Production update – April 19

by ton - 2012/04/19 16 Comments Filming, Production

Man o man, so much coolness is happening and I can’t talk about it in detail yet :) Here’s some stuff:

We now have young Thom, old Thom, Celia and Barley via Kemna Casting. Each of these actors is *awesome*. I rather not reveal names before we have the paperwork done though!
There are two online audition submissions we’d like to invite for the film. They get a mail today. The rest hereby gets my honest thanks and *respect* for doing it!
New filming crew members as confirmed sofar: Assistant director, Focus Puller, Gaffer and Best Boy (light), Grips (cranes). Sound and Make-up/hair is in process. Full bios, pictures, names, etc will be posted here later.
After careful deliberations & testing & discussions, we decided to film the bridge scene on location after all (not in studio). Is going to be daytime now, not evening (which was terrible complex for lighting and which makes city of Amsterdam nervous because we do this in middle of red light district).
Flying camera shot around church will be CG. We have permission to climb in tower next week to photograph the view from tower (to make a nice 3d projection map!).
Last minute news; we *might* still get the former energy museum location to film some scenes. We know more tuesday!
Pablo Vazquez is coming over today again! He’s going to work here on a 2nd edition of famous training dvd Venom’s Lab. I’m sure he’ll lend us some hands the next months too :)
Tonight: all of the team going to the Dutch premiere of Iron Sky!

Picture: I found a great store in Amsterdam where they sell or lend the craziest things. Might come in handy for the props department!

Weekly – April 13

by ton - 2012/04/14 48 Comments Artwork, Production

This week was spent on a lot of modeling and testing efficient ways to recreate photo-realistic parts of Amsterdam. How much to do with photo/footage projection? How much is real modeling here? A lot depends on the final shots of course, but it’s crucial to master the art of recreating realism in Blender asap, before actual filming. The tests I’ve copied above are just first trials, it’s research in progress. As soon as good results or conclusions can be shown it’ll be here on the blog within a day. :)

We’re also very happy to have the help from production designer Romke Faber for the sets! Ian produced an extensive briefing. Together we should visit the studio asap to inspect the possibilities there.

For next week the main question to answer is “Are we going to film the bridge breakup scene in Amsterdam on location, or in a studio with greenscreen?”. Lots of factors to weight here, including financial ones!

Oh: anyone knows where to get the best quality chrome balls to photograph reflection maps?

-Ton-

Netherlands Film Fund and Cinegrid support Mango!

by ton - 2012/04/13 36 Comments Production

This week we received two times great news!

1) The Amsterdam Cinegrid consortium – researching 4k media distribution and creation – grants us support of 20k euro. That’s to encourage us to at least use a 4k pipeline for filming, storage and conversion, tracking and keying in our studio. This makes it possible we deliver (parts of) the film in 4k, but this depends on factors we will only know in a few months.

2) The Netherlands Film Fund today confirmed we get a wonderful grant of 30k to support the filming process, and another 30k for the animation/CG side of our project.

With both subsidies, our current sponsors, and the ongoing DVD sales (yes, we still need you!), it means our project now is financially being covered in a decent way; allowing us to hire a good film crew, good hardware, great artists, and of course development time!

-Ton-

Online casting for Mango

by ton - 2012/04/11 73 Comments Filming

We are working with Kemna Casting for finding us the right people for roles, they’re awesome and for sure they can get us the right people. For the five older roles we will do a casting based on their portfolios, for the two young characters – Thom and Celia – they’ll organize a casting this week for us.

Chances are very high they’ll find us the awesome actors, but we shouldn’t rule out the chance something magic happens online as well. So, here’s your chance if you want to become a movie star! Rules to participate:

0) You have to be available in Amsterdam Studios on one day, either 7-8-9-10 or 11 May.
1) Pick a character from below’s list
2) Record yourself acting out at least the lines of text, upload it to YouTube/Vimeo as Creative Commons
3) Paste here the link to the video
4) We pay in eternal fame; lots of fun and a great movie credit.

