VFX Breakdowns

A selection of VFX breakdowns from my short films Falling Out (2011) and Meta (2010)

Phoenix Comicon & Edinburgh Short Film Festival

I've had some great news for my short films recently.  Both Meta and Falling Out have been selected for the Phoenix Comicon Film Festival and A Stately Suicide has been selected for the Edinburgh Short Film Festival.  All three films were directed by myself, shot by Ian Forbes and produced by Flyboy Films.

Meta and Falling Out screened last week at the Phoenix Comicon Film Festival.

A Stately Suicide will be screening on the 17th of June at the Edinburgh Short Film Festival.

Good news for 'Meta' and 'Feet for Hands'

Meta 2010

My undergrad short 'Meta' has been nominated for two awards at the Bafta Scotland New Talent Awards 2011;  'Producer: Short Form' for John Fairfield and 'Technical Achievement' for myself.  The awards take place on the 24th of March so I'm keeping my fingers crossed until then.

'Meta' and my other undergrad short 'Feet for Hands' are also to be featured at Screentest Festival in London which takes place 18th - 20th March with 'Feet for Hands' nominated for best comedy!

You can read the Dundee University press article on the nominations here.

Scotsman Arts review: Dundee degree show 2010

Many thanks to Susan Mansfield for her complementary review.

'Here is a strong pack of young artists, not afraid to be large in their vision, to explore other worlds, utopian or dystopian, and to look back at our own world from the vantage point of another. And nowhere was this more clear than in Time-based Art, where a strand of ambitious narrative film is led by Matt Cameron, who seems to have enlisted most of his classmates as the crew of his short film, Meta. The result is a gritty sci-fi drama of parallel worlds and life-sapping addictions which would stand comfortably alongside professional low-budget films.'

Meta Poster

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After effects CS5 ....good things come to those too late!

The post production for Meta is just about coming to a close. 60 VFX shots in two and a half months; not bad I'd say! About half of those involved some level of rotoscoping, some shots so complicated they took days to do. And it's all finished just in time for Adobe to announce their magical new Roto Brush for After Effects which seemingly reduces time spent working on roto mattes to a small fraction of what they used to be.

Thanks Adobe, I'm sure I'll love using it next time but for now I'm more than ready to render and leave the edit suite.

Post about post (and fatigue)

I've not posted in a while as I've been absolutely consumed prepping, shooting and now doing post on my graduation short 'Meta'. The film is a kind of grim take on 'Romeo and Juliet' meets the 'Matrix' ...on crack!

The pre-prodution process can be traced on our Tumblr site;
http://meta-film.tumblr.com/

The shoot was done in two blocks, one over three days at six different locations and another over four days at a single location. It went very well, professional and fun despite the bitter bitter cold. I couldn't have hoped for a better crew and cast to work so hard for no pay!

The edit was locked by the second week of Feb and I am now up to my neck in the 60 VFX shots which have to be completed by the mid April. Before the degree show in May the sound design, music, VFX, colour grade, encoding and bluray burning all need to be completed for 'Meta' and 'Feet for Hands'. That's on top of getting a web site up and running, applying to the NFTS... maybe I won't be posting much more frequently after all!

VFX tests

A series of rough VFX tests for my upcoming short films. The first being for Hands for Feet and the rest for Meta.

More Kuler swatches for art direction

Kuler swatches for Meta art direction.

These neons are taken directly from the Blade Runner screen grab;


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Meta

Meta; Toms blurb

It is a cyberpunk love story that looks at the nature of perception and deals with issues of dependency. In the not too distant future, IT has come to mean Immersive Technology. Cyberspace exists as a distinct and separate world that people jack into to do their jobs, play games or just socialise. Many people have become addicted to virtual reality and let their bodies waste away in the Game Slums. Among these addicts is a young couple: Mark and Grace. Grace has jacked into the net without a firewall giving herself an informational overdose. Mark searches the net for her soul, her data. All he can find is echoes. Data pertaining to other data – Metadata.

Datamoshing article

View my tutorial HERE.

DAZED&CONFUSED VOLII#74

This technique could be employed during some of the jacked in sequences where communication is breaking down.

Screenplay

My friend Tom McCarthy has agreed to write the screenplay for my grad film based on my outline. We will continue to collaberate throughout the process but I'm so glad to have somebody who knows what they're doing to take charge of the script.

Tom has written a couple of short films, co-written a feature with his brother (Outcast) and is just finnishing his first solo feature screenplay.

He's given me some reading to help with the process, it's all pretty much cyberpunk;


Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Vurt by Jeff Noon
Strange Days
Videodrome

The Last Temptation of Christ

"The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God - has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh... and my soul is the arena where these to armies have clashed and met" Nikos Kazantzakis

Characterisation in graduation film

There will only be one rounded complex character, that of the male lead. The other two speaking parts will be flat characters representing the oppositions in the leads conciousness. The main opposition is between the flesh of biological life (represented by his partner) and the weightless freedom of digital life (represented by a software daemon character). The lead has a contempt for the flesh and tends to regard it as a breathing machine for his brain.

Philip K. Dick

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.


from How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later. Philip K. Dick, 1978

Sci-fi Treatment

Themes;
Dehumanisation / Post-human / The Nature of Reality / Isolation / Voyeurism / Loneliness / Paralysis / Greed / Hunger / Fractured Thoughts / Dream States / Jealousy

Locations;
A derelict industrial basement ties together leaps to unreal ephemeral locations. Industrial basement will be given context of a decaying unoccupied future city through 3D matte paintings.

Look;
High contrast desaturated cold look for reality and high key look for cyber-memories and places.

Story;
Two characters. A couple who have been living in isolation for some time. The guy uses cyber memories and experiences as a drug like crutch. The girl resents his increasing use and refuses to use herself until, lashing out, she jacks in but goes in too deep, losing any sense that she is in an artificial reality. The film starts with the guy trying to pull her out of her cyber-trance by going in after her. The back story is told through him reexperiencing recorded cyber-memories. As time goes on he becomes more desperate and hateful and eventually, not seeing another way tries, to shock her out of it. The film ends with a feeling that he may have permanently damaged her or even killed her in the process. No dialogue is used in the reality portions and the cyber portions are confusing.

Ideas stolen from Red Dwarf books and Neuromancer.

Next years film; feature film influences

Taxi Driver - Isolation, paranoia, self imposed loneliness and a hostile environment lead a fascinating yet unlikable character to an inevitable conclusion. [story, character]

Death of a Salesman - Delusion of the character is carried through in the form of the text, we are taken with him in delineated time, space and reality. [form, story]

Memento - Broken memory and post-human isolation combine with single minded revenge create a character willing to loose himself to the cycle of death rather than confront his own misdeeds. [story, form, character]


Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Dream sequences which use poetic connections to move through time, space and reality. [form]

The Matrix - Visual Effects used as an integral element of the story and its underlying concepts, computer generated realities. [form, story]

Evangelion - Investigating the nature of our human separation from each other and the fundamental loneliness that brings. Exploring the dangers and possibilities that would arise if we were able to bridge the gap between one anothers minds and be one. [story]

Next years film starts here.

After much thinking about what I want to make next year I have settled on making a short scifi set on a William Gibson influenced earth. I have been toying with writing about electronically altered states and artificial experiences and this quote from Andrei Tarkovskys book Sculpting in Time really seems to be a seed of truth that could help keep me focused;

"Let us imagine for a moment that people have attained happines - a state of complete human freedom of will in the wildest sense: at that very instant personality is distroyed. Man becomes as solitary as Beelzebub. The connection between social beings is cut like the umbilical cord of a new-born infant. And consequently, society is destroyed'