FORGE: A Feature Film by 500 Cuts

When you work on big, multi-layered project like a movie, you hit several major finishing points… kind of like the end of “Return of the King.” Pardon the dork movie reference (as opposed to a movie dork reference which would be something from Truffaut), but it totally fits. You arrive at a number of stages where you could call the movie “over.” But unlike “Return of the King” I’m not adding additional endings, I’m making technical adjustments.

After the first completion, the movie is watchable for 85% of the people out there. That is to say that 85% of people wouldn’t notice any difference if you made fixes. But you make fixes anyway. Then you hit a spot where 90% of people wouldn’t notice, then 95%. But you keep tweaking the movie, you know why? Because all of your friends – other writers and filmmakers, the people whose opinions really matter – are the people who fall in the 98% and above category!

But I’m “finished” enough to book a screening!  I’m having lunch with Seth on Thursday so I’ll let you all know what I can work out with him.  I’m sure it’ll be a few weeks so we have time to promote it, but it’ll be great to get everyone together.  Cast and crew will be in attendance!  We’ll see the movie at the Clinton Street, then have a wrap party at Dots.  Sound good?

I’ll also be posting some “before and afters” over the next few days to show a little bit of the process.  And check out TheFORGEProject on Facebook.  Become a fan!

VFX plate before

Finished VFX frame grab.

Spring time is rapidly approaching. In seemingly no time at all, almost a year has flown by since we completed principle photography on Forge. As the director of photography, the brunt of my time was spent on the film in the pre-production and production phases. Basically, I got ready to shoot, did tests,  had discussions, and then dove into production. After the 12 short days of principle photography, my job was largely done. About a week after the shoot, there was a fairly finalized cut of the film, but it lacked many of the final pieces including sound, effects, color correction, titles, music, and a plethora of other elements.  Since then, I’ve worked on several other projects but throughout this time I have seen the movie come together and inch closer and closer to it’s finished form. A large part of what makes a film cohesive happens after the fact in the post production phase. In the case of Forge, there is a pretty significant visual effects component to the film. It’s been really interesting to see the effects come together, and to see various shots in-context with their associated effects elements. On set, Luke touching thin air has now become Luke touching an object on-screen, a blank background plate is now filled with an element, and many key pieces of the film have taken shape. It’s been a tremendous learning experience, and I can’t wait to see the finished product.

I’m ticking shots off the list! Feels good that the movie is coming together. I’m doing my best to get all the effects shots filled in just so there’s a complete version of the movie by the end of year, even if many of the effects shots get replaced in the long run.

The locked date for my sabbatical presentation is November 18th at 4:45 in Room 263 at the Art Institute of Portland, 1122 NW Davis. The talk will go for 45 minutes with Q&A to follow. If the Q&A period runs over, we will move to 364 to finish up. Hope to see you there!

A couple days ago, I set an internal/personal goal of finishing the movie by September 20th.  I also set a goal of learning the full production workflow for visual effects.  Those two goals are butting heads right now.

I have a handful of very talented people helping me out, but they’re also very busy.  That makes everything take longer because every practical tweak or conceptual alteration takes weeks to implement since the schedules never seem to be in sync.  I was really hoping one or two people would take ownership of the complicated shots to build their portfolio, but that’s a lot to ask with all the other opportunities that come up for hard-working visual effects artists in Portland.

But I’ve found inspiration in District 9.  So well made.  Just goes to show where perseverance and a great idea gets you in this industry.

So now I go into zero distraction mode to get this project together.  Gotta build a priority list and stick to it.  As I’ve said before, it’s hard to focus on one thing when there’s so much other stuff to do.  But that’s all there is to it at this point.  Nothing tricky.  Just make the list and check off the items one by one.

I’m pushing forward to get the movie in good enough shape to submit to some of the bigger festivals.  I’m not optimistic about my chances, but I like to think of rejection as proof that I tried.

P.S. Don’t say “industry.”

Things are going really well on the movie so far, but man, the clock is ticking!  I have about 10% of the visual effects shots completed.  Of course, 80% of them are simple screen replacements so they’re not hard, just numerous!

