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Planning VFX: Traditional Techniques

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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…

Planning VFX: Traditional Techniques

Tapering Lines and Milky Shadows

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Recently I was hired by Astute Graphics to direct an advert-like promotional film for the launch of their new product, an Adobe Illustrator plug-in called WidthScribe. Here is the result:

Laura gets to grips with WidthScribe on a Cintiq touchscreen. Photo: Sophie Black
Laura gets to grips with WidthScribe on a Cintiq touchscreen. Photo: Sophie Black

It was a really fun and creative project, working with a great bunch of people including gaffer and GlideCam operator Colin Smith, designer and make-up artist Sophie Black, actress Laura Markham, and Nick van der Walle from Astute Graphics.

I have noticed a recent trend in adverts for a milky, low-contrast look, and I felt this would be an appropriate project for such a look. I knew that we would be featuring crisp, contrasty vector graphics throughout the film, so it made sense to counterpoint these with live action that was organic, soft and diffuse.

In preparation I set up a picture profile on my Canon 600D with minimum contrast and sharpness, and slightly reduced colour saturation.

On set the front light came from softboxes, reflectors and natural bounce, though always with a strong backlight to prevent the image from looking completely flat. The backlight also produced lens flare which further reduced the contrast of the image by lifting the shadows. In fact, I decided that almost every shot should have a lens flare, to enhance that organic look. Often this meant that Col would stand next to the camera and shine a 100W reporter light into the lens.

Fake sun
The “sun” here is actually a 1,000W Arrilite in the garden. Lens flare and smoke soften the image, while a fluorescent lamp in a softbox provides fill from out of the top right of frame.

Smoke was used in the kitchen scene, again to lift the shadows and diffuse the light. By a stroke of luck, the direct, wintery sunlight I faked in this scene with a 1,000W Arrilite pretending to be the sun was replicated almost exactly by the real sun when we filmed the office scene the following day.

In a future post I’ll reveal the secrets of the driving shots.

Tapering Lines and Milky Shadows

A Window on Oblivion

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Last month the lastest Eric Bana movie, Deadfall, was released in US cinemas. The unusual thing is that it had already been out for a month on demand. This is one of the first examples of yet another massive shift that’s occurring in the film industry.

For the first few decades of its life, cinema was unique. Then television came along. The film industry responded by introducing colour and widescreen aspect ratios to the cinema. TV eventually caught up with both of these developments. As we approached and entered the new millennium our home entertainment options were expanding exponentially. TVs are now huge, 5.1 surround sound systems are highly affordable; you can even watch 3D at home if you want.

So why go to the cinema?

Until recently, the answer was “because you have to if you don’t want to wait months for the DVD release”. This is known as the theatrical window, the time within which a film must be exclusive to cinemas, before it becomes available in other media. Many claim this system fosters piracy. After all, if you could buy or watch a film on demand for a reasonable price as soon as it’s first released, why would you pirate it?

Many others claim that without this system, cinemas would go bust. I suspect this may be true.

I will be interested to see what happens as more and films follow Deadfall’s example. Clearly the aim is to create word of mouth with the on-demand release, building the film up to the point where people will be desperate to see it on the big screen. Sorry, I mean the slightly-bigger-than-the-screen-you-have-at-home screen.

35mm projectors - a thing of the past.
35mm projectors – a thing of the past.

Ask yourself this: what happened to phone boxes when the infinitely convenient and flexible mobile phone became affordable? The same fate, I fear, awaits cinemas.

Because we can all have cinemas in our homes now. If we want to ban popcorn from our living rooms and pause the film whenever some weak-bladdered buffoon has to get up, we can. Or (and I’ll never, ever understand this behaviour) if we want to make phone calls and chat to our mates all through the movie, we can do that too without spoiling anyone else’s enjoyment.

The only possible reason to go to the cinema is to watch a movie on 35mm film….. Oh no, hang on… You can’t do that any more either.

Right, I’m off out to see Les Miserables. At the cinema. While I still can. If I could watch it on demand, would I? Given that it’s f**king cold outside and Hereford Odeon only seems to project digitally now, yes, I’d probably stay home and watch it on demand. A sobering thought.

