Directed by Neil

Blog posts from when Neil used to produce and direct his own micro-budget movies (2001-2014).

Falsification of Precipitation

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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.

Falsification of Precipitation

Random Events on Stop/Eject

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Mystery grave
Mystery grave

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.

Random Events on Stop/Eject

Picture Lock on Stop/Eject

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Last week Miguel Ferros and I locked the edit of my short fantasy-drama Stop/Eject. This project represents the first time in seventeen years of filmmaking that I’ve worked with an editor, rather than doing it myself. I found it an extremely positive experience and I wonder why I’ve never done it before.

Georgina Sherrington as Kate
Georgina Sherrington as Kate

Miguel’s cut makes the story clearer, the characters more consistent and the emotions more real. Not to mention the fact that it’s paced much better, coming in a good minute shorter than my tightest cut.

Filmmakers are always told that they shouldn’t edit their own material. I liked to think I was an exception to the rule, that I could put the baggage of preproduction and production aside and cut with fresh eyes. Perhaps you’re thinking the same as you read this, just like I did when I read things like this in the past. Then like me you’ll only discover how wrong you are when you finally try working with an editor.

If I was to compare my cut to Miguel’s side by side, I have no doubt that where he has made a different decision to me, in most cases I made my decision at least in part because it looked pretty, or it was a shot I had had in my head since I first started writing the script, or it was a shot that had been particularly difficult or time-consuming to get, or because I somehow felt like it had to be that way because it had always been that way. Miguel simply chose the best material to advance the plot and characters.

It was a real joy to finally see some of the film’s key moments working in a way they never quite have before. I now look forward to what I’m sure will be equally positive experiences as the film splits off in three directions:

  • Composer Scott Benzie, profiled in a recent post, begins writing the score.
  • Sound designer Henning Knoepfel begins creating and layering the sound effects.
  • Half a dozen rotoscoping and compositing artists begin work on a variety of visual effects shots.
As always, you can follow Stop/Eject’s progress here on my blog, on the Facebook page or on Twitter.
Shooting more pick-ups in my living room.
Shooting more pick-ups in my living room for incorporation into Miguel’s edit. The entrance of the alcove – a set which is long gone – is represented by the curtain and a shelf clamped to a C-stand.
Picture Lock on Stop/Eject

Stop/Eject Fully Funded

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Hooray! We’ve smashed through our crowd-funding target for post-production of Stop/Eject!

Fully funded
Fully funded

Huge thanks to everyone who’s contributed since we launched our first campaign back in November 2011. Across the two campaigns you’ve given us almost £4,200. Without it, Stop/Eject could never have been made.

As well as reaching our grand total we’ve passed two public reward targets. The first one, the sound design podcast, you’ll have to wait a little while for, as work on this aspect of post-production has yet to begin. The second one is the People’s Choice Reward, so leave us a comment on the Stop/Eject Facebook page with your suggestion of what we can create and upload as a thank you for all your donations.

If you’ve been meaning to donate but haven’t got around to it yet, we’re keeping the rewards open for one more week. That means you’ve got until midnight on February 7th to secure yourself an invite to the premiere, a copy of the DVD or Bluray, an illustrated script book or any of the other lovely goodies. After this date these gifts will never be available again. (We hope the film will be available to buy in some form or another after its festival run, but that’s a couple of years away at least.)

The other big Stop/Eject news this week is that we’ve locked the edit, which is a watershed moment in the post-production of any film. Stay tuned for more info on that soon.

Stop/Eject Fully Funded

Music Cue Sheet

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If your film gets picked up by a distributor, one of the many delivery materials they’ll ask for is a music cue sheet. If you’re unsure what one is or how to lay one out, take a look at Soul Searcher‘s as an example. See the Guerilla Filmmakers Handbook by Chris Jones and Genevieve Joliffe for more information on music cue sheets. For more on distribution and delivery materials, read this post about what to look for in a distribution contract.

Download Soul Searcher’s music cue sheet (.doc, 84kb)

Music Cue Sheet

Scott Benzie: Composer Extraordinaire

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Scott Benzie conducts the Worcestershire Symphony Orchestra as they perform his score for Soul Searcher.
Scott Benzie conducts the Worcestershire Symphony Orchestra as they perform his score for Soul Searcher.

