Leap

Backstory:
I've completed three independent feature films, plus countless shorts and adverts. My first feature was a no budget slasher I shot in 2007 for a budget of $600 called "Wulf". It played a few festivals and then I buried it, considering it my trunk novel. In 2009, I turned my back on horror and decided to be the Christian I considered myself to be. I still wanted to make movies and had an idea to combine parkour and the last days into a movie that was ultimately called "Leap".

I shot it in 2009 on MiniDV (a Canon ZR800) for a budget of $200. I spent three months teaching my actors parkour and they did most of their own stunts. It screened at a local theater and we sold 200 DVDs. Let's be honest though- it's bad. My heart was in the right place, wanting to share what I was finding in my own personal Bible studies with the rest of the world, but it was poorly executed.

In 2010, I made the sequel, "Leap: Rise of the Beast". It was the first feature film shot on a Canon Rebel T2i and we only had the kit lens. The budget was $2000 and continued the story I began in the first film: a group of college kids trying to save the world while the Vatican hunts them down. My goal was to make a Christian version of the Bourne series. We had a theatrical screening for it, sold 100 DVDs and then I stuck it on YouTube in 2012 and it now has over 1.5 million views and has made over $10,000 over the past ten years. Most of that money has gone toward purchasing better equipment because hey, tax write-offs

Immediately after Leap 2 came out, I wanted to do something different before finishing the story. So I wrote a supernatural Christian thriller but everyone kept begging me to do Leap 3 next instead. I caved and wrote the script called "Leap: Revelation". It picked up in the middle of Leap 2, followed a new parkour crew and took us to the end of the world. The only thing stopping me from shooting it was the financing. I figured that I'd need $20,000 to do the movie on a "low-budget" while paying for actors and a few key crew members. Unfortunately I never raised the funds.

The past ten years saw me being homeless, getting a dream job as a VFX supervisor, losing everything I owned (including my dog) in a house fire, rebuilding my life, getting a wife, a new dog, and moving back to Montana. Now I run my own production studio called Pyro Studios and I feel like I'm at a point where I want to revisit this material again. I've grown a lot as a person and as a filmmaker and finally feel like now is the time. I've been keeping a production journal on my computer and I'll be sharing that here.

I hope it is useful and I welcome you all along this journey.

-Chris

Ten Years Difference

 

[Chris Tempel]

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

I’ve been working on this project for two weeks and I haven’t done a journal entry yet. Shame on me. In a nutshell, I’m back working on Leap 3 again. It started two weeks ago when my wife and I talked about how I could feasibly make Leap 3 now. So much has changed in the world, and all of my actors have moved on to other things. Partially inspired by the Matrix 4 and Scream 5, we're toying with making the movie a requel.

I spent the past two weeks working on a vomit draft of the script, mostly to feel out the characters and start discovering the story. I ended up with almost 30 pages before deciding to start over. This morning, I started working on the story again using the Beat Board feature in Final Draft 11.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Sunday, April 17, 2022

It’s been a month since I started on this project. I’ve got all my index cards on the Beat Board, I’m 15 pages into the new draft and I’m much happier with how the story is developing, even if the progress is slow. The story is a bit slower paced than the second film, but that’s partially because this is a requel. It’s not a reboot, and it’s not a sequel. It’s both of those combined.

I’m trying to write this with a little bit of the mindset I had when doing Leap 2. The mindset where I’m not quite sure how we will pull all of this off, but I have faith that we’ll manage. It’s interesting to reflect on myself - I’m not the happy go lucky, naive filmmaker anymore. I’m much more of a realist, and much more aware of how the real world operates. My spiritual journey over the last ten years has been one of immense change and that is now reflected in my writing and filmmaking. That said, I feel like I need to get back to that place of naive. That place where I don’t know what’s not possible. If I can do that, then maybe this movie has a chance.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Monday, April 25, 2022

Today has been an incredible day. First, the temperature hit into the 60’s, which means Spring is here! I woke up this morning, kissed my wife goodbye as she left for work and then I started working on my script for Leap. I finished re-writing the portions I had already done before and now I’m sitting at 36 pages. I feel like the pacing is good, things are really going to start building soon.

