Still ain’t no Ellenshaw . . .

. . . but this will have to do and should suffice for LVJ.  So after a few days of painting the image up with detail and lighting effects in Photoshop, it’s ready for comping in with some of the live action shot against bluescreen.

The matte painting is one of a few that feature in the ‘hanger shootout sequence’ as backgrounds to the live action foreground.  There’s about 90 shots in the sequence and this background is used in about 50% of them.

Here’s a couple of stills from two of the shots from the sequence and a version of the matte painting.

I ain’t no Peter Ellenshaw. . .

Come to think of it, neither am I a Harrison Ellenshaw, Michael Pengrazio, Chris Evans, Craig Barron or even Chesley Bonestell.  The next shot after hso_020 is a reverse angle that reveals the large interior of the hanger on board an alien space craft and there was a time when I was going to be texturing every fine detail of the model, but then I wised up and thought I’d treat the shots as if they were digital matte painting shots.

Initially, I thought I’d take the model and throw a basic, mid grey material all over it.  Then light it and render it with all the usual techniques and use this as the basis of the matte painting, it’s a similar technique that they used on ‘Final Fantasy’, but, like I said at the top, my matte painting skills fall short and need as much of a helping hand as I can give them.

So what I did, was make a bunch of textures that were kind of generic in nature that could be mix and matched across the hanger model and that would at least give me more variety in tones across the render.  It also meant I wasn’t starting with a blank canvas and could concentrate on adding detail and life to the painting rather making sure my perspective was bang on.

A couple of other passes that I’ll spit out of the render process will be a depth pass so I can control depth of field and colour correction into the background and like the corridor shot before it, there’ll be a low level fogging.

hso_020_F_n_V_entrance_final

The hanger entrance shot has been completed and although the last blog post which talked about the commencement of the shot was dated December 2008, the work rate isn’t as embarrassing as it looks, what with other work commitments always part of the juggling act.

The corridor went through further stages of detailing and texturing since the last post and then a render which included ‘final gathering’ out of 3DSMax went into Photoshop where even more detailing was added as a matte painting.  This became the background for the shot which had a thick layering of fog added in the comp along with some light glows courtesy of ‘Knoll Light Factory’.

Then we needed some heavy duty blast doors that opened to reveal the corridor.  I was definitely aiming for something that had a chunky mechanism of some kind, so after trawling through some reference, I came up with an idea, sketched it on paper, then modeled and textured it in 3DSMax and Modo.  Some really basic rigging was used so that the door could do it’s thing, just parenting one object to another.

The Hanger is very low lit so the lighting was low key with only a couple of sources above left and right that dropped a wide diffused pool of light onto the door.  All rendered in 3DSMax using Mental Ray with Final Gathering, a single pass pretty much, just dropping the same render on top of itself with some expanding of values and blurring just to get some glows on the lights.

We recently got access to an extremely cool plugin for 3DSMax called Fumefx that does some awesome looking fluid dynamics effects, great for smoke and fire, so we couldn’t help ourselves and added some steam and smoke emanating from the mechanism as the door opens.

One of the next shots on the list is the reverse angle on this one that reveals the hanger.  This will involve similar techniques although the plan is to do no texturing on the actual model itself and do all colouring as a matte painting which can serve as the basis for all the shots that follow looking in the same direction.

hso_020_F_n_V_entrance

Work has commenced on the first shot of the ‘hanger shootout’ scene.  Okay, that’s not strictly true, work commenced on it many years ago as it’s a scene that’s been in the movie right from the start and the bluescreen plates were shot very early on during principal photography.  In fact several shots from this scene have been worked on in the past but that was only so we could add them to the trailers that have been produced over the years.

The idea behind the scene is that when our three main characters find themselves on board an alien Lander/Tug vessel, one of them becomes displaced from the other two, who then try and find him.  During the search, they come across a large hanger where they are attacked by a group of aliens; hence ‘Hanger ShootOut’ scene.  During the producton of the movie we have shot in several aircraft hangers around the world, but none unfortunately were suitable for that of a hanger on board a UFO, so we bit the bullet and decided to shoot the whole thing against blue screen, in a garage, with the CG set to be added later.

This first shot is actually a reverse angle of the hanger and shows the two characters as they step through a blast door and take position at a control station about two stories up from the hanger floor.  As the doors open we reveal an empty corridor which you can see here.  It was modelled, textured, lit and rendered in 3D Studio Max, it still needs some detailing adding to it and some extra elements will be added in photoshop as a matte painting.

