Freekstorm VFX Blog

I am a victim of my lizard brain.

Let me explain. I am a huge fan of Seth Godin, probably the world’s most famous business blogger. If you’ve never read him, then I humbly implore you to check him out ASAP. I guarantee that reading his books will change the way you think about your work. His sound business advice applies equally well regardless of your chosen profession - yep, including and especially your filmmaking career. Anyhoo, enough of the book recommendations and back to my lizard brain and how it relates to filmmaking.

In his new book Linchpin, Seth makes an extremely persuasive argument that our attitude to our work and whether or not we make a go of our project depends on how well we can resist our amygdala.



The amygdala is a lizard shaped piece of your brain, located near the brain stem. It determines your feelings of rage, fear and your sex drive. When you feel threatened or scared of failure, when you hear that nagging voice in the back of your head telling you that you will probably never finish your movie because it’s too damn hard, when you want to write a script but you keep putting it off, when you have writer’s block, that’s your amygdala talking. As Seth says, “the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.....so it rises up in rage and fear and shuts you down.”

And so your amygdala resists, so much so that you find excuses for not pushing forward your filmmaking project. You prevaricate, you doubt that your ideas will ever work and as a result your movie never gets off the ground. But as Seth says, if you want to achieve your goal, if you want to push forward and make your plans reality, then you have to fight and defeat your lizard! How do you do this? By recognising that what is stopping you finishing your film or your script is merely your amydgala at work. You must stop finding excuses, quash your self-doubts, push aside your fears and your dawdling and realise that your film is more important than your insecurities. Willpower is your only solution when faced with the mighty lizard. Push, push, push through your blocks. Ignore the distractions of your mind and just keep on going until your work is finished.

And when you have fought your lizard and won, when you have finally finished your film and you are ready to release it to the unsuspecting public, only then will you have vanquished your demons, only then can you sit back proudly and say, “I did it. I really did it!”

And that’s what makes a truly successful filmmaker rather than a mediocre one.

Right, time to go slay my lizard! See you all next week...

Labels: books, filmmaking

On all production and filmmaking company web sites you will usually find not only a description of the aims of the company, but also a section devoted to the bio’s of the company directors.

So when Rich designed the Freekstorm web site, he allocated a section for the bio’s of the cast, crew and most importantly the director (Rich) and the producer (moi.) As I do most of the writing (it is after all my raison d'être) this task has fallen to me. So for the last two weeks I have been wrestling with the herculean task of trying to squash our life accomplishments to four short, dry paragraphs (each.) This has the fairly depressing side effect of making you feel as if you’ve done absolutely nothing of note with your life and you really should get off your ass, head for Hollywood, make a blockbusting movie and thus have a glamorous resume crammed full of festival awards and various gongs, just so you can have a bio as glamorous as all the other (clearly fabulous) directors out there.

Take Rich’s bio, for example. Although his talents outside the movie world are considerable, he is new to filmmaking and so his VFX and filmmaking credentials are somewhat...erm...limited (as are mine.) This does not make for a dazzling filmmaker’s résumé and so a certain amount of embellishment (carefully worded) is required in order to make the proverbial mountain from the molehill. Of course as the number of short films we make increases, then his list of accomplishments gets bigger and his bio will expand accordingly. It wouldn’t hurt to win a few film festivals either.

*sigh*

Oh well. In time...

So how do you write a bio that is suitable not only for your web site, but also suitable for your future press releases and (one day) your IMDb listing? It has to be factual, yet descriptive, inspiring, professional and above all it should make you seem like the real bona fide filmmaker that you are.

This process often terrifies ordinary mortals who are not used to having to make up this sort of thing. But hey, we’re all filmmakers here! Your bio is just a (very) short story of your life’s work, no different from any other movie character’s synopsis, just a bit more formally worded. If you have no idea what to write then the easiest way is to Google the bio's of other directors and producers. You can then get a feel for the type of thing you should be writing as well as a suitable style of wording to use in order to best reflect your magnificent accomplishments in the film world. If you are completely and utterly desperate then you could always crib someone-else’s and re-tailor to your own history as appropriate, although you really should use your own original wording you know. Nice people don’t copy – they reinvent stories and make them their own.

