Are we having them? Eh, nothing unexpected! But somebody asked if we could do a blog post about things that can become complicated on the actual filming front (we do tend to be a bit Blender-cenctric). The differences between making a film and making an animation. These are some of the things we’ve been having to think about over the past (and rest of this) week.
Actor line-up: Derek de Lint, Sergio Hasselbaink, and more!
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
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
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
Weekly – April 27
Just one week left before we’re going to film! This will be on May 7 8 9 in Amsterdam Studios, and on May 10 at a bridge in Amsterdam. If you want to see us in action; then check on the set on thursday – visitors in the studio will be too disruptive and keep us from working.
Above you can see a floorplan of the studio (with 2 limbos), we will add a temp greenscreen in the white limbo for sets as well, so we can film on 1 set while the other is being prepared by the crew.
On location (exact spot will be announced asap) we’ll have a huge crane for the opening shot and some of the dialog break-up scenes.
All will be filmed with Sony F65 – brilliant 4k footage – which generates 250 MB per second. Go figure! Better not to do 48 fps then? ;) Although for slomo shots we will be using it, obviously.
Below video is Jeremy’s crazy awesome robot arm rig.
Blender 2.63 Splashscreen
For the upcoming Blender release 2.63 the Mango team worked hard to produce a splashscreen. We tested various concepts, as well as different techniques. It was a good exercise to take the tests to the next level and produce a “final-ish” image, that would also look good in the movie.
Both scenes still heavily rely on Blender Internal, in particular for the volumetric effects. The main renders come right out of Cycles, but halos and smoke could only be achieved by linking the scene to Blender internal, in a new scene, with it’s own setup of render layers and passes. As you can imagine that makes everything a bit complicated, since you work with different scenes, juggling around layers, passes and baked smoke files. The interactive preview capabilities of Cycles have been of great help and the speed and quality of the engine is improving almost on a daily basis! We are very excited to work with such great tools.
Grab the latest release of Blender here: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
Here are the node setups for both scenes:
More Location Scouting
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…
Anyone Good at making Maps/Blueprints?
EDIT: Got what we needed! THANKS! If anyone else has been working on stuff, feel free to still send it in! I’m sure we’ll still have a great use for it. We’re going to have diagrams/blueprints everywhere. But don’t start if you haven’t already.
This entire film takes place in one location, presenting us with a lot of interesting opportunities. We already have a blend file representing the entire place, meaning that I can just sit back and fly around the scene to identify possible shot angles and stuff like that- perspectives that would never occur to us thinking about the scene just our heads. Since the entire set up is actually all planned out in physical space, I’d love to take as much advantage of that as possible.
