Zen Films

MindFlesh Monster Update

There's been absolutely tons happening on the MindFlesh front but I've been so busy getting on with it that I've not had the chance to blog it!

First, we've had a stack of great reviews - thank you so much for all the folks that have taken the time to watch the film and post their opinions. Including, but not limited to, these most recent reviews at Eat My Brains, Tony Lee's blog (Editor of Zone and VideoVista) and Horror-Movies.ca.

Secondly, we're getting some great exposure via WonderTouch, creators of the excellent ParticleIllusion digital effects software we used on MindFlesh. If you're into CGI and you're making an independent film, then it's worth a read.

Thirdly, our Cannes market screening has now been booked - yahoo! This will be our market premiere. Dates and times are May 19th at 2pm and May 20th at 11:30am both in Palais D in the main Marche. Oh yeah baby.

Forth and finally, I've started work on the DVD extras - the first of which is The Making of a Monster. Here, Sangeet Prabhaker explains how we went from concept through construction to create the Guardian creature suit as worn by Charlotte Milchard.

Render Jockey to MindFlesh Render Junkie

Good grief, these blog entries are getting fewer and further between – must have been busy these past months J I promise to do better in future. I have to confess to becoming a “render junkie” – sometimes waking up at

3am

to check on the damn After Effects render and starting again if it’s fallen over! It’s not always a fault of AE – on one occasion I managed to somehow get a corrupt Targa file that halted the render.

I’ve adopted a two-stage rendering process: first, render the composition to a Targa file sequence and the second render the TGA sequence to whatever format I need – Quicktime, MPEG2 etc. I think it’s a pretty good process because the rendering a 20min composition with all the layers and effects takes about 15 hours; rendering the Tga sequence to another format is about 5 hours. And that’s with the Nucleo plug-in. Without it render times are 3 to 4 times longer.

At this stage, all the effects and colour correction has been done to at least a “good” standard but now I plan to go back and refine further and elevate the work to “excellent” level. Why two passes? Well, the original clean footage is ok for the basic sound work of cleaning up production sound and adding regular scene atmos but for the extra-creative sound design work, the guys need to see what the picture will look like. Trying for excellent on the first pass would take too long. In this 2-stage process we can shorten the overall post-production time.

This week we added all the completed music and it’s awesome. I think (hope) audiences will be enthralled at the approach we’ve taken (he says with everything crossed!). The last reel (final 20 mins) is absolutely intense: we have only two lines of dialogue and the rest is a full-on orgy of adrenalin. Imagine Alien meets Viagra ;) Oh….. MindFlesh.

Sound Design - part 2 of 2

This is part 2 of the interview with MindFlesh sound designer, Jeff Darby. Here he talks through his kit and presents a simple example of combing unusual sounds.

DNA Computing & Parallel Worlds..oh, and an Update on MindFlesh

Wow - it's already the start of July. This is a bumper update because I've had my nose to the grindstone for weeks...er.. and I went on holiday last week to Rhodes (the Greek island)...and there's lots to say. Here's the headings:

• MindFlesh update
• Books I've read recently

MindFlesh update

Picture progress...

Three of the four reels have now passed stage one (of two) - which means they've been graded and special effects added. They haven't been given an overall "look" yet and some SFX shots need to be tweaked but all-in-all progress is pretty good. I hope that by the end of July all the picture grading and SFX will be complete... at least to a really good stage :) I'm not planning to screen the film until Jan 2008 at the earliest so that gives me time to (a) improve any SFX I fancy and (b) find out how I'm going to get the hi-def image files off my PC and onto a HDCAM tape for screening! On the last point, watch this space.

Sound progress...

Matt the editor has now transferred all the Final Cut Pro (FCP) reels to ProTools where he's made a start at organising everything into tracks - vocals, production sound, sound effects, music, atmos etc.
Meanwhile Arban the composer has completed about 95% of the music so all that remains is a final (music) mix and then we can slot it into Matt's ProTools projects.

Books I've Read Recently

Did I mention I spent last week basking in the sun and I'm now a bronze Adonis? Oh... then that's probably because I was hiding in the shade with the redheads and babies :) Forty degrees...luvvly.

Anyway, at the airport I picked up two books, Genesis Machines: The New Science of Biocomputing and Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. Is it me or are subtitles getting longer? :)

Believe it or not I wasn't on the look-out for a book on biocomputing but it just happened to be the store and I thought it looked interesting. There's an important lesson in distribution there. Anyhow, despite what you might think, it's actually quite a riveting read and I couldn't put it down. It's not at all about living computers, computers made of flesh, stolen pregnant embryonic fluids or anything in the slightest ethically disturbing. It's about using DNA, enzymes and other microbiological chemicals to perform discrete computing tasks...or maybe not because it's all still theorize-build-trial-and-error. What makes the book enjoyable is the author's tone although I could have done with a few more diagrams. The author also has this tendency to provide examples for the easiest concepts and then skip over the more challenging. It reminded me of my school chemistry teacher who used to dictate his lectures - example: "use a 'deflagrating spoon'... thats spelt  's' 'p' 'o' 'o' 'n'". Amazingly the book inspired me to refresh my programming skills and while sunning myself by the pool I knocked-up a little program in Excel that plays Rummy using fuzzy logic. Yeah, I know it's a bit nerdy but it's not much worse than playing su doku all holiday.