When writing Rich’s bio, I specifically tried not to copy the ideas and wording of other directors’ bio's (largely because they were either too famous or too awful or both) and tried to devise suitable wording of my own. This took many hours of blood, sweat and tears for a few short paragraphs and the result is very far from perfect. It’s rather more formal than I’d like, but it’s the best I can do for the time being. I’ll keep nibbling it over time as our repertoires expand, and with any luck, in a couple of years time it will look positively impressive. Well, that’s the plan anyway.

Unbeknown to me, whilst I was wrestling with words to make his bio sound as professional as possible, Rich effortlessly tossed out a humorous version for his Facebook profile which is SO much better than my herculean effort. Damn! I hate it when he does that! He is such a great writer, although he’s terribly modest and really doesn’t think he is very good at all. But truth be told, if there is one thing he can do well, it’s humour. I really wish I could use his version instead of mine but he thinks my formal, stuck-up, dry version looks more “professional” for our web site.

So without further ado, I give you my version:

Richard has spent over 30 years as a self-confessed computer geek. He has had a life-long passion for visual effects, digital art, photography and filmmaking.

After winning multiple awards for his black and white photography, Richard became fascinated with cinematography. To that end he has written and directed several short films including "Dick Ikon and the Petulant Princess" and "Diabolus Domi," both of which have been featured in the DVX film festivals.

When he is not making films, Richard is a highly successful computer software designer with his own international software company. He has a degree in Physics and Electronics and is married to Lin Bang, a writer and film producer and they have three wonderful kids who are also enthusiastic members of the Freekstorm team.

Richard founded Freekstorm in 2009 with the aim of exploring the worlds of filmmaking and Visual Effects. It is Richard’s creative desire to tell stories which merge fantasy with reality, thereby connecting the real world with the power of our imaginations.

And Rich’s version:

Richard, who does not normally refer to himself in the third person, is a keen film and visual effects director. When not writing cutting-edge software, he spends his time creating visual effects films and blowing zombies to bits in "Left 4 Dead."

His debut starring role in “Dick Ikon and the Petulant Princess” received such praise as ‘the acting was a bit off’ and ‘the acting of the father I found a little bit rigid.’

You can follow the exploits of Richard and his team of filmmakers on the Freekstorm web site.

Now which of the two gives you a better idea of Rich’s character, his wit and the style of films he loves to make? Which tells you what type of director he really is?

Yep, I rest my case. Effortless humour wins over constipated formality - every single time.

Labels: director, filmmaking, marketing

Resources: Autodesk ImageModeler, Softimage

The purpose of this exercise was to create a photorealistic 3D model of a real world object. Any object would suffice – in this case a toy garage provided a worthy subject for our modelling experiment.

The first step was to take a series of still photographic reference shots from lots of different angles so as to give full coverage of the object.

Labels: matchmoving

Some of our readers may dimly recall our failure last October to get Acid Pro 7 to work on our 64 bit PC. Well, finally our resident genius figured out how to do it!

For those who are having similar problems, you need to install ASIO4ALL which is the universal ASIO driver for WDM Audio. You can download the driver here.

After installing this you will need to switch Acid Pro 7 from WDM to ASIO (the option can be found in Audio Properties) in order for it to work.

Such a shame we discovered the solution too late for our movie deadline!

Still, now at least we don’t have to buy Adobe Audition 3 instead, and that saves us loadsa money. (I’m a skinflint – I LIKE saving money!)

Labels: Software

Resources: SynthEyes, Softimage, After Effects, camera, sticky dots + willing victim.

This was an experiment to practice object tracking to see if I could effectively match move Mervyn the Monster’s head onto a real human head (many thanks to Michael, who bravely volunteered for this task.)

