A Stately Suicide - Best Comedy

My short film A Stately Suicide won Best Comedy at the Phoenix Comicon film festival last month. A big thank you to the festival and congratulations to the Flyboy Film crew and Andy D Smith and Ian Forbes who wrote it.

Digital Cinema Package Tutorial

In this tutorial I detail how to create a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) from a quicktime video file.  The source video in this example was HD 1920x1080, 25 frames per second in the ProRes codec.  In order to be sure that the DCP will work on any server I convert it to standard cinema 2K pixels and slow it down to 24 fps.  This demonstration is done on MAC but all operations can be done on PC as well.

DISCLAIMER: SINCE RELEASING THIS POST I HAVE BEEN CONTACTED BY PROFESSIONAL DCP ENCODING LABS POINTING OUT FLAWS IN THE WAY OpenDCP CREATES DCPs.  PLEASE READ DAVID MARGOLIS'S POST IN THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW AND CONSIDER USING A PROFESSIONAL LAB.

'Falling Out' Nominated for Best SciFi at Screentest

My 2011 short Falling Out has been nominated in the Best SciFi / Fantasy category at Screentest National Student Film Festival 2012.  You can check out my interview here.

'META' Trailer

Here is the trailer for my 2010 short film Meta

Falling Out - Trailer

I am holding off putting my 2011 short Falling Out online while I submit to festivals but in the mean time I am proud to show off this trailer cut by myself and Rose Hendry.

Falling Out - Looking Back

Hanna Stanbridge as Carrie

In November I posted a blog entry discussing the development of a script for my short film Falling Out. In it I mention that it was five months prior that I had first introduced the idea to writer Tom K McCarthy, which would make it now 14 months since we began the project!
As the final film is now complete I am taking a moment to trace the project from inception to completion.

Monsters Under the Bed - VFX Breakdown

Here is a quick breakdown of the VFX shot that I composited for John Fairfield's film Monsters Under the Bed.  You can check out the film on the Virgin Media Shorts website.

Nuclear Explosion

Dylan Gauld's work on the CGI dynamics for the nuclear explosion from my short Falling Out is coming to a close.  I've been experementing with a single frame render that he's given me to see what I need to do to sell the shot.  Because we haven't had much time to refine it in Maya I'm doing the colouring in Nuke using an R, G & B ID pass and generally distroying the image as much as possible to hide the seams.

CG ID passes coloured and merged over plate.

Early pass on reducing detail with over exposure effects.

Monsters Under the Bed

This is John Fairfield's submission to Virgin Media Shorts.  Please check it out and 'like' it on Facebook if you find it deserving.


I was assistant director on the shoot and did the colour grade and the monster VFX, concept artist Ross Burt created the monster asset in Photoshop for me to composite and animate in Nuke. The DP was Ian Forbes.

Falling Out - FX01 Previz

Previs for the opening shot of my upcoming short Falling Out. Ian Forbes and I shot the plate last week, now I am looking to have concept design work done on it before meeting with some Maya heads to talk about how to proceed.

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.

Non-player Character test for 'In-World War'

I was approached by Graeme Turnbull of the Mill a few months ago to do some visual effects work on a film he is involved with called In-World War.  One of the problems was to create NPC's that had their faces pixelated in world space rather than on the cinema screen.  I struck upon the idea of mapping the pixelation onto their faces in 3D but it wasn't until I saw this interview with Digital Domain artist Justin van der Lek on fxguidetv that I realised how it could be done.

Falling Out - Developing the Screenplay

It has been about five months since I first mentioned to my writer Tom K McCarthy that I wanted to make a short film which focused on a small group of people dealing with the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast in Scotland.  Last week he delivered the first draft of the screenplay.  There are several redrafts needed before we get to a shooting script but we both agree this draft holds the essence of the story we want to tell.

Meta Poster

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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!

Moon

Saw Moon last week; bloody amazing. Here is another interesting article.

Wow! The possibilities for immersive motion pictures by the way

Drag your mouse around to move the camera like in google map street view.

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.

Great site for film locations

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/

This site has a great community of people writing about and posting pics of their urban exploration experiences.