In other news, I recently had coffee (I don’t drink coffee!) with my friend of 15 years, Joe Malina.  We hung out pretty much daily back in ‘96, then I got a girlfriend and screwed that all up.  Nevertheless, we met while taking classes at The Northwest Film Center, and made a few small projects together.  One of which was a no-dialog short shot on 16mm about a guy dealing with loneliness after a recent breakup.  It was Joe’s concept, and we hashed it out together over a burrito at La Sirenitas (the Siren, get it?) back before they got huge. It’s still one of my favorite shorts.   Those were really good times.

The guy who acted in it, David Rolfe, is now the head of broadcast at the globally dominant ad agency, Crispin, Porter, Bogusky.  And the guy who lived in the apartment in which we shot it is now a chef instructor at the school where I work, The Art Institute of Portland.  It’s funny because the culinary program just started there, and I haven’t see the apartment guy, Dave McIntyre, in about 12 years.  Now Joe tells me he works where I work!  That’s classic Portland.

Anyway, Joe is a colorist for film and video.  He trained up at Downstream back in the day, but now lives in Austin, TX and works there and in Dallas.  He was in Portland to visit his wife’s family and looked me up.  It was like we hadn’t missed a day.  What a great feeling to have old friends turn up, and you still have stuff to talk about!

Thanks for checking in.  More as it develops.

I knew from the outset that I would be stepping well out of my comfort zone on this project.  That is the sole reason for this film’s existence!  I wanted to push the boundaries of what I’m capable of learning in a few months.  How much information can I process and retain?

If you’ve heard Alexander Pope’s famous quote, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…” then you know where I am right now.  I have taken in a lot of information in many areas of computer generated visual effects, but not ALL of the info in any specific area.  So I’m dangerous because I don’t have what I need to succeed in any one of the many facets of CG, but I’m still expecting to see the end result when I render!

CG is like a home theater system:  It’s only as good as its weakest component.  Modeling, lighting, shading (i.e. surface texturing), simulating, match-moving… all these things need to be quality in order for the effect to work.  My problem is that I’m not taking it step-by-step.  I’m trying to throw dashes of each thing in and hope the soup turns out.  Sorry… I promised building analogies…  It’s like I’m framing, dry-walling, and painting a room a square foot at a time and wondering why the house doesn’t look like a house, yet.

It’s ironic (sadly so) that I’m going through this since I’m a teacher.  I build classes so cumulative knowledge builds up over the course of several weeks.  How many times have students asked me a phase five question in phase two and I answered, “Don’t worry about that, yet?”  Many times.  So many times that I’m numb to it, I guess.  Am I above my own advice?  No is the final answer.  I need to take satisfaction in smaller bites.  When I’ve achieved complete results in one area, then I’ll move on to the next.  That’s the goal now.  Wait for the final result instead of slapping the half-baked parts together and getting disappointed.

Pope is also famous for the quote about watches and opinions.   When it’s all said-and-done, my watch is the only one from which I read the time.  So what’s the rush?

Here’s Mike Gibson’s quick concept render for the octahedron in scene 42.  The idea is that the tech is airborne (from phase 2), and the system no longer needs the helmet to communicate (phase 3), so Paul (Luke Clements) is able to think up a simple shape and the tech forms that shape seemingly out of thin air.  Paul chooses an octahedron because it represents the sodium chloride molecule that he remembers from basic chemistry.  He remembers salt because he’s a chef.  After successfully communicating the image to the system, Paul then thinks of something for which he feels very strongly.  This is a key turning point in the story.

Paul imagines an octahedron

A week ago my good friend Dan Herrera stopped by and we (he) devised a front end for the Amazon cloud computing services some of you have heard me talk about.  When I originally started this project, I knew there would be a lot of rendering.  Not necessarily heavy frames, but a lot of them.  I was ready to build 5 or 6 computers and make a render farm at a cost of about $5000.  Then Dan suggested Amazon’s EC2 service.

It sounded great, but I’m a hardware guy.  I knew I could build 5 computers in a couple hours and was concerned the EC2 would be too hairy to manage easily.  Dan showed up, asked me a few questions, and cranked out some code in Ruby-on-Rails in about 20 mins.  We had a fully functioning setup by the time he left.  Really exciting stuff (for me at least).

