I've been working on the O'Neill's scene this past week, and haven't quite finished it yet. This is the single longest scene of the film, and also the best-covered; we filmed a lot of angles for this. That's both good and bad. Good in that there are a lot of performances to choose from. Bad in that continuity becomes a problem, because we had so much to film that there's no way we could keep track of every little hand gesture and head movement. That's okay though. As usual, I'm up to the task.
Those of you in Albuquerque probably know that O'Neill's isn't there anymore. It's a tragic case of a landlord wanting to boot a successful bar to start their own in its place. I don't even know what the new place is called, but I for one am going to avoid it on general principles. Don't want to encourage such backhanded perfidy.
We had a bit of a tough time getting the O'Neill's shoot done, in large part because of some miscommunicaiton between Rob O'Neill and myself. I thought we'd need at least two nights to get the shoot done, because as I said it is the longest scene. He agreed to let us shoot on two consecutive Monday nights. While we were there the first night, I foolishly told him I hoped to get it all done in that first night. Getting to a location and setting up was a pain in the ass, as you may well know, and I was trying to encourage the cast and crew in the hope that we might actually be able to do the whole thing.
Of course, we didn't, so I planned to go back the following Monday. Around the Wednesday between the first shoot and the second, I got a call from Rob (or maybe I called him, I don't remember now). He was pretty upset; apparently four customers had complained about us on Monday night. I asked what we should do differently the next Monday night. He was shocked. He thought we had finished in one night, and given the complaints didn't want us to come back. So I managed to negotiate a filming time on Saturday morning before they opened, from like 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.
So, like most of the scenes we filmed parts of on wildly different days, the final product turned out wildly differently. The main problem is the lighting; the first time we shot, it was night. When we came back, it was morning, and blue light was flooding in from the front windows. I think we also had less crew on the Saturday morning, and somehow or other the lighting ended up a lot diffrerent. Finally, but certainly not least, the white balance was set entirely differently.
So here's what I'm trying to get at: check out the color differences between the shot of Billy & Aaron and the shot of Leland:
As you can see, big difference. Thank the Lords of Kobol that we're doing everything digital. Part of the reason I didn't get this scene finished as far as editing goes is that I got sidetracked messing with color-correcting it. I finally got it to a point where the color correction was pretty decent:
Now, at first glance you may think the two don't match up. If you look at their faces, it's a pretty close match; the problem is our primitive lighting job. What we basically did (and I don't have any memory of why) is point a light directly at the side of Leland's face, apparently without even diffusing it. The result is an overly-bright wall and a clearly visible Leland-shadow:
Thankfully, high technology offers a solution. What we're going to do to fix this is create a static matte. What we do is export a frame from this part of the scene to Photoshop. In Photoshop, we edit the offending part of the scene - in this case the part of the wall that is too bright and that Leland's shadow is on. We can only edit the wall in places where there is no movement, because the matte is going to be a static image pasted on top of the video; if an actor's hand or face moves into the matted area, it will look cut off.
By creating a matte in Photoshop, we can fix a lot of image problems that there's just no other way to deal with. We may end up doing mattes in several scenes that are otherwise just hopeless. Here's what the shot looks like with the matte:
It's not totally perfect yet - if you look closely at the above image you can probably spot some of the matte image's edges. Fear not, in the final film the matte will be pretty seamlessly merged with the video. This screenshot is from a test of the matte process before I had finalized the color correction. The final matte we'll use will probably be a little bigger to more fully cover the wall, and will be much more carefully blended. You won't be able to tell it's there at all.
So technically, using digital mattes counts as a special effect. In a way, this means that we can brag about Land of Entrapment's digital special effects. Of course, the digital special effects in this movie, as in any movie I ever create, should blend in seamlessly with the live action. In my humble opinion, the best special effects are the ones that never make you think, "hey, that's a special effect!" Once upon a time, George Lucas knew this. Alas, the lure of 3D computer animation has corrupted him and so many others.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for computer generated effects. What I'm opposed to are the ones, like a lot of the stuff in the first two Star Wars prequels (among many other recent films) that are so obviously computer generated. Look, if you're going to make a computer-animated movie, then make it! For example, I just recently saw Appleseed at a recent Midnight Movie screening, and thought it was great. I wasn't entirely impressed with the lip movements available to cell-shaded animation, but that's a different gripe. The point is, in a movie that is straight-up an animated movie, you accept it when the 3D CG effects look animated. When it's supposed to be a live action movie, CG effects that look animated look seriously out of place.
