I thought I’d post some VFX work I did for a 29 minute independent film a while back. The VFX team on this was 2 people for all of the 100+ shots, and our budget was tiny so some things could certainly be better. But overall we are pretty pleased with the result.
Shot on RED at 4K. We did the post at 2k in 32 bit.
Software: 3ds Max, V-Ray (duh!), After Effects, Syntheyes, Mocha, Photoshop, PDPlayer, Illustrator.
VFX reel: VFX shots from the movie edited together.
Thanks! I was the lucky guy rotoing that I actually had a fever while doing that, and managed to start rotoing the head of the soldier (who is actually the producer) instead as he passed him. A pretty clear sign that I should get some rest instead
How many figures was the budget?
Im curious about the shot with the aeroplanes and the tank. Was the backplate made up of purely stitched still photogrpahy? Were the people all comped in post?
The budget was way to low compared to the hours we put in. Sadly the financing for short films is terrible compared to feature length productions. In US $ the budget was in the low 5 figures, and for 100+ shots that is ridiculous. We had to look at it as an investment in reel work and experience.
In the shot with the tanks the backplate was shot on RED, and the people were all there. This shot was a pain to track BTW, since the camera passes over a large area of sky that only has low contrast clouds on it. I could only get a good track of the start and end of the sequence separately. I ended up planar tracking the clouds with Mocha, and rendering out a new sequence with my own tracking markers corner pinned onto the clouds in a few select spots. I was then able to get a good track in Syntheyes for the entire sequence.
The reverse panning shot with the scaffolding was something the director decided we needed while editing, but we didn’t have a backplate shot for this. So I stitched and painted a new backplate from a few stills from the first shot. This was wrapped on a sphere in 3ds Max and we made the camera move there.
Its really easy to find low budget producitons in the States that need the effects work doing on a shoe-string, Im always tempted to take one on to build a reel for that industry. Problem I have is that low a budget would still require the same amount of commitment a decent paying job would.
Money is always an issue, and I wouldn’t have been able to take this on without doing other decent paying broadcast and illustration jobs in between to make up for the low income on this job. This was a typical case of “Good, Fast, Cheap < Pick two” where I was able to stretch the schedule enough for me to fit some other jobs in in parallell. Now that it’s done I am glad I took on the project. But it will probably be a long time (flying pigs etc…) before I want to do another low budget project this big…
Looks really good!
If you don’t mind, how much time did you have to finish the job Torgeir? Just generally is that “x” weeks work?
Just wondering how long these things take having never done that type of work myself.
Thanks, It’s hard to know exactly how much time was spent on it because I juggled other jobs in between. The editing (not by me) was done late November, and we finished post early March. Full time it was maybe 2,5 months for all the shots. (100+, some very complex, some easy) In addition there was some preprod/previz and 2 weeks on set as VFX supervisor. I also handled the online/grading and the final export to 35mm via DPX.