In simple terms, this means I can render 24 hours a day for a month on ten computers – 7200 hours of rendering – for under $1000.  That’s way more economical than buying machines and being stuck with them after.  Yeah, I could sell them after, but this is scalable and lower maintenance.  And I don’t have to pay for the electricity!

Stay tuned!

I’m trying to get a few people started on the visual effects since that will take the most trial and error and therefore, the most time.  Here’s a rough I did in photoshop to give Rafael an idea of what I’m thinking for the shot.  This literally took 5 mins, but I think it’ll do a better job describing my concept than a half hour phone call.

Before

After

Co’s pretty much correct on both images below. In an early screen test, we shot at Tom’s apartment and realized that it has some very beautiful natural light. Very often it seems as though there’s an inclination to light everything. Sometimes even though natural light looks beautiful, actually lighting a scene makes more sense for continuity, controlability, etc etc….In the case of Toms apartment, we knew that we wanted to shoot with the natural light, and so we did! We weren’t there for very long, and so continuity wasn’t going to be an issue. There was plenty of light in there, and we were stopped down to a 2.8 on the 50mm lens. An added bonus is a shot where Paul (played by Luke Clements) is in silhouette at the window looking out upon an element that will be added digitally. Coincidentally, the silhouette provides a very clean edge “live matte” that will make it a lot easier for the FX people to add our digital elements in the background.

Co and I scouted the kitchen scene the night before we shot, and I pretty much decided that I would supplement the lighting that already existed in the kitchen- and for the most part, we just went with the existing light! We had two 4′ 4 bank flourescent fixtures with 5000k tubes, and those provided all of the additional light that we needed. We shot the screenshot below on the 50mm, and we were wide open at f1.4. Normally, I try to not shoot wide open because I feel the image loses sharpness, but in this case I felt that the existing light worked so well that we just went with the wide open lens. and brought in light where we could.

In the end, I feel that the scene has exactly the look we wanted, and a nice side effect of using natural/existing light is that the scene looks “un-lit”. As I thought about it, I also realized that the natural light of the apartment provides a nice transition state from the unnatural, manmade kitchen light to the very earthy feel of the cabin.

A small tangent about our camera setup- When shooting film, whether it be stills or motion, the sensitivity of the emulsion is referred to as the ISO. In simple terms, the higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the film is to light. You might say well, so what? Films with a higher ISO tend to yield more “grain” in the final image. With modern film stocks, this has become less of an issue, but often times in the “olden days”, movies were photographed with effective ISO’s as little as 25! To put it into perspective- your mom probably took photos at your 8th birthday party using 400-800 speed film. Now, as time went on so did advances in film but even so, it wasn’t too long ago that motion pictures were still being photographed at 100 ISO. Essentially, this means you need a ton of light to expose your subject! When outdoors, this isn’t so much of a problem since the sun is ridiculously bright, but when you consider lighting a subject that would otherwise be completely black, you really have to pump in the light.

FORGE was shot digitally, but the rules of ISO still apply, and the factors that go into lighting an image captured on film or on digital are exactly the same. Through testing and reading about other experiences, we pretty much surmised that the effective sensitivity of the HVX200 is around 320 ISO. Not too shabby! But here’s the hitch, we weren’t just using the HVX alone- we were taking advantage of the Letus Extreme 35mm adapter. A large part of the “look” of the film is thanks to the 35mm adapter we were using, but it does come at a price. In simple terms, this device allows 35mm still lenses to be mounted on the front of the HVX, that would otherwise have just a fixed lens. Without getting too much into the physics of light and optics that go on inside this adapter (you can read about that HERE) I will just say that it steals a lot of light that would otherwise go into the lens. Long story short? Our 320 ISO camera becomes a 160 ISO camera.

This isn’t always a problem, but it does have to be taken into account ALL of the time. The amount of light needed to get proper exposure is exponentially increased compared to a faster camera. By the way, “faster” in this case means more sensitive to light, “higher ISO” if you will. It’s a constant battle. Bigger lights take more power, and cost more money. In the case of this shoot, we took advantage of using HMI lighting. HMI lights are about 5 times more efficient per-watt than tungsten lights. So, our little 575 watt PAR really pumps out a lot of light for not much power draw- very important when filming at a practical location without the luxury of a big generator.

Please stay tuned for more screen grabs and technical discussions of the scenes!