Production update & HP sponsor!

by - 2012/03/22 15 Comments Artwork, Production

Everyone’s busy, no blog posts is always good news (unfortunately for you guys out there!). The team spirit is awesome amazing, very inspiring, it tops any project before! It’s probably a bit thanks to the kick-off workshop, but also because we have an amazing talented and well fitting team together.

Here’s production updates from my side:

  • Two new workstations in!
    Hewlett-Packard kindly provided two HP Z210 Workstations and two 24-inch Performance Displays. These powerful systems (xeon processors) are perfect for content development!
  • Casting agent: Kemna Casting.
    I’ve already had a couple of phone meetings with them, they’re going to help us with finding the right person for the roles. Good actors are crucial… they can make an audience absorb with a single eyebrow move…
  • Tomorrow Ian works 2 hours with Joris on DoP stuff
  • Next week we meet with www.overexposure.nl about getting their helicam (!) for filming the Oude Kerk and canal+bridge.
  • Next week we also meet with a production designer to check on cooperation or an advisory role.
  • City of Amsterdam should tell us now any day if we get permit for filming there!
  • Filming is most likely now: May 7-8-9 in studio, May 10-11 on location. We might need some hands, extras, or just people to make sandwiches! Mark it in the agenda :) A call for help will be posted later.
  • Breakdown of film: we have four main sets, with about 40 scenes, 120 shots. Expected length is 6 minutes. Probably will become 7 or so ;)

Image in this post: stolen from the render farm. Ian is doing already crazy cool animatics! Will get posted here later, promised :)

  1. Aaron says:

    All awesome news! :D

    Great to hear everyone’s rocking on and working with high spirits! What happens if you don’t get the permit to film, or have you already had persmission and just awaiting official paper work?

    A film of this calibre should be at least 8 minutes. ;)

  2. Forseti says:

    Please share the “making of” videos from filming with helicam. It’ll be great.

  3. Big Fan says:

    Very good! I think Ton likes to play with all the latest movie hardware.
    I can see him moving up to 12 mins if he can get away with it.
    Extra 6 mins of helicam shots and cameo appearances….

  4. J. says:

    Casting suggestion: Pierre Bokma as one of the scientists! And he’s also very experienced in acting in German, so I guess English shouldn’t be too hard for him.

  5. Stuart says:

    Great clock render! All sounds good although I’m a little concerned about the helicam – the demo videos suffer pretty severely from rolling shutter wobbles. Will Sergey need to write a remove-rolling-shutter algorithm? :)

    http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/121489/main.pdf

  6. Rafster says:

    Love these updates!

    Have you shown the script to a Unit Production Manager (UPM)? They catch the surprises.

    I once took a 1 day class with a UPM, and I showed her a short script that I wrote. One of the scenes said: Boy tackles the girl as she is running.

    The UPM read this and immediately said that I would need a stunt coordinator for that shot. My reaction was: “What? How is tackling a stunt? I don’t have a budget for stunts!”

    She recommended that I rewrite that part.

    The lesson was that even a simple fall by an actor is considered a stunt, and I would not have known that.

  7. PhysicsGuy says:

    Is the hp sponsorship in any way correlated to Sintel’s cameo in the hp commercial posted on blendernation a while back *grin*

  8. alexander says:

    please, invite the whole new kids crew for the cast; that would be do hilarious to see gerrie as scientist :D

  9. J. says:

    Must be doable, since the DoP, Joris Kerbosch, knows those guys very well!
    Great idea, btw!

  10. MrNoodle says:

    Is Jan Morgenstern going to be the composer for this film too ?

    • Jeroen Mank says:

      That’s what I’ve been wondering about as well. So far his name hasn’t been mentioned and he himself doesn’t make any reference to this project on his website either.
      I do hope that he’ll get involved.

  11. M1C4HTRON13 says:

    That RC heli-cam looks sooo epic

  12. Haha, I have bought myself just that Workstation half a year ago, it´s epic, you gonna have a lot of fun with them, I promise! Its really fast (for my standards at least)!