I’ve been a little disorganised (actually, that should read “busy”) this week, so I haven’t had the time to get the footage from The Last Act 2 (that’s the very low-budget bullet-time shot) ready for today’s breakdown, so I’m going to run through Enter The Zombie instead…

(Final edit: Quicktimes are now working… If you tried them before, you may need to SHIFT-Refresh to get it to grab the new ones… Much smaller this time…)

What’s the film?
Enter The Zombie

Who made it?
It’s officially a Broken Pipe Films film, but that’s more down to the fact that James (Hamer-Morton) is directing it - I’m only involved in the VFX side. It’s being shot (they’re still in the middle of production) in Bristol.

What’s it about?
Zombies. I’ve not read the script or seen much of it, so I can’t give you more than that….

What VFX was there in the film?
James (director/editor) has been doing various bits of the simpler VFX work himself, leaving me with the more complex shots. So far, I’ve completed two shots, and am in the middle of a third. I know there’s at least one more coming…

The most challenging shot I’ve had was a zombie transformation shot. I was given 8 stills of the guy lying on a sofa (seemingly dead) in different states of make-up.

You can see the original stills here (0.65Mb).

I then had to take these and stop the guy from moving all over the place. I think (it was a while ago!) I did this by starting with the end image and patching ‘clean’ sections over it all the way back to the original.

These static ones can be seen here (0.65Mb).

Once I’d got those, I then had to merge between them. The whitening skin and darkening eyes were relatively easy to do - basically a fading in and gradually revealing of the darkened areas. The tricky sections were the two blood streams.

The final shot is here (4.28Mb).

The other shot that’s been finished so far is a shot where someone turns to the camera and then disappears. I was going to do a number of tests of this and let James choose which one he liked best, but he then went and finalled the first one I sent through… (I wasn’t going to complain!)

You can see the final shot of this one here (0.57Mb).

The shot I’m still working on is another zombie transformation shot - this time just of a hand. Here are the two stills I’ve got to blend between (these have already been edited to make them in the same position):

I’ve got this one going somewhere so far - I’ve got one trail of blood (the one coming closest to the camera) looking quite good - just got the rest to do now!

The last shot that I know about so far (the one that I haven’t got yet) is a Matrix-spoof shot - I’ll be given a straight shot, and will have to make it start from black, and the room apear from the falling green charactery-thingies…. I have yet to see the shot, but I’ve got a fair idea of how I’m going to do it…

What did you learn from this film?

Not to let the director do all of the on-set VFX stuff! Not that I had a choice in this one - I was brought on board after they’d started shooting, and it was going on on the other side of the country….

To be honest, I did what I could with what I was given on this. If I’d been on set, I’d have probably gone for persuading them to do the zombie blood shots practically - even if that meant painting out a tube later - at least the blood flows would have looked real.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2005 at 13:45 and is filed under VFX Breakdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.