You Ask the Questions

March 7, 2013October 20, 2013 neiloseman

When we launched the postproduction crowd-funding campaign for Stop/Eject last spring, I promised a “People’s Choice Reward” when we reached our target of £1,500. Well, we reached it in January, we canvassed opinion, the People spoke, and verily you requested an interview with the cast for which you the People submit the questions. And lo, it shall be done.

You have until next Wednesday (March 13th) to submit your question(s) for Georgina Sherrington, Oliver Park and Therese Collins. Email them to info@stopejectmovie.com with “People’s Choice Reward” in the subject line. The best ones will be posed to the actors in a specially shot interview which will be posted online in a couple of weeks.

If you’re stuck for ideas, have a read about the cast below…

Georgina Sherrington. Photo: Paul Bednall — Georgina Sherrington

Georgina Sherrington (Kate)

Georgina Sherrington (born 26 July 1985) spent her early years playing the the lead in the series The Worst Witch and Weirdsister College. The series was shown on ITV in the UK, ABC in Australia, HBO in America and on various other networks worldwide. In 2000, Georgina won a Young Artist Award for Best Performance in a TV Comedy Series. In 2008, Georgina completed a degree in English Literature at Princeton University. Since graduating, she has worked on the LA, New York and London Fringe and won Best Actress in the London Solo Festival last year. She also produced and starred in the film Steamboat, and will soon be seen in cinemas in the horror film, Tag.

Visit her website at www.georginasherrington.com

Oliver Park. Photo: Paul Bednall — Oliver Park

Oliver Park (Dan)

Oliver Park is an award-winning actor. His first major film role was Kai in the multi award-winning Shank, and as a result of this performance the production team behind the film wrote parts especially for Oliver in their two follow-up productions – Release and Buffering. After shooting the feature film Just Ate early in 2012, Oliver won the Best Actor award for his performance in the short film Wakey Wakey at the ITV West Film and Television Awards. Later that year he was approached by Darlow Smithson Productions to appear in an episode of Seconds to Disaster for National Geographic. Since then he has gone on to take leading roles in several other features including: Dark Vision, Tidal, the comical role of Tom in Tenants and the challenging role of Shaun in Fratton by IVN Productions. Oliver is currently involved in several projects including the feature film One by Reel People Films, David S. Goyer’s Da Vinci’s Demons and a film for the new X-Box. Visit his website at www.oliverpark.co.uk

Therese Collins. Photo: Paul Bednall — Therese Collins

Therese Collins (Alice)

Therese has worked in theatre for 27 years and is returning to acting after a break in which she concentrated on writing. Her play Remendos is currently being performed in Portugal. Her acting career has been varied, ranging from international tours in plays such as The Bridge – by Hanyong Theatre Company touring the UK, South Korea, Japan and Australia – to Lucifer in Immaculate in a small theatre in the West Midlands. She spends most weekends in the summer touring in a giant silver whale for the company Talking Birds. She has recently worked on Doreen’s Story Episode One, a Youtube pilot for a Black Country comedy. Therese has previously worked with Neil Oseman on several participatory dramas – playing a range of single mothers! – and she is absolutely delighted to have been part of Stop/Eject.

Photography by Paul Bednall – paulbednallphotography.co.uk

More Random Updates from the World of Stop/Eject

March 5, 2013October 20, 2013 neilosemanADR, DVD, music, publicity, sound, VFX

Here are some more disjointed updates from the post-production of Stop/Eject:

Scott Benzie has written all of the score now. A few cues just need tweaking before we start to think about the logistics of recording it with live players.

The ADR session has been organised for next week. Standing variously for Automated Dialogue Replacement or Additional Dialogue Recording, ADR is the process of dubbing lines because of intrusive background noise or to adjust a performance, or even to add entirely new lines to clarify story points. This will be the first time the principal cast have been reunited since the shoot almost a year ago, and we’ll be taking the opportunity to record some extra bits and pieces for podcasts, DVD extras and sponsor rewards. Lots more news on that to come in the near future.

Work is well underway on visual effects. As expected, there has been a certain amount of attrition amongst the VFX artists, as paying projects understandably take priority. Nonetheless, several key shots involving frozen time and cloned cassette tapes are finished or nearly finished.

