Category Archives: Production

Actor line-up: Derek de Lint, Sergio Hasselbaink, and more!

by - 2012/05/01 52 Comments Filming, Production



It took a while to get everyone confirmed! Here’s the line-up:

  • Derek de Lint, “Old Thom”. One of the few Dutch actors with a lot of international film experience
  • Sergio Hasselbaink, “Barly”. He’s a new talent here, former dancer/skater, famous for his lead role in “Sonny Boy”.
  • Rogier Schippers, “Captain”. Rogier is very well known as theatre & TV series actor in the Netherlands.
  • Chris Haley, “Tech Head”. Chris is Pixel Pusher at JEHProductions. He was selected after a wonderful youtube audition!
  • Jody Bhe, “Djenghis”. She’s an experienced musical actress, currently doing Miss Saigon.
  • Vanja Rukavina, “Thom” and Denise Rebergen, “Celia” were casted via auditions at Kemna Casting. Excellent picks from our casting agent Houdijn Beekhuis!

Extra’s for scientists fighting with robots: Daan van ‘t Einde (Blenderhead audition), Keir Meirle (libmv dev), Campbell Barton (Blender dev). Hippie: Jeremy Davidson.

Prop Hunting

by - 2012/05/01 18 Comments Production

After having decided the locations to shoot on we now have to get our props ready for shooting next week.

We need guns, grenades, weird old tech stuff, buttons, cables and old crap. Well, everything you always need in a post-apocalyptic weird scifi story!
A good place for that is the famous freemarket in the Vondelpark, that takes place each year on Queensday. This year the Amsterdammers where really lucky to get the only day with beautiful weather, blue sky and warm sun for Queensday. So yesterday whole Amsterdam plus thousands of tourists was getting out, dressing orange, getting drunk and dancing on the street. And so where we! Well, not exactly, but at least we got out to go to the Vondelpark, where there is the traditional freemarket where kids and people sell their old stuff. Perfect place to get all kinds of old crap that we can use in the movie, for example old Super8 projectors, typewriters, grenade-belts, toy walkie-talkies etc.

Today Ian, Jeremy and Kjartan went to the toy store to buy nerf guns, that are now being disassembled and put together to form the badass hero rifle for our sniper Barley!

And if you happen to live around here and have a closet full of scifi stuff, grenades, rifles, or other interesting stuff, you can take a picture of it and post it here. We might need it! :)




Blended Box Mapping

by - 2012/04/29 23 Comments Production

Blended box mapping is a technique where you project images from 3 angles and blend them together based on the objects normals. Doing this in cycles was until recently only possible to do on static objects, but now we can use it on animated objects as well!

Download example file:  blended_box_map

This technique requires a very new build of blender after build revision 46076. That means newer then blender 2.63 stable. Or you can also use a recent tomato branch

Hope you guys find it useful

If you want to geek out and learn more about this technique then go here:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/blended_box_mapping/blended_box_mapping.htm

More Location Scouting

by - 2012/04/27 13 Comments Production

On the quest for the locations of the movie we visited 2 great places in Amsterdam: the old energy museum and the tower of the Oude Kerk. Unfortunately the energy museum was closed officially, and all the cool electricity machinery that we expected to find there has been moved to a different place: http://www.energetica.nl/
But the place was still great!  Would have been the perfect location to shoot many scenes of our movie. Unfortunately we didn’t get the permission to film there.





The most breathtaking view so far was the visit to the tower of the Oude Kerk. Beautiful overview of Amsterdam!

For one hour we also got the chance to get the whole church just for us, exclusively! We got home with hundreds of reference pictures…

Location visits with crew

by - 2012/04/23 14 Comments Filming, Production



Today we had a near-complete film crew meeting on location and studio with Merle Bos (Assistant Director), Joris Kerbosch (Director of Photography), Eugene Sprik (Gaffer – Light), Romke Faber (Production Design) and Victor Dekker (Sound recording). We will do another meeting with the Grip (crane, dolly) later. Of course Ian (Director) and Sebastian (Match Mover) were there too.

Biggest outcome of the discussion on the bridge was that this location would have a lot of practical issues to solve; we should carefully weight if that’s worth the efforts (and money!).

Tomorrow another exciting visit will be to the former energy museum. I really hope the location is usable for us.

Later more!

Weekly – April 20

by - 2012/04/21 23 Comments Artwork, Production



This weekly was even streamed live via Google Plus! We have already like 700 followers there. Will do that next time again!

Further; just enjoy the pictures! A full animatic (minus last minute) should have been online already too.

Powerlib addon for libraries management

by - 2012/04/20 10 Comments Development, Production

A very important aspect in daily production, is to keep assets organized and easily accessible. We needed some system to link complex environments into a scene and being able to toggle the visibility and complexity or their components.
With the vital contribution of Olivier Amrein (oenvoyage) we realized an addon called Powerlib, that allows toggling visibility and level of detail (high and low resolution) of subgroups contained in a linked group.

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Production update – April 19

by - 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!

Robot Hand Integration Test

by - 2012/04/18 43 Comments Development, Production

During these weeks before the filming and the actual work on the shots starts we are doing several tests to check out the production tools. One of them is obviously Cycles. In this particular test we wanted to see how far we can go with the integration of the robot hand in a shot.

Of course it is obvious that the hand is fake, after all it’s a robot hand, so we also put in objects that could in theory be actually standing on the table. We went for a mirror ball (because there was an actual mirror ball in the scene, so, easy to compare) and a plastic toy.

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