After writing for a bit, I finished a video for a client and uploaded it for him to look at. He called me, we talked, and planned some revisions.

Next I changed into workout clothes and took a run over to a park a little over half a mile away. I worked out on the playground and ran back. I’m doing a Spartan race in a few weeks, so I’m trying to get fit.

When I got home, I took my dog out to play frisbee and we enjoyed the warm weather. Getting back, I cranked out a video for another client and got that uploading. And now I’m sitting here on the couch about to throw on a show and do more writing.

It’s amazing how much can get done when you don’t have to work a day job. I really like my line of work.

This is still an "end times" movie that features my views, but it's a personal story at heart. When I did the first movie, my goal was to tell the story from a personal, rather than political view. I broke that rule with Leap 2, making the Vatican out to be the bad guys. This time, we still say the Vatican is evil, but the bad guys are actually based on what we've seen with COVID and politics, as well as what I can read in the source material for the film (a book that means much to most Christians).

 

[Chris Tempel]

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

I mentioned not having a day job. Two years ago I was able to move back to Montana with my new wife and new dog. COVID had just hit, we'd just married, and I was let go from my VFX Supervisor job due to the shutdowns. I had a friend back here in Montana who's family owned a recovery clinic and they needed a front desk person. I apparently have a good personality, and it provided an excuse to get out of Idaho and back to where I love.

After a year and half at the clinic, I was over it. I do enjoy a drink now and then, and somebody like me doesn't wake up and say "Gee, I want to be a receptionist for the rest of my life". I think my friends who own the clinic also knew this and in December 2021 they let me go. Being a good employee doesn't come naturally to me. I always think I can do things better. So I took my final paycheck and formed Pyro Studios, LLC. I've loved fire since I was kid, I think it's very beautiful and I want my work to reflect that. I went down the bank, got an account and Pyro Studios was in business.

My first client came from my church. He's a financial advisor and wanted me to help him improve his weekly update videos he was doing via some conference service. I spent a few hours consulting with him, gave him advice on equipment to purchase and showed him some better software. A week later, he called me back and asked if I wanted to produce his weekly videos so he does't have to mess with it. The guy is in his 70's and money was no object, so every Monday I shoot a video for him and upload it to his YouTube channel which I manage.

With these weekly update videos, I really only need to do one big project a month that takes up maybe 3-5 days of my time in order to make ends meet. So far I've done a few "About Us" videos for local business and even got flown to Chicago for another that I just finished the edit on. The rest of my time, I've been spending on Leap. Working on the story and script. Researching equipment, locations. Getting set up with the Montana Film Commission. Looking into tax credits. I can honestly say I'm happier now than I've been in a long time.

Now that I can focus more on creative projects Leap, I decided to start working on the opening sequence. It's all CG with voice over. I had attempted something like this ten years ago using Element 3D and it just look bad. My time as a VFX sup has taught me techniques and methods that will actually allow me to pull this off. Blender is still my 3D software of choice and I'm using that to create the sequence.

While I cut my narrative work in Avid, I do use Resolve for client gigs because of the fast turn arounds. I also conform and online my narrative work in Resolve, so it's a key part of my pipeline. I'm assembling this CG sequence in Resolve because I don't have to export any offline yet this way. Once I have actual footage from the film and am ready to start cutting, I'll be over in Avid land, but for now, this is working out great.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

The opening CG animation is 717 frames long and takes my Z800 18 hours to render. And I have to render the sequence twice so I can fade between a regular earth and one with bloody oceans. I could composite this in Blender and do it in one go, but I'm more comfortable doing it in Nuke. I'm rendering 1920x806 multilayer .exr files. The layers consist of a background, the moon, the earth, atmosphere and a sun placeholder.