First I put tracking markers on Michael’s head. These were simple sticky red paper dots that you can buy from any stationery store. The dots were specifically positioned on his head so that they wouldn’t move relative to each other. Then I filmed him moving his head around.

The next step was to transfer footage to SynthEyes and perform an object-based match move on the markers. This results in all of the markers being treated as part of the solid object and the output from SynthEyes is the movement in that object. I then took the results of the match move and loaded it into Softimage. This gives you a virtual camera that sees the object move in 3D in the same way as it does on film. You then load in the object that you want to composite onto your footage, which in our case was the large chunk of Mervyn’s head. I created a mask that hid the part of Mervyn’s head that I didn’t want to be visible and then rendered out the sequence. Finally I composited it into Adobe After Effects which produced the final output.

Voilà! Boy and Monster are as one!






The total time taken for this was around six hours. Please note that I didn’t make any effort to ensure the cut-out of Mervyn’s head fit cleanly, so the match move isn’t perfect. This was a proof of concept – and it worked! Next time I will do better!

Labels: test, visual effects

This is a new experiment for us. In previous years we have not been interested in new year resolutions at all (because most people break them after the first couple of weeks) but personally I’m fed up with drifting along aimlessly, wondering what the hell we will be doing during the next year. You can’t make movies with vague intentions. Good film-shorts don’t happen by accident; they actually need a huge amount of planning and organising. This is not Rich’s forté – he can do it if he has to, but he’s far happier designing cool special effects and dreaming up stories, whereas it is my job a producer to make sure his dreams are realised by planning and organising the year ahead.

Last year went absolutely splendidly, as far as I am concerned. Considering this time last year we were utterly clueless when we came to filmmaking, we’ve certainly come a very long way on our vertical learning curve. We have studied, studied, studied some more, read tons of books, learned the basics of scriptwriting, producing, directing, acting, the fundamentals of VFX, spent way too much money on getting filmmaking equipment (that bit was not splendid), made loads of mistakes (not splendid either, but necessary I guess), made two six minute film-shorts and entered two online film festivals. Oh and we designed a groovy new Freekstorm web site and started this blog too (which not only charts our progress but also propels us forward into action.) Yep, when you put it like that, crikey, didn’t we do a lot?! One year later, we’re still pretty clueless, but slightly less so than before. If we keep learning at this rate, think where we will be in a year’s time, or in five years time?! The mind boggles.

So what are our goals for next year?

Well, I’m including a few of the highlights here as an exercise in mass accountability.

Rich’s goals:

1. Make a blockbusting action epic in 6 mins!
2. Make a second movie-short that blows something up (I volunteer the barn in the garden – we need a new one.)
3. Finish the cyc-studio, with the possibility of hiring it out.
4. Continue to develop my skill set regarding filmmaking and special effects.

Lin’s goals:

1. Write a decent script for once!
2. Blog at least once a week, preferably twice (this not only helps develop my writing skills, but furthers my interest in film studies in general.)
3. Enter next year’s two films into DVX fests, which acts as a very useful mechanism by which to learn the process of making short films.
4. Learn how to better market our movie-shorts (and boy, do I have a long way to go!)

These goals may change and expand over the next year, of course, but by writing them down here now, it gives us a marker when this time next year we can look back and see how far we have come, and what we did/did not achieve and why.

One year from now, what do we want to have accomplished?

At the end of 2010, we both want to have made two movie shorts which have been entered into DVX festivals, with a view to moving beyond DVX fests in 2011.

So what is the purpose of 2010?

In a nutshell, Freekstorm is our way of learning about the art of making movies. During 2010 we will continue to train ourselves in VFX and filmmaking . We are not expecting Freekstorm to pay for itself during next year because we are still very much in the training phase – VFX and filmmaking are incredibly difficult to learn (especially without formal education) so we are pacing ourselves and trying to have fun along the way.

"Small moves, Ellie, small moves."

Labels: filmmaking, reviews