Blade Runner SUSHI BAR + SLICE OF LIFE making of

Love it to bits! The update has enough meat on it that you can chew/digest all of this info with several viewing. Also: don't loose that sense of humor; you guys crack me up:thumbsup
 
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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:

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We added a waste truck passing by and some buildings in the back. That setup looked like this:

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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:

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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:

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Then we lit it only from the back and filmed the scratched out lights:

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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:

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That would give us these cool volumetric lights and make the painting look more three-dimensional.

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And when I combined it all together it would look something like this:

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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.

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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!!!
 
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Thanks a lot guys!
Here's the second part!

This one's probably going to make you guys from UK laugh... We needed a model of a spaceship that's docked, and it was supposed to be looked at from afar. So to make it faster we bought 3D puzzles of Old Trafford and Anfield stadiums and connected them together into one big mutant stadium, haha. Glued random stuff on top of it and as always spray painted it grey.

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It was filmed in front of the cityscape matte painting that Stipan aptly named "California Sun 40000" ?!?!. Since it was only seen from one angle I made the spaceship as a paper cutout. So it's only 2D but you can never tell. Also, you can see I'm looking pretty confused because I have no clue what I'm doing. :lol

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In almost every shot we would put something in the background, like tiny flying cars or something. And they have to be in front of the painting, but behind the docked ship. So I always need a so called "matte pass" that tells the computer what to block. Nowadays it can be easily done with greenscreen, but we actually did the same thing that they would do in the 80's. we put white canvas behind the ship, and leave the foreground in the dark. That way we would instantly get a black and white matte, and the computer would know that the tiny flying cars can only appear in the white part. I must say I actually prefer this technique over greenscreen, because you can get much more details this way. 80's ROCK! haha

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Here's a temp shot with a lot of stuff missing, but just to give you the idea:

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You can see here how most of the lights have a star effect on them. That's 'cause we filmed them through glass sprinkled with water like I explained last time.

All the vehicles and spaceships were of course filmed separately. For each shot we needed to film them in an angle that matched the angle we used when we filmed the shot. So there was again a lot of going back and forth until it all matched. It takes a lot of patience to do this, hahaha.

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So that's it for now. I still gotta find time to edit the new Miniatures Production Diary. Until then here's some more -pssssst- super secret shots... ;)

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All that stuff is so awesome. Can't wait. Finally just watched Blade Runner 2049 two weeks ago, so now this gets me even more hyped for your film.
 
Awesome sauce you guys! Yep, a simple matte as you have used, works as well than using green screen;) Very exciting update(y)thumbsup
 
Very cool stuff, guys! I love that you shot it against white to get the matte in-camera. Can you go a little more into your compositing (AE?) of those shots in your BTS production diary? That'd be super interesting to see.

SB
 
I was passing through Zagreb the other week as part of a tour I was doing. Tending to stay in hostels as you meet so many people from around the world, it was just of one of the main streets there. Walking back I noticed a few things that looked very familiar. Turns out the Gallery had/was hosting an exhibition. I was floored. This was half eleven at night as I was heading back to the hostel from the city centre from the 360º experience (but that's another story). I burst into the gallery and geeked out. Dang they look awesome. The people at the gallery were shocked when I said I knew what this was. The models let me tell you are just beautiful seen first hand. Big thanks to the Gallery for letting me in of the street and take all the photos I wanted.
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Yoooo guys!!!

Hahaaaa! Yeah, recently we had a small exhibition in a tiny gallery here in Zagreb, Croatia. Exhibited the models and matte paintings. Needles to say we had a couple of cold ones with Rubble as well, haha! Nice meeting you buddy and hope you'll visit again soon! ;)

In other news I finally found some time to edit the next Production Diary called - MAGIC OF MINIATURES! :lol StevenBills Sorry, I didn't have time to go into compositing this time, but I'll definitely do it sometime in the future. This is more a coverage of the past two months and the filming part.

So here it is and I hope you'll enjoy it!


Cheerio!
 
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Awesome. So cool to get to see things models, props and paintings up close and personal too :D :cheers

In my best Arni impression… "I'll be back" :lol
 
Love it! You guys are ILM-Croatia, circa 1979!

And now worries about not showing how any of the compositing is done. Maybe you can do a Post-Production diary next and talk about it? ;)

SB
 
It sounds like the matte paintings required a lot of time and effort but, boy, do they look great. That rear projection shot is a beauty.

I also wanted to say thanks for all the extra effort you guys put into making these video diaries. They're as entertaining as they are informative! It's been a lot of fun to watch this all come together.
 

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