In Nuke, I bring in the .exr sequence and pull out the layers with shuffle nodes before merging them together as I like. Working this way gives me control over each element's color and blur so things composite exactly the way I want it.

Finally, I'm tracking the sun placeholder and replacing it with a flare gizmo (think a free version of Optical Flares for Nuke) that I can keyframe the intensity of to fit the shot.

I reordered some temporary VO as if I was the main actor since I haven't started casting yet. It sets the tone for what the movie will be. Once I cast the part of Blake, I'll have him redo the VO in his voice.

All in all, it's coming together well!

Side note - spent the past few days re-reading the entire production journal for Leap: Rise of the Beast it's got me all kinds of excited. I really had a great time shooting that film and I'm hoping to recapture that experience.

 

[Chris Tempel]

The first render pass finished last night and is looking great! Today I setup the second pass for "blood" and rendered a single frame to check it. This *should* be the final comp for the shot when the second pass finishes tomorrow. I'll just replace the single frame Read node with the animation and it should just work. Fingers crossed.

If you've never looked at a node graph before, I'll walk you through it. Unlike layer based compositing where you literally stack one image on top of another in layers, and each layer contains effects for that layer, nodes work by building out a literal flowchart. Under the hood, this is actually what After Effects does, but then hides it with layers. With nodes, you take an image, do something to it, and composite it on top of another image using a Merge node.

In the shot above, the gray node in the upper right is my 1st Read node. It's a multi-layer exr file from Blender. Almost immediately, it's branched off into different segments and the multiple layers are brought out with the dark purple Shuffle nodes. The large colored blocks are called backdrops and are just a way to group and organize the composite.

In the section called "Blood", there is another gray Read node. This is/will be the second render pass with the oceans turned to blood. I shuffle out the ocean and merge it on top of the regular version. To the right, you can see a group called Blood Ctrl. This is a tool I built - Nuke is great for building your own tools - that uses a noise texture to animate the blood on in an organic way. I control it with a Color Corrector node by playing with the brightness and contrast. This animated, controlled noise texture is shuffled into an alpha channel which is being used as a mask on the Merge node. It's like a more elegant version of "track mattes" in AE.

Finally, way down in the bottom right, hidden offscreen, is a Write node that saves the entire composite back to disk. For my testing, I'm using a png image sequence (never EVER render a movie file, if your computer crashes, you have to start the render over). For the final render, I'll be using dpx.

The advantages of using nodes is numerous. First, there's no precomps. I can see the entire shot at once. Again, there is zero need for precomps with nodes! Second, it's easy to reuse elements in a comp without bringing in another copy of it to a timeline. The computer reads the information once and you just pipe it around. The improves resource management. Also, a node comp is so much easier to come back to months down the road. Since I'm doing this shot before I've even finished the script or shot a frame of footage, if I decide to change something a year from now, it'll be easy to come back in and figure out what I did.

So that's my primer on nodes and why we're using Nuke for "Leap".

 

[Nate North]

You're on the right track. Node based workflow is really the best way to go. I think that most people find it very counterintuitive, and end up getting scared off, but once you get over the initial frustration curve and understand it, it's actually more intuitive than anything else, and as you said, easier to read later on when you come back to a project. Really, in general, modular design and logic is the wave of the future.

Good job setting up your composite! Davinchi Resolve actually features node based workflow, and is a really great primary editing program. Most people that use it don't even realize it's there, but it's incredibly useful.

On the audio side, I'd also recommend that you try out the demo of Izotope Ozone. It can boost your audio clarity by about 15% across the entire film with a few clicks. They also have a product called RX, which is useful in surgical repair of issues like wind noise on microphones, and other unwanted sounds picked up during recording.

