More VFX breakdowns...

More visual effect break downs for All That Remains.  

From design to final shot

FX breakdown for a dream sequence in "All That Remains" in which Takashi comes face to face with the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

These last couple of weeks, our main focus in the edit room has been FX work - turning concept art into convincing special effect shots and recreating iconic scenes from archive photos, for our feature project, All That Remains.

Most of the "digital set pieces" are a mix of photographic, live action and 3D elements created in Smith Micro's Poser and landscape generator Vue from Eon Software. 

In Vue, a 3D model of "Fat Man" - The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, is prepared for rendering.

All the elements for each shot were composited in PhotoShop, the shots were then taken into Adobe After Effects for coloring and final blending of all the elements.

For the shot illustrated above, we worked from an archive photo and built up the atom bombed landscape using a mixture of photographic material and 3D renders. Actor Leo Ashizawa was filmed in the greenscreen studio and superimposed into the scene to recreate an iconic photo of Dr. Nagai.

Check out the movies blog site.

Retro lenses - part 2

This close up was taken with the latest addition to our retro lens collection – the Helios 44m 58mm.

As you may know, we’re big fans of using old prime lenses on our DSLR’s. Anyone who is interested in using older lenses will no doubt come across the Russian built Helios 44m 58mm. Well we certainly had heard a lot about the Helios when we started to research the use of old lenses, indeed, it seems to have garnered a legendary status amongst fellow enthusiasts and aficionados of retro lenses.

We’d been meaning to get one for a while and after a recent chat with a colleague and friend about the use of older lenses, we were reminded about this Russian beauty which dates back to the late 1960's, although most that are available seem to be from the 1980's. 

After a trawl through Ebay we found one (probably dating from the late 70's or early 80's) for about £22 and an adapter for £8.

Below is a short video showing test footage we took with the Helios while on a shoot. As we film with a very flat and de-saturated picture style (for optimum grading possibilities in post), the footage has been lightly graded, but only enough to reveal the true richness of the image.

On seeing the images taken with this lens it's now our favorite lenses for close ups. We were really taken aback with the sharpness of the lens, but also the "old school" filmic look it produces, the beautiful "bokeh" (the aesthetic quality of the out of focus areas of an image) and the way it catches lens flare.

Along with the Helios 44m we also purchased a Takumar 135mm – again based on the fact that this lens gets a lot of attention from other users of old lenses. We’ve not had much chance to experiment with this one, but we have used it a couple times on set and the quality has certainly lived up to the expectations we had.

This still, taken from our feature project "All That Remains", was shot using the Takumar 135mm.

Takumar 135mm attached to our Canon 550D via an M42 adapter

Talking of old lenses on DSLR camera bodies, "Experimentalist" Jason Bognacki managed to attach a Piccolette Contessa-Nettel folding camera from1919 to his Canon 5D Mark II!

We often wondered if it was possible to attach really old lenses to a DSLR. Apparently he's not the only one who's attached such a lens to his DSLR....  check out this video shot with a lens from 1908!

Rethinking Storyboards...

As balancing our feature film work around client work becomes a real juggling act, we’re finding that our storyboards (which are the most time consuming of all our preparation work) are becoming more “shot design” boards. To explain; if a scene in a script calls for three close-ups of particular actor, instead of showing that close up shot three times on the storyboard, we’ll show it just the once. So long as we know or have a clear idea of how a sequence will flow in terms of order of shots, we simply don't need to show multiple panels of the same shot.

On set, our usual practice is to shoot the entire scene from each angle, which also makes it kind of pointless for us to have to render a shot more than once on a storyboard. Plus we've long since found that each scene tends to take on a life of its own once we have it in the edit room as we always approach the edit from as fresh a perspective as we can, not only keeping open to new ideas, but fostering them.

We also have decided to not adhere to a particular layout either, opting instead to just let go creatively and make the ideas, visually, come to life for us, often combining shot lists with illustrations (we don’t always have the time to render every shot idea, or we simply don’t need to).

A "Shot Design Board" - it's more about the design of each shot than how a sequence will work.

Working on these new shot design boards, we found something happened too, we enjoyed the process more and we felt more liberated as we often found the process of working in a series of regimented panels (as you do in conventional storyboards) made us literally feel a bit boxed in, somehow. Everything was too neat and regimented. 

Of course, if you're a professional storyboard artist hired in to work for another director, your job is to show how a scene or sequence will look, so this approach would not be the right one, but as far as we are concerned, unless we are presenting a concept to a client, this approach to shot design is now the preferred approach to previsualising a scene.

To hell and back...

Alongside bread and butter work these last few weeks we've been hard at work filming, editing and grading one of the war sequences for All That Remains.

The film covers Takashi Nagai’s experiences in the second Sino-Japanese war as well as his experiences surviving the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Shooting these scenes meant costumes, props, locations (not all the sequence is shot against greenscreen), several extras, a good make-up team and a dedicated crew on hand, not to mention plenty of planning in the form of storyboards, pre-visual art work and shot lists.