Today’s post is an introduction to Scott Benzie, composer of Soul Searcher, The Dark Side of the Earth and now Stop/Eject. (The series on VFX planning will continue next week.)

After becoming interested in music at a relatively late age, thanks to a synthesizer Christmas present and the inspiration of James Horner’s Krull soundtrack, Scott majored in music at Notthingham Trent University. In 2002 he wrote an impressive orchestral score for Jim Groom’s noir feature Room 36, conducting the Westminster Philharmonic Orchestra and recording all 50 minutes of music in a single day. Scott repeated this feat for Soul Searcher three years later, after responding to an advert I posted on Shooting People for a fully orchestral John Williams-style score – a goal which many people mocked as naïve or over-ambitious, but not Scott.

The composer’s other feature film credits include Ten Dead Men (dir. Ross Boyask), Fear Eats the Seoul (dir. Nick Calder), and Dinner with my Sisters (dir. Michael Hapeshis) which was released in UK cinemas last November. Several of Scott’s soundtracks have been released in their own right, including Room 36 which is available on CD from KeepMoving Records.

Scott recently took his first crack at some music for Stop/Eject and this is the result:

This is rough, unmixed and all done with samples. The finished version will, I hope, be recorded with live players. On Soul Searcher  we were able to persuade a choir and a symphony orchestra to perform Scott’s score for us. Here’s a clip from Going to Hell: The Making of Soul Searcher covering the music recording, one of the few things that didn’t go horribly wrong during Soul Searcher’s creation. (Remember that you can watch Going to Hell in full for a small charge at neiloseman.com/soulsearcher and Soul Searcher itself completely free on the same site.)

Visit Scott’s website at www.scottbenzie.co.uk

Scott Benzie: Composer Extraordinaire

Planning VFX: Computer Generated Imagery

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Following on from last week’s thoughts on planning VFX shots, I’m now going to look at the issue of CGI vs. miniatures. In this post I’ll cover some of the advantages of choosing computer generated imagery, and next time I’ll look at the advantages of miniatures. As any regular readers will know, I much prefer miniatures, but I aim to be completely impartial in what follows.

To start off with let’s go back 20 years to Jurassic Park, the movie that really started the CGI revolution, and find out why Steven Spielberg chose this emerging technology over traditional techniques. (Skip to 13:12.)

So Spielberg favoured CGI because it produced more realistic motion. In fact, watching Jurassic Park these days I find the CG dinosaurs are easily differentiated from Stan Winston’s full size animatronics by the fact that the former move much more fluidly. Even when miniatures move “live”, i.e. without stop motion animation – vehicles powered by motors or pulled on hidden wires, for example – the motion is often less realistic than a CGI equivalent because the laws of physics dictate a small thing will always move differently from a large thing.

Next up, here’s a clip from Going to Hell: The Making of Soul Searcher, in which I discuss how I arrived at CGI as the best method of creating the spectral umbilical cords the script required. (You can watch the whole of this feature-length documentary at neiloseman.com/soulsearcher.)

So control was the key thing there. There were 80 shots, many with camera moves, and the umbilical cords had to be locked to the characters. Trying to achieve this with string and cables was just not realistic, or would have required so much manipulation in post as to make shooting a real element pointless. CGI can be controlled completely and adjusted quickly, without the need for reshoots.

Here are some other pros of CGI over traditional techniques:

  • No shooting required, so no crew to pay, feed, transport, etc. On a micro-budget where the crew are unpaid, CGI is completely free, whereas any kind of miniature shoot will always have costs.
  • CG elements can be tracked to moving plates without the need for expensive motion control cameras.
  • There are far more talented and experienced CG artists out there than model-makers.
  • You can create anything you can imagine, without any practical or logistical restrictions.

Can you think of any others? Let me know. Next time I’ll look at the advantages of traditional techniques.

Planning VFX: Computer Generated Imagery

Planning VFX

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A few years back I taught a module on Visual Effects for filmmaking degree students at the SAE Institute in north London. Rather than getting into the nitty gritty of how to actually do VFX, it focused instead on how directors and producers should approach and plan for them.

