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.

Scene 2. Gonna be better with music and sound and whatnot. I would have liked to colour correct the moving leaves, and the birds in the last shot. But my computer is getting too crashy to be running multiple effects on multiple things.

Computer is a litte too old. It's getting a bit ridiculous. And it makes working incredibly slow.

The orange-looking first part is a stand in for the painting. We'll see something similar within the painting.

Scene 2. Was a bit too much work. Though it didn't take me long to ruin-ify the house.

I'm finally finishing Lord William. Gonna start animating him right away. I like his costume. Gonna be fun. What isn't going to be fun, however, is keying him out. We originally planned on using a greenscreen. We switched to blue. Probably gonna have to bust out the green again for him. Because he's blue. Which was a little dumb. Green is even going to be tricky. Might have to get crazy and use magenta.

Recent backgrounds. Sure is a lot of them.

Scene 19 in progress. The last little outro of the film. I've since added more shots. There's some neat lighting effects too, but couldn't render them. Computer is getting too crashy.

Scene 15. Missing a couple elements. Like crows in the roof shots. Thought it would be about 6 shots originally; turned into 19. But it didn't take very long, all in all.

The scene is cooler with voice over and music. And sound would be neat too.

There's one more scene that involves the exterior studio. Gonna shoot that. Then i'mma wreck it and make the 'in ruins' version of it. Then I can get rid of the thing. Running out of space to keep all this crap.

Couple stills from the scene.

Did about half an assload of work today. Too much to get into. I was gonna shoot all the exterior studio shots in one go, but I found I had to get into and finish a scene before I could say I was done. Which is what all this junk is.

Gonna have to wreck the exterior studio when i'm done - gonna have shots of the same thing, in ruins. So gotta be sure i'm done with it.

And another one. Day for night action.

Exterior studio backgrounds. Here's the two from another scene.

Found a new trick for comping HDR stuff together. Its drudgery, but it works.

Finally over the hump for this not-fun set.

Main wide shot in progress. Still need to shoot the sky. Using a random one as a temp.

Couple more details, then it's done. Finally. The grass is hair. Pig hair (from bristle brushes). It's furry.

Though this set was gonna be fun, but it's been pretty damn tedious. Having to tear through it with willpower.

Carving the pink styrofoam was the worst. And the clay tree. I hate clay.

Cranked out the plague doctor in record time. 10 hours from start to done shooting. Course it's pretty easy cause he's standing there doing nothing but looking creepy. Here's a full size HD frame.

Almost the same as previous post, except there's two cow shots. I cut them a little brief. Can barely see them. This beast of a scene is pretty close to done. Parts one, two, and three. This being part two. Then I get to see how the snappy transitions between parts work.

Got two solid days to finish. Gonna make the costume for the plague doctor in this scene tommorow. Should be pretty fast; gonna be a crude leather costume. Mask and huge hat will probably take a bit longer.

Cranked out a new set in record time. Gotta have disciprine. I did. it's done. This part's gonna be a close-up fest. Ba-jam bajman bajam (bajam being the sound of a fast cut from one close up to another).

Assorted shots from part 1. Shots of Cornelisz are temp. Not gonna bother rendering out the actual animation myself. Leaving that for Mike. Shots ain't in order either. Gonna be about 11 total.

That's it for my share of this part. On to part 2 next.

Handed the project (gibbet scene) over to my mang. Gonna bat clean-up on his super-mac. Some of the stuff looks good on a giant screen. Some, not so good. Gonna finish part 1 tommorow, and build and shoot the set for part 2 on the weekend.

Scene 6 part 3 sketchpad shots. They were pretty fun.

Lots of After Effects shenanigans going on.

This part of the scene is inches away from being done. Almost done Scene 6 part 1 as well. On to part 2 next.

We managed to do maximum balls-to-the-wall animated HDR. Hooray. This is a reprocessed shot with new settings.

Damn embed code is cropping my clips. Clink on the big blue link for actual clips.

Reshot the animation for Cornelisz for this here shot. Definately worth it. Didn't work with 30 frames of animation, cutting on the hold. Now its 56, and we can cut on the movement.

A shot from part one of this bit, with a little colour action. What is that, soft focus? Romantic.

The first buncha shots rudely edited. Colour is all over the map. Trying to do a kinetic cut-on-motion kind of thing. Hence the Weinerwold. Gonna be tight when Mike gets his high-powered mac and experienced hands on them shits.

Got tired of fighting with the background plate behind Cornelisz for this scene; tried just cranking out a set element to stick behind him. Should have done it to begin with; took me under an hour. Photographed it with the wood glue still wet and the stain fresh. Just did some Photoshop sketching to figure out what rakish angles the thing should have. The computer cheats are often more trouble than they're worth; they're easy to begin with, but usually result in many hours trying to make them match the other elements.

Pics are raw mid exposure, and tonemapped result shopped into background. Still a little crappy, but there's gonna be all kinds of blur on that thing. There's some dark edges around the wood frames on the left hand side of the building. Gotta go. I'll do that in designated festering time.

Stopmo-ilization from Band Sinistre on Vimeo.

A challenge for this scene is going to be making the 'cheatin' (keyframed photoshop stills) match the actual stop-motion animation. This clip is a test of possible solutions. Most of the problems/solutions aren't visible on this small low-res clip. Really have to see it in full HD. The second clip has a 'wiggle' expression on the rotation of the gibbet - 24 times a second. To make it more choppy and less computer-y. There's also a 'match grain' going on, with the sample pulled from actual stopmotion in another shot. Also a tiny bit of flicker added to the whole thing.

Another test. Different settings.

Another one. Looks nice n' crispy at full res.

Finally found the holy grail for HDR tonemapped animation. 16 hour day yesterday. 11 hours today so far. But it's worth it - he looks way less shitty than he did before.