Freekstorm VFX Blog

No doubt some of you may be wondering why we haven’t started on our next little film by now. Well the reasons are threefold. First, we have been promoting the two we’ve made so far, plus my oldest son’s school Media Studies Professor showed Diabolus Domi to his class, and it “kinda went epic” (in the words of my son) from then onwards. I will admit that we were petrified what my son’s school would think of it, and it was a HUGE relief that it was well received. In fact eight out of ten teenagers loved it. Hurrah! It’s good to know our movie appealed to its target audience!

My sons’ classmates have been asking when the next movie is due out. Well, we decided to skip the next fest (due for completion by March) because of the theme, which is Betrayal-Fest. Try as we might, we just couldn’t think of a six minute script involving betrayal which was uplifting, funny and involved visual effects. Yes this is probably because we’re not that good at scriptwriting yet, but the only ideas we came up with involved song and animation, which are great ideas but which we definitely would NOT be able to do by the March deadline because of the time required to do the animation.

Also, we have no green-screen studio! Yes, that’s right, folks. We are decorating! Rich has decided to re-do our old studio and transform it into a green screen Cyc studio, on a miniscule budget, I might add. (In case anyone is wondering, “Cyc” stands for “cyclorama”, so called because when you look at it, the walls appear to be infinite and you cannot see where the edges are.) Building the new studio is not a small task and we will be pretty busy with this for the next few months, and it simply isn’t possible to squeeze in another short film in the meantime, no matter how much we want to!

So I guess it’s “all systems go” for getting the new studio completed ASAP in time for the subsequent DVX fest in the summer. Now....where can I get hold of twenty-five sheets of MDF, a limitless supply of hardboard, new recessed lighting and several gallons of bright green paint? Oh the things we do for our art....

Resources:

If anyone is interested in building a cyc-studio, we recommend the DVD Visual Effects for Directors by Hollywood Camera Work, which explains the “how-to” process in detail.

Labels: green screening, studio