September 22, 2006

Picture what?

Picture lock.

This is the point where we call the picture editing process to a close. No more fiddling, tinkering or finessing. Nail your colours fairly and squarely to the mast because this is the point of no return. To an extent. And the time is fast approaching - there's about two hours left.

So I have called round the cutting room to get a sense of what's happening and how all the final decisions come together.

Over DM's shoulder as they edit

The atmosphere is palpable. I was greeted with a startled look from David whose eye flicked away from the screen to see who was interrupting at this crucial point in proceedings. The addition of a foreign body to this inner sanctum of the filmmaking process upsets the balance for a little bit. Not made much easier by the fact that I was brandishing my camera when I came through the door, perhaps a little insensitive on my part.

DM & CM at the coal face

I've been here for half-an-hour now though and drifted into the background. The usual bouts of deliberation have resumed between the cutting gang and I am little more than a quiet impression of David Bellamy peering into the set of animals existing in the dark, quietly going about their very precise business. They flick between scenes, debate the merits of performance over focus, tweak shots by frames and balance up the crucial against the less so on the decision making priority list.

It's a privilege to be hear at this time and something that I will hopefully reap the benefits of seeing in my own filmmaking ventures.

Posted by colin kennedy at 7:15 PM | Comments (0)

September 9, 2006

CGI set

Here are a couple of stills of the CGI set I got from David's reference material. These are not finished yet, but we're using them as reference material for some possible shots we can do with Jamie while he's here.

Just click through the frames to look at the individual pictures, don't press play or you will only see each image for a 25th of a second. Pretty rubbish if you're not superhuman.

Posted by colin kennedy at 3:43 PM | Comments (0)

August 21, 2006

078-010

This is the new name of Sc78C, the vfx shot that I mentioned in previous blogs. You can here to compare.

Stephen Elson and his team at Base Black have been working on a variety of shots and this is the one that we are following.

It turns out, according to Giles (Asst. Editor) that we no longer use wire frames anymore, instead the pictures are compiled using info from various stills shot on location and in the studio. As you can see this is already beginning to look pretty realistic, its still to get more textures mapped on to it, extra detail added in and to be graded so that it better reflects the danger Hallam is in and the reality of the situation.

Posted by colin kennedy at 5:43 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 10, 2006

Our new home part two.

Avid 2.

Posted by giles at 8:30 PM | Comments (6)

Our new home.

Here is a picture of Avid 1 installed in the new, considerably more spacious, cutting room.

Posted by giles at 8:25 PM | Comments (5)

April 3, 2006

The Buttery

The Buttery is a very pretty little building next to the Unit Base on the estate we are shooting on just outside Peebles, and we've turned it into an edit suite.

As soon as the rushes have been synced by Giles the Asst Editor they are passed on to production and distributed as I have mentioned earlier scene 1 take 1 action

This is common practice on feature films. Its good to be able to see if the things you are doing are working, and if they aren't then looking for a solution to the problem and getting it to work.

Colin Monie is our Editor and this is his third feature with David. I think its unlikely, but if I can get it I'll try and post a sequence of shots he has cut together. The reason its unlikely is that the editing at this stage is very rough, no sound work is done and the picture is digitised at a very low resolution so the detail isn't there.

I'll see what I can do.

Posted by colin kennedy at 4:41 PM | Comments (2)