Thursday, March 31, 2011

No pictures yet, but...

Holy crow, the shoot went really well tonight.

I had estimated about two hours to get all three of the shots, and it took... two hours.

The shots look beautiful. Man, the Canon 7D is awesome. The results look really professional and even with a green screen behind Scott, it totally looks like he's lost at sea.

Now I gotta get the ship built.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Another film shoot!

Yup. Thursday night at 8:15, Scott gets in the water and pretends to drown while the merchant ship Fleet meets its fiery doom.


My wife's friend Delphin has graciously allowed us the use of his heated pool for the night- It's a black bottom affair that should allow me to pull a really nice matte on that last pull out shot. I've also packed the green screen for the closeups.

Essentially, we're looking at three shots. The first is looking at father from the front, as he watches his ship burn. The second is over his shoulder so we can see the burning ship. The third (and most difficult) is from directly overhead as he loses hope and the vessel explodes. This is the grand reveal. The camera pulls out from the closeup and becomes a map.

I built a pretty neat firelight rig for the shoot. A few years ago IKEA was selling these butt ugly torches for children's rooms, cheap. The thing is, though ugly, they had a really neat random flicker built in, with an umber filter on top. And they're pretty bright. So I bought about seven of them, not really knowing if I would ever find a use for them. Well, I now have an ugly torch array to cast a fiery rim light on Scott. Perfect! I also bought some cheap 500 watt work lights to light up the green screen.

This is the first of the two flashbacks during the prologue.

And, while things have been slow on the filming front due to family illness, I'm hoping to shoot the whole damn thing at the end of May.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

A grand reveal...

In preparation for a shoot I'll be doing in the coming weeks with Scott, who will, in a twist of fate play his own father dying, I started to put together this rough comp in After Effects.

This is a flashback Mulvey has when he reads a telegram sent to him that finally, after ten years of searching, reveals the location where his father died at sea.

In the sequence, we watch Mulvey read the telegram. When Grimmauld asks him what it is, there is a flash of his eyes, and a reveal of a lone man barely holding on to a broken board. Illuminated by a fire, the next shot is over his shoulder, looking at the ship as it burns out of control. The last shot (the one you just looked at) is directly overhead as he stops struggling. Right at that moment, there's a blast and the camera travels straight up, to reveal a map and the location where Mulvey's father died. Back in the present, the camera pulls out of Mulveys eye and he says, "They know where my father died."

Obviously, the father and the ship aren't in the shot yet.

This sets up an interesting quandry for our hero; Does he go to the Moon, or does he search for his Dad's ship and the fortune he was travelling with? His decision is made for him when Glowerston tells him to build the bathysphere.