The opening and closing titles are being designed by Andy Roberts of speakersfive, who recently laid out the lovely illustrated script books for sponsors.

Two of the main extra features for the DVD and Bluray are near completion, with work on the menus underway and some commentaries to record in the coming weeks. Sophie Black and Chris Newman will soon be shooting another featurette in their part of the world, along with a last couple of pick-ups for Stop/Eject itself.

On Sunday I gave a talk about the whole process of making the film to the lovely folks at CEMRIAC in Worcester, and next Monday The Courtyard in Hereford will screen the trailer as part of Borderlines Film Festival.

In a nutshell, it’s all happening.

Planning VFX: Traditional Techniques

March 1, 2013October 20, 2013 neilosemanCGI, fx, miniatures, VFX

Over a month ago I wrote a post about the advantages of computer generated imagery over more traditional ways of creating visual effects. Apologies for the delay, but here at last is the flipside of that coin: the advantages of old-school technqiues.

Here’s an alternate ending from Blade (1998)….

It was ditched after test audiences responded poorly to it. They had invested in the film’s villain throughout the movie and they felt cheated to see him turn into a CGI blobby thing for the final battle. The filmmakers cut the scene and replaced it with a sword duel between Blade and the baddie in human form.

This highlights CGI’s chief difficulty – it’s unreality. There is something disappointing about being served up an image that has been created with ones and zeros. It feels like a cheat. And that can take an audience out of the story.

In contrast to CGI, model shots tend to look more realistic but move less realistically, due to the unavoidable physics involved. But there can often be a charm to this motion that allows us to forgive it. Indeed, I think the best reason to use traditional effects today is when you want things to look unreal in a very appealing way. Take for example Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which used forced perspective and painted backdrops to create a beautiful fantasy world. Or The Life Aquatic’s stop motion marine creatures…. except that the animation was so good they looked real.

Some other advantages of traditional techniques over CGI:

Some techniques, like puppetry, can be achieved in camera, giving the actors something real to react to.
All the randomness of nature is automatically built in.
Effects like fire and water are theoretically easier, though in practice can be difficult to control and to scale correctly.
Today’s audiences are used to CGI and can generally recognise it, but model shots are perhaps more likely to fool them.

In writing this post I’ve realised how CGI has advanced even in the few years since I stopped actively developing The Dark Side of the Earth (an ambitious fantasy feature intended to include stop motion, puppetry, miniatures and matte paintings).

Almost no-one today is still shooting miniatures without enhancing them digitally. Savvy filmmakers like Peter Jackson, Duncan Jones and Sam Mendes combine models and CGI to get the best of both worlds. It seems traditional techniques alone can really only be used now as a deliberate stylistic choice. That saddens me. I’d be delighted if anyone can prove me wrong.

If anyone out there is contemplating using miniatures in their indie film, here are some tips…

Unaccustomed as I am

February 26, 2013October 20, 2013 neilosemanlecturing, tips

This Sunday I’ve been invited to give a talk on the making of Stop/Eject for the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers. Tickets are also available to the general public for £6.50, and the event takes place at Perdiswell Young Peoples’ Club in Worcester from 9:30am. The other speakers are producer/director Ben Lewis discussing documentaries and the internet, and award-winning fimmaker Howard-Smith Laci on working with actors.

My talk will cover the whole process of making Stop/Eject to date, covering crowd-funding, casting and crewing, finding locations, scheduling, design and visual themes, storyboarding, the budget, the challenges of the shoot, lighting, the evolution of the edit, and visual effects. There will be plenty of clips throughout, including excerpts from the forthcoming DVD documentary Record & Play, and specially prepared material illustrating the evolution of a scene from the script through shooting to various iterations of the edit. My presentation will end with an exclusive screening of the first five minutes of Stop/Eject in rough cut form.

You can book tickets on the CEMRIAC website.