Board and Shot list for part of the War Sequences

Throughout the film we also explore the "evolution" of warfare. 

Now, we could have opted to cover these scenes with the use of archive footage, which would have been a hell of a lot easier, but we chose not to. Why? Well, firstly we felt the scenes needed to be from a personal perspective, we needed to be there with Takashi, because his experiences in China had such a profound effect upon him. Secondly, we had yet another point to prove. Back in the early days of pre-production, we were told by someone who had just read the shooting script, that because of the China war scenes as well as the atomic bombing sequence, it would be impossible for us to make the film on our budget - it was just too ambitious.

Well we already knew exactly what we could and couldn't do having had a number of years experience making low budget films under our belt (several shorts and two feature length), and if someone tells us we can’t do something, especially if it's because we don’t have anywhere near a Hollywood budget at our disposal, it’s going to make us even more determined to prove them wrong. So we have.

Working with the portable blue/green screen

Discussing the next maneuver on location

One last take...

Taking a break on set.

Some stills from the war sequences as they'll look in the final film…

Dell upsets the Apple cart.... but it's Apple's own fault.

After years of hearing from lots of other professional editors and sound people, how much better Macs are than PC’s when it comes to professional video post-production work, it was great to hear the news that many professional video editors are now forgetting their old alliances with Apple and turning to Dell PC workstations.

We’re big fans of Dell machines, but it’s great to know that other editing professionals are also now embracing the very same model of laptop we've been using for a number of years.

Many of the shot's for the All That Remains trailer below were generated on our Dell Precision and it's now  an integral part of our editing/FX suite.

Sure these laptops aren't as “artful” looking as an Apple Mac, but it’s what’s inside that matters, and our Dell laptops have always proved to be reliable work horses, so much so, after buying our first Dell laptop, we've stuck with them ever since.

It seems Apple have brought on this mass emigration to Dell systems themselves, which must make the victory for Dell that bit sweeter. Lesson to be learnt here - don't get complacent (and lazy) and look after your loyal customers, no matter how big and lorded you are.

To prove the superiority of a Dell system over that of a Mac, Dell brought in an independent third party to perform a series of benchmark tests. As for the outcome, well...

The results showed the Dell Precision T7600, featuring Intel Xeon processors,outperformed Apple Mac Pro by up to 96.5% on video production tasks and is up to 28 times faster than the Mac Pro! For example, to render an entire work area for an AVCHD four-layer video, the Dell Precision T7600 with an Intel Xeon processor took only 13 seconds to do what it took the Apple Mac Pro more than 6 minutes to accomplish.

But this wasn’t some fluke test. The average time saved, incorporating every single test that was run, was 79 percent! 

Source: Nofilmschool

Having said all the above, we've always said, it’s not the tools that make an artist, so let’s not get hung up on which system or computer is better. It’s just nice to wipe the smirk of those once smug Mac lovers we've run into from time to time...

Trailer moment

We've spent all our free time these last few weeks editing together this first official trailer for All That Remains.

When cutting a trailer together, it’s very much like cutting a short film, it has to have a sense of story line with  a beginning, a middle and an end. This is what makes editing trailers so hard. Sometimes less means harder work...

Another difficulty we faced was that we've so far shot under half of the movie, but it still had to feel as though we were watching glimpses of an entire movie. Luckily we've shot enough to be able to give an "impression" of the movie in it's entirety.

With this trailer, we also wanted to convey how the film will look in terms of the stylized blend of live-action and animation as a series of moving images as opposed to the stills we usually post on our blogs and FB pages.

The sound design was another aspect we paid a lot of attention to – while being conscious of not using too much sound FX. We always do a creative pass over the sound when working on an edit, in fact we're often thinking up ideas for sound design even at the scripting stage.

One idea we have for the sound design in the movie is to use music to symbolize both the beauty and the resilience of the human spirit, and we were keen to experiment with this idea when working on the trailer.

The way we were going to do this in the trailer was to have an orchestral track up until the moment of the bomb exploding, then switch to a choral version so we are left with only the sound of human voices on the soundtrack. This way, the lush orchestral sound (itself a collection of man-made instruments) would represent all the beauty and grandeur of man-made achievements (such as a city), and the human voices would come to symbolize the beauty and strength of the human spirit that still remains after all the magnificence of man-made greatness has been taken away.

But, on this occasion, the idea didn't work with the overall dynamism of the trailer, so we had to let it go. As filmmakers we have to be able to sometimes let an idea go, no matter how much we fall in love with it. 

Still, it's a design concept we will certainly explore and experiment with in the movie itself, as the survival of the human spirit is one of the main themes of the movie and music itself plays such a prominent role throughout. This idea of blurring the line between music and sound design has always excited us.