A Window on Oblivion

DVD Extras

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Terminator 2 boasts some of the most comprehensive DVD extras ever
Terminator 2 boasts some of the most comprehensive DVD extras ever

If your new year’s resolution is to get out and make a film, perhaps you need a bit of inspiration to get you going. For the past decade, one of my biggest sources of both inspiration and knowledge of the craft has been DVD extras. The days of DVDs may be numbered, but that does mean you can pick them up cheaply, so there’s no excuse. Here’s my run-down of the most interesting extras out there.

General

Without doubt the most comprehensive set of extras I’ve ever seen is that on TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. Although a lot of it is text, it leaves absolutely no stone unturned, covering every part of the process from scripting and scheduling through to marketing, release prints, telecine and foreign dubbing. It also breaks down every single VFX shot and special make-up gag in the movie.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST includes a fascinating feature-length documentary following the huge cast and crew as they island-hop with ships full of equipment, building roads as they go to get to some of the remote locations, and weathering a storm that nearly destroys their picture boats. At one point an AD gives some staggering statistics about the shoot; you will not believe how many walkie talkies went missing during production.

The Tarantino-Rodriguez collaboration FROM DUSK TILL DAWN comes with an unusual feature-length doc called Full Tilt Boogie. Rather than dwelling on the action on set, director Sarah Kelly interviews many of the crew – right down to the PAs and runners – to get a unique set of perspectives on the production. Throw in a dispute with the union and the result is a much more revealing doc than we’ve come to expect.

Pre-production

LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS is a movie with a unique look, using traditional techniques like forced perspective and painted backdrops to create its fantasy world. A DVD documentary called A Woeful World explores the incredible artistry that went into this sorely underrated film.

Viewers of the FIGHT CLUB DVD get to come along on the tech scouts – detailed recces where the director tells his heads of department everything he’s going to need at that location so that all the logistical problems can be anticipated.

TITANIC’s four-disc release includes interesting featurettes on previz, the process of creating moving storyboards. Although previz is a CG thing these days, there is much to be learnt from the military precision with which James Cameron plans his deep dives to the shipwreck using miniatures.

Production

For an unedited, fly-on-the-wall view of a small portion of a shooting day on a Hollywood movie (albeit one shot in New Zealand), Peter Jackson’s THE FRIGHTENERS is the place to go.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 has a good set of featurettes on the film’s varied stunt sequences, including one which reveals the terrifying way the knife-coming-towards-Tom-Cruise’s-eye shot was achieved.

If cinematography’s your thing, you could do worse than listen to DP John Schwartzman’s commentary track on ARMAGEDDON, where you can learn how to shoot under UV tubes, how to light half a desert and how to make Liv Tyler look her best when she’s on her period.

For a fascinating look at the construction and on-set operation of puppets and animatronics – from little chest-bursters to the huge alien queen – look no further than the ALIENS DVD.

Post-production

THE MATRIX: REVOLUTIONS’ DVD includes an interesting featurette on the specific use of miniatures for a crash shot in a film which mainly relied on CGI to create its illusions.

Staying with traditional FX, SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE includes a great documentary on how they made us believe a man could fly before the digital days with such classic techniques as front projection and optical compositing.

But if the digital era floats your boat, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING has a nice featurette on digital colour timing (a very new process at the time). In general, THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy has a remarkable plethora of extras on all aspects of the blockbuster-making process.

Finally, I’m not sure any DVD extra has yet fully explored the world of post-production sound, but Sound & Music on the bonus disc of SPIDER-MAN 2 gives a nice glimpse. Legendary foley artist Gary Hecker takes us through some of the ingenious combinations of mundane items he used to make such sounds as Spidey’s shooting web and Doc Ock’s claws ripping open a bank vault.

Any good ones I’ve missed? Comment and let me know!

DVD Extras

2012: The Year that Film Died

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Dark Side camera negative lab rolls
Dark Side camera negative lab rolls

A couple of weeks ago I screened the 35mm print of The Dark Side of the Earth‘s pilot at the last FilmWorks session in Bristol. It had been about 18 months since I last ran the print, and I was shocked how much attitudes towards celluloid had changed in that time. People were acting like they hadn’t seen a roll of film in 20 years, like I was some kind of whacked-out nostalgia hippy for wanting to shoot on 35mm. (But it still looked fucking awesome on the big screen.)

