And While I'm at it....

This is yet another Uni Project. We had to reshoot a scene from a film. So in the middle of a terrible British winter we decided the best possible film to shoot a scene from was Predator... Well it made sense at the time!

Shot over 2 days, we encountered a huge problem when we came to edit the footage. The camera we'd used for the first days filming had a fault (a lose wire or something)A number of the visuals in shots had been corrupted (most noticably in shots where we were moving the camera around). We did our best to edit around these but a couple have ended up in the final cut. We also had absolutly no useable sound from that first days shooting, just nasty hisses and what sounds like the tape turning :(

Our solution to the second problem was a little bit novel, and quite abit funny.

Anyway...

Second Uni Video Project

Has It Really Been Two Months?

So really long time and no posts! Has this become another of those poor forlorn blogs that gets bought for Christmas, cherished for a couple of days, then dumped on the RSPCA or in a canal by the start of the new year?

Well never intentionally.

Other stuff has been a little higher on my agenda for the last couple of weeks (okay months) namely writing, shooting and editing another little production. Acute observers might already have noticed that I wrapped the tale of Lazarus up a bit quick (Well I did, I could have rambled on for ages about editing and pick ups and stuff) But I wanted to get the story done so I could move on to the next (which has largely been keeping me from updating this very blog by giving me evil looks and hissing) Anyway…

While writing for TAOSB was kind of fun, one was awfully restricted by the existing material and the series’ need to stay ‘family friendly’. In short there was a whole load of stuff that I wanted to do that I would never, ever, (ever, ever, ever!) be allowed to put in to an episode of SB.

So flash back a couple of months to when Lazarus was actually in production. During this period I’d spent quite a lot of time chatting with Pete and Sarah. Mostly pipe dreaming about all of the plot, content and effects we’d like to (Well actually could) do if we weren’t bound up in all of SB’s restrictions. Now while we had some really cool ideas, we had no real context to put them in until Pete, made a simple if dubious suggestion.

Way back when I’d written an original zombie movie (Not to be confused with the Stephen Brown zombie show) now it has to be said we didn’t have any intention of shooting my old zombie movie script. It was to put it bluntly a bit cack, overly complicated, and a little to silly; but that script had generated an idea that we could work with. For reasons that are far too long to type, the film featured references to a made up film franchise/computer game (I was a little to scared of getting sued to mention an existing franchise/game in the script so I’d made one up) Pete’s idea was simple. Let’s make the franchise/computer game into a show!

Now this opened up a whole motherlode of questions. The fake show hadn’t really been developed in the script. It had a name and it had bad, nasty things that liked to eat people’s brains, but that was it. What started was a series of conversations (Heaven forbid almost actual brain storming sessions) about what we actual wanted to do with the show, and how we could sling it all together in a vaguely cohesive manner. Not to mention how the hell we were going to shoot it.

Within a couple of months we had a framework to play with. We’d settled (More or less) on a format. We’d worked out the background of the setting and how the world worked. We had a solid idea for the over ridding story arc of our first ‘season’. Finally we’d had ideas for some lead characters and their own individual plots. We even had some of this written down! We were well on our way. In the end it turned out we’d only really taken one thing from the original script and that was the name…

Echoblack.

Shindigs & Shenanigans!

On the 28th of October 2006 Lazarus had its official premier. From what I understand (and I could be wrong here, I wasn’t particularly involved in the post production) it was originally supposed to be ready to go a month or so earlier.

The Director had run into problems getting completed FX shot’s off a chap called Mike Todd. Mike had been with the club for a long, long time. He was responsible for virtually every computer generated shot that had been used in the Adventures of Stephen Brown for the previous 7 years, despite having moved to the other end of the country. Unfortunately work, and other things were taking a toll on the amount of time he could dedicate to the show, and his heart was just no longer in it. After he ‘completed’ the Lazarus shots he announced that he would be leaving the club, with pretty much immediate effect. While this caused a minor panic at the time, a number of talented individuals have since stepped up to the plate with impressive results, and exploding spaceships will continue to be a feature of SB for the foreseeable future.

Anyhoo, as time rolled by someone had a genius idea. Why don’t we have a Halloween party and premier the show at that? Well that just made sense, and sure enough that’s what happened. On the 28th a ton of people turned up at Big Steve’s house dressed in ghoulish fancy dress, and carrying enough booze to drown an elephant. It was quite a party!

