blog Leap

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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".
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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.
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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 :)
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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
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Five shots completed! I did three easy news reports (actress on green screen). I purchased a motion news background, as well as a news intro bumper from Envato and slapped them together. Here's a comparison of the different news looks I've had in each of these. The first was done completely in Sony Vegas. I built the graphics and background and it looks like garbage. Leap 2 was done in AE, with a still photo I found on Google and a lower third I got from VideoCopilot. A little better, but not great. Then there's this one, comped in Nuke. I need to match her skin tone a bit more to the background, but it's basically done.
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The other two shots I just finished involve an airplane at the end of the film. The first shot is the main characters POV looking up at it flying and the second shot is the POV of the pilot looking down at them. The first shot was easy: purchase a model, light, animate, render and comp. Done! Matting out the plane behind the trees was a matter of increasing the luminance of the blue sky until it matched the clouds, then screwing with a Grade node until I had a nice black and white image, then shuffled that into the mask input of the plane's Merge. The second shot required a bit more creativity. I used my drone to get the perspective of the characters from the plane. Then I reached out to a pilot I know from skydiving and had him take a picture from inside the cockpit looking out the side window. I cleaned up the image in Photoshop and setup a 3D comp in Nuke with a few cards.

One card is pushed way back in 3D space and has the drone shot. The next card is of the image from skydiving buddy, it's just the strut and wing. This card was angled slightly to create some parallax. The final card is of a dirty glass texture to represent the window glass and is the closest to camera. For the 3D camera, I used a Gizmo I found that lets you dial in shaky cam since I wanted to capture the high frequency vibrations from the aircraft. The final effect is actually pretty convincing. Because it was setup in 3D, there's a lot of natural parallax with the strut, wing and glass against the background plate.

This is the second time in the film I've used this type of effect and I really like. Much better than just a typical drone shot.

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A short video update on the VFX for the shot above

And the node graph after implementing the projection mask:
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You'll notice I got lazy and didn't want to roto out the trees, so I used Keylight to create a mask since the trees are green. Shuffled that to an alpha channel, blurred it a bit, and it worked great!

My favorite part about this projection mask approach to coloring the water is that it's almost procedural. I paint one frame, and it updates for the rest. I can also modify the matte at any time, adding or subtracting from it.


And finally a still after all that work:
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Still not finished, but getting much closer!
 
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Anyone else here use Blender for adding CG to their films?

I've been using Blender since 2001, back when the interface was horrible. Anyway, in 2013 I was supervising a four part documentary series and I watched Sean Kennedy's presentation about his use of Blender in Hollywood films.


I instantly fell in love with the idea of using Blender for little things that can help make shot, like birds. I'm not much of a modeler or animator, but I was motivated and set out to make a small flock of birds that could be added to spice up a shot. We used them a lot on the documentary series, and I've tried to sneak them into almost every project I do now, including this film. I ended up sharing them on Blend Swap and thought I'd post them here if anyone else wants to use them.

Blend Swap | Flock of Birds- Fully rigged and animated

Create and Share Blender Assets
blendswap.com blendswap.com

The animation is on an infinite loop. To use them, just set your camera and frame range, then apply linear keyframes to the "Bird Controller" empty. The three birds are parented to the controller and will follow it. Render it out and you're set! They work with Eevee too, so you can render the shots in almost realtime. I did 800 frames yesterday and it was quick.

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Ended up needing to add another step to my VFX workflow. My beast of a computer doesn't like playing back the rendered .exr files from Nuke, so now I'm converting all VFX finals to h.264 and added another track to my timeline where I place these renders. They're only for playback. On the final export of the film, I'll shut that track off and copy my color work down to the .exr sequences of the VFX finals.

Basically, my timeline is setup as follows:
(From the bottom to the top)
Main edit with source footage
Two tracks for Fusion slap comps
VFX Selects
VFX Finals from Nuke
VFX Pre-Renders
Titles (credits, title cards, other super'd text)

I haven't started on sound a whole lot yet, but there will probably be close to fifty tracks for that when the time comes. I'll also render the entire film as an h.264 and lay that on a new top track before starting the sound mix for smooth playback.
 
It's days like this where I'm so happy I chose Nuke as my compositor. A while back, way before I started shooting, I mentioned on here about needing some prop newspapers. Due to budget constraints, I wasn't able to get any made. Instead, I bought a local newspaper for one dollar and used it as a prop every time I needed a newspaper in a scene, intending to just replace the headline and main photo in post.

Well, now I'm in post, and it's time to do the VFX for those shots. When I was the VFX supervisor for Days of Noah, I learned about "Smart Vectors" in Nuke and we used them to add digital makeup to actors. I figured I could use a similar approach here and it didn't fail me! In a nutshell, Nuke spits out an exr sequence that contains vector distortion data about your shot. Pick one frame and touch that up in Nuke or Photoshop. Mask off the affected area of the shot, and run your fixed frame through a Vector Distort node while referencing the exr sequence.

