Pickups and Trailer Work

It’s been a busy Winter and Spring for the project as we’ve been tackling a lot of the very ambitious shots in our trailer, trying to reach the dizzy heights of Hollywood with our oceans of simulated water, collapsing cliff faces and close up facial acting.

Our grant has helped a lot with the more computer intensive shots and we now have 2 6k computers stacked up on Alex’s desk grinding away simulating individual water droplets. we also have a new piece of software called “Flora”; thanks to FABRICENGINE for this, as it will be invaluable in helping us create our massive mountain forests.We are starting our big push with full time studio practice this week, now that the teaching term has finished. Our dedicated Stina team will be working full time to finish the trailer. So far we’ve made good progress with our character pipeline, environments and shader development and are getting closer to having an integrated muscle system for all the characters, which may possibly make it into the trailer if our R&D proves production friendly. We are also well on target for animation and have already finalled a number of shots.

Over the Easter break we’ve also been holding our last (possibly) round of pick-up shoots. A chance for Alex to get off the computer and start playing with proper boy toys.

Week one of our shoot saw Becky and Dave reuniting as Stina and Gunter, our main characters, giving us more insights into their stumbling romance. There was also a cameo from students Owyn Abrams and Lucy Spurge for our Rammstien Dance-athon. I promise not to put this up on you tube. maybe 🙂

For week two we worked with professional Dramatic Violence group RC Annie, who helped us develop our Militia into a proper fighting force. They delivered some fantastic improvised performances, including a scarily convincing sergeant major and some terrifying fighting styles with scimitars, knives and spears. All the more impressive given our smaller capture volume. Their dancers also gave us a fantastic variety of weird, sexy, scary and surreal dance performances to capture the spirit of our uniquely odd Gypsy Caravan troupe.

Now we’ve completed all the performances, including our incidental and background action, we have the raw ingredients to make the whole movie. A lot of work lies ahead to build the rest of the assets, characters and effects to wrap around the performances. Our next big challenge (once our promotional trailer is completed; which hopefully will be the focus of our efforts to finance the rest of the production) is to edit all the reference footage down to a solid 2 hour film. This will be cut with storyboards and assorted previz to get an overall sense of the structure and tone of the movie. Once completed we can make a definitive shot list and start ploughing through all the motion capture, cleaning it up and adding the cameras and the world around it. A massive challenge, but we have the solid base of a good story, a lot of our key CGI assets, great performances and a wealth of sumptuous concept and storyboard art to guide us through . Over the next few years we should be able to complete the whole film, if the trailer does its job and helps us finance the rest of the production (our next very big challenge!).

All for now, check back in the summer to see our finished trailer,

Paul