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hamphouse

Hi. We shot a full-length feature film, THE GOD QUESTION, in and around Amherst, Mass. last summer, did many months of editing, and are starting to submit to film festivals now. The story is about a computer scientist who is experimenting with a breakthrough super-intelligent computer and he gets unexpected results.
Our web site where clips and a trailer are posted is:

www.thegodquestionfilm.com

You can see just the trailer on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2EEQ0gey5E

Or vimeo

https://vimeo.com/76359279

If you think this might interest you, please take a look and offer comments or ask questions. Thanks.
 
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hamphouse said:
Hi. We shot a full-length feature film, THE GOD QUESTION, in and around Amherst, Mass. last summer, did many months of editing, and are starting to submit to film festivals now. The story is about a computer scientist who is experimenting with a breakthrough super-intelligent computer and he gets unexpected results.
Our web site where clips and a trailer are posted is:

www.thegodquestionfilm.com

If you think this might interest you, please take a look and offer comments or ask questions. Thanks.
Click to expand...

Hey,
I went through the clips on your site. It looked like a lot of locations and a lot of work. I'm in the process of making a feature myself. I was curious what your lighting kit included.

Thanks,
Aveek
ps. Good luck with the festival and distribution efforts. Keep us updated.
 
The lights were rentals, but our lighting guy, Chris Husta, went to Emerson and knew what he was doing. If you look on the cast and crew page, at the bottom, there's a shot of one location and you can see the kinds of lighting equipment that were used. Thanks.
 
hamphouse said:
The lights were rentals, but our lighting guy, Chris Husta, went to Emerson and knew what he was doing. If you look on the cast and crew page, at the bottom, there's a shot of one location and you can see the kinds of lighting equipment that were used. Thanks.
Click to expand...

Thank you!
 
Wow... good looking film and the acting looks pretty good too. Can't wait to see it. With the TV screen overlays, if you have the original screens black, comping a copy of those screens (with the multiply mode) back over the footage you're adding will put the footage on a tv in a room, not just on a tv. The room reflections will be brought back over the top of the footage.
 
Didn't quite understand that. We've got time to do more editing though. Can you go into a little more detail for the slow learners. thanks
 
Knightly is saying that monitor burn-ins look better if the original screen reflections are composited on top of your graphics. He describes how to integrate the graphics "into" the monitor, instead of looking pasted on top. It's a very effective technique.
 
Ok, so I failed to find the original video I'd seen that covered this for Imagineer systems' Monet planar tracking suite (I think it got rolled into Mocha)... but it was 3 layers. 2 of the background plate (the TV), with the screen replacement layer inbetween them. The top layer is matted using the middle layer's edges as that's all that needs doing in it... So the top layer (the TV screen) is then set to blending mode "Multiply" making the black in visible and the white (reflections) visible. Then adjust the opacity and boom. You've got your room reflections back on your TV and it's in the room again.

What you've got is so close to convincing... this last little bit may just make people doubt you when you tell them there was compositing done.

Was the TV on set black (off), or was it turned into a green screen with markers somehow? The instructions work for a black screen, to do this with a green screen is a little more difficult, but if there's room reflections still on it, they can be recovered by desaturating the image and using contrast/levels to push the background to black again, leaving the reflections white.
 
visually it looks great, and the trailer looks very professional.

Personally, the story seems a bit pretentious. Kinda feels like a mashup of Pi and Primer. While I liked both of those films, this one is just too preposterous, and the line about getting a computer to answer the mankind's greatest question made me cringe a little.

Building a time machine or finding a mathematical equation to the stock market are preposterous too, but they do make for interesting narratives.

I might be proven wrong, but a narrative about a computer that can answer the question of God's existence just isn't compelling because I can't imagine a computer doing anything other then saying "No, there is zero evidence for the existence of god"

Obviously that's the atheist in me, and any narrative that pretends a computer could answer that question in the affirmative will probably be a lot of new age woo-woo mumbo jumbo.

That said, I would be curious what perspective the film takes, and how it's executed. Good luck!
 
Mussonman - We used a canon c300 and a canon 7d for a lot of the b-roll shots.

Knightly - Thanks! I understood this. We had the TV turned off with markers in the corners. We laid a cropped newscast video over that then skewed the image and scaled it down to stretch to the edges of the screen. I was hoping that when I went back and looked at the original of the blank TV screen, I would see reflections of the room in which we shot it. Then I could have laid over those reflections into the newscast and made it something like 5% opaque and that might produce the reflection effect. But there were no reflections. Maybe I can create a blank reflection of another room's TV and see if I can't use it. I'll see.

By the way, we did all the editing in FCP 7 on a macbook pro. Very low-budget.
 
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That's exactly my setup for 80% of my editing. There may still be some lighting differences on the screen that could blend it back into the room slightly, even if not reflections specifically. Give it a go and see if it helps.
 
Ultimately, the compositing overlay of a blank screen with room reflections didn't work. I think you could probably add some blur to the original newscast that is overlaid to give it less of a burned in look.
 
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