Freekstorm VFX Blog

One of the more challenging aspects of making Diabolus Domi was mastering the timing. To experienced filmmakers, timing comes naturally. To newbies like us, it’s a whole new art form.

Timing is difficult to explain and even harder to learn. Much of it is to do with instinct. As a writer I have learned that timing in a piece of writing is critical to its success. You can’t get the message of the piece across effectively if your timing is wrong. Writers mutter about cadences and rhythm. Directors talk about beats. In filmmaking, beats are the high and low points of the film – the moment in the story where something significant happens which contributes to the story. Beats are used to pace the film so that the story moves forwards (roughly every five minutes in most popular American films). Beats are not necessarily merely different scenes – you could have more than one beat in a scene, for example, or one spread over several scenes. Between each beat a sequence occurs. The sequence is often a series of scenes that relates to the last beat and leads up to the next beat.

Still awake so far? O.K. the next point to make is that beats aren’t the only form of timing within a film. You also have to figure out the pacing within a scene itself: for example, do the actors move at the right speed? Do pauses occur in the right place? For the most part, this happens naturally with real actors – they physically move and interact according to normal live, human behaviour, so even if the pacing doesn’t fall quite right, the process can be further refined in editing.

However with a CG character, the pacing becomes much more complicated. Because you have to simulate human (or animal) behavior and make it as realistic as possible, then the movement of the CG character has to be worked out from scratch. This is very difficult to do, and is further complicated by the fact that visual effects are not necessarily best displayed in real time or according to the laws of physics. With VFX, hours and hours of careful planning are required and even after you have wired the character to move realistically, you still need to rework, rework, rework until the timing is perfect.

At the point in our film when Mervyn materializes in the bathroom, this took a huge amount of reworking of the CG to get the timing right. If Merv materialized too quickly (real time), the viewer’s eye couldn’t follow the visual effect because it was way too fast, so Rich had to re-render the scene and slow it right down, so that the monster materialized more slowly and the viewer could clearly see what was going on. Visual effects artists often forget to do this – often they simply choose to make their visual effect “real time” which means that the effect whizzes past so fast that the eye can’t figure out what on earth is going on. Think of Transformers – maybe I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but I had huge problems figuring out which character did what to whom because the CG action was in real time. There was special effect after special effect – my poor little brain rapidly became overloaded and I couldn’t figure out what on earth was happening (not helped by the fact that one big stompy robot looks much the same as the next at high speed.) The action was just too fast.

So the conundrum for the VFX artist is that he wants to show off his special effects, but he has to judge the timing incredibly precisely so that it is a) realistic to the viewer b) not too fast so that the viewer can keep up (the human brain finds it easier to absorb human movement at speed, but harder to process how a CG monster moves, so this point is critical) and c) the VFX timing has to be in keeping with the story. In our little example above, Rich had to slow down the monster materialization because smoke couldn’t coagulate and form matter that fast. It’s all about appearing real enough to the viewer so that he can accept it as reality within the confines of the story – even though he knows inside that it’s not. To take another example, for me, Spiderman doesn’t work because his CG character swings from building to building too fast – the character looks unnatural. O.K. so Spiderman may be a superhero but he swings so fast that it really does look too cartoony.

In VFX, the transition between the real world and the CG world has to be relatively seamless (and our viewers very politely told us that we need to work on this!) Everything has to look and feel believable to the viewer’s imagination. This is dependent on rhythm and timing as much as on how good the CG artwork is. Without perfect timing of the character, the whole lot will look unnatural and the film will fail.

So how do you decide the timing of your character? Our recommendation is to rework it until you think it looks real, but then let someone else take a look at your scene and provide feedback. A fresh pair of eyes often helps. When I reviewed the monster materialization scene I could instantly see that the timing was wrong, whereas Rich was too close to the work.

You cannot get the timing completely right by yourself. Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, and that goes for timing as much as any other element in the film. Your film is a symphony – as a director it is your job to conduct each instrument and time them correctly so that they blend together to create the perfect performance.

Labels: Diabolus Domi, filmmaking