I'd love to do a sci-fi movie someday. I could almost do it right now, except the version of Avid I have (XPress DV) doesn't support .avi alpha channel matte keys, which you need to do bluescreen effects. The thing is, I'd want the special effects to look really and truly real... none of this cartoony stuff.
Just to continue my special effects rant, because I think about this kinda stuff way too much, one of the biggest problems with CG effects is that they tempt directors to do things with their virtual cameras that are impossible with real cameras. That can be nice, especially because it lets them do effects with the computer that would be very expensive to do in actuality. It's really bad in that some directors (Lucas) go too crazy with the concept, and start having the camera swoop and zoom and fly around and through things in ways that physical cameras could never do.
The problem with that is that, whether you realize it or not, you have a subconcious awareness of the camera's physical orientation in relation to the other objects in the scene. The camera, in effect, is you - most of the time, in most movies and TV, the camera is oriented in ways that are comfortable and familiar to us. It's horizontal, near normal eye level, and pans, tilts, and strafes in ways that are instinctively familiar to us. Ideally, you should never think about the motion of the camera while watching a movie; it should just seem "natural." But when the camera starts out at a normal eye level and then suddely shoots 40 feet in the air, all the while keeping perfect focus on a variety of exotic spaceships and creatures, you are immediately jarred out of that normalcy, and you realize that what you're seeing is a special effect.
Ironically, it was Lucas who originally inspired me to understand this philosophy. In his original Star Wars films, he went out of his way as much as possible to create special effects that you accepted as real because they fit so well into what we are used to accepting in movies. For example, one of the biggest special effects innovations in Star Wars was the ability to "pan with spaceships." The blue screen effect had actualy existed before this; Stanley Kubrick used it (albeit without the aid of computers - ugh) on 2001: A Space Oddyssey. But in all movies prior to Star Wars, the camera never moved during space shots; the camera was always rigidly locked into place while a spaceship moved in and out of the frame. What ILM did was come up with a way to make it look like the camera was panning to watch a spaceship zoom by. It was actually quite simple - instead of locking the camera in place and moving the spaceship in front of a bluescreen, they locked the spaceship in place and moved the camera around it. When superimposed on a field of moving stars, this made it look like the spaceship was flying past the camera. Brilliant stuff.
Anyway, the reason it's important to my point is that this panning was both new and old. Panning has been common in movies since... well, since motion picture cameras were invented. It's also a very natural, familiar movement to us; we turn our heads all the time. So along comes a movie where the camera does something for the first time ever - pans to watch a spaceship zoom by - and we instantly accept it as realistic even as the geeky side of us says, "coooooooool!" Sadly, a lot of directors, including Lucas himself, have forgotten why that was a realistic shot. They get so giddy over having the power to place a virtual camera anywhere that they have forgotten that the audience has an inherent sense of 3D perception and will instantly realize the camera is doing something entirely unnatural.
I don't meant to indict all sci-fi directors. There are a few who feel as I do, that CG special effects should be handled by naturalistic camera angles. One of my favorites at the moment are the "handheld" spaceship effects created by ZOIC Studios for Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. In fact, some of the comments on this subject to be found in Ron Moore's blog are so similar to the arguments I've just laid out that I think he stole them from my brain.
Speaking of Firefly, have you seen the new trailer for Serenity, the Firefly movie? Basically Fox cancelled the TV show on Joss Wheedon but still retained the exclusive rights to it as a TV franchise. So rather than let them destroy his story, he said screw them and turned it into a feature film instead. It wouldn't surprise me if he went on to make a whole series of them. I'd happily gobble up each installment as it came out, but I'll be really disappointed if he doesn't get it back on TV somehow. I cried when that show got cancelled. Anyway if you haven't seen the trailer, check it out: http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/serenity/
And if you are truly hardcore, check out this 1280x544 Xvid version of the QT7-only high def trailer: Serenity Trailer Torrent
Well, that's about it for this update. Sorry it turned into a rant about special effects, it's just that it's a subject that's near and dear to my heart. See you back here next week, same bat time, same bat channel, etc.