Digital cinema is one of those things that’s been lurking on the horizon for ages, then suddenly, silently… it’s here, like it’s always been here. Projection of moving images from celluloid is very, very quickly becoming extinct, as is acquisition of moving images on celluloid. Suddenly the likes of Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, staunch defenders of shooting films on film, are starting to look a bit loony, although I agree with them completely.

In September Fuji announced it would cease manufacturing of film stock, leaving only Kodak in the “market”, if such a word can be applied to an unwitting monopoly.

Dark Side mute print
Dark Side mute print

So we’re quickly heading towards a world in which “film” is a word completely divorced from its original meaning. Plastic strips coated in light sensitive emulsion will no longer play any part in the production or consumption of “films”.

The other day I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Although I chose to see a 2D 24fps screening, Peter Jackon’s sedate trilogy has been made in 3D at 48fps. The higher frame rate produces smoother motion which most people will associate with news broadcasts and documentaries. Overall the aim seems to be to make watching a film more like experiencing real life – sharper, smoother, three-dimensional. But is that what we really go to the cinema for?

It’s not what I go for. I want the scratches and the weave and the flicker because without them there is no magic, there is no suspension of disbelief. I want escapism. I want film. It seems I’m to be disappointed for the rest of my life.

2012: The Year that Film Died

Free Music, Stock Footage and Sound Effects

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A clip from epicslowmo.com
A clip from epicslowmo.com

For low-to-no-budget filmmakers, it wasn’t so long ago that stock footage and sound effects were out of our price range, and the only way to get music legally was to have someone compose it specially. Today the situation is very different, with plenty of sites out there offering material that’s not only free to download but royalty-free too. (This is an important distinction. Always read the license carefully to ensure that no further fees are due when the material is used in the territories, media and manner you wish to use it.)

Here are some of my favourite sites for free stuff. Again, please check the FAQs and licenses on these sites to make sure your intended useage is approved. If you’re serious about filmmaking, you’ll want to commission a composer, sound designer and second unit to generate original material for you, but we all have times when we need a quicker, off-the-shelf solution, and these are the places that help me out in those times.

Stock Footage

  • Detonation Films have a large number of explosions, smoke, debris and fire effects shot against blue, green or black for compositing into your own FX shots. Many are free, though there is a small charge for some. One downside is that, due to the site being quite old, the material is all in standard definition.
  • Epic Slow Mo have 20 HD clips for download, including money burning, TVs being smashed up, insects flying and even a wet dog shaking itself off – all in super-slow motion.
  • The official Hubble Space Telescope website has a number of “Hubblecasts” and other videos which you can download and use bits of in your own productions. It’s a great place to get CG animations of the sun and other heavenly bodies for your micro-budget sci-fi epic.
  • The Prelinger Archives are a collection of vintage corporate and amateur films, including such gems as Joan Avoids a Cold: A Health Film for Children (1947). These might be useful to a documentary maker looking for footage to illustrate a period or just for comic punctuation. There are even some clips from old movies.

Music

  • Incompetech is the home of composer Kevin MacLeod (not to be confused with Kevin McCloud from off of Grand Designs, or anyone from off of Highlander). Throw a stone on YouTube and you’ll hit six hundred videos that have his music on, because he gives it away completely free. All the music on the Stop/Eject pre-production podcasts and on my comedy documentary Video8 is from Incompetech.
  • CC Mixter is a site where musicians can remix each other’s work in an endless creative dialogue. It’s also very handy for filmmakers, since the Creative Commons agreement allows you to use the tracks in your productions (though beware that some tracks prohibit commercial use). I recently edited a film set at a party and we got all the background music from CC Mixter.
  • Jewel Beat‘s music isn’t free, but at 99 cents per track it’s as near as damn. It’s surprisingly high quality too, with many orchestral tracks (albeit using samples) that wouldn’t be out of place in a big movie. This is where I got the music for Stop/Eject’s trailer from.

Sound Effects

  • Free SFX has a wide range of noises and is always my first port of call when I’m hunting for a sound.
  • Partners in Rhyme has a collection of royalty free and public domain sound effects including animals, instruments, and human sounds and phrases.
  • Sound Jay is another handy library of free sounds.
  • All Music Library has a small collection of free sound effects.
  • Sweet Sound Effects has plenty of epic action sounds like helicopters, gunshots and even Star Trek-style transporter beams. Nowhere on the site does it specifically say these aren’t actual Star Trek sounds that have been ripped off though…

Do you know of any more sites I could add to this list? If so, leave a comment.

