Paul
Author Archive: Paul Charisse
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
New Cast and Production Roles Filled
Over the last 2 months the production has grown massively. We’ve had a very productive time casting and doing workshops at the Gregg School in Southampton, who have been extremely helpful in facilitating this process. The part of Stina has now been cast and is to be played by the student Becky Waldron. We have also cast the additional roles listed below. All the actress we saw were excellent and we’ve been feeding back a lot of the ideas explored in the workshop into the script.
Graeme and i have been hard at work organising the production process and writing the script. We have imposed a deadline of Easter for completing the screen-play, which should hopefully give us enough time for all the inevitable re-writes, external feedback and consultation. Graeme has also been doing a stella job on the website and has made what is going to be an essential production tool and hopefully a focal point for all the creative energy expended over the next few years. Please explore all the content we have on the site. We have lots of exciting new animation tests of the environment software we’re planning to use (VUE) and fluid dynamic simulations. Of particular note is Harry’s latest tests of waves hitting a beach which look stunning; Also some splendidly creepy new concept art from Chavdar. The production is intended to be an open process, so we will be updating and uploading new art work, animation and designs all the time. The public will be able to follow the development of the film right through to its world premiere in Leicester square 😉
I’ve also been setting up the VFX pipeline and we now have a good idea how the animation production will work. We have leads in all the main departments and a production coordinator to hold it all together. We were surprised by the number of applicants we got from within the university and are filling up the roles very quickly. We are planning the production to be a rich learning experience for the students involved and hopefully a lot of them will leave it with some good show reel work and a realistic experience of the feature film production environment.
We welcome the following new recruits to the team this month:
CAST:
Stina – Becky Waldron
Mahdid – Evie Payne
Abriana – Jade Guillford Laishley
Isabella -Steph Chapman
Lia -Eden Glover
Olaf – Lucy Gates
PRODUCTION:
VFX Producer – John House
MODELS:
Lead – Razvan Arventiev
Steve Wadsworth
Ben Hall
MOCAP:
Ben Vere
Joshua Philip
Peter Campbell Smith
Owyn Abram
3D ANIMATION:
Lead – Ollie McDonald
ENVIRONMENTS:
Sam Hoffman
CREATURES:
Lead – Marcus Mills
Roman Diapa
Timothy Wilson
All for now,
Paul Charisse (Director)
Pre-Production
So the film is staring to pick up pace with the pre-production now well under way. Some great new talent in modelling and environment areas with Harry Ellard already producing some splendidly dramatic work on the fluid dynamic simulations. The script revision has started in earnest with each revision bringing the themes and characters sharper into focus. The addition of Graeme Herwig as script supervisor has provided a much needed check and balance to my story telling skills and has already added a tremendous amount to the narrative structure and focus. We now have some storyboard animatics and it’s very exciting to see the first glimpses of the music working with the narrative.
We had our first round of auditions yesterday and the quality was frighteningly high, well beyond what we were expecting. Which is going to make choosing the final performers a real challenge.
The main character model is nearing completion with the facial animation system now reaching a somewhat ludicrous level of complexity (i just hope it doesn’t break as fixing it will be a project in its own right) But it provides the functionality to recreate some very subtle performances; useful as we have a fair few close ups planned. The modelling of the final character has sent me slightly do-laly, as getting the specific age with its request subtle proportioning, keeping a certain look to the face and all the animation controls with their deforming muscle volumes has been a nightmare of balancing and revision. Not to mention the accompanying sleep deprivation. I start back at uni lecturing in 2 weeks (actually looking forward to a break from modelling!) so am trying to get this all done by then.
We now have a fairly smooth mocap to rig pipeline worked out, although the cleaning of the motion capture could be fairly time consuming and we’re looking for help on this. We presently have about 10 people on the pre-production team but will be slowly expanding to full production capacity over the next 6 months. All in all the project is going swimmingly but rather a lot left to do 🙂