Giving talks is a great way to raise the profile of both yourself and your projects, and I’d advise any filmmaker to do it if they can. Here are some tips:

They’re here to listen to you. Many filmmakers are shy and don’t like to speak publicly, but if you’ve been asked to give a talk that’s because people believe you have something worthwhile to say, so there’s no need to be nervous. Audiences will be inspired simply by the fact that you got out there and made your film – that’s something to be proud of – so talk with confidence.
Don’t read word for word. There is nothing less engaging than listening to someone read a speech. Yes, I know news anchors and politicians read off autocues, but they have had lots of training and you haven’t. I suggest that if you can’t remember at least 90% of what you’re going to talk about, you’re not qualified to be giving the talk in the first place. (If that’s the case, don’t be afraid to suggest to the event organiser that you change the focus of your talk to something you’re more comfortable with.) Certainly you should have notes to structure your talk and make sure you don’t miss anything significant, but you should speak from the heart, making eye contact with all areas of your audience. People will prefer a bit of rambling over monotonous reading any day.
Show clips. Filmmaking is one of the best professions to be in when it comes to giving a talk; you already know how to entertain an audience, and you have a lots of moving image material at your disposal to show them. I suggest you should never talk for more than ten minutes straight (ideally more like five) before showing another clip. You may want to talk live over some mute clips – behind-the-scenes footage, for example – to keep things immediate.
Rehearse the length. Give your talk to your empty living room with a stopwatch on hand, to ensure that it’s the right length for the slot you’ve been assigned. Remember to allow Q&A time at the end. I’d advise against taking questions as and when they arise during the talk, because it spoils the flow and can drag you behind schedule.
Stick around afterwards. If there are other talks at the event, always attend these if you can. You might learn something from the content of the other talks, or from the way those talks are delivered, not to mention the fact that you would want those other speakers to stay and listen to your talk. And in the breaks and mingling sessions between and afterwards you will get to meet satisfied audience members who may want to work on your future projects (that’s how I met Sophie) or give a talk at another event (that’s how I got this weekend’s gig).

Shadows and Ashes

February 22, 2013April 10, 2017 neilosemancinematography, DSLR, lighting, production, Super-8

Colin Smith lines up the Super-8 camera as director Sophie Black pans the mirror.

After an unseemly delay, here’s the third and final part of my series about lighting Ashes, Sophie Black‘s dark fantasy drama. Read part one here and part two here.

For the fantasy world dubbed “Toybox” by the production team, Sophie wanted a gritty, grainy, comfortable look. She was keen to shoot the scene on Super-8 and wanted to make full use of that high contrast celluloid look with harsh spotlighting, deep shadows and vignetting.

The biggest problem for me was how to get a spotlight effect in a fairly small room with an ordinary daylight fresnel. To get a circle of light small enough to fit entirely within the camera’s frame required the lamp to be much further from the subject than was possible within the space. I suggested shooting at night and putting the light outside the window, but the schedule couldn’t accommodate that.

The problem was solved by bouncing the light off a circular mirror. This masked the light into a relatively sharp circle, because the lamp was the entire length of the room away from the mirror. (The closer a mask is placed to a lamp, the fuzzier the edge of the mask will appear when thrown on the subject, so simply cutting a circle out of cardboard and placing it in front of the lamp would have given us a blob of light instead of a defined circle, because there wouldn’t have been enough space to put the cardboard far enough away from the lamp.)

Bouncing a redhead off a circular mirror. Photo: Sophie Black — Bouncing a redhead off a circular mirror for the sweeping light effect. Photo: Sophie Black

Not only did the mirror allow us to achieve a key shadow puppet shot which Sophie had conceived, it also enabled us to create a sweeping light effect for other parts of the sequence. Inspired by one of Lana del Rey’s music videos, Sophie wanted the effect of headlights passing by outside a window. We were able to do this simply by panning a redhead across the mirror.

The Toybox scene was shot both on Super-8 (by Col) and on my Canon 600D as a back-up. I set the ISO to 1600 on the DSLR to bake in a grainy look. I won’t do this again, however, because I failed to take into account the effect of the camera’s H.264 compression. The grain looked fine on the viewfinder, but once compressed and recorded there were lots of blocky artifacts. I hoped that the Super-8 film would come out well so this sub-standard digital material wouldn’t have to be used, but alas there were some focus issues and several of the shots were inexplicably missing from the reels when they came back from the lab. Fortunately the day was saved by a talented VFX artist who applied a very convincing Super-8 look to the 600D footage, which hides the compression artifacts.

