Here’s the first of the film break-downs from ones I’ve previously worked on. This one is slightly different, as I’m still working on it.

What’s the film?
Zero

Who made it?
I directed and co-produced, plus did most of the post production. My co-producer was also the DoP

What’s it about?
It’s an action/thriller short about a hit-man who, while on a job, discovers that one of his targets is his wife. Unable to go through with it, he then has to protect both her and himself from his employers.

What VFX was there in the film?
Most of the VFX was un-planned (a result the director/co-producer/vfx supervisor being the same person).
One sequence involved putting a car back into a number of shots, because we had to go back and do some more shooting, and the car was unavailable (okay, it’d been scrapped…)

Before

After

There were a few day-for-night shots (we did know about these ones before!)

Before

After

A lot of the VFX was relatively simple clean-up work… When going through the cut of one scene that we shot at the end of a 21-hour day (9am - 6am), there were so many points where there was a light visible, or someone had left a gun propped up in the background.
Then there were a few shots where an already-existing effect needed enhancing slightly. There are a few bullet-hit shots where the original effect looked really feeble, so we beefed it up in post…

What did you learn from this film?
Not to do two (or more) jobs at the same time! On the non-VFX side, the film really suffered from not having a dedicated producer, as both Ed (the DoP/co-producer) and I were both far too busy with our ‘main’ jobs. Also, as a director who knew he was going to be doing the VFX later, I took the (unforgivable) attitude that we could “fix it in post” far too many times on the shoot.
Also, I realised quite how essential good preparation is (something that I’m very much carrying on to Roy’s Odyssey at the moment). We had nothing that gave a huge problem because of this, but there were too many things that we didn’t even think about until after we finished shooting, and we were lucky things didn’t go far more wrong than they did.

If anyone has any questions on any of this, or want me to go into any more detail, please do ask - I’ll either try to answer in the comments or I may dedicate a whole future post to it.

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