Scene 2 test

Here's our latest test, this time scene two. I am the actor you will be seeing for about a third of the movie, and yes my acting is really that bad! (according to my sister at least!)

Enjoy!
It won't spoil the plot of the movie if you watch it, but it's up to you, and we may post tests of scenes that will give it away...

DIY shoulder mount

I've recently made a dual shoulder camera mount.  I copied the design from Film Riot, a YouTube show for indy film-makers.  I modified the design a little due to lack of supplies, but overall, it came out pretty well.

As you can see, it looks extremely professional *Cough, cough* with it's duct tape finnish, and cardboard  mount.  Despite the duct tape and cardboard, it holds up surprisingly well.   Although I still don't fully trust it, and until further testing is done, I will hesitate to put a 1D mkIV with a 300mm L lens on it.   But hey, give it a break.  It only cost $10 to make!   For a pro rig like this one, we'd be looking at near a hundred or more.  

Since this is an indy film, we want to make as much of our equipment as we can, so we hope to have more DIY film gear coming soon to project 2.6!  

Camera rig

I've been working on a 15mm camera rig. A follow focus will be essential to this project, and I'll need something to mount in on once I make it, so here's what I've got so far:

The rods were from http://www.onlinemetals.com/ if I remember right, and so was the plastic. The photos should make the design so far clear. The plastic parts were cut from this plastic, 3/4" I think. Hey, it was the cheapest option by far and it works great! I cut the sections shown from a 12 X 12" piece, and this took 36 square inches (3X12) to make two brackets. I can make smaller brackets, but I wanted to make a larger one for the camera first, and I can always swap out brackets later. The measurements are 60 mm rod spacing, and 15 mm (approx., it's slightly off, but not much) diameter rods. The reason I built it to these measurements is that is what commercial DSLR rigs are using, so if we ever happen to acquire a 15mm rod accessory, (which is unlikely, as the prices are astronomical!) it should be compatible with commercial systems. I'm not the only one building or who has built a DSLR rig though, but I'm the only one who has posted it so far (hint hint, Daniel!) Next I need to work on making this into a shoulder rig, with a counterweight and shoulder pad, or I could just use it on a tripod as its main function will be for the follow focus.

Computer upgrades...the hard way

This is a long enough post that's not entirely related, so to keep clutter down here's a link to my blog:

http://kj4bxt.blogspot.com/2012/05/new-cpu-cooler.html

Check it out, it's not the usual!

Satellite parts?

When the satellite is in outer space I can make it look like anything (within my limited modeling / texturing abilities), but on the ground we have to have actual physical parts. I've started keeping my eyes open for possible satellite parts. They don't have to bear any real resemblance to the satellite, because it will have been scorched beyond recognition during its reentry of earth's atmosphere (they just have to look plausible and cool)
Here's some of the things I'm considering:

No shortage of (old) computer memory! One of these will probably be the satellite part we hack.

This is an old RF amp I had lying around. It looks interesting enough I think it could be used. ( I have two, the photo below is of the same one, just a different angle)

So, that's the latest from Project 2.6!

(Actually it isn't, the latest news is that I can't get my asteroid field to render with the satellite and world...but that will be fixed...shortly...I hope...) :D

More concept art

Here's where I am on a satellite model. It's coming along, but realism is sadly lacking. It just doesn't look right to me, try as I will... Still, it's a start unless we decide to go with a different model.

Right now the main thing I could do to improve realism would probably be to use an image texture for the solar panels.

Our most exotic location in the movie...

So, for the satellite entry scene we will need to show the satellite flying through earth's atmosphere. There are two ways to do this, and as we've already disclosed that we're using Blender and have essentially no budget you can probably guess how we're doing it! Here are some test renders.

First one, this looks pretty good, but needs some tweaking. Mixing in some fast Gaussian blur could probably improve this. It is the only one that has a starfield, because I was having too much trouble trying to keep the blur from affecting the stars, which just made it look weird. 

Second render; this is better, I also changed the lighting to get a better feel for how it would look. This is the only render that I consider totally unacceptable. Why? Because there is a wireframe looking texture in some of the clouds, really killing realism. It took a while to figure out how to get rid of it.

This is pretty decent.  I wish it had a starfield, but until I figure out an easier way to do it, it will have to wait. I'll probably leave it at this point for now, and through the test scenes. I may tweak it from time to time though, probably nothing major, other things will now take priority.

By the way, this is with Blender internal. I would like to use Cycles for more things, but I already had made this a few months ago with Blender internal render engine, and it would be a lot of work to redo it. Besides, I'm getting 20 second render times with my CPU overclocked to 3.15 GHz, and I don't think Cycles would really have any appreciable time improvement over that. Anyway, lots of fun to make. I'm hoping to start work on the satellite soon so I can post a test version of the first scene.

New video card for cycles!

Project 2.6 will now be able to render using the Cycles render!  We just got a Nvidia 560 with 2gb of DDR5 memory.  This will allow us to successfully render using cycles without crashing the program.

When idle, the 560 runs about 30 degrees Celsius, but after 1000 passes in cycles in jumps up to 75 degrees, and can render 6000 passes in just over 8 minutes.  Which is more than 10 times faster than the CPU!

We will hopefully have some more statistics and test shots later to show just what can be done with the Cycles render engine.  

Cycles!

Cycles may be a possibility for this project after all! We're having some posting / authorization issues right now, but hopefully by Saturday we should have that straightened out. Once we get that fixed we'll try to post more about Cycles and our current setup... :)

More fire

More fire!



Just playing around with a blend file... It looks pretty weird though, I may change the seed and tweak some settings to see what else I can do.

Celtx vs. Google Docs

I've tried Celtx and I've tried Google Docs. Celtx doesn't work nearly as well when multiple people are working on the same thing.  So, we'll probably leave the script in Google Docs. Celtix can be useful for making lists, and possibly some other more in depth scene breakdown, but for now, nothing major is going to change.

First Scene Location Scouting

Location scouting; Right now, I'm looking for a place to shoot the first scene. We have three houses right now that we can pick from (ours), but there's a catch. What I want to do is to have a room with some chairs / sofa and a window to the backyard. One of our houses doesn't have a backyard that I know of. Our house has a room that might work, except that the view from the room is of our deck, not the ground. It might work, but would be less than ideal. The other house I haven't seen the backyard. 

So...

Daniel, does your house have any rooms with windows not very far off the ground in the back, and if so, could you send or post some photos?

We also have two other options. One is to greenscreen the window, for the video of the impact. I don't want to do this, as that means we will have to shoot locked down, which won't look as good, or use motion tracking, which I think we're going to be doing enough of already. The other is to have the satellite fall into the front yard. This is worth considering, especially for the last scene, when Zeke has a bunch of his friends around it, telling them what happened.

So, what do you think? What should we try? We have to decide soon, because we want to shoot the trailer soon.

I think we should shoot it so that the satellite falls in the front yard. If people agree, I'll change the script.

If we did this, we would preferably shoot it at your house, Daniel. Are there any rooms that would work for this?

Camera Ladder

Camera cranes are great, but commercial ones are really expensive. I want to use one on this project, so I have to figure out how to make one. I've posted about my first ones, but I'm also looking at trying to using a ladder like this one as the arm. It has the advantage of being (slightly) collapsible, and probably lighter weight, but it's also more flexible than the triangle design of the tower that I was using, so there might be bounce on faster moving shots. Only a test run will show, so that's on the list of things to try. It's not very high on the list though, because I already have something that I think will work.