Lord Billy's House

This window thingy is gonna be the main unit for the set. I'mma make a latex mold and cast a whack of them out of fiberglass resin. Hopefully it works.

Only got a lousy two shots done yesterday. They were hard though. Lots of takes. I ended up filming them backwards, like I often do. Should have done that to begin with. They're the 'close-up floor' shots. The keying needs some serious work. There's some whacked-out colour around the edges. I'm going to wait until i'm on a real computer before I take care of that.

The new shots are at 00:20 and 00:38.

I like this shot. It's the first one done with the 50mm prime lens. It has it's uses.

Scene 7 in progress. I'm doing it out if order; doing all the shoots for each setup at once. So there's some key actions missing. Hopefully it'll all make sense when everything is in there.

Busted out an old scene 4 shot with Johannes, my least favorite puppet. Rendered out the old version, then a new one with a bunch of crap splooged all over it. Looks more cinematic. Suprisingly, the animation still sucks.

A couple scene 7 backgrounds. Finally opened up the window, which has remained closed for the whole film. Guess this is going to be the only scene where it's open. There's one more Interior Studio scene left after this one; barely a scene. Just some quick cuts between Cornelisz and the almost-finished painting. Then that's it for the main set and main scene of the film.

The current scene has other parts which happen outside; probably going to leave them for now. Lord William is close to finished; I might finish him and then knock off the Interior Court of Lord William set. Once I shoot the scenes in that set, which should be pretty easy and fast, we'll be getting close to done.

Scene 7 in progress. Aiming for lots of closeups and quick cuts. Corndog is missing from the wide shot. The first shot ain't quite working; tried to get a bit too fancy. The shot immediately preceding is a CU shot of the sketchbook with a sketch of the gibbet on it (same thing we see in the painting in the first shot).

Scene 14 Corndog shots.

Haven't done any colour correct for him yet.

The animation for this scene has been a real bastard. Just can't seem to get it right. By 'right' I mean a pass. Thought i'd be finished this business last week. Not done yet, though there's only five shots of Corndog. The three shots in the clip get a pass. The last half of the last shot is missing. I got tired of waiting for it to render. But he's got a line of dialogue missing.

I had alot of the old HDR problems come back with this scene. I figured i'd us this scene to have it out with the process, so I could should the rest smoothly. I've got things reasonably solid now. A subtle, mild HDR that's going to stay consistent for the rest of the film. And it leaves the bluescreen keyable still.

Here's the three backgrounds, with candles and shenanigans. Threw out all the backgrounds, etc. I did on Tuesday. I wanted a decent reverse shot (2nd shot) and it kept looking bad. So I figured it might look good if there were candles on the little table-dealie. So I redid all that stuff.

Wait, there's more!

Processed a brighter version of the candle shot. Then processed another high-contrast version for use as a phota'shop matte for it. Keyframes the opacity of the result in the AE background to make it look like the candlelight is flickering.

Final Plate (above pic)

I use the shot with the candles as it's own mask, to reveal the day for night ambient exposure underneath. So's I get cool shadows with detail in them. Instead of being pitch black.

Then I blow out all the candles, and turn on my ambient light, and shoot it again (bottom pic). I then run it through Videocopilts awesome 'Day For Night' AE preset; top pic.

Spent all day making three backgrounds for scene 14. That's all it needs. Pretty short scene; Corndog is painting away, then Anna-Maria shows up with her dress all torn up. Corndog' all like, 'what the hell'.

These are the most complicated backgrounds i've done so far. I'mma explain everything I did for these ones for fun. I could have done something simpler, but I felt like it. Doing fun stuff is good for morale.

There were many different exposures for each background.

Firstly; the scene shot with candlelight, including tiny candles I made and lit. Then I blow out the tiny candles, and shoot it again with the light from the unseen candles. So that I can photoshop out the flames. The above pic is the main exposure, with the tiny candles.

Working on the backgrounds for scene 14. The still of Cornelisz in this shot is just a temp, pulled from another scene.

Trying to do a thing with animated candles. That part of it is working fine. This shot ain't quite working though. I did a focus pull for this shot; shot the background, then shot the foreground bits where the table and candles are separately. Tried to then mask it out, but it ain't quite believable. Not quite buying the candlesticks either. Put them in separately. Gonna have to think of another way to do this. It looks fine in a small compressed clip, but full res HD is another matter. It's completely ruthless; any and all of the suck is visible.




Here's a wee candle test. It's a bit crappy; the camera is moving around and I was blowing on the flames to make em' flicker. So they flicker a bit too much. But it's pretty easy to do. Bumped up the iso and lower the F stop until I could get a decent exposure with a fast shutter speed. Put candles in front of a black background. Turned all the lights off. Then just set the shutter to 'continuous' and held it down. Since the candles are already on a black background, just had to bring the frames in as an image sequence into After Effects, and set the sequence to 'add'. Or maybe it was 'screen'. Either way, it only takes about 10 minutes.

Scene 19. Added the exterior studio in ruins.