Screening

Today was our screening of Android Insurrection.
That might seem odd because the movie has already been released in some territories (although not North America yet). But today was the first day we could actually hold the screening for cast and crew and family.
We had it at the Gibson, in Williamsburg. It's always interesting to watch a screening. Usually at a screening I've had a few drinks — but I also have the wherewithal to watch the movie with a more disinterested eye than all the times I've watched the movie before. I have no idea why that is.

Although the screening is a bit washed-out at the Gibson, because we can't exactly blackout the whole room, it seemed fairly clear to me that this was the best movie we've made so far. This makes me happy to think. I mean I'm glad our movies are getting better and that, it seems, they are.
Plus it amuses me how high the headcount is at the end of our pictures. If it's not 100% then we're doing something wrong! ;-)

Baring Arms

So this is funny.

I saw this book cover for Alien Lockdown by Vijaya Schartz. The arm and the gun looked very familiar.

Oh yeah! Millennium Crisis.

The joke here is that Claire's arms are actually much more cut than the model used for the arm and torso.

No THIS is the party video

Here is the Android Insurrection party video (Henry Steady approved version).


Android Insurrection Party Video from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.
Click through for the high-def pure-love embiggenizer.

Android Insurrection Party Video

Our brilliant Mr. Steady edited a "party video" for Android Insurrection. He'd realized he hadn't made one for the party for Android Insurrection back in the day.

Android Insurrection party video from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo. Click through to embiggen.

Bigger but gamma

My dad wanted a bigger and clearer picture of the Venom approaching the Prometheus. One thing about these kinds of pictures on computers is that the gamma is a bit sunk so they come out a bit on the dark side. But this is basically the look.

Partay

We had our wrap party for The Prometheus Trap last night. Sangria. I drank some.
Also, Maduka Steady's wrap party video for Prometheus Trap! (Click through to embiggen the video.)


Prometheus Trap wrap party from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.

Testin' ovah here!

The Venom docks with the Prometheus.

Juanita Gillette

Our own Juanita Arias in a commercial for Gillette!

Docking

The Venom docks with the Prometheus. I don't know if there's too much glare in this or not. We'll probably just track a lens flare on top and party with it.

We have the model finals and we're busy animating and rendering. This weekend I'm planning on shooting some footage of flashlights through haze at the shop to add on top.
I think we're going to want a POV of the Venom's airlock looking at the Prometheus airlock. I might animate some lights or something on the Prometheus to flicker as the Venom gets closer.
My critical distance is completely gone. I can't tell what's photoreal and what isn't. I have no idea what I'm seeing. One thing that seems to be true though is that the outside of the ship(s) look like the inside.

What are we doing?

I was discussing my business plan with my dad the other day and I said "I'm just going to do what my father does and no matter how impossible things might seem at any given time I'll just keep pounding away at it and hope things work out."
Which he found amusing.
So what are we doing right now?
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We're in post-production on Prometheus Trap.
We're doing a bit of audio re-do post on Solar Vengeance (remember that movie? Never got North American distribution. We're trying to rectify that.)
We're in a sloppy pre-production on Dragon Girl. I hate being in pre-pro when we haven't locked a script. But we are. And we've done it before. We'll probably do it again. I'm sure we'll do it again.
We're in long pre-production on another alien-planet picture. We sorta have a script.

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Right now I am a "director" on 11 titles on IMDB. I'm a sound guy on 17 titles. That means that my sound department titles come up before my directing titles and I don't want that. I want my directing titles first. Just because. So that's my personal goal. Get 18 directing credits.
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A while back I got into a competition with Ato Essandoh with who had more IMDB credits. At the time I won handily with the sheer number of credits, but he'd been on some very high-profile movies so he won with the "star ranking". Now he wins both with credits and box-office gross. So I gotta do something about that. Ha!

Love the One You're With

After having seen Prometheus I now have some spoiler-free advice for filmmaking.

1. No movie should start more than three times.
2. Do not make references to Stephen Stills or Stephen Stills' squeezebox ever.
3. If you find that any of your terrifying alien creatures look like Jar-Jar Binks, rethink your design.
4. When you have characters standing open-jawed and looking at some visual effects in wonder, you've lost the dramatic tension in the scene.
5. Do not keep replaying part of the Star Trek theme over and over. Please. For the love of all that's holy.

Langue Espanol

Did we even sell a Spanish Language version of this movie? I... I don't remember. This image was found here.

Oh So Close

Here is Ben Dansie's modification of the Dolf Veenvliet's Venom. 

The Venom, for Pandora Machine's Prometheus Trap.

What are We Doing?

We're noticing that there are a lot of download sites with Android Insurrection on them.
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Here's a nice-looking shuttle on Turbosquid. There are free textured and untextured versions on Blendswap.
I do not understand Blender's "Cycles" renderer. But one cool think about it is that you can use a mirror-ball as your environment. So that means that ostensibly you just shoot a silver Christmas ball on your set and then import the image into Blender and Blender uses that image as your environment. Which is kind of cool.
Blender 2.6 has motion tracking. We can't do motion tracking until we get back to using a camera which has no rolling shutter though. But it's cool that it exists.
And there's camera stabilization.
Cogfilms has a bunch of Blender tutorials.

The still plate (which will be live action in the actual movie) for the Prometheus cockpit.

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$50/month is $600 a year for the Adobe CS suite. I do wish it were more like $30/month. I don't pretend that prices are a rational thing, so I just feel like it should be $30/month.
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I want a bit of particulate matter in space. Just a bit of foggy gunk swimming around. So that searchlights have some volume to them. So say I. So way we all. Time to look up volumetric lighting in Blender.

Prometheus Trap Teaser Trailer

Here's the teaser trailer for The Prometheus Trap. Click through to embiggen.

Prometheus Trap Teaser from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.

Here's a Prometheus

We're fighting with the renderer in Blender to get the Prometheus (and the smaller Venom) to work. I stripped out all the nodes and made a new render layer. So we're getting closer.

Yeah yeah yeah. The alpha channel is white. So sue me.

So what happens?

First of all, did I tell you about this? We're a "Staff Pick" on Blendswap -- this is Ian Hubert's model of the Earthkiller.

I think that's very cool.

Also, you may want to know what has happened each time I challenged "Content Lizenz Agentur" on their claims on our videos. This:

Yeah. They're all "Oops, my bad."
I'll tell ya, it's getting very irritating. So far we haven't gotten any of that kind of bull noise on Vimeo so we may just stick with uploading clips to Vimeo and ignore YouTube altogether.