GUYS WHAT'S UP!!!!
Long time no hear I know! I'm sorry I don't post more often, these last couple of months was pretty intense. We filmed the miniatures for almost two months, and then we started doing the sound design and scoring the film. We're really pushing it to finish the film as soon as possible and start applying to festivals.
So today here's a much longer post about miniature filming!
Didn't actually count them yet, but we needed about 35 VFX shots for Slice. On average we would do one per day. We're showing vast cityscapes so it takes some time to set the buildings up, arrange them in the shot, and then we film 10-15 passes for each shot which takes a couple of hours. Not all shots are of the city of course, so every change of setting basically screwed us up because we weren't on familiar grounds anymore and we had to figure out how to film it. Then there were the matte paintings which were a nightmare of their own, but more on that later.
Let's start with the shipyard setting.
The film basically opens with a couple shots of the shipyard, and I'm sure you'll recognize many miniatures I built before. The printer building, cranes, shipping crates... It's all here. Shipyard was a joy to do because we could try something else apart from city scenes, and it's in a completely different scale as well - we got much closer to the ground.
Here you can see Sandrino setting up some containers. He's a friend who built a couple buildings as well and was of tremendous help during miniature filming. We would break something every day, a tower would tip over and break into million pieces... And poor Sandrino would have to glue it up in 15mins so that we could continue filming.
Here's a setup with our hero car parked near the Shipyard. I'm making the foreground muddy with one of my favorite weathering materials - mud.
Same scene, different angle. Between the objects there's a lot of empty space. We would always choose a camera angle first and then move stuff around until it looked nice and crowded in the shot. On the right you can see two pipes that leak some sewage or something, and a wonderful contraption behind it where we would pour water during the shot so it would come out the pipes.
And since I really like you guys I'll squeeze in a couple of super-secret temp composits
. Here's how that shot looks in the end:
On some occasions we would use miniatures to make some live action shots more spectacular. You remember the back alley shoot I talked about? Here's a before and after:
We added a waste truck passing by and some buildings in the back. That setup looked like this:
But even though it doesn't look
that complicated, we still had to do a couple of tests to match the perspective and light to the live action shot, and then figure out how to pull the truck with fishing string so it would look believable. And almost every shot had some little problem of it's own that would complicate our life day by day.
Oh, and then came the matte paintings. I'm still in total awe with the whole concept of matte paintings, but it was a bit nerve wracking. I mean, Stipan painted them for what.. one or two months every day, and now we filmed the first one in half a day, I went to composit it on the computer and it looked like - crap! We had no idea how we should film it and the result just wasn't acceptable for our film. So we kinda got scared a bit, haha. But we started experimenting and invented a couple of tricks that made it more magical and cool.
Here's how the matte painting setup basically looked:
For the first pass we lit it from above so it wouldn't reflect light and filmed the painting from the front. Here's the result:
Then we lit it only from the back and filmed the scratched out lights:
One trick that we thought of was to film the lights through the glass sprinkled with water. In this case you can see the effect is pretty obvious as this painting is supposed to be looked at through the windshield of a car, but for the other paintings we did the same thing only more subtle and the water droplets would turn the lights into stars and it would look pretty cool. So that's a nice trick to remember.
Another thing we thought of was to cut out the silhouettes of the buildings we have on the painting, and shine light from behind them. We would trace the shape of the building Stipan painted, and cut it out from thick paper. Here Sandrino is doing some touch-ups before the take:
That would give us these cool volumetric lights and make the painting look more three-dimensional.
And when I combined it all together it would look something like this:
Ok, then here's a couple of random pics from the city setups. This room is the same one where the toilet scene and all the car stuff was filmed. Not a huge space but we managed. And as always it was the middle of the summer so we had to be shirtless all the time, haha.
It won't let me upload more photos, I think I reached my limit for this post.. I'll post some more stuff tomorrow!
Talk soon guys!!!