watch A short comedy: The night of the falling star

[malco]

I have added to the Vimeo folder a couple of "behind the scene" videos:

- a slideshow of BTS pictures: http://vimeo.com/36225151
- a video showing some compositing/ green screen effects: http://vimeo.com/36226461

Thanks again to all of you for your feedback!
j.m

 

[dandevans]

Loving the effects video - the smoke in the "red alert" section was particularly effective I thought! How did you do that?

 

[malco]

Hi dandevans,

Thanks again for the nice words!

To answer your question: The "read alert" scene was essentially built in After Effects by compositing some real footages of "home made" smoke bombs (quite fun but a bit scary too!) that we used on the "space station" set, with some added stock video from a great source of explosive effects: http://www.detonationfilms.com/
The flashing red light was made on set with an halogen spot and a red gel.
For the Color correction (to match the stock footage with the scene) I used Magic Bullet Colorista (but anything would do I guess). Some shadows were added too, using a few feathered masks and a negative Exposure Effect in AE.
But I guess the most time consuming job for this scene was to manually rotoscope the hand that briefly moves on the foreground in order to create a mask that would cover the added stock footage of smoke coming out of the round hatch in the background wall. Hmmm I'm not sure that's quite clear... but without this mask the added smoke layer would appear "on top" of the hand and would give the impression to be on the foreground...

 

[Heisenberg]

Thought it was great:
You managed to pull a quite ambitious project out with flying colors!

The story worked very well IMO (in particular the way the main character tries to find a solution was quite witty and original: Reminds me of McGuiver...in space...) and the photography was fine too: the space part was believable and the back and forth between Space and Earth created an effective rhythm to the whole sequence (and the granny did an excellent job!). Music during the re-entry was quite effective too.

Also, I appreciated you opted for real sets (e.g. the spaceship) rather than overusing CGIs - as seems to be the norm nowadays. On the same line, I liked the "semi-retro" props (e.g. the spacesuit, the "shabby" satellite): it gives a fresh feel while keeping the film unpretentious and .. well just plain fun.

Yeah, well crafted and fun to watch: I hope you'll find an audience for this, it deserves it!

If I may ask, how long did it take you to complete this (pre-prod to end of shoot) and what was your budget?