Here is one of the examples I gave, using a shot from my 2005 feature Soul Searcher. Joe Fallow (Ray Bullock Jnr.) sprints down the platform of Hereford station as the Hades Express departs, bearing away the villain of the piece and the kidnapped love interest.

Finished shot from Soul Searcher
Finished shot from Soul Searcher

The train was a 1:18 scale miniature and was dropped into the live action plate by means of a simple, static matte drawn in Photoshop – essentially a splitscreen effect.

But what if I, as director, had chosen a different camera angle?

Alternate angle 1

To achieve this version, the model train would have needed to have been shot against a green screen to make it appear in front of Joe and the platform. This would have complicated shooting the miniature slightly, as lighting for a green screen can be quite time-consuming.

Alternate angle 2

Here we have the opposite; now Joe is in the foreground, so he’s the one that needs to be shot against a green screen. Since he and the station are full size, the green screen would need to be much bigger and would require much more light. And remember we’re now talking about an impact on the main unit’s time on a location, rather than a small model unit in a studio, so the cost implications are magnified.

Alternate angle 3

Finally, what if I’d gone for a camera move? Now we’re into motion control rigs, to record the camera’s movement on location and applied a scaled-down version of that same move to the camera shooting the miniature. Either that or the live action plate has to be 3D-tracked in post-production, and that tracking data fed into the motion control rig that shoots the miniature. More time, more people, more equipment, more money.

This is the first step in planning for VFX: understanding how your choice of shots influences the techniques required to achieve them and therefore impacts on the schedule and the budget. Stay tuned for more on this topic, and remember you can watch Soul Searcher in full for free at neiloseman.com/soulsearcher

Planning VFX

Press Kit Tips

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Stop/Eject press kit
Stop/Eject press kit

This week the lovely press kit folders for Stop/Eject arrived. Although we probably won’t need these for a while, you never know when something might come up; I wish I’d had one of these for the FilmWorks finale last month. The folders were designed by Alain Bossuyt of Le Plan B, who won the poster competition last summer, and printed by Sign Link Graphics.

For Soul Searcher I had the press kits printed as brochures. The disadvantage with this is that you have to reprint the whole thing if you want to make changes or add things, which might well happen as reviews come in and your festival run develops. With folders it will be easy to remove sheets and add new or revised ones.

Stop/Eject press kit
Stop/Eject press kit

So what will be on those sheets? What should a press kit contain?

First up you need a SYNOPSIS. For a feature film you should include a short one, similar to the blurb you’d get on the back of a DVD cover, and a longer one, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words. If you read Sight & Sound magazine you’ll see that they reprint these synopses verbatim.

Then you need biographies of the key CAST AND CREW. Sometimes these are included as extras on vanilla DVD releases.

Next come the PRODUCTION NOTES – behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the origins and making of the film. In the early days of DVDs you could often find these reproduced like liner notes in a little leaflet inside the case.

Stop/Eject press kit
Stop/Eject press kit

Next you need a BONUS SECTION, for want of a better name. This is where you provide some extra material for a journalist to fill out their article with. Commonly this will be something related to the subject of the film. For example, the press kit for The Fast and the Furious might have included some facts and figures about illegal street racing. For Stop/Eject we might put in some info about cassette tapes and their history. For Soul Searcher I took a slightly different tack and included some extracts from my production diary.

Finally you need to include the complete CREDITS. Again, Sight & Sound reproduces these in full.

(If you’re supplying publicity photos on CD, which is unusual in these days of ubiquitous broadband, you shoud also include a sheet of thumbnails with accompanying filenames and photographer credits.)

Stop/Eject press kit
Stop/Eject press kit

Remember when you’re writing all this that you’re trying to give a journalist a story on a plate. You need to give them all the exciting elements they need to effortlessly put an interesting article together. The bonus section in particular gives you a chance to provide them with an angle – a hook which convinces them this is a story worth telling.

Why print all this, rather than emailing a PDF? Because a nice glossy folder on a journalist’s desk is more likely to get read than yet another attachment in the inbox. And if you meet someone unexpectedly at a festival or other event, it’s far better than to give them a hardcopy to take away than to rely on them reading an email you send later.

Press Kit Tips