"Mass Producing" Blasters, helmets and our Star Wars film project

[mikoyan99]

Good luck with filming Matt. Cool to see your props and costumes coming together.

Mike

Thanks! Shame I never had time to sort the imperial fleet trooper helmet.

We've started in the VSFX/CGi side of things - here's what should hopefully be the final form/background of our gas refinery/outpost:

Currently the background is a flat image, which is causing issues when the camera moves. Other option is the render clouds, but it'll take my computer around half an hour to do each frame with those. At 24 fps, that's not really feasible.
-Matt

 

[Sym-Cha]

Well you could always rent a drone with a camera attached and shoot 'live' clouds instead and just rotoscope your gasmining facility in between and color correct those cloud images to match your cgi

Chaim

 

[Valcrow]

Thanks! Shame I never had time to sort the imperial fleet trooper helmet.

We've started in the VSFX/CGi side of things - here's what should hopefully be the final form/background of our gas refinery/outpost:
http://i.imgur.com/CkE96dk.jpg

Currently the background is a flat image, which is causing issues when the camera moves. Other option is the render clouds, but it'll take my computer around half an hour to do each frame with those. At 24 fps, that's not really feasible.
-Matt

Map individual clouds on planes, you can key them out with the blue in the sky and then scatter them about so you get some parallax during your camera movement. It'll render fast.

 

[ArkRaider]

Love it! Keep up the good work. I really like the pilot outfit.

 

[DaddyfromNaboo]

...

Currently the background is a flat image, which is causing issues when the camera moves. Other option is the render clouds, but it'll take my computer around half an hour to do each frame with those. At 24 fps, that's not really feasible.
-Matt

Use the same image on various planes set apart at will, try separating the clouds and give them some transparency, render the background movement and the foreground element in separate passes and you should be fine. I´m guessing that your lighting setup and shadow interaction takes up a lot of computation time.

Depending on what camera movement you have you can also use half-spheres or curved planes. But keep in mind that, depending on how far your camera is away in "real life", i.e. the scale of your model, you should not have too much movement in the clouds. The further objects are away from your camera, but placed next to each other, the smaller the noticeable shift between those objects will be. See the Episode 1 Making of video for an example of how they built a few scenes using the technique of digital mattepainting/travelling mattes.

 

[mikoyan99]

Thanks guys; i've been chatting to the director - plan is now to keep the camera static related to the backdrop, so the parallax shouldn't be an issue. I'm rendering very high resolution cloud backdrops as we speak. Job for tommorow is sorting rigs for the models; we've had a play with the chroma key for the live action shots and that's working, which is encouraging.
-Matt

 

[roryyeung]

Hi Guys,
I'm directing & editing, and I thought I would post here to show you guys a few stills from the rushes (pre- VFX & grading)
What do you guys think? We're planning to Roto & Motion track objects into the sets.
-Rory

 

[dwmcguff]

Very cool to see. Currently planning my own star wars short. A battle between two sith lords. Always a joy to see more people on the same boat. Best of luck

 

[DaddyfromNaboo]

Good work so far. I guess you don´t have much options re. lighting, shooting on location and hence using the practicals that are already there? I´d like to suggest to use a few coloured lights here and there, to spice things up a bit. You could of course do this in post, but its just additional work. A uniform camera height for the action sequences might help, too. It may be personal preference, but I like shots from a lower angle with the horizont almost in the middle of the frame, or tilted upwards. And a personal pet peeve of mine is if shots are done without a tripod

 

[bbmchl]

Coming along nicely!

 

[mikoyan99]

Sorry it's been so long since there have been any updates - our director is still working on post production (when he has time, the two of us now having jobs).

I do have a few stills for you, showing off some of the effects shots (so far):

-Matt

 

[Xtafa]

Also, had a demand for another blaster:
http://i.imgur.com/bx55aGJ.jpg
Sorry for the bad pic, camera is slowly giving up.
-Matt

I find this one quite interesting, do you have any other shots of it/info?

Your stills look great too!

 

[mugatu]

This all is looking great. Really, great job on the props and the CG!

 

[mikoyan99]

I find this one quite interesting, do you have any other shots of it/info?

Your stills look great too!

Thanks!

WRT to that blaster - it's just a cheap die-cast cap gun, with a 40mm PVC pipe shroud over the barrel. I originally built it for a steampunk outfit - but we were running short of props, so we grabbed that one to use in the film. Sadly, it was broken during filming. I don't think I have any more pics - but it was based off of this:
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net...sparent.png/revision/latest?cb=20111015181636

-Matt