 

[Chris Tempel]

You're on the right track. Node based workflow is really the best way to go. I think that most people find it very counterintuitive, and end up getting scared off, but once you get over the initial frustration curve and understand it, it's actually more intuitive than anything else, and as you said, easier to read later on when you come back to a project. Really, in general, modular design and logic is the wave of the future.

Good job setting up your composite! Davinchi Resolve actually features node based workflow, and is a really great primary editing program. Most people that use it don't even realize it's there, but it's incredibly useful.

On the audio side, I'd also recommend that you try out the demo of Izotope Ozone. It can boost your audio clarity by about 15% across the entire film with a few clicks. They also have a product called RX, which is useful in surgical repair of issues like wind noise on microphones, and other unwanted sounds picked up during recording.

I first got into nodes when I was hired as a VFX sup for a documentary series. With what the director was wanting to do, I started researching how Hollywood does things and set out to replicate the workflow, including adopting Nuke. I've spent a year and a half screwing around with Fusion (standalone and Resolve) and making tutorials for YouTube with it, but I just prefer Nuke at the end of the day.

That said, if I were giving advice to an new filmmaker, I'd tell them to get Resolve because it covers the entire post pipeline seamlessly.

 

[indietalk]

-Chris

Ten Years Difference
View attachment 2414

Cool to see your journey, all while being an IndieTalk member!

 

[Chris Tempel]

My blood red ocean render finished and looks great! I dropped it into it's place in Nuke and everything works well - except for one bit: My noise texture that drives the transition effect is a flat, 2D image. The earths that I'm fading between are round and rotating. So the shot doesn't look right. Five minutes ago, my plan was to go back into Blender and do the transition in the shader settings, for the earth, but then it would all be baked in with no ability to adjust the timing later without another 20 hour render.

As I was just sitting down to write this update, I had an idea: Apply a noise texture to the earth and render that as a pass. Should only take a few hours and then I can use that to drive the effect in Nuke, changing the timings as needed. I'll report back with what I find.

Script-wise, I'm sitting pretty at 40 pages. I'm worried it might be too slow, but I'm going finish this draft and see where we come out before reworking things.

 

[Nate North]

You can map that noise image onto a sphere in element 3d inside AE, then use a temp output from nuke as a semi transparent overlayer to align your spherized noise layer to your scale and spin from the nuke output you already did, then use the AE output layer as your noise layer in nuke for the final render. That will render much faster, you can probably get it done in a half hour.

 

[Chris Tempel]

You can map that noise image onto a sphere in element 3d inside AE, then use a temp output from nuke as a semi transparent overlayer to align your spherized noise layer to your scale and spin from the nuke output you already did, then use the AE output layer as your noise layer in nuke for the final render. That will render much faster, you can probably get it done in a half hour.

Cool idea! I haven't sat down to do it yet, but I'll probably just use the Eevee render engine in Blender which is just as fast as Element and will be easier since I don't have to align anything.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Small update for today. There's a massive earthquake scene at the end of the first act and I've been thinking a lot about how I want to pull this off. Just for fun this morning, I put my cinema camera on a tripod and locked down all the axis to the point where they just barely moved. I set the lens to 105mm (the most telephoto I can go), framed up a shot with multiple depth planes, hit record and started violently shaking the tripod head handle. Having all the movement almost locked down damped things nicely and it actually worked! Since the camera is really moving, there's a slight bit of parallax and since my camera has a global shutter, there was no JELLO!

I brought the shot into Resolve, added eight layers of sound to it and it looks great. I rendered and saved the test to add to a future BTS video. My next test will involve an actor or two doing the scene like in the movie. Pretty cool though how an old school effect can work well and doing it in camera with this particular camera yields a better result than doing it in post.