Free Music, Stock Footage and Sound Effects

Introducing SAS Couriers

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Vowchurch
Vowchurch

A few months ago I was approached, via a comment on this blog, by John Harrington. A Herefordshire-based writer, John had completed a script for the pilot episode of SAS Couriers, a sitcom based on his experiences as a driver for a rural courier firm. The BBC had displayed some interest in the script, but wanted him to go away and shoot some of it before they would take it any further.

Rowlestone Ice Cream
Dairy cattle at Rowlestone Ice Cream

So John’s hired me to direct a ten minute section of the pilot episode, which will be used as proof of concept and which we hope will lead to a TV commission. I was immediately attracted by the opportunity to do something about Herefordshire, a place I rarely get to shoot any fiction in, despite living here, and by the quirky but complex characters John had created.

We’ll be shooting early in the new year, and work has already begun on casting, crewing and location scouting. The other week Louise Wright – who doesn’t really have a job title yet, but I’m going to call her the production manager – took me into the beautiful west Herefordshire countryside to look at some locations. We quickly found a stunning setting for our sheep farm and an ideal dairy farm for an escaping cow scene.

More on this project as it develops.

Benfield Farm
Benfield Farm
Introducing SAS Couriers

Director of Photography

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I’ve just completed a new DP showreel for myself. I’m keen to expand my DP work on fiction projects of all kinds in 2013, so please get in touch if you’re looking for a cinematographer. I have seven micro-budget features and countless shorts under my belt as DP. Watch the reel in 1080P for the best experience.

In order of first appearance, these are the films featured on the reel. Click on them to link through to the official websites, Facebook pages, etc. In square brackets after some of the items below are links to posts on this blog about how I lit and shot the film in question.

Director of Photography

Double Vision

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When I first started making amateur films with my grandad’s Video8 camcorder, the only “actors” I had available were me, my friend David Abbott and occasionally my sister. Even a little later on, when I managed to rope in a few extra friends, there were still far more characters than actors. The solution? Each person – with the addition or subtraction of a hat, jacket or pair of glasses – portrayed multiple characters.

While this massively confused the audience (which fortunately consisted of only my parents), it did teach me a thing or two about how to shoot scenes in which one actor plays two characters. Below is a run-down of the various techniques you can use next time you shoot a script featuring time travel, parallel universes or uncanny doppelgängers. Back in the nineties, when I was making amateur films, there was no way of combining two separate video images on screen at once (without a hugely expensive video mixer), so only the first two of these techniques were available to me. Nowadays they can all be done with a green sheet, a decent home computer and the right software.

1. Ordinary cuts

The simplest method is to block your shot so that one doppelgänger’s face is not seen, be it out of focus, turned away from camera, in shadow or whatever. Simply dress a stand-in in the right clothes and make sure their hair matches. Two over-the-shoulder shots, each with a stand-in providing the foreground shoulder, can be edited into a very natural conversation.

Katie Lake (foreground) doubles for Georgina Sherrington (background) as the character of Kate steps into her own past in Stop/Eject.
Katie Lake (foreground) doubles for Georgina Sherrington (background) as the character of Kate steps into her own past in Stop/Eject.

2. Hidden cuts

It’s possible to pan from one doppelgänger to another, without any post-production effects, so long as the pan is very fast – a “whip” pan. There is so much motion in a whip pan that the eye will not detect a cut in the middle of it. Alternatively, track the camera so it passes close behind a foreground object or character; use the moment of darkness as this object wipes frame to hide a cut.

A quick camera move behind a foreground wall masks a cut from Johnny Cartwright to Johnny Cartwright in The Picnic.
A quick camera move behind a foreground wall masks a cut from Johnny Cartwright to Johnny Cartwright in The Picnic.

3. Split screen

As long as your camera is locked off, it’s the work of seconds in post to create a simple split screen effect using your editing software’s crop tool. If a straight vertical line doesn’t suit your shot, more unusual matte lines can be created with a garbage matte filter. Watch out for changes in lighting when you shoot the two elements, particularly when filming outdoors, and beware of shadows crossing the matte line. If you can afford to hire a motion control rig for accurately repeatable moves, your camera doesn’t even need to be locked down.