So what was the finished product like? Well in many ways I’m entirely the wrong person to ask. When it comes to this story I’m quite possible the least objective person in the whole wide world. So I can’t really give you a review of the show. All I can say is some bit’s turned out as I expected, other bits were better than I expected, and some of it was atrocious. The sound was also a little off. But as stated that’s my highly un-objective opinion. Except for the bit about sound, that’s quite empirically.

On the whole the people gathered were very nice about it and I was very drunk. So all in, not a bad night :)

What happens to the episode now? Well eventually it’ll be shown on Southampton and Oxford TV (if Southampton ever get their transmitter fixed) It will also eventually creep on to the internet via Chichester TV, an online equivalent of Southampton and Oxford TV. I have no idea about time frames, but I will post a link here in the blog when it goes live online.

With Lazarus done and dusted it was time to move on, for me anyway. Dan, never happy with Mr Todd’s 'completed' FX shot’s has been beavering away gradually tweaking and replacing various bits of CG with the intention of creating a ‘special edition’. The rumour that while working on these shot’s he wears a lumberjack shirt and fake beard starts here! I’m also lead to believe he’s sorted out the sound.

But enough about Lazarus, the question is what would I do next?

Explosivo

A couple of weeks later and I received an email from John. The shots were complete. He attached a tiny little compressed version of one of the shots and told me to come on over and pick up the full size masters on disk.

Duly I down loaded the shot and watched with a content smile on my face as a corridor full of zombies got turned into crispy critters! A number of times in the run up to the shoot, and for a period after it. I had questioned how much it had cost to hire the fort. Was it worth it? The four shots that John had doctored screamed a big fat YES! They were easily worth 5 times what we’d paid for them. In fact on a number of occasions since, we’ve seen professional productions on TV and film, looked at each other and gone “Our explosion’s better than that!”

But it wasn’t easy. Producing the finished shot required masking off a number of elements in the corridor. Because a tripod hadn’t been used for the shots, what should have been a relatively simple task (solid unmoving mask’s placed over walls and door frames) became a pain staking, frame by frame, labour of love as John had to essentially rotoscape the whole scene. The finished effect was well worth the effort, but did lead to the following out burst from John.

“Next time you take a shoot like that make sure you use a tripod. In fact I can recommend a good brand. What was it called again… It began with and F… That’s it. Use a F**KING TRIPOD!”

Dutifully I passed his comments on to the production team. Never the less the completed FX shots inspired me. I’d already had a play around with my footage in an editing package. Putting together my scene to see if it played out the way I wanted it to (which it did, mostly) but having seen the cool stuff John had done I wanted to do a little bit more. I began to assemble a little promo reel.

It didn’t follow the script of the episode and it wasn’t real a trailer (Neither of these options were open to me as I only had 1 days worth of footage) It was more a sort of extended action sequence, and it wasn’t easy to paste together. In many of the scene’s there was a depressing lack of coverage. For example, the ‘split up’ scene consisted of 2 shots. A master and a single close-up. In the official version a number of these instances are sneakily covered up by cutting in CG shots, or using bits from other scenes. Well I didn’t have the CG bits, but I had a plan! I pulled some sneaky tricks, and some not so sneaky tricks, all with the intention of making the viewer so sea sick, they can’t spot the mirrored or reused shot’s! It almost works!

I finished the edit and slung it across to John for some additional effects, muzzle flash, smoke, that kind of thing. While he worked on that I started to neaten up the sound.

A couple of weeks later the newly finished audio track was layered over the finished video and we had a complete little promo, it looks suspiciously like this…



Well okay it looks a lot like that, although the compression has made the colours go a bit squirly. The start is suspiciously orange, and the end is a little to dark, meh! If I cut it again (which I won’t, the project is over. George Lucas could learn a lesson from me here!) I would probably get rid of the nasty, wildly swinging camera shots. But tough, you’re stuck with ‘em.

For those what is interested (and cause I don’t wanna get sued) the music at the start is ‘Through the Loop’ from the album 'Hold Your Colour' by Pendulum and the main piece of music is ‘Seizure of Power’ from the Resident Evil Soundtrack. Clicky the links to go buy albums and find out stuff about the artists.

The day after we finished the promo it was the Lazarus premier. The journey was almost over.