I bought this camera (Blackmagic Design URSA Mini 4K) in 2016 because of the global shutter and because it was a camera I could grow with. For the first couple of years, I shot at just 1080 in ProRes 444. More and more recently, I've started shooting narratives in RAW at 4K, especially since I can bring back highlights. The more I'm messing with RAW recording, the more I'm thinking I'll shoot this movie in 4K RAW. I have two 128GB Cfast cards that gives me 22 minutes each when I'm recording at RAW 4:1. So I'd have 44 minutes total. When I shot the last Leap film (Leap: Rise of the Beast) on the Canon Rebel T2i, I had one 16GB card that gave me 48 minutes of record time. I never needed more than that for a single day, so it worked great. If I can shoot a similar ratio this time, I shouldn't need to offload cards, but I'll have my laptop on set just in case. I really need to do a short film soon to test all this out.

 

[Chris Tempel]

53 pages. It's been emotionally draining as I wrote a huge argument, death scene, and a funeral. Crazy how it affects you in real life.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Thursday, May 26, 2022
Things are still moving forward. The script is progressing and I might have my first cast member. I reconnected with an actor from that last Leap movie recently on Instagram. His name is Walt and he played one of the bad guys back then. I only worked with him for two days back then but he did a nice job. Anyway, he's a Christian now, retired, and looks totally different that how he did back then. We were talking and I told him about this new film and just asked if he'd have any interest in working on it. Short story long, he's excited to check out the script when it's done.

I've been thinking a lot about the two leads in this film, Blake and Liz. They're college age and reconnect with each other while Blake is home on break from school. The casting for these two roles will be pivotal. The actors will need chemistry with each other, and they need to be fit since they'll be learning parkour. This morning, I was doing some research online for a potential client I want to pitch to and they have a gallery of their employees with photos and a short bio. So I was scrolling, looking to see who might look good on camera for the video I want to pitch. I ran across a girl who has the right look, is the right age, likes ju-jitsu, hopes to be on Ninja Warrior someday, enjoys acting, wants to be in a movie, and loves God! No joke, it's all right there in her bio. I told my wife and she didn't believe me, so I showed her.

I'm going to pitch using this girl in the video so I can see how we might work together. It would be nice to have someone on board early on so I can start tailoring the script to them and so we can start on the parkour training. We'll see what happens.

 

[Chris Tempel]

 

[directorik]

An interesting read, Chris.

I've played with doing a Christian movie or series for decades. I was on writing staff of Christian based "Twilight Zone" type show a few years back but the production fell through before the pilot was shot. I have two feature scripts finished.

I'm following along your journey.

 

[Chris Tempel]

An interesting read, Chris.

I've played with doing a Christian movie or series for decades. I was on writing staff of Christian based "Twilight Zone" type show a few years back but the production fell through before the pilot was shot. I have two feature scripts finished.

I'm following along your journey.

Sorry to hear the show never went anywhere. I had a similar experience where I worked on a science show for kids that was Christian based. We completed a 9 episode first season and then the project got canned and never saw distribution.

 

[Chris Tempel]

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Music.

I am not a musician, but I can hear an eight count. I know a few guitar chords and I can pluck out a tune or two on the piano, but that's it. I can't sing. I can't read sheet music. Yet somehow I take an active role in the music for my films.

It started in my high school video production class back in 2002-2003. I would edit a 1-3 minute project by cutting the picture first and then finding some song to drop in. Time after time, I found that my natural editing rhythm would sync up with beats in the song we'd rip from a CD and drop in. I made a short film for my senior project and ripped soundtracks to drop in as this was the only way I knew to get music for my movie.

A year later, I decided I needed a way to get music that was my own and purchased Sony Acid Music Studio. It had something like a thousand loops and I learned how to make loop-based music using this technique. I "scored" a bunch of my short films this way and honestly thought that I was doing it like Robert Rodriguez (You all know what I mean )

In 2007, I made my first feature film and I knew that I needed original score but had no idea how to do it, yet knew I'd figure something out. I went to see TMNT at the theater with a buddy and a guy I knew from high school was working behind the counter. We started talking and I told him about my upcoming movie and he told me he just got done going to school for film scoring and asked if he could work on it. I agreed and just like that, I had my very own composer!