Elizabeth Shue plays both old and young Jennifer in a split screen shot from Back to the Future Part II (1989).
Elizabeth Shue plays both old and young Jennifer in a split screen shot from Back to the Future: Part II (1989, dir. Robert Zemeckis).

4. Green screen

If you try to use technique 3 for a shot where one doppelgänger passes in front of the other, you’ll quickly find it a post-production nightmare of painstaking matte animation. Instead, shoot the foreground doppelgänger against a green screen. As always with green screen work, light carefully to reduce spill and match the background plate.

Peter Kay is green-screened over an element of himself and Patrick McGuinness in the 2005 Comic Relief music video "(Is This the Way to) Amarillo".
Peter Kay is green-screened over an element of himself and Patrick McGuinness in the 2005 Comic Relief music video (Is This the Way to) Amarillo.

5. Face replacement

This is the only suitable technique when your doppelgängers are in close physical contact and both faces are visible. The action is performed by the actor and a stand-in, who may wear a green hood with tracking marks on it. Later, the actor performs the second character against a green screen, wearing a green body suit, with the angle and lighting carefully matched to the earlier shot. This isolated face, or the entire head, can then be tracked onto the stand-in. (Alternatively, on a big budget, the actor’s head may be cyber-scanned and a CG version of it tracked onto the stand-in.) Beware that only experienced VFX artists will be able to pull this off convincingly.

One of the many face replacement shots in the climactic fight of the dimension-hopping Jet Li vehicle The One (2001, dir. James Wong)
One of the many face replacement shots in the climactic fight of the dimension-hopping Jet Li vehicle The One (2001, dir. James Wong)

The best approach is to mix as many techniques as possible, relying mostly on the simpler ones but hitting the audience with a more effectsy one every now and then to sell the doubles. Happy sci-fi shooting!

Double Vision

Stop, Collaborate and Listen

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Operating camera, directing and even monitoring sound on The Beacon. Photo: Mark Evans
Operating camera, directing and even monitoring sound on The Beacon. Photo: Mark Evans

Cooking MCs like a pound of bacon, and so on and so forth.

This week’s FilmWorks session was called “How to Succeed at Not Doing Everything” – i.e. how to collaborate. This session really chimed with me. Like many low budget filmmakers, I suspect, I can be something of a control freak and have only recently been letting go of certain key roles within my productions.

On my 2002 action movie The Beacon I was writer, director, producer, director of photography, camera operator, focus puller, editor, visual effects artist, sound designer, sound mixer and colourist. Since then I’ve been gradually letting go of roles and almost without exception the results have been good. Giving someone a job to do and getting results that exceed my expectations is one of the most enjoyable aspects of filmmaking for me now. Neil Douek’s sound mix of Soul Searcher was light years beyond my efforts on The Beacon, and on The Dark Side of the Earth when I turned over both sound design and mixing to Henning Knoepfel, I was rewarded with a soundtrack beyond anything I could have imagined.

The roles I’ve clung onto the longest are (co-)writing, (co-)producing, DPing and editing. The writing and producing are down to the necessities of unpaid filmmaking; I’ve always hated both of these roles. I kid myself that the same is true of DPing, but it’s probably more due to an over-inflated opinion of my own abilities. Yes, I’m fairly certain that I’m a better DP than I am a director, but to think that no-one else could have DPed Stop/Eject to a good standard with limited time and equipment was somewhat egotistical.

Filming Stop/Eject with a minimal rig
Stop/Eject, and I still haven’t learnt my lesson. Photo: Paul Bednall

This year, for the first time ever, I’ve handed over the editing of a project to someone else – Miguel Ferros is now working on a cut of Stop/Eject. Although I was initially resistant to the idea, I now feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I eagerly anticipate Miguel’s cut.

Gratifyingly, I’ve recently been hired by a couple of different writer-producers to direct their shorts. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to direct and only direct. (More on these projects on the blog in due course.)

To close with, here’s a simple example of the perils of not collaborating. This week I recorded a line of ADR on my Zoom H1. Coming from a technical background, when faced with a technical task and an artistic task to do simultaneously, the former gets priority unless I make a conscious effort otherwise. So I was focused on the technical quality of the recording, and only noticed on playing back the material at home that I had failed to give the actress an important piece of direction. Had someone else been operating the recorder for me, I would have caught this mistake.

Fortunately the main ADR session is yet to come. At which someone else will be pressing the buttons.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen