Read Me, Seymour!

Two short films today: firstly, The Wonderful Present, placed 3rd this year in Sci-Fi London's 48hour film challenge. I saw this film at the screening event, it's got great atmosphere and effects, does a lot with minimal dialogue, and seems to be following the DV Rebel's Guide to the letter - right down to the vignetting. Congratulations also to Shoot The Runner, makers of this year's winner Abducted, and More Reel Than Real, who made the other runner-up The 10th Planet. You can see the other films here.



Today's second film is The Slush Pile, a comedy by Keith Kowalczyck and Martin Ott. This is not a 48 hour challenge entry. It's based on a true story, and another screenwriter friend also confirmed that it is very true to life. Martin Ott writes:

An friend of mine in the entertainment industry worked at a top agency where he dumped all of his "reader" scripts in a "Slush Pile" so that he could network his way out of the mail room (which he did).

So part of it is true enough and part of it is "tongue-in-cheek" - obviously a Slush Pile monster hasn't really eaten Hollywood (yet!). However, a town filled with so much nepotism and "connections" for a script to get read deserves this type of "parody."



[edited 10.5.10]

The City Of Gold And Lead

This week sci-fi has literally been oozing out of the ground all over London. First of all the Tree of Souls sprouted in Hyde Park:
Rumours of the discovery of massive deposits of unobtainium beneath the Serpentine lake remain unconfirmed and I am assured that the excavation works all over London are pure coincidence.

Over in Piccadilly Sci-Fi London is in full swing. Accompanied by my two leading ladies I came to the screening of the 48 Hour Film Challenge entries, just as the All-Nighter survivors were leaving. I say "leaving", but what I really mean is "falling asleep all over the foyer." Brave souls, I will join you in your cryogenic suspension pods next year.

Our non-shortlisted film, Half A Million, received a few giggles and some applause - you're a polite lot, Sci-Fi London! More about this in my last post. It was shown alongside some really good entries made by some very nice people, so I'll round up the links and publish my favourites in another post.

Starcraft II was on display. This is news. Look!

The amazing Science Fiction cupcakes by Chocoloty (pictured) - which tasted as glam as they look. I'm guessing Chocoloty is a fan of Barbarella, Flash Gordon or old-series BSG rather than, say, new-series BSG.

Half A Million intro [remake]

We made a film for Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Challenge 2010. The results were shockingly poor - looking back the decision to shoot everything on bluescreen & model all the locations in Blender within the 48 hours was a bit ambitious and should have rung a few alarm bells, and although the live shoot went smoothly post-production was completely rushed. The film will eventually be uploaded at Sci-Fi London & I'll link to it when it appears.

This is not that film.

Here I've completely re-made the first few shots using the original bluescreen footage - took a few nights but the clip you are now watching is closer to how the film appeared in my head.

With thanks to the wonderful cast and crew.

Sci-Fi London 2010

The Sci-Fi London film festival opens this week. The opening night is already sold out but there are some real gems elsewhere in the programme including a rare showing of Daleks: Invasion Earth, the office comedy Drones and Sandy Collora's much anticipated Hunter Prey, as well as the awesome shorts programme.

Also, the 48 Hour Challenge Shortlist is now online here. Our entry, Half A Million, didn't make the top 12 so congratulations to all the teams that made it. I'll post my thoughts on the entries (shortlisted or otherwise) in a bit.

The Day Before The Day After Tomorrow

The 48 Hour Film Challenge is now over - I handed in a finished film for Team Sky's Edge at about a quarter to one this morning, just in time for the deadline.

We finished the production stage in good time - following the Last Zombie model we did the whole shoot on Saturday afternoon and had tidied up, gone out for a meal and got ourselves home all before midnight. The initial plan was to use a friend's urban jungle as a location but unfortunately at quite short notice this wasn't possible so I came up with an utterly foolhardy alternative - shoot the whole thing on bluescreen and leave myself to post-produce everything Sky Captain style for the rest of the weekend, so it's been a race against the clock, particularly with the render time required for every scene. I "finished" at 11.30 this morning and just made the 1 p.m. drop off, and I don't think I want to see ANYTHING blue for some time. Anything arty went out of the window - we went with what our title and prop suggested so ended up making a heist movie which also required one cast member to play an entire army of security guards on her own - which she did brilliantly.

Although I'm temporarily off blue I'll post some more about the bluescreen stuff because I do think it's got some potential & would like to do more of this in future. For this film in some scenes it works well, but if we hadn't been in a competition I would have wanted to re-shoot some scenes.

The Day After Tomorrow - update 3

Only a few hours left until the deadline. I now know I will have something to hand in although some parts have been more successful than others.

The Day After Tomorrow - update 2

This is proving to be quite a challenge to edit this year & I'm not 100% certain at this stage how complete the film is going to be when we hand it in. We had a last minute change of plan and the new plan involved a large amount of bluescreenery - a risk as you can end up with completely unusable material if you're not careful. So far it's just about holding up.

The Day After Tomorrow - update 1

Running slightly behind schedule but we did complete our 48 hour challenge shoot this evening, leaving me with a very ambitious editing & post production job. Still think I can do it but we'll see what happens over the next 36 hours.

The Day After Tomorrow

Sci-Fi London's 48 Hour Film Challenge starts in a couple of hours. I'll post updates on my progress. We're going to try something a little different this year...

The Purrfect Storm

The Eyecat Training Collar has some serious competition - well, it made me laugh. Thanks bro.

In other news, Sci-Fi London is coming in April. I'm getting a team together again for the 48 Hour Film Challenge, but right now I'm still working on post-production for Bast in every minute I can squeeze in.

Demo of post-production work on Bast. I'm working in Blender 2.49. The steps:

Artefact reduction: Quad blurring the Cr and Cb channels in the compositor leaving the Y channel unblurred. You can't see this step at all if you're watching at 360p as YouTube tends to add in some lovely artefacts of its own. If you're watching at 480p look at the candle during this step.

Colour consistency: lift gamma gain balancing in the VSE so all the shots in a scene look similar. Blender 2.5 will include colour balancing nodes in the compositor as well, seriously speeding up the process.

Lighting: adding or reducing highlights - meshes with gradient textures in the 3D scene, multiplied in the compositor.

Gradients and overall colour look: adding local colour uses same approach as lighting step. Overall colour look is a colour curves node that is applied equally to all the shots in the same scene. Here I've just bowed the red and green channels slightly to add warmth.