Freekstorm VFX Blog

Labels: filmmaking, industry news

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

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

One of the masterpieces of cinema is Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The film opens with the famous deathbed scene, which could easily stand alone by itself as a most excellent short film. As he dies, Kane’s final whispered word is “Rosebud.” This single word forms the mystery of the film – “rosebud” is his final and most powerful memory which defines him as a person, the key to unravelling the mystery of his life. “Rosebud is the emblem of security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone could have such an epiphany? A single extraordinary moment which forever changes the direction of their life? A recent interesting article in The Independent addressed this very subject and detailed the Rosebud moments of famous directors which ignited their passion for filmmaking and thus changed the course of their lives forever. After reading this, I figured that most great directors experienced such epiphanies, so I asked my own trusty director to identify his very own “rosebud moment” which made him want to go into filmmaking.

“I don’t believe in epiphanies,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve never had one.”

“What? Never?”

“Nope. I think they’re a bit too melodramatic, to be honest.”

Well, so much for defining moments. It turns out that my dear director believes in evolution not epiphanies. He believes in a more logical (for that read “Vulcan”) approach where a person’s direction in life changes due to cumulated experiences, rather than because a light-bulb goes on somewhere. He is way too sensible for epiphanies – he is far more likely to change the course of his life in response to an intellectual challenge, rather than a sudden revelation.

He told me that when he was a kid, he spent endless hours watching t.v. animation shorts such as Morph in Take Heart. He was inspired enough to want to make animations like these, but in those days the opportunities simply didn’t exist for teenagers to create things like that, no matter how ambitious they were. So he shelved his ambitions whilst growing up and instead became fascinated with computers. He threw himself into programming in a big way, and this formed the cornerstone of his career path. As technology developed, he began to see the possibilities of reviving his interest in animation, not through stop-motion but instead through designing CG characters and animating them on the computer.

“The latest CG animation technology is still in its infancy,” he says. “A few years ago the average six minute animated short film would take around two years to do. I want to develop technology that will reduce the two year period to something manageable, like three months or so. It is only in the last year that the price of the CG software tools has come down enough to make this timescale possible for the serious amateur. Now the sky’s the limit.”

“But why animation?” I asked.

“The real world exists,” he says. “You just have to put a camera in it and record it. You can then put your character into the real world and see how it interacts. I love mixing reality and fantasy. That’s what telling stories is all about.”

So? Less of a single rosebud moment, and more of a slowly growing shrub?

“I’m not trying to open a door to my past,” he says. “There was no epiphany I’m afraid. I know you think there should be, but frankly, I’m just not that deep a person. All I want to do is to tell stories. Now, thanks to modern CG technology, finally I can.”

Labels: director, filmmaking

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

The Importance of Music in a Horror Film

One of the most important elements in any film is to get the score right! In a horror movie in particular, using extra-diegetic sound is an important tool which can be used to build atmosphere and suspense. When timed correctly, the right music can be used to scare the viewer witless, where dialogue and action alone would not be enough.

I’m afraid our little film would not have worked remotely as well as it did without the suspense music. Whatever other criticisms we received from viewers (and there were many) the sound and the use of music were judged to be very well done (hurrah! We did something right!) The film music starts off quiet and sinister, and gradually grows throughout the film until it gets louder and more dramatic towards the end, thus raising the suspense levels to the optimum level when the demon attacks.

In order to get the score right, Rich listened to various pieces of scary music over and over again. He did this by loading pieces of potential suspense music into a Windows Media player playlist and learning them off by heart. He then visualised each element of the film in his head and tried to put himself in the place of the viewer. He needed to figure out which pieces of music generated the right emotional reaction for each scene, and that meant that he had to build the whole movie in this head i.e. pre-viz both action and music, and then match them together perfectly in order to pace the story properly and build suspense. This sounds easier than it is, incidentally – many filmmakers employ professional sound designers to do this. Alas, we don’t have that option, so Rich had to try it himself. Personally I think he did really well, considering this was only his second attempt!

Dramatic music has the ability to alter our mood, manipulate our emotions and compel us to respond to the film in a different way. A film succeeds only if it generates emotion, which in turn is directly dependent on the sound. Emotion can be attached to any piece of film footage through effective use of the film-score. If used correctly, suspense music can be used to play on our innermost fears and thus create a truly effective horror movie.

Resources:

For our own little film-short, we used stock music, in paricular, Tunes of Terror from Stockmusic.net.

Labels: Diabolus Domi, filmmaking, sound

The Recording Process: General Sound Recording

Despite the hundreds of hours spent on the CG in our little film, as well as many hours endlessly editing, it wasn’t until we finally put the sound into the film that it really started to gel.

I was appointed as the sound technician for the actual recording of the footage. I thought Rich was very brave trusting something as important as the sound to a half-deaf wife, but you gotta love his faith in me. Anyway, we decided that we wanted sound which was a bit more advanced than the camera’s microphone, which always ended up with the dialogue sounding as though it was recorded in the loo. So we took the plunge and allocated some of the film budget to purchasing a microphone and big furry cover (which is rather horrifyingly called “a dead cat”- as a cat lover I must protest – I really do prefer live ones.) We also bought a groovy new Tascam DR-100 Solid State sound recorder, which was so simple to use that in no time at all I was wandering around practising my newbie sound-recording skills by poking my dead cat into the faces of anyone and everyone in the vicinity.