Continue

Weekly – April 6

by ton - 2012/04/07 11 Comments Artwork

Here’s a selection of images I copied from the weekly presentation. As usual a lot more went on, but presenting it all online shouldn’t take us away from working. We do our best! :) Right now everyone’s enjoying an extra long easter weekend! Back in 2 days, have fun too! :)

Camera testing: Sony F65

by ton - 2012/04/02 28 Comments Filming, Production

Tomorrow we’re going to do tests with cameras from Camalot in Amsterdam. I’m very happy that we can also test (and most likely use) the new Sony F65 camera, which made everyone in the industry drool! More news & original frame samples will be posted here tomorrow.

-Ton-

Dick Maas going Blender!

by ton - 2012/04/02 13 Comments Production

Rob Tuytel invited the famous Dutch film maker Dick Maas to check on our work. He immediately accepted! This morning he showed up and spent an hour with us. He saw the full animatic and storyboards (“You should add more wide shots” – duly noted) and had a short demo from the artists (“Is all of that Blender? Amazing!”). I then spent some time with him on production stuff in general, how to organize & finance features efficiently here. I noticed he’d be very interested to direct a 3d animation film once!

He left with a huge pile of Blender training DVDs, we’ll be hearing more of him I bet :)

Weekly – March 30

by ton - 2012/04/01 10 Comments Artwork, Production

After three weeks we already have a first version of animatic! Things went fast the first 3 weeks, with 5 weeks of time left still to tweak & refine (before filming starts). We also had the first designs in for the costumes! Casting info is still unknown, have to hunt the Casting Agent this monday. As weekly visitor we had composer Joram Letwory.

Production update: Composer Joram Letwory

by ton - 2012/03/29 11 Comments Production

March is nearly over, the filming dates (around May 10) are getting closer every day! So much todo :)

Here’s some news tidbits from the production department:

Composer & sound designer: Joram Letwory
I’m already following Joram’s work a couple of years – yes he’s the brother of Blender developer Nathan “Jesterking” Letwory – and I’ve always been impressed with this work. More over, he’s not only a great composer and sound designer but even doing film and hiphop & dance clips! I’m very happy he accepted to help us with music and sound! It’ll be a tough job to work in the shadow of the great Jan Morgenstern, but it’s time to give a new talent a chance to get a public portfolio with a film soundtrack!
Ian and me had a meeting with production designer Romke Faber to go over a lot of practical filming details. He already did film design for several blockbusters here in the Netherlands. Needless to say – good quality films have production designers involved from the very beginning! For Mango, we have a lot of great artists on board already though, under Ian Hubert’s creative direction. For the filming itself however we can really use Romke’s help here. We’ll only have a week to film and we better make our sets & props work out perfect!
Rob Tuytel arranged us a surprise visitor next week: monday the famous director Dick Maas will be coming over for a studio visit! Dick is the renowned (and and first!) action & horror director we have in the Netherlands. His films usually give a nice level of controversy – with as many haters as lovers. His somewhat cheesy Dutch style is definitely well aligned with Ian’s American cheddar approach! It’ll be a fun visit ;)
Joris Kerbosch (DP) has already found us his crucial buddies for on the set; a Key Grip, a Focus Puller and a Gaffer! I need to settle deals with them first, then we’ll talk more about it.
Sebastian – finally done with dvd duties – now is refining our breakdown spreadsheet into fine detail for sets, props, etc. He’ll be doing preparations & tests for us as some kinda mix of assistant director & production designer. That’s what vfx supervisors do!

(Image: Joram)

-Ton-

Weekly – March 23

by ton - 2012/03/24 29 Comments Artwork, Production

This is only the 2nd weekly presentation of the team, and we’re already getting glimpses of how the film will look like! Ian and Jeremy have been doing crazy stuff on animatics already! The whole team’s been working great last week; concepts, training dvd work, animation tests, modeling, and even work on an auto-run Blender demoloop for HP (Francesco will post this soon).

As usual I’ll just grab from the weekly presentation folder. The artists themselves will update with more elabortated posts here.