Ashes is nearly finished now and we’re all very excited to see how it’s turned out. Meanwhile, here’s the trailer:

Practical Rain Effect

February 18, 2013July 15, 2017 neilosemanb-roll, behind the scenes, fx, production, special effects, video

How do you create nice, thick, artificial rain for a dramatic fight scene, with no budget to speak of? Here’s how we did it on Soul Searcher.

This is a clip from the feature-length documentary Going to Hell: The Making of Soul Searcher. You can rent the whole doc digitally from the Distrify player below for a small charge, and you can watch Soul Searcher itself for free at neiloseman.com/soulsearcher

The clip shows how we created a fake downpour for a fight between the outgoing Grim Reaper, Ezekiel (Jonny Lewis, doubled by Simon Wyndham), and his replacement, Joe (Ray Bullock Jnr.). Ironically it was actually raining for real, but not heavily enough to show up on camera with the impact we needed. We’d had some rain bars made (lengths of hosepipe with holes drilled in them, strapped to bamboo canes) but we found the water squirted out in unrealistic jets. Luckily the location – Westons Cider in Much Marcle, Herefordshire – had a high pressure hose and we found that by pointing it upwards the water back down looking like rain.

See last week’s post for how to add rain (and snow) onto scenes after the fact.

Stop/Eject Illustrated Script Books

February 15, 2013August 2, 2016 neilosemancrowd funding, publicity

With Stop/Eject now fully financed, we’re working to create the rewards for the many sponsors who contributed to the project. Most of these rewards – invites to the premiere, DVD copies and so on – can only be completed when Stop/Eject itself is finished, but not all of them.

Sponsors who picked the Unit Publicist reward will receive, among other things, a very nice hardback book of the script with production notes and a full credits list, all lavishly illustrated with photographs from the shoot. This book has been beautifully designed by Worcester-based Andy Roberts of Speakersfive – check out his website at www.speakersfive.co.uk

When your crowd-funding campaign is over, it’s important to show your appreciation to your sponsors by making sure the rewards you create for them are really high quality. And if you ever need to raise money for another project, people will know that they can contribute with confidence that they’ll get something special in return. Here are some sample pages from the book:

Many of the photos haven't been seen anywhere else before. — Some of the photos haven’t been seen anywhere else before.

Andy shot some twisted cassette tape as a motif to tie everything together.

Falsification of Precipitation

February 12, 2013August 2, 2016 neilosemanfx

Yesterday I had to shoot some fake snow. Ironic, I know, given the weather lately, but it had to be composited over a pre-existing shot. Various software plug-ins are available to add snow to a shot, but I’m of the school of thought that says it’s always better to use a real thing. Even if it’s a fake real thing.

A few years back, Col sent off for some free samples of artificial snow from a weather effects company called Snow Business. (Eternal winter in Narnia? That was them.) When Miguel pointed out that a snow-covered shot of Belper’s bandstand in Stop/Eject looked like a still photograph in the edit, I saw a way to make use of these samples to bring some movement into the frame.

From the box of samples we picked one that appeared to be made of shredded carrier bags, because it floated the most realistically as it fell. I suspect you could make some of this yourself with a lot of patience and a few trips to Tesco. I set up black drapes with a redhead poking over the top to ensure that the snowflakes would be backlit without any direct light falling on the drapes. Then we rolled the camera and started sprinkling.

Afterwards it was a simple case of using screen mode (or ‘Add’ in Final Cut Pro) to combine the footage with the background shot. This mode gives exactly the same results as double-exposing a traditional photograph would: the black areas naturally become transparent because they have no brightness.

Must resist temptation to use snow-based puns... — Must resist temptation to use snow-based puns…

Several years ago, Col and I did exactly the same thing with rain, filming water from a hosepipe in his back garden against a black night sky, then layering it on top of scenes from Soul Searcher.

