing, it's pretty heavy and even if I keep everyone back, there's still a chance it could damage something. So I'm creating a couple "stunt" axes, made from lightweight wood and foamboard. They won't look awesome, but it's a quick shot just so we can see it's actually Heather, not Jordan, and that's she's really throwing it. And then it will be replaced with a CG axe from there...It's nothing if not overly complicated

And one other thing I'm preparing for is that I will need for the final fight to not only create the computer generated Mal'Vash creature, but a CG version of Heather and Steve as well. They won't be heavily relied upon and will only be seen in long shots or for a very quick cutaway. However, I'm also going to get some hi-res images of the entire room so I can then recreate it entirely on the computer, so if there's some horrible incident where I miss a couple shots, I can hopefully use the computer generated versions of my actors and set to fill in the gaps.

I'm hoping I won't have to rely on it, since it will by no means be perfect looking or fool anyone if I have to linger on it too long - at least I suspect that will be the case.

So here's hoping it all comes together

The movie poster

I finally found a decent place to get the movie posters done, not the full size poster I would like, but the quality and reliability of the company seems pretty decent. I've only ordered one poster from them, however I was really impressed with the shipping and their pricing and the overall quality of the printed image.

So, here it is, the movie poster. I may make a few adjustments here and there, but ultimately this is the final look. So, if anyone wants one, I think they'll be around $30 each, 32" x 24", I think about $7 shipping and handling, and they're shipped in a hard plastic tube (so no squished posters!).

I intend at some point to get one for everyone involved in the project who wants one, but anyone outside the project, put in an order - not sure when I'll be getting them, but I'll keep everyone updated here.

Finally getting around to editing

Like the title says, I'm finally getting around to editing. Editing what? The White Room scenes.

Well, I'm pretty much happy with everything. Not entirely, but as much as can be expected. The reason I'm not entirely pleased is really no one's fault by my own. As I mentioned before, I'm not a fight scene director - so I really have no idea what I'm doing. I actually have a much better grasp on things now. The one thing that really makes the difference is rehearsal. I certainly don't blame my actors, they did a great job - they just did what I told them, which is where things went wrong.

To be a little more precise, the only real problems were the actor's positions in certain shots, they don't really match up sometimes and as a result it feels a little clunky, even though it's a pretty tight edit at the moment (I will be going over and over it to see what I can do). That's not to say by any means that's it's terrible and we wasted our time, by no means, there's really only 2 or 3 shots I'm not thrilled with, otherwise it's really not bad at all - I'm just being overly critical.

From there the cleanup and post work on the shots is going to be incredibly time consuming, although. The entire sequence comes in just shy of 1 minutes 30 seconds, not too long, nice and quick and to the point.

This was basically a lesson for all of us I think. We have one more fight scene (two really, but the third one is mostly CG), so I think we definately will be doing some rehearsals, filming the rehearsals and just end up shooting the hell out of the scene so there's nothing we miss. As I said, only real complaint was lining up the shots - with a little editing I was able to clean up almost all them, a couple just can't be helped though.

I was going to post some storyboard/shot comparisons, then I realized I didn't want to show off The Resurrectionist too much right now - so sorry, nothing to see here.

UPDATE:

Looks like I spoke too soon.

Well, I did as much I could last night, then decided to just leave it and come back the next day. Since I've been sleeping less then usual I had some time to think about some of the shots - specifically the ones that didn't match up.

Believe it or not I was able to reuse some older shots, very creatively to fake the shots I was missing. Some I just had to reverse, others I flipped horizontally. And quite honestly if anybody could point out the difference seeing it once or twice - I'd probably spontaneously combust, or they're just a bloody lying wanker.

In one case, I decided to fix up a shot where the Resurrectionist gets a boot to the face. Now the shoot looked fine, but I came up with an idea to make it a little better. There was one take where the timing was way off, so I actually had a blank shot of the character flying back without a foot in the shot. So, I removed the foot from it's 6 frames and repositioned it in the shot to match up with the reaction and ended up with a perfectly timed boot to the head.

In the end, still not a perfect fight scene, but much better then what I originally had only 12 hours ago.

Quick update

Started going over the footage, so far so good.

Thought I'd show you what the final version of what The White Room should look like, it's not completely accurate, but it's pretty close.

BEFORE

and AFTER

The particles will be adjusted, maybe made smaller - but to give you an idea, they'll be constantly floating upwards throughout the entire scene.

And that's it, some of the shots are a little dark, so they'll need to be touched up. It's not a huge job, just a little touchy when dealing with some of the Resurrectionist shots - since he's rather white to begin with. The overall effect should be a weird enough looking for my taste though.