Now the rough edit of Casimir Effect is past the midpoint we’re looking further into the future, everything from music, to the special effects. We have a bunch more meetings before we really get dug in, but we have established our post production and marketing budget goals. We are looking to raise £12,000 to cover post production and marketing. However we have a bit more time to raise these funds. This new goal has been split into two, the first £6,000 needs to be raised by the 1st October 2010 and will be mostly used for post production, the last £6,000 by 1st February 2011 which will be used for the preparation for film festivals.
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Third Budget Goal
£743 GBP / £6,000 GBP
1st November 2010
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Forth Budget Goal
£743 GBP / £12,000 GBP
1st February 2011
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Like reaching our other goals we will be auctioning off a number of items including more film props, costumes and set dressing, and all those donation that have gotten us this far. We are also putting together a selection of limited edition signed prints that will be put up for auction over the coming months. As always we will be adding more items to our store, including signed versions of our regular prints. I have a bag with some more Torchwood goodies to be signed, and a few of the audio books Gareth did.
We’re also thinking of making some costumes for cosplay if there is interest, CJS ID badges custom made with your picture and name on them. As always we’re open for new ideas and suggestions as to what you would like us to do and we will look into getting them.
Sound and Music
As mentioned before Blue Gillespie’s tracks Paradox and Time Knot are for the film. Once we have the rough edit we will be looking at getting the songs as stems (each instrument in its own track) so we can remix and rework the songs for the sound track. However before that we have ADR (Additional Dialogue Replacement) to get done, once we have the ADR sorted we can start looking at getting the first full trailer out. But before then we hope to get a second teaser out.
Once we have the ADR sorted, our sound guys Espen and Ewoud will be spending the summer collecting sound effect and building banks of sounds. To create everything that is important to the world of the film, everything from a sliding cup to the hums and crackles of the time machine. When they are off doing this we will be working on the music and reworking the songs we have to create all the character themes and incidental music, that will set the mood and tone for each sequence.
Special Effects
This is the hardest part of post production and will require a large team working many hours to get everything that is needed. Once we have a rough edit we will be going through each scene deciding what effects are needed and what we would like to do but hadn’t thought of. Then we need to prioritise them so we can create our workflow for the coming months. Also it will tell us which scenes we need to re-edit first and allow us to structure our path to the final edit.
Everything from Rotoscoping (cutting out actors from the background, and replacing markers), to rendering new elements for the time machine and the future. Everything takes time and we need to start the complex things now and leave the easy things till near the end. Of course these special effects are also where most of our post production budget will go.
Trailer
As mentioned above we will be working on a new teaser once we have a rough edit, this will give you a taster for what we have coming. Than after that and we have some of the sounds in and music ready we will do our first full trailer and look to doing a longer trailer later in the year with some of the completed effects.
Sex Wales and Anarchy 3
And finally we will be at Sex Wales and Anarchy 3 this year, hopefully we will have a few scenes close to completion for people to see. However we are also running the film side of SWA, called SWA Film, we’re turning this into a mini film festival, with a prize fund at the end of it. The details will be on the SWA3 site in the next few days and hopefully many of the filmmakers that are following us will submit something. We are still looking for our judges at the moment but we’re hoping we can get some interesting names to help out.
Anyway it proves to be an interesting day with lots of fun and creativity and some good local bands to boot.
I have spent most of the morning looking in to video codec’s and encoding, though I would love to film edit and work in 4:4:4 samples, I feel that 4:2:2 might be the limits of my editing system. Though I am getting a 6 terabyte raid array for doing this film on so dependant of the data throughput I might be able to push 4:4:4. I have also been looking at colour depth; 8-bit is good but for that highly polished look 10-bit is the only way to go. Though this means more bandwidth considerations, if I can work in 10-bit I’ll do it. Well I know I can work in 32-bit colour on my editing system, but the final output I’ll be looking at 10-bit 4:4:4 1920×1080 progressive. At the moment I’m testing a series of codec’s for storage of the original footage and CG work, though I may just request the CG as still images then it makes it easier for everyone.
At the moment my PC is rendering out a number of HD samples to test codec’s here are some results:
Black Magic: 10-bit colour depth 4:4:4 samples, no compression.
Huff YUV: 8-bit colour depth 4:4:4 samples, lossless compression.
AVI uncompressed: 8-bit colour depth, 4:2:2 samples, no compression.
Quicktime uncompressed: 10-bit colour depth, 4:2:2 samples, no compression.
On the face of it Black Magic wins, however in tests it eats hard drive bandwidth, so unless the 6tb array can keep up then it’s probably only going to be a final transport codec. Huff YUV I have used before but only for SD video, and it halved the file size, which is great when you cost limited. However in preliminary tests Huff YUV struggled to work properly, however if I can get it to work, it might do for storage of original files and CG layers, then in rendering output to Black Magic, to maximise the colour depth when they layers are flattened. AVI uncompressed is okay, but by far the worst, so unless I’m really stuck for a stable fast codec I’m not going to consider it. The Quicktime codec is interesting, and this might be an option depending on the camera we use and its output, 4:2:2 is acceptable if the original footage is in the same sample ratios. All if this is dependant of the max throughput of the raid array, but first choice is Black Magic, second Huff YUV and finally Quicktime uncompressed. Redcode is probably out of the question as we need to get an uncompressed output from the camera, and the Red One can’t do that yet. Though the Scarlet 2k might be an option.
In other news we have gotten a lot of feedback on the screen story and have implemented as much as makes sense. The first part of act 2 has had a major sub plot added and the slow scenes removed. Act one is pretty much sorted, Act two has more action and reflects better the hopelessness of the characters situation, and brings in the consequences of a change in a Significant Event in time. One more read through then it’s on to working out the characterisation getting the dialogue tight and on track. Hopefully by Monday the story will be off to our editor, and when we get it back it’s over to Ian Watson (Screen story: A.I. Artificial Intelligence).
One last thing, this is a bit of a gripe at women on film and TV especially in Sci-Fi and action roles. Most women are written as men with boobs they act like men talk like men and react like men. There is no subtlety to them or their actions. Alice our main character is written as a woman and developed by a woman. She is a strong female role-model, but not by being a man with boobs, by being a woman and succeeding in her actions in a positive manner.
Things are moving forward at a good pace, there is a lot of juggling at the moment and plenty of opportunities. We may be using a 4D Camera system, 3D Monitors and other such cool stuff to make this film come true. We have some interest from Gareth David-Lloyd (Torchwood), to play the male lead in the film, were still chasing a female lead.
I spent yesterday speaking to one of our Science advisors; mostly it was to make sure the technology we show in the film is plausible, even if there are some narrative freedoms being applied. We know what were putting in isn’t going into the realms of impossible.
Today has been mostly looking up rendering engines, at the moment for the free engines LuxRender is the best we have, it has the best rendering of light and that to me is one of the most important parts of doing any CGI is the accuracy of light. I’m also tasked to write a love letter to the Renderman Crew at Pixar, to try and blag the use of their render engine for the film as our budget is currently £0. I have also started to compile our crew list, while Lydia is writing a prose short story that we will use to develop the script from.