The result is that you can have skin, cloth and even paper deform and your VFX elements will follow the deformation. So in this shot I'm currently working on, I added a new headline and photo, as well as changed the date from Monday to Sunday. And even though the actor is fondling the paper, the effects track to the paper as if they were done on set with a real prop!
 
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Chris Tempel said:
It's days like this where I'm so happy I chose Nuke as my compositor. A while back, way before I started shooting, I mentioned on here about needing some prop newspapers. Due to budget constraints, I wasn't able to get any made. Instead, I bought a local newspaper for one dollar and used it as a prop every time I needed a newspaper in a scene, intending to just replace the headline and main photo in post.

Well, now I'm in post, and it's time to do the VFX for those shots. When I was the VFX supervisor for Days of Noah, I learned about "Smart Vectors" in Nuke and we used them to add digital makeup to actors. I figured I could use a similar approach here and it didn't fail me! In a nutshell, Nuke spits out an exr sequence that contains vector distortion data about your shot. Pick one frame and touch that up in Nuke or Photoshop. Mask off the affected area of the shot, and run your fixed frame through a Vector Distort node while referencing the exr sequence.

The result is that you can have skin, cloth and even paper deform and your VFX elements will follow the deformation. So in this shot I'm currently working on, I added a new headline and photo, as well as changed the date from Monday to Sunday. And even though the actor is fondling the paper, the effects track to the paper as if they were done on set with a real prop!
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That sounds amazing! I'm going to have to check out Nuke.
 
Rusty Bolt said:
That sounds amazing! I'm going to have to check out Nuke.
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Cool part is that you can try it out for free with Nuke Non-Commercial. It's a free version for learning and doing tutorials. If you decide it's for you, Nuke Indie is actually pretty affordable at $500 a year. You'll also want to use the Nuke X version. Regular Nuke is basically like Natron - simple compositing. Nuke X has all the good stuff like 3D, smart vectors, etc... Then there's Nuke Studio which is useful for conforming and VFX editing, but I don't really mess with that. Nuke X in conjunction with Resolve is the way I go.
 
Working on my most difficult shot yet. There's an earthquake scene that we shot practically as much as possible in the middle of a street. For VFX, I wanted to make some transformers explode on power poles, as well as add a huge crack in the asphalt. There's been a few challenges. First, just trying to find the right crack asset. I went through my library and found one from ActionVFX that works well. It has a nice animation without being over the top. The problem is that the "ground" in that asset is just middle grey and looks like crap.

To fix this issue, I merged it on top of the plate, setting the blend mode to "Hard-Light". This added the asphalt texture to the VFX element, but at the cost of destroying the alpha channel. I used a copy node to move the alpha from the original asset to the screwed up version and it cut out perfectly! It did require some color correction on the asset to really blend in with shadows and such, but that was easily accomplished by pulling a key from my shadows and using that as a mask on a color corrector.

The other big issue has been just tracking the shot to get the asset to settle into the frame. I tried Mocha, as well as a 3D camera track, but neither of those worked. Since we had practical shake on set (me violently shaking the camera), the best result was a supervised track of a sewer cover just next to where the asset is placed. It took me over an hour, but the result speaks for itself.

Bonus note: having a global shutter camera was a HUGE help for this scene :)
 
I'm almost halfway through my shots. Unfortunately things are going to be put on hold for about two weeks as my wife and I move out of our apartment and into a house. Good thing I don't need to do any reshoots at the apartment! In any case, I'm looking forward to having a few acres and a new house to film short films around :)
 
Moving Update:
We're 75% moved into the house! Bad news though - my editing computer is acting up. When I moved it, I placed it in the front seat of my truck, and even buckled it in with a seatbelt. Super cautious. In the three days it's been hooked up at the new place, I've had issues non-stop. Windows explorer crashing, Resolve bugging out, it's a nightmare. The icing on the cake is that I won't have internet at the house to even begin to troubleshoot until Feb 20th. In the meantime, I'm having to come back to my old apartment and use it like an Internet cafe.
 
Got it working! I took it apart and rebuilt it yesterday, cleaning all the components and making sure everything was seated properly. Spent a few hours after getting it rebuilt working on a Fusion comp for a client and no hiccups :)
 
The fun keeps coming. Computer was working great for a week, then Monday, when I had a client project, it started acting up again. Decided to just buy a new SSD for it and go with a fresh install of everything. The SSD arrived yesterday, got it installed, got Windows 10 installed, and Resolve. I import my Resolve database and my movie is nowhere to be found.

All my project files are stored on a separate hard drive, so I know the project couldn't have been wiped. I did a Windows Explorer search for "Leap" and found a backup database from the last time I had opened the project on Feb 6th. Unfortunately Resolve doesn't like to play with these files natively. I found a YouTube video walking me through creating directories and using these backups, and guess what? It worked!

I had been on the verge of panic, thinking I'd have to recut the entire film from scratch (something that had occurred on my second feature in 2009-2010), but nope! We're in business. Super thankful that it all worked out. Now, back to work.
 
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