Image Sequence Utility

I recently paid for a small utility to be created by someone at RentaCoder and I'm very pleased to be able to offer it to Zen Blog readers :)

For some unknown reason it's called "Incognito" - probably because I didn't determine the name in the spec! Anyhow, here's what it does:

• it'll check an image sequence and tell you which files are missing
• it'll copy one image sequence (source) and paste it into another sequence (target), renaming and renumbering to match the target.

Why is this useful?

Scenario One: Well, let's say I have a composition that's about 32000 images long, all rendered in HiDef. If I need to make adjustments to a part of the composition, I'll just render the changed images. Problem: for some reason, the After Effects plug-in Nucleo "accidentally" deletes one image before the start of the newly rendered images - leaving me an image short. It's a pain in the arse but worse if I have to look through a heap of files to find it. Not any more with Incognito :)

Scenario Two: I've broken large compositions into smaller comps to make the projects easier to deal with. If I then want to stitch all the comps together, I can now use Incognito to copy and paste from various comp names into a new final image sequence without manually renaming (practically unworkable) or creating an Uber-composition and re-rendering.

How to Use

Download the executable here. Your browser will complain that it's an executable but I've not had any problems. The file size is exactly 212,992 bytes (or 208k in summary). 

I think it's pretty clear what you need to do but one thing you need to know is that it expects files in the format "name_#####" where "name_" is your filename and ##### is a sequence number 00000 to 99999.

It's provided free of charge to use and freely distribute but it's provided without support or any apologies. I had it developed for me and I'm giving it away out of the kindness of my heart :) It'll be nice if you mention ZenFilms if you add it to your site for download. Enjoy.

Pictures of Carole and Picture Lock

As the end of April approaches it feels like we're getting closer to locking the picture - editing changes feel more like refinements than big changes. I've spent much of the week grading certain flashback scenes and getting drunk on compositing - good grief, there's almost no limit to the amount of tweaking that can be done: an extra highlight here, a shadow there, a steadier shot or smoother track...

Anyhow, the big work has been developing the 3D cgi model of Carole Derrien our fantastic French actress that plays the Goddess. Its a shame that uploading to YouTube degrades the quality of the clips so much but here's the two clips that I've been matching this week: the first is Carole against the greenscreen and the second is the 3D computer-generated Carole :) If the click the links above you can download the clips to view them more clearly.

I've also used a muscle and bone render, which is the most fun to do. Here's a still image of our Visible Digital Carole - VDC :)

By way of contrast, here's a few additional images of Carole: the first is Virginie's (the costume designer) sketch of one of Carole's outfits and second how it actually looks in the film.

Here Carole's posing with our Guardian e.g. "the monster"... er... except that Bill the author has told me they're not monsters, they're "highly intelligent beings"...er..yeah, except they murder the protagonist's friends! :) Just kidding with ya Bill! ;)

Finally, here's a shot of Carole being prepared by Daneeta and Virginie as Little Red Riding Hood for a dream sequence.

Editing 102? :)

CGI

Meet digital Peter :) Here's our 2-part podcast on creating some trial effects for MindFlesh.

I think I may have this guy start delivering the podcasts....

Here he is again with no skin :)

Pre-visualisation

I found this short pre-visualisation clip on my PC earlier this week - a relic from about 18 months ago when we were in discussions with producers to shoot MindFlesh in Thailand.

The clip was something like an experiment because for all the effort that went in, it doesn't really pitch the film well enough (in terms of projected production quality) and it's over-kill in terms of pre-visualisation - for me, storyboards achieve the same result for a lot less work.

The clip was created by animating Poser figures/props and then enhancing in After Effects and Premiere. In Bill's novel, the two women on the corner are prostitutes (as shown in the clip) but in creating the Thai script (Bill's novel is set in San Francisco) the women became street vendors. In the final MindFlesh shot in London they were cut completely.

Man handled!

Had a busy day today doing everything except what I was supposed to! Took the Guardian head to Sangeet for his prosthetics trade show this weekend and then popped to London Bridge to get my photo taken for my City AM interview.
Anyhow... finally got a few hours in and managed to improve a shot.

The Problem... BEFORE
Check out the clip below and notice the guy who walks across the back of our shot! Either the compression or conversion at YouTube has made the shot darker but on the HiDef screen this guy looms large and clear, spoiling the moment.

The Solution... AFTER
Managed to take a section of alleyway and mask over the offender :) Check the clip...now you see him, now you don't.

How?

In After Effects we applied a stabilizing track to the doorway, added a new layer with the masked (e.g. clean) doorway, switched on the 3D layer properties and then parented both to a camera. The picture below (click for larger image) shows how the shot jitters around because it's handheld.