Being classically trained, my composer could read music and did his scoring in Finale, which is a notation based software. Once I finished the rough cut, I gave him a DVD and he guided me through the process, leading our first spotting session. He would compose by writing notation in Finale, export out an .mp3, and email it to me to drop into the movie. Once the music was finalized, he created MIDI files and had another friend of his export the MIDI using real sampled instruments. For the B-Grade slasher that this was, the process worked out fine.

In 2009, I was on feature number two. Another buddy who was into filmmaking showed me his new iMac and was giving me a tour of Garage Band. I thought that it was the greatest thing that I had seen and set out to see if there was a Windows equivalent. That's when I found Mixcraft. It was in version 4.0 at the time, but it looked to have all the same features as Garage Band. I found some hack workarounds that let me use the computer keyboard as a music keyboard and started fiddling with creating actual score.

A week later, I was at Best Buy and they had an M-Audio USB keyboard for $99. I purchased it and went to town experimenting. My buddy, who introduced me to Garage Band, he liked it so much that he went out and bought the same keyboard. I watched a few YouTube videos on music theory and convinced myself that I could score my film.

^- My editing and music setup from 2009, running Vegas Pro 7 -^

I ended up doing all the original score, save for one track, by myself in Mixcraft 4. A lot of my tracks were loop based as Mixcraft had some nice loops, but I did a lot of keyboard based scoring as well. My composer from the first film did do one track for me, and he used Mixcraft too after I had turned him onto it. Honestly, my tracks were not the best, but I had fun doing it, and it allowed me to move quickly.

By 2010, I was on feature number three. By this time, I had gotten a second computer just for creating music and my composer wanted to try doing the score himself again, soI let him. The working relationship that we came up with was that I'd create an eight note long melody or motif to establish mood, and he would create a track based on my idea. This was by far my favorite way to work as I felt that I got to be creative in the music without having to really know what I was doing and it could still sound great. Since we both used Mixcraft, I could send him project files, and he could send them back to me. Eventually, we brought on another friend who used Fruity Loops (now FL Studio) to do percussion. The two guys did a great job and I gave them their own commentary on the DVD since, aside from me, they were more involved with the production than anybody else.

^- Composer 1 at work on my system -^

^- Both of my music guys -^

Fast forward to today as I'm working on the new Leap movie. I've upgraded Mixcraft to version 8, and now I can import video to my Mixcraft timeline and write directly to that! I also have a new keyboard, the M-Audio Oxygen 49, since my first was destroyed in a house fire. Since I know live out in Montana, I'm currently doing the music for the opening scene I'm working on by myself. I still don't know all the nuances about music and how it works, but I know what I like and I'm trying to trust my gut. My current process is to leave Mixcraft open in the background while I'm working in Blender or Nuke and as I wait for caches, bakes and renders, I noodle around the keyboard. If I find something I like, I flip over to Mixcraft and record it. I've toyed with learning Cubase or something else, but just like with Blender, Mixcraft is what I know and I don't feel like learning a new tool.

I spent a few hours yesterday going through my music notes (no pun intended) was able to piece together something that I think sounds really nice and sets the vibe for this opening sequence. I really wanted to pay homage to the first two Leap films, so there's hints of theme from them. It's not overly complicated, but with the instruments I'm using, it works. I had my wife listen and she thought it reminded her a bit of the opening of "Heroes", so I guess that's a compliment. I'll be sharing the intro video sometime this week or next, so I'll be sure to post it here.

A problem I'm having right now though is that it sounds great on my computer system with my sub and good monitors, but it's not sounding so great on my laptop or phone when I watch it on YouTube. I thought it might be my levels, but they're set to -6 for dialogue and -10 -12 for music.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

^- Scoring in Mixcraft 8 for the new Leap -^