Despite all the work that goes into scripting, planning and directing, we find that much of the film’s final shape, actually takes form in the edit room, so for us, the most exciting thing about working on the trailer has been seeing it come together in such a way that we too could see a glimpse of the final film.

New updates.... and an old pre-conceived idea.

As 2013 kicks off, we’re preparing to get back to work on our feature project, All That Remains. We've got several months of hard work ahead still, but we’re really pleased with how it’s shaping up so far.

Just before Christmas, we posted on the film’s official blog and Facebook page, a scene we’d recently been working on. With over half of the film still to shoot we wanted to post an update showing a little more than the usual stills we post.

Check it out below.

And talking of stills….. here are few more from scenes we shot in December.

 We're also currently planing on releasing a new trailer pretty soon.

Alongside all the work on the feature, we’ve been pretty busy with client work – that is, our bread and butter work, including filming a series of TV ads for Derby County council. The ads are due to be screened on TV mid-late January. In the meantime, you can check out the storyboards we created for the ads…

When it comes to client work, storyboards are even more important than usual, as they convey your vision and ideas so much more clearly than anything else.

And while we are on the subject of storyboards – over Christmas,  we came across a chapter on storyboarding, in a book on digital film-making, where it was stated by the author, that digital storyboards (that is boards created with 3D software as opposed to hand drawn ones) tended to be bland and lacked individuality – well, yes, that can be true – but it certainly doesn't have to be. To prove it, here are few more of our storyboards. 

All of these were created with Poser from Smith Micro, iClone from Real Illusion and of course, PhotoShop and they all look very unique. because the above mentioned software allow you to customize their content as well as import other 3D models. PhotoShop allows you to mix in photographic or hand drawn elements as well as composting different renders to make a single image. It just means putting in a little hard work, but guess what? The beautiful hand drawn boards often used as examples of the true art of storyboarding, are also the result of  hard work.

We're big fans of hand drawn boards too, and we both have backgrounds in traditional art, but the reason we opt for digital boards is the ability 3D software such as Poser has of allowing you to manipulate virtual lights and cameras in a 3D space, so we get to work out lighting schemes and play with different camera angles long before we arrive on the set.

The point is, just because a book says so, doesn't mean it is so. The comment that all digital storyboards will look the same and lack a sense of individuality (assuming it's based on some of the terrible examples of digital boards that are out there) is a lot like blaming Steven Spielberg for Jaws 3D. It's not the tools that make an artist. Besides, as film-makers we have to have the vision to look beyond potential limitations, to have the guts to go against the grain, if we have to. 

For more examples of our storyboard art check out this earlier posting...

Greenscreen before and after shots...

Working with greenscreen can be a truly magical experience, watching these shots literally transform into something so very different to what you actually filmed and blossom into something wonderful is up there with the other "magic moments" of making a film, such as the moment the right actor walks into a casting session and you know you've got your star, or when you see your script breathe life through an actors performance.

But greenscreen does require your cast and crew to have absolute trust in you as director. Many times, all they have to work with is a green wall and imaginary props.

Actresses Ava Lyn Koh and Kyoko Morita act out a scene.

Japanese actor Junichi Kajioka preparing for his close-up.

One thing we always do to help foster the all important trust needed when working on a greensreen shoot, is show our cast and crew  previous greenscreen shots we've filmed that have been completed, this helps boost their confidence in the project and their excitement.  Excitement = passion, and passion + confidence = performance.

Below is a selection of greenscreen footage we shot for our feature, All That Remains showing before and after we've got to work on them.

A few more stills from scenes we've worked on....

(All images (c) Pixel Revolution Films & Major Oak Entertainment Ltd)

Check out the movie's official blog here

It's producer hat today...

So, if you read this blog fairly regularly, you'll know we're halfway through making our third feature length project, "All That Remains".

You'll also know we're pushing the boat out on a ultra tight budget. So far we've done what many people told us we couldn't, but we still have a little way to go before we have a finished movie wrapped up and ready to go to market.... and we need a little more cash in the budget to ensure we can give the film the finishing treatment it deserves.

So.... we've just launched another Indiegogo campaign and are looking for a few kind individuals to help us out.

Of course we don't expect money for nothing, so we've listed several perks we'll give in return for various amounts of donations, for example, a donation of $75, will get you a signed copy of the finished movie on DVD and your name in the credits. But even a small donation of $15 will still get your name in the credits (in the special thank you listings) and for an even larger donation, you can get a producing credit.

If you have a spare few dollars/pounds why not head over to our Indiegogo page (by clicking on the widget below) and help us to make a very special movie!

(Visit the movie's official blog here)

Alternatively you can help spread the word - below are some of the official art work for the movie, fresh off the press. Feel free to post these on your own blogs or social media sites, but please don't forget to include the following URL: http://www.indiegogo.com/allthatremainsmovie?a=152526

Facebook cover 1

Facebook cover 2

Promo art 1

Promo art 2