Teaser Trailer for Ray Gun Revival — A brief post mortem
Every Day Publishing launched its new(ly acquired) online magazine, Ray Gun Revival on February 1st. I had, sometime in November, I think, offered to produce a teaser trailer to be released in advance of the magazine’s unveiling.
Sometimes, well, things don’t come in exactly on time. Nonetheless, here it is:
If you love me you’ll watch it in HD instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdFfrgbyDfE&hd=1
I’m pretty happy with it, overall. The most significant problem is that it wasn’t delivered on time, failing in its desired purpose of generating buzz in advance of the magazine’s start date, and this is directly related to the second most significant problem with the short, namely, the relatively shoddy bluescreen work.
We tried a couple of new things with this, most importantly, it’s the first short I’ve cinematographed that I’ve actually done lighting more complex than flipping different combinations of light switches around the house to get proper exposure levels. We had a pretty impoverished setup: one two-lamp 500 watt halogen work light, one 100 watt halogen spotlight, appropriate bulbs for each, an alternate amber bulb for the spotlight, wooden clothes pegs, parchment paper, coloured gels. Basically, we just clipped some parchment paper in front of the big light and then blue gel in front of that to get some good blue fill light on one side of the room, and then we put the amber bulb in the spotlight and used that to light the other side of the actor’s face (placing it to make it look like this was the light coming from the onscreen lamp). Not fancy, but I think it definitely helped with the mood of the peice.
The whole thing was done handheld. There were shots in there which clearly were meant to have been done on a dolly or nice fluid head tripod or a steadycam, none of which we had available. It shows. Still, I suppose at least pretending that my body could emulate those devices (it couldn’t) led to some more interesting shot choices than I might have stuck with otherwise.
Blue screen failures. The blue screen looked relatively evenly lit to our eyes (not really, I was too eager to move on to the next step to let myself believe that a bunch of hideous shadows all over the blue screen would have caused a problem). We attached it on the inside of the room, rather than the outside — this, because attaching it on the outside would have required a ladder, and we’re not ladder climbing folk. Had it been outside, Keylight could have rendered all of the semi-transparent window reflections, opaque window frame and segmentation, over the beautiful background of space. This would have looked amazing. In front, being backit but interfered with by the shadows of the window frame and other windowy elements, and also, by virtue of being in the window frame, not properly coming right up to the edges of the sill, simply keying out the blue produced a window rich with amorphous shadows and bizarre aberrations. To work around this, I used Adobe After Effects CS5’s new and amazing RotoBrush feature. It managed to eliminate the screen and not our actor, but the edges sometimes move, and are occasionally ragged. I don’t want to make some kind of actionable statement about Rotobrush, but when I used it, I found that it ran pretty slowly, After Effects would become more crash prone, and frequently, my entire computer would outright freeze and require a full reboot. In spite of this, though, it’s a really interesting tool that managed to get me out of a tight spot much faster than masking by hand would have, and I can imagine that as it’s refined and extended, it could allow for some really advanced, incredibly easy post work. In the meantime, it is not meant to replace a good blue screen. Holy god. Hours and hours were wasted because of this. Even if setting up the blue screen properly had taken us three hours, it would have repaid itself in post many times over. And the video would have been finished on time. As part of this process, I’m going to install the Magic Lantern Firmware Hack for my T2i; it includes a handy histogram feature, which should help us properly confirm that our blue screens are evenly lit.
Another reason for the lateness is that we didn’t shoot until early January. It’s best to shoot early, always assuming that editing and post will not be nearly as easy a process as we’d like.
Another valuable lesson we learned, was to keep adding until there’s no time left. The costume for Rod started out pretty plain: a blue jumpsuit and a rocket ship badge. In the morning, as we were getting ready, we went to the Dollar store, and began looking for any way to spruce up Rod’s space suit. There, we collected a belt and two water bottles, and some tubing for his air tanks. We found some red electrical tape to add some handsome detail lines to the suit… these were attached after the actor was already in costume. And then, in the children’s toy section, we found our sheriff’s badge. Steven already had gold spray paint. Gold makes everything better. I think the changes we made to the suit made a huge difference, and frankly, without the suit looking like it does, I don’t think I would have been nearly as happy with the way this turned out.
I’m sure there’s more to discuss about this, but I’m exhausted, and I have the flu, so I’m off to bed.
As an aside, the bluescreen and compositing work is officially credited to Hobart Butterworth. This is not a real person. I think it has been decided that from now on, when something we try doesn’t quite work out, we make Hobart Butterworth responsible in the credits. There were many many other candidates, and google, god bless it, informed us that many of the most preposterous names you could imagine already belong to at least one actual person on the internet.