Okay, okay. You may have strong feelings about fan films. Me? I am kind of up in the air as I have seen some shockers and I have seen some amazing work. Either way though they always involve people who are doing it for the sheer love of making something that they believe in and are willing to get off their bums and give it a shot, and I always give that two thumbs up.
Check out the recent Half Life 2 fanfilm “Escape From City 17 – Part One” which has been doing the rounds recently. Short, sweet, focused and with very passable VFX all made for $500. As far as I know most of the hero 3D models are meshes straight from the game. The match-moving is top notch which opens up a lot of possibilities for set-extensions. If you have solid tracking, suddenly you aren’t limited by what you see. Having said that, the locations were well chosen and more importantly, the whole thing captures the atmosphere of Half Life 2. I will go on record as saying that Half Life 2 has been the most immersive game experience I have yet had. So much care was taken with everything, from the look to the models, to the texturing and, possibly the most overlooked factor, the sound.
So, given that fanfilms can be great, why not volunteer? As an aspiring compositor I would urge us all to consider helping out, as fanfilms can provide the most important thing . . . footage. Chances are you don’t have the ability to set up a greenscreen shoot for your own stuff, rustle up costumes and actors and make all the 3D props. By being involved in a team, suddenly you have access to ready made elements and you can concentrate on your compositing. Another thing is that unless you are really lucky and working with something like DigiBeta or Red camera, you will be working on crummy DV footage. Most likely crummy DV footage with badly lit greenscreen with the default sharpening filter on the camera left on. Think of this as a test though . . . if you can develop the chops to get decent keys from this footage, when you graduate to film you will be laughing! 
The downside is that you have to spend a bit of time weeding out the crummy projects. If they don’t have strong leadership and focus, keeping everyone on the same page, they can become a dismal timesuck with nothing to show at the end of it. I am not against cutting your losses if things go downhill, but do your homework first so you are not leaving people in the lurch if you decide to leave.
Sooooo, having said all that I just signed up for a fanfilm named Star Wars: The Forgotten. I found out about it on a thread talking about online collaborations and the problems facing people and I contacted the director, Douglas, wishing him good luck. We exchanged a few emails but at the time I was working on ‘Australia’ as well as teaching at Uni, so I had literally no spare time.
Come February and work is thin on the ground everywhere in Australia, so along with upping my Maya skills I thought I might check in and see how it is going. Seems that it is full steam ahead and Douglas even has an old VFX maestro on board: George Muhs who worked on VFX for such films as “The Hunt for Red October”, “Robocop”, “Ghostbusters 2″, “Scrooged” and ”Earth Girls Are Easy”. Not a bad pedigree!
I had my first online meeting on Monday after downloading my footage and checking all the design docs and I have to say I was impressed with the organisation. I feel confident that the people running the project have it sorted and that is a big thing when it comes to fan films. I have checked my shots and done a few quick tests in Shake and while the footage is certainly not perfect, I reckon we can get something decent out of it.
Maybe the film will be great, maybe it won’t. I don’t know at this stage, but I can tell you that I am busy honing my compositing skills and I have already met some interesting new people who I might get to work with again in the future, so it is all good!
Check out:
RvD2: Ryan vs. Dorkman 2 – a very impressive lightsaber battle with FX contirbutions by our own Daniel Broadway
http://www.theforce.net/fanfilms/
>> UPDATE <<
Whoah! I just recalled that one of my first exercises in compositing was a Star Wars Lightsaber duel (surely most nerds would say the same thing) in Combustion. I ordered the DV Garage Composite Toolkit and the Composite Toolkit Companion and followed their excellent tutorials to produce this wonder. Unfortunately the tutorial was for After Effects, so I had to convert almost every step to make it work in Combustion, but I sure learned a lot! To be honest, it still doesn’t look too bloody bad for someone’s first go at real compositing
Of course, at the time, I had no real idea what I was doing. Now it all seems so straightforward and obvious, but back then it was some kind of arcane magic that you could make cool stuff happen!
.
Tags: Compositing, Ramblings
Don’t forget RVD2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RATMJ8JH1qo
Composited in After Effects. I know, I worked on it. (shameless plug)
Ha! Plug away my friend
I recall seeing that film a while ago and was (still am) impressed by the camera shots and VFX in that. I remember there was a breakdown somewhere showing some of the FX like the lightsaber being dragged through the water (using a heated up crowbar or something). Please post a link if you know where it is.
If anyone else reading has worked on a fanfilm/student/indie project, feel free to post the link here. It is always interesting to see what other people are doing and find out how they overcame (or not) the myriad of issues that face no-budget film-makers.
Hey Matt, this is the link you are thinking of…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7aJvR0hX1k
I didn’t work on that shot, but it is very neat.
I worked on two shot which required a CGI lightsaber, both involving stunts which would have been impossible or dangerous to shoot for real.
The first shot I did was the one of Dorkman kicking his saber hilt against the wall with his foot, which then bounces off the wall and into his hand. Obviously, this would have been near impossible to shoot for real, so I built a CG replia of the prop in 3ds max. I then tracked the footage and animated the CG hilt to do the required movement.
The other shot I did was when Dorkman’s saber hits him in the forehead during the force tug of war. Obviously, it would have been painful to actually throw a metal rod at his head. :p
Here is a good luck at the CG replica I made for the film…
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v58/PixelMagic/dorkman_saber.jpg
You almost may already know this, but you can by a Behind the Scenes DVD which is really interesting from the official site…
http://www.ryan-w.com/ryanvsdorkman/merch.html
I get no commission, I’m just spreading the word.
Yep, that was the video I was thinking of. I don’t know . . . depending on the actor it might be necessary that you throw stuff at their head ;P
Very cool work overall and again, it just goes to show what can be done these days by people with a bit of get up and go and a home computer. When I was a teenager there is no way we could do stuff like this. I was using Deluxe Paint to make animated sprites and Imagine 2.0 to make shiny reflective balls on chess sets!
I ran across this site today: http:/www.wreckamovie.com , and it reminded me of this post, so I thought I’d come back here and share it. In short, it’s a site that is attempting to use a crowdsourcing model for movie making.
Thanks for the blog, Matt. I’ve been enjoying it!
Cheers, thanks for that Bryan. Someone posted a link to that recenlty somewhere but I forgot about it. Time to go check it out!