Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Pandora Machine Doings

We've locked act 1 of Earthkiller. And I mixed a "first mix" of it too. One decision which I haven't made yet is how much music should be happening through the movie. For this first pass I was (relatively) sparse with adding music cues. We'll see if that's how we continue to do things as we get some distance, listen to it again, and get notes.
I realize that I should be just finishing Earthkiller. But I spent an hour today making this shot. This shot was one of those things just "tugging" at me that I needed to make.
We had a number of last-minute hiccups on our last day of exterior shooting. Including the fact that on this "Abbey Singer" shot (meaning "the second-to-last shot") the camera kept having write failures.
Incidentally, we've never identified what causes a write failure on the GH1. Note that only since the camera got "hacked" has it had any trouble. And note that it doesn't matter what the temperature is (it was relatively cool when we were outside this day) or if we pop the battery or the SD card. Nobody's got any idea.
Anyway, we also were missing a set piece on this day. So we shot the scene with the big whirleydoomer robot contraption in front of the cast. Keeping the visual effect in front of the live action makes it much easier in post-production because you don't have to rotoscope or "cut out" the people in front of the robot. Robot goes on top. That should be a rule somewhere. Robot goes on top.
Anyway, it may turn out that the shot looks better this way than the way I first thought of it.
Virginia Logan, Juanita Arias, and Joe Chapman in Android Insurrection.
That all being said I did replace the sky behind them. That was made easier to do because the shot was locked down.
I figure that the editor is going to want this complete shot rather than to try to edit without seeing the effect, so we took this wide shot and made a big master composite which will take... 3 hours and 40 minutes to complete.
That sounds like an overnight job to me so I'm going home.

5 comments:

Kangas said...

You had a full size robot thingamajig to put in front of them? Say what? Perspective trick?

Andrew Bellware said...

No no -- we were going to have this big whirleydoomer EJECT a small thing which could hide an android and a baby. It's the creche we didn't have.

DAVID FREY said...

I imagined something completely different when I was raining down pain with my BFG. I was reading something recently about the GH1 hack. Apparently it has been updated to work on the newer, previously unhackable firmwared camera bodies. You can still find those GH1 bodies new for about $400 get em while they last.
I like the replacement sky, but I think it needs to stand out more from the quarry background. Just my two cents

Andrew Bellware said...

David -- I thought I'd told everyone they were shooting at a whirleydoomer. Oops. My bad. Hope that didn't affect your performance. ;-)
Updating the GH1 hack is awesome. I'll look around for that.
When I made the sky "stand out" it did just that, and looked more like a composite. So I backed it off to have about the same color palette as the rest of the shot.

Chance Shirley said...

That's an awesome still. Can't wait to see the whole scene!