Author Archive: Paul Charisse
Report From the Shoot: Week 2 (8th – 13th August)
Week 2 now over with the bulk of the ensemble drama now captured. This week we saw a huge range of shots from fast visceral action (thanks to our “stunt” Stina: Lucy.) to satisfyingly awkward kitchen sink drama. The film is now taking shape and we’ll clearly have a wealth of material to select from after the shoot. (A rather terrifyingly huge amount in fact) A hectic and thoroughly enjoyable week; Plus the actors and crew got wave swords around. (until Alex hid them under the ramps)
Report From the Shoot: Week 1 (2nd – 6th August)
Paul
On Set Rehearsals
Paul
Making the Movie
Paul here with a lot to report since my last post. Our research trip to the Carpathians was a great success and proved once and for all that lecturers have a much higher level of general fitness than the youth of today, with myself and Jackie bravely leading the assembled student throng up a mountain with not so much as a nibble on a bar of Kendal Mint Cake. (Although we were forced to eat snow after the gallons of fresh mountain spring water promised by our Turkish/Romanian host failed to materialise. I’d recommend Kendal Mint Cake for future ventures) The landscape was stunning and when not resting, the students collected a great array of visual research material which is already proving invaluable in concept art and environmental design (see below) and should give us an excellent texture library.
50 Sided Rubik’s Cube
Cast news: Steph from our Gregg school contingent has now taken on the additional role of Stina’s Aunt. We have a new character: a boy in the village called “Petov” who we are now looking to cast as soon as possible. We have also started auditioning for the role of “Pipe Catcher”. All other roles are now cast. On the 2d art front, Dan Little our graphic artist has provided us with new logos for “FOAM digital” and “Stina and the Wolf” which are a vast improvement on the ones i knocked out last year.
Along side the production ramp up, we have also been developing a full film quality 720p demo sequence of footage taken from mo-cap right though to finished render and composite; complete with with foley, sound design and music. This is about 80% complete and we will post up the full sequence next month. For now. Here are some stills:
Production Update
Paul
Hand Stitched Dalek Antennae
December Production Update
We’d like to welcome the following new additions to the team:
ANIMATION
Phil Shenton
Athos Cammell
Matthew Hernandez
CREATURES
Laura Millar
Tautvydas Katkevicius
Luke Wilkins
PRODUCTION DESIGN
Tang tsz-hin
MODELS
Stephen Campbell
Edd McDermott
Rokas kucinskas
Simon Pearce
ENVIRONMENTS
Dan Little
ACTORS
David Taylor (to play Gunter)
cheers, Paul
First Motion Capture Tests
We’ve now completed our first motion capture tests with mocap supervisor Alex Council and a few of the actresses. It was a very useful exercise, accompanied by much amusement at the silly blue costume and the somewhat surreal situation of performing a scene supposedly set in the mountainside, in a white room, whilst covered from head to foot in velcroed reflective spheres. Becky was particularly patient, as she was this session’s mocap muppet 🙂 We are now using the collected motion capture data to test out the rest of the pipeline. We also tested out some high quality hands free mics in an effort to test out capturing on-set audio, as an alternative to ADR overdubs later. This worked well (although a few worries about air-conditioning noise – hopefully we can turn this off for final capture)
The effects on the film are now to be provide by the newly formed FOAM Digital, an effects facility imbedded within the faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at Portsmouth University. The departments have been hard at work developing 3d assets for the production. The script is still under development by Red Rabbit Films and we are aiming get the first draft down by the end of Christmas. Concept and production art are still rolling out and we are aiming to accelerate the production of this in the next few weeks, as it’s starting to create a bit of a bottleneck in the production process.
Paul