Today was a scary moment for me on the production. To the extent that I actually said out loud what was running through my head. “I look around and there are so many people doing so many complex tasks, I can no longer fit it all into my brain.” “It’s alright, just trust them” replied the vfx supervisor and my co-collaborator Alex.  He was right. But for the first time the complexity of what was unfolding; the cloth simulation collision issues, the snow scene  not loading, the facial animation sync problems, the modeling pipeline confusion, the mocap and finger animation interdependence, the broader thematic context of the matte paintings were all so complex, so involved, I could no longer fall back on the comfortable cushion of omniscience a director craves, and that is often expected on a daily basis. There was just too much to cram into one brain, certainly one the size of mine. This is the trickiest moment i imagine for a director, as it requires trust, trust that when things break they will be fixed and decisions, big and small  can be made that make things better, not in need of fixing at a later stage, or at the very worst sink the production. While I was mulling this all over in my head, the model had been finished, the fingers animated, the snow scene had finally loaded, the matte painting was looking like Ralph Macquarie had just grabbed the paintbrush and the cloth team had devised a way of making the costume work that had never occurred to me. I suddenly realised we were actually making a proper “feature film”, which for me should involve creating something from nothing with people I can trust; who contribute and improve on my ideas in way that will one day, possibly along way away, come together into some thing bigger and clever than all of us..

Paul

Over the last few months things have been very busy production wise and I’ve been very lazy about blogging about it. Firstly, we had a week long pick up shoot over the Easter break on our smaller mocap stage.  As well as a few important set pieces from Becky as Stina, the students played a variety of exotic and occasionally ridiculous  gypsies. Of particular note was Natalie, our resident dancer,  who spent a whole day doing a gypsy Dance in a mocap suit, no mean feat; as well encapsulation a collection of weird forest animals in what was getting dangerously close to modern dance. Also Athos, our resident half Greek  threatened to steal the movie as a lecherous yokel dancer, a performance for which i have no words, but can release the video for a fee. An unexpected display of acrobatics from Dan proved very useful and amazingly managed to fit on our small stage. I also put in a brief and much mocked turn as a gypsy foot slapping dancer. In addition to Stina, Becky played a variety of small Gypsy children, but struggled trying to imitate bad dancing, as her sense if rhythm was clearly too good; in the end one of our producers James had the idea of creating a unique piece of dance music by randomly hitting his iPad drum kit. Again the resulting performance is available from me on video for a fee. All in all there was some great footage obtained.  At present  we are running full time studio sessions with the Foam team, working flat out to complete a few shots ready for a show in London for film  industry professionals. The idea is to raise awareness of the film, get some technical feedback and maybe even find a producer, as we sorely need an industry champion to help us raise some finance, as my pockets are getting a little thin. We have a massive challenge ahead over the next few weeks, as we integrate our cloth solves, dynamic VFX, Faceware facial animation software and Vue and Arnold renders, all to an industry standard. So far the students have treated the process seriously and professionally and we are hopeful we can get it all done by the end of July deadline.  Also this month we have another pickup shoot with Dave and Becky for some more drama set pieces and hopefully an ADR session in  early August, where we’re hoping to record some of the prologue.

Busy times! Paul

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)