Must also refrain from rain puns. Uh-oh, I said "refRAIN"... — Must also refrain from rain puns. Uh-oh, I said “refRAIN”…

We also shot one scene for Soul Searcher in “real” rain – real in so far as it was actually there falling on the actors, but not in so far as it actually came from clouds. Perhaps I’ll upload a behind-the-scenes clip of that for my next post.

Meanwhile, if you’re going out to shoot in real snow, check out the tips I posted a couple of weeks ago.

Random Events on Stop/Eject

February 10, 2013August 2, 2016 neilosemanDVD authoring, fx, music, sound

Here are some of the assorted things I’ve been doing on Stop/Eject lately.

On Wednesday I returned to the Hereford cemetery where, almost a decade ago, in the small hours of a cold and rainy October night, I shot a scene from Soul Searcher. This time I was just there to photograph gravestones for a VFX shot.

On the same day compositing/rotoscoping artist David Robinson delivered the first offical VFX shot, a run-of-the-mill wire removal but extremely well done.

On Friday I recorded this thank you message for everyone who sponsored the project:

Apologies to anyone whose name I’ve mispronounced.

Yesterday Scott Benzie delivered a demo of his beautiful theme for Kate. Much as I liked the first piece he wrote – listen to it here – I felt it emphasised the film’s fantasy aspects too much, and this new piece instead concentrates solely on drama and emotions.

This morning I filmed the tape recorder for probably the last time – not for Stop/Eject itself, but for the DVD/Bluray menus. Tomorrow the recorder gets sent off to Henning Knoepfel so he can record some new foley effects with it (that’s with it, not on it). Henning and I had a great conversation about the direction the sound should take and I’m very excited about how it will turn out. More on that on this blog in due course.

Poor Man’s Process

February 7, 2013March 27, 2017 neilosemancinematography, corporate, fx, production, special effects

The WidthScribe promotional video I recently completed for Astute Graphics involved the actress driving a car – except we ended up casting an actress who can’t drive. We got around this in a few different ways, including the obvious substitution of a qualified driver in the wide shots, complete with appropriate wig.

Perhaps the most interesting technique we used, and one which I might well have used even if she could drive, was Poor Man’s Process. Nowadays, most fake driving shots in films and TV shows are achieved by shooting against a greenscreen and replacing that screen in post with a moving background plate. A more traditional technique is to film against a rear projection screen – a screen onto which previously-shot footage of a moving background is projected in real time behind the actors. This was known as Process Photography.

Poor Man’s Process leaves out the screen altogether, shooting against a plain, ambiguous background that doesn’t reveal the lack of movement – typically empty sky. Careful use of camera movement and dynamic lighting create the illusion of movement.

Here is the set-up we used on the WidthScribe promo.

The car is parked on Nick’s drive, which is conveniently sloped so that – from the camera’s point of view – only sky and a bit of a distant tree are visible in the background.

A light behind the car represents the sun, and Nick chops a piece of cardboard up and down in front of it to represent the shadows of passing trees.

Sophie operates a hairdryer to blow Laura’s hair around.

Col shines a reporter light into the lens, moving it around to create the impression of the sun changing position relative to the camera.

And I dolly the camera side-to-side while vibrating it ever so slightly.

When intercut with wide shots of Nick’s wife driving the car for real, you’d never know the close-ups were cheated. (An additional trick we employed was to sit Laura in the passenger seat of the moving car then flop the image in post, for the over-the-shoulder shot of the pylon passing by.)

The drapes are to cut out the reflections in the windscreen.

Poor Man’s Process works best at night, but with the shallow depth of field provided by DSLRs it’s now possible to get away with it in daylight too, so long as the shot is kept fairly tight and the road you’re meant to be driving on is fairly open.

You’ll want to vary the lighting effects you use according to the surroundings the car is supposed to be in. You can use spinning mirrors to sweep “headlights” or “streetlights” over your actors, or move a keylight representing the sun or moon slowly side-to-side, or even place two out-of-focus bulbs in the background of your shot to represent another car behind.

I’ll leave you with an example of Poor Man’s Process in use on a big-budget Hollywood film, Michael Bay’s 1997 Alcatraz actioner, The Rock. All the close-ups in the cars were shot static in a car park.

Neil Oseman

Director of Photography

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