Unfortunately I didn’t have any training in how to use the recorder correctly to obtain the cleanest sound levels, so my learning was strictly a trial and error process. We were also filming the outside scene in the middle of the worst winds for several years, so we had to reshoot the scene many times so that I could learn to record the actress’s speech as clearly as possible whilst minimising the sound of the howling gale. I screwed up frequently at first, mainly setting the recording volume too high, resulting in red-lining the sound levels and generating a godawful hiss. At one point I set the recorder too low and the sound was inaudible on playback, resulting in a lengthy reshoot – the kids were not happy. No, not happy at all. And before you say, “Why didn’t you just over-dub afterwards?” I’m afraid that option wasn’t available to us as our leading actress is five years old and has a pretty bad stammer. With the best will in the world, overdubbing and stuttering do not mix. But it’s all a learning process and we recorded some good sound in the end – crisp and clear, just the way it should be.

The next stage was for Rich to synch the sound and match it to each scene, originally in Acid Pro 7, but when that turned its toes up, with Adobe Audition 3 instead (good software – a piece of cake in the end – shame we can’t afford it though.) He then added foley sounds (feet crunching on gravel, walking up stairs, monster sounds etc) which were mostly recorded separately by me, although we also used a few commonly available foley sounds which were available for free online. Finally he added the creepy music (which will be the subject of the next post.) Then the film really started to come alive!

So to summarise, Rich recommends adding sound to your film is as follows:

1. Master the dialogue
2. Add the major foley components
3. Add the music
4. Add any additional ambience and foley sounds which are needed to fill any spaces
5. Check, check and check again that the timing is perfect

What would we do differently next time round?

Well, for future movies I will definitely avoid recording sound in bad weather conditions - picture if you will your trusty sound-recording-mama bracing herself 45 degrees against the howling wind and driving rain, desperately trying to record crisp clear sound whilst simultaneously shoving her dead cat into face of her young, courageous actress-daughter and frantically worrying that said actress-daughter might be swept away in the gale.

Oh yes, that’s what all great family memories are made of – stress free, jolly, happy filmmaking. Such a shame real life isn’t like it is in the movies...

Resources:

Tascam DR-100 Solid State sound recorder
K6-ME66 Microphone by Sennheiser
Dead Cat: Rycote Softie
Tunes of Terror from Stockmusic.net
Monsters and Creatures Foley Sounds from Sound Ideas

Tips:

Don’t be afraid to spend real-live-money to buy good sound equipment. It will pay for itself many times over. On-camera sound is the sign of a newbie and almost always sounds like it comes out of a toilet, so make sure you invest in a decent microphone and sound recorder instead!

Labels: Diabolus Domi, filmmaking, sound

Labels: filmmaking, visual effects

My oldest son (also leading star of our latest movie) is learning Media Studies for his GCSE’s at Hogwarts School. This is very handy for me because it incorporates a huge amount of Film Studies, so I am learning along with him and soaking up any juicy crumbs of filmmaking lore that he drops along the way.

Last week his most learned Professor taught him a new word: "diegetic."

For the completely clueless such as myself, “diegesis” means the fictional story world and everything that happens within it. Conversely, a “non-diegetic” scene is one which happens outside the story world that is inserted into the main narrative, for example, if the actor talks directly to the viewer in the film.

Titles, subtitles and voice over-narration are also non-diegetic and some clever filmmakers can switch between the two as a way of connecting with the viewer. Think of “Scrubs” where J.D. usually talks to the cast as part of the internal story-line, but he also often addresses the audience directly. He readily switches between diegetic and non-diegetic, which acts as an effective and humorous mechanism for drawing the viewer into the story.

Similarly, sound in a movie is diegetic if it forms part of the story of the film. For example, if a film character is whistling a tune or playing a piano in the movie, then that would be "diegetic sound" or "actual sound." In contrast, if music cannot be heard by the film’s characters (e.g. the score, or the suspense music in our own little movie) then the sound is “non-diegetic,” or more accurately “extra diegetic.”

Some directors loathe non-diegetic sound and refuse to use a score. However, with Diabolus Domi we have used it extensively. As this is a horror-short, we are trying to get a similar feel to the T.V. series “Supernatural” (of which we are all huge fans) so suspense music is definitely required as a mechanism for setting the atmosphere which, along with subdued lighting, is used to stimulate a reaction of fear in the viewer.

As to whether or not our efforts to scare your socks off succeed, that will be up to you wonderful viewers to decide. As with all elements of filmmaking, effective use of diegetics takes practice, practice, practice!

Labels: filmmaking

For new filmmakers, the first rule of camera blocking is “Never cross the line.”
But what exactly is “the line?” Your clueless producer sought clarification from the aforementioned filmmaker, and he was kind enough to assist with a little example.

At any particular instance the line is the to-and-fro between the current active characters. So yes, the line is about camera angles, but it’s fundamentally much more than that.



Have a look at the example above. When these two characters are talking, there is an invisible line which exists between them. This imaginary line gives visual continuity. If the camera moves across the line it causes the spatial relationship between the characters to change, which is very confusing for the viewer because it interrupts the visual flow and leads to viewer disorientation.

To use a simple example, if a character is on the right then they should STAY on the right through the different camera moves and despite different camera shots. If the character suddenly moves to the left, the viewer would then lose the relationship of where the characters are supposed to be, and would have to pause and mentally reset the line between the two characters before continuing with the movie. This basic error would prove to be very annoying for the viewer and must be avoided at all costs.

Crossing the line is therefore a huge faux-pas and is the mark of an amateur filmmaker It’s bad enough when this rule is broken with two characters, but the problem is compounded when you add more because the line shifts around constantly as the interchange between the characters also changes. It takes a skilled cameraman to figure out where to position the cameras, so that the line is not crossed at any point in the film.

If all this sounds horribly confusing (as it did for me) don’t panic! You have a way round this conundrum: Previs is your friend. Because you have extensively planned the character positions and camera angles before beginning shooting, you can eliminate this sort of basic mistake and concentrate on the rest of the movie. As the saying goes, “It pays to plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.”

Labels: filmmaking