The whole sequence could well be 100+ shots in total, mostly because it’s an action scene and has a lot of fast cutting.  The rest of the hanger has been modeled but is still to be textured and there is a lot of FX related CGI like rigid body dynamics, particle effects and fluid simulations using FumeFX to be considered in the scene.  With all this going on it will be necessary to keep both eyes on the ball to make sure that the drama of the scene isn’t lost so an explosion can look pretty.

Compositing Apps used on LVJ

We recently made the call to do the majority of the remaining compositing for LVJ in After Effects and this is the latest and potentially final decision on the topic of ‘which software to use’.  I thought it may be of interest to do a quick backtrack through all the compositing apps that have either been used or considered during the production of the movie.

Funnily enough, After Effects was the first app that was ever considered for LVJ, but at that time the cost of the software was prohibitive which led to the first app used in the movie being one called ‘Satori’; if I remember correctly it was free on the cover of CGI magazine.  I can’t remember one thing about this app, whether it was any good or not, what it looked like or how it worked.

Next up was ‘Effect’ from Discreet Logic, before they became Discreet and before they became Autodesk.  I guess it was the precursor to Combustion and as far as I remember was a great little app, plus I got a kick out of using an app made by a company that advertised high end stuff in Cinefex.

After ‘Effect’ I drifted into ‘Combustion’ but was keen to explore the possibilities of node based compositing and saw an opportunity in XSI who was offering their FXTree included with the 3D app.  From what I’ve heard FXTree is pretty much the same as Avid’s old ‘Media Illusion’ under the hood and although it was great for getting into node based compositing, it did seem a little out of date.

Then Apple crashed the price of ‘Shake’ which was just irresistable.  Shake was used on dozens of shots from the movie and a tonne of freelance work, but it ain’t getting any younger and I was beginning to realise that perhaps After Effects would be more suited to the work in our movie, that of an indie/guerrila one.

Alien Tug ship

The alien Tug ship as we call it appears several times in the movie, sometimes it’s carrying a probe ship, other times a scout vessel and then finally hauling a large transporter, itself containing fighters and landing vehicles.  This is a first look at the 3D model being built in the computer (for those interested, it’s being modelled in 3DSMax and textured in Modo).  It’s a work in progress  and we’ll bring you updates as and when they happen.

Trailer is done

The new LVJ trailer is online at www.lvjmovie.com

There’s also a link to a new gallery of behind the scenes photo’s on our flickr photostream

Trailer Delay

Well, two things came up, one, another freelance BBC gig and you can’t stick your nose up at that, and two, a TV show treatment that Mark Shields and I have been working on over the past few months suddenly had a deadline bolted onto it.

Normal trailer progress will be resuming sometime soon.

Trailer update – almost there

It’s been a slow few weeks on the LVJ front, but there’s only one week left on my current job, so when that’s done, I’m back on LVJ full time; at least until the next job comes along anyway. This should mean a steady stream of posts and updates on the movies progress, starting with the completion of the current trailer that is so close we can almost taste it.

I’ve included a handful of images from the new trailer:

This an alien pilot being blown up while dogfighting in a one man/alien fighter.

Three alien fighters open fire on a wing of X-74’s piloted by Sabre.

The grading for the trailer has been done in ‘Color’ primarily by Dave LeMay (LVJ’s DoP) with a handful of shots picked up by myself. Using Color to grade the trailer was a way for us to test the workflow for the grade on the whole movie, without the pressure of using it on a longform project straight out of the gate. Here are a selection of side by side comparisons on where we were and now where we are.

Future updates will include details on some more 3D models being built for the film, specifically, hero details of the mothership and a hero spaceship that features heavily in the final battle of the movie. Also, Mark Shields will be joining the blogging team to provide details on how things are moving regarding the film’s score and soundtrack.

Wow, very impressive

I don’t know what it is exactly, or how much it costs, but I hear that Skywalker Sound use them and what I hear is amazing. It’s a bit of kit from TC Electronics and it can take recorded dialogue that’s full of noise, which in our case was air conditioning units, and completely remove it, leaving dialogue so clean it’s as if it was recorded in a sound proof booth. It takes a sample of the background noise and uses that to remove it from the bits you want to keep; the dialogue. It’s like audio voodoo, and we’re using it on our trailer.