Future grunge

...now with added static, scratches and scan-lines.

I guess the technology of 2038 is a bit crap...

You know what they say; you can put a woman on Mars, but you can't make an iphone work in space...

Details, details, details....

Here's a couple of examples of the animation that's being built for the computer displays that appear in the film...

We're going with monochromatic displays - on the assumption that power is at a premium within the astronaut's spacesuit.

Also note our usage of IAL - the International Auxiliary Language of 2038. This is a language being used by the European Union in our future, and is an actual working language, created by David Parke.

Canyons test

Here's a quick and dirty (low res that is) look down into the canyons of Mars, with clouds whizzing past, as created in Vue 7.

The clouds are going way too fast, and full blown rendering of the shot is looking like it will take 10 days, so I'm not sold on it yet... But I'm getting there...

Canyons of Mars from Damon Keen on Vimeo.

This shot will ultimately be composited with a cliff-edge and our astronaut's feet, as we see a POV of her peering over the edge... Original storyboard shot below:

The worm has turned...

Mostly moving between sky renders in Vue to PhotoShop and back at the moment...

While some of the work is about creating nice imagery of Mars, a lot of it is actually just fixing consistency problems... For example, adding clouds to the sky in one shot because it's part of sequence that was shot earlier - when it was cloudy.

Mars is actually not particularly cloudy, but I've taken a bit of artistic liberty and decided to stick with cloudy skies. This is partly because it's easier to leave the clouds in the footage already shot (and add clouds to blue-sky shots), than take them out, and also because it looks great.

It's kind of embarrassing in a way, because it's the sort of thing that the geek in me gets irritated about in other people's sci fi movies!

The view inside Shake...

Behind the scenes of a shot Zane is working on inside Shake...

Rendering...

So... 50 hours rendering 40 seconds of Martian sky early this week (for the scene below), followed my 35 hours for 7 seconds of fast moving Martian clouds Weds/Thurs. My poor old computer is crawling.

I'll say one thing though, Vue does a beautiful job of skies; it's clouds are beautiful - it's certainly a godsend for us.

Every shot has now been assigned a job bag and handed over to Sunset for coordination.

Also a big welcome to Harry from Melbourne who is experimenting creating dust for a number of shots. Can't wait to see his results!

We're alive!

...But what have we been doing?

Well, Dylan is working on sound and music (exciting!), and I've been putting every shot into a separate job bag (Boring!), so we can systemize the visual effects work. What this all means of course is that the edit is locked down - YAAAY! - and the final film is 18 minutes long.

So what's the plan, stan?

Well, once I've got every shot in its own job bag (this week) it'll go to Zane at Sunset Studios to be given a first grade - essentially to give the whole movie a consistent look.

Then we hand out the shots to various people to work on. This includes compositing and a lot of keying. Adam will be working on the animations for the wrist display computer. Which, in case you're wondering, currently looks like this:

LAME! Once Adam finishes of course it will look AWESOME. Can't wait.

Meanwhile, I've been rendering out cloud sequences in Vue and creating backgrounds for the green screen shots... Slow, but enjoyable work, at least it is if you're a geek like me.

In short, there's plenty happening. And if anyone out there knows anyone who could create some realistic CG dust for us, get in touch! We'd love to hook up.

Leaky suit...

A POV shot from Herne Bay yesterday, showing our astronaut's precious air venting from the leg of her spacesuit...

A star is born

Lance and I went cruising for birds yesterday ...literally! ...driving around Auckland looking for seagulls, slowing down everyone once and a while and yelling "there's one!"

It turns out that working with animals is a dumb idea. For all the fish and bread we threw at our "blue screen" tarpaulin for 2 hours, the bloody birds refused to go near it. Eventually a star was born (below) when one of the birds finally plucked up enough courage to give us the performance we needed.

We also collected a difficult special effects shot: a POV with freezing aerosol blasting out of our body double's space suit leg down at Sentinel beach in Herne Bay. It looked fantastic however, and our new body double, Frances Wilkie, was a legend. Thanks also to Treve, for giving up a golf day to stand around and throw bread at the gulls.

Looking down into Noctis Labyrinthus....

Just a quick render, looking straight down -about 5kms straight down that is- into the canyons of Mars. Starting to feel pretty good about the way they're looking!