Over the last few weeks I've been developing an idea for a short film, The purpose of this is to improve at compositing 3D animation with live action footage.
My idea was to show a character in some sort of battle with flying drones, From this I began thinking of different scenarios that this character could be in. I knew roughly where I wanted to film but hadn't had the chance to scout out properly.
After coming up with several ideas, I managed to break the film into 4 separate parts. I don't like to keep doing films or effects that I know I can do, I'd rather challenge myself and try and teach myself something new. So in part 1 I wanted to do a car chase, part 2 would be escaping through a forrest, part 3 would be the main action scene and part 4 would be the closing scene.
My location of choice was Kielder Forrest, excellent views and quite quiet, so filming with guns wouldn't be too much of an issue. I met my main actor early in the morning and we had a scout out for usable locations, we managed to find several dirt roads for the car sequence, a part of the forrest that wasn't too dense so there was plenty of light and and a rather large viaduct.
We began on the viaduct, this would be part 3, where the main bulk of the action was going to happen. I decided I wanted to shoot this in slo motion. We spent 2 hours running back and fourth across this bridge getting all the shots.
I had some crew members show up a few hours later to film the car stuff, The dirt roads we were planning to use ended up not being practical and so I had to think of a contingency. I'd wanted to use a quiet dirt road because I wanted the car to come under fire, which would result in my main actor leaning out the window with a G36 - something I couldn't shoot on an open road. The quieter roads meant I would have also been able to lean out the window of the camera car and capture some unique shots. I had to change the idea slightly so that we could safely use the open roads and not scare the locals.
Instead of having the actor lean out of the car, I had him shoot out of the rear windshield, this limited the number of camera angles I could get, otherwise you'd be able to see that the window was still there!
With filming on an open road now we were able to get much more speed, which looks far more dramatic. We had to be cautious of traffic and to only roll when there was cars in front or behind. This sequence was the riskiest thing I've ever shot. Remember, even though we were using plastic, airsoft guns, they can still look real. If you're planning a video that uses guns either alert the local authorities or shoot somewhere the public aren't going to be.
The forrest stuff and closing shots were filmed relatively quickly, as these weren't very long scenes. I wanted to do a few more shots in slo motion so I ramped up the shutter speed to bring down the amount of motion blur - makes the motion look smoother when slowed down. and Increased the frame rate.
Because most of these shots are handheld I'll need to do a 3D track so that when I composite the CG drones they stay where they should.
This shot was filmed when the car was stationary. I wanted the driver to get shot and didn't want to do that when the car was moving. Safety First.
This was a pretty intense day of shooting, Got a lot of stuff done. Just need to edit it all together and get cracking on the Visual Effects.
This is actually the first project of mine where I've used the Zoom H4N for audio, Defiantly a worthwhile investment.
