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!

Fly birdy, fly!

Rendered the computer generated seagull (see previous post) in Vue 7 and have dropped it into some of our green screen footage from Sunset Studios.

It's pretty unpolished, but looks like it may be fine for some of the more distant birdy shots - especially once we throw in a bit of dust and grade the sucka. Nice!

Seagull test from Damon Keen on Vimeo.

First flight for this puppy...

Experimenting with 3D seagulls in Vue... Looks like they might work for some of the long shots of seagulls flying in the distance. I'll post some tests up shortly.

Happy New Year, crew!

Well the holidays are drawing to a close, so I better get on with it!

The plan for 2010 is:

1. Film seagull shots
2. Complete rough edit and test on audience
3. Complete final edit
4. Sound and music
5. Special effects work - CG, grading and animation
6. Last Flight Complete!

And finally, it'll be time for our premier, marketing and festivals.

Wow...

Some beautiful work by Jeremy Geddes I stumbled across. it reminded me of Last Flight.

Snip snip!

Last weekend we wrapped up filming at Sunset Studios. This week I'm editing up a storm. The footage is looking fantastic, though I have to admit I can't want to see it graded and finished either. This project has taken a lot longer than I imagined.

I expect we'll slow down over Christmas and then launch into the special effects shots with a vengeance in the new year, so stay posted!

IT'S A WRAP!

We've finished filming folks. It is done. I'm very happy.

Some more shots from Port Waikato...

Pics by Lance.