Save Point Chapter 1 Previs reel

Nate North

Nate North


I didn't bother to do a chonological story here, because this is a throwaway reel, and it's a branching plot, etc. However, you can kind of get some idea of some of the things you might see in the opening chapter of Save Point. The decision was made years ago to make the opening chapter kind of a blockbuster vibe. It may sound basic at first glance, but this was a strategic choice made at great expense, and one that prolonged the release window a lot.

I don't think the modern internet user has the patience to sit through 10 minutes of minimalist conversations while I establish the opening and introduce the characters. I definitely couldn't do a 20 minute chapter with just talking heads. So we'll get about 90 seconds into the story before the air raid sirens go off and the entire world starts exploding around the character. We'll tone it down from blockbuster level to tv episode level after the opening chapter, but at that point the viewer should be at least a little bit invested, and I'll have some leeway to develop character and start orchestrating subplots.

That's a long way of saying - "I'm testing out a bunch of crazy shots to see what works"

Also, to avoid confusion, "Snapshot" is the name of the first chapter, and reffers to a reveal much later in the plot, about why the nukes launched in the first place. This is the main project, being developed in parallel, and is only connected to the "cat game" by a single cameo of the cat in this first chapter.
 
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Nice video. It's funny how to refer to this as a "throwaway reel". 😆 You are very talented. I could never create something like this, although I wish I could. The jewel, face in the smoke, and what appears to be a multi-limbed person are the stand-out shots for me.
 
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I had fun making this one! These are the earliest days of being able to make stuff like this on a really small budget, so it's kind of an amazing time for filmmaking. It may not be production grade yet, but it's fun just seeing your ideas come to life so fast.
 
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Hey @Unknown Screenwriter

I was curious as to whether you think this type of technology could replace storyboarding in the future.

Obviously, this isn't for final production, but to me it feels like a leap forward in communicating visual concepts between creatives and artists in pre production.
 
I've always felt kind of restricted in my filmmaking that I couldn't just set a city on fire, or crash an SR71 blackbird into an aircraft carrier. But soon, those troubles will be a thing of the past. Lol.
 
Chris Tempel said:
Are you using Embergen, Houdini...??? I've felt the same way.
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OMG, does nobody know about this yet?

Dude. You are gonna love this.

First, to answer your question. For production grade at photorealism for this type of stuff, yeah, you're going to want to get into the calculus nightmare that is Houdini, etc. I use almost everything, but for SP I limit myself to one main program per pipeline function. There's good reasons, but I'll keep this short. I'm using UE5 for the baseplate, Stable Diffusion for the overlayer, and about a million plugins and custom scripts for each.

That's not what I did here. This is Runway Gen 2, which is a technology similar to what I'm working on, but kind of a toy version with decent output and very minimal controls. It's not for serious filmmakers, but it's very fast and easy to use, if you don't need quality or consistency.

You can sign up HERE - https://runwayml.com/

it costs about 30 bucks, and comes with a starter package of about 500 seconds of film available.

You describe your scene in as much detail as possible, and it creates a 4 second clip of your description. After that, just download all clips from your composition, drop them into your editing program, and work normally. You could learn the system and make a video like the one above in 20 hours probably.

Seriously, give it a whirl. I'd love to see some "price is no object" shorts from people like you, Fetus, Unknown, Scoopicman, Sean, Mara, Jackson, and of course the artists formerly known as camblamo.

You're correct though, Houdini is where it's at when you really want to release something. This super fast AI is really fun to mess around with for a minute though, and I think it could serve a practical purpose in terms of communicating your vision clearly across a crew.
 
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Nate North said:
This is the main project, being developed in parallel, and is only connected to the "cat game" by a single cameo of the cat in this first chapter.
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Cool. I'm glad to read this and understand a little more, because I had thought before, is all this work for a maze? One of the simplest (and dullest) of puzzle games? One one usually finds on restaurant placemats for children. I had wondered why it wasn't more...ambitious.

The video. I get that this is a test reel and in that it seems wildly successful. The length and succession of the shots, the camera movements, feel completely transparent, as if this is exactly how they should be. In a more narrative pass, I Imagine your theme here--billowing, smoke and fire--would punctuate, every several seconds perhaps, bits of expository stuff.

I am being naive here; what strikes me as amazing may actually be, now, mundane. The ability to move the "camera" unburdened by actually having to have a camera, with a, I guess, mouse or something . . . when you see this exploited by a talented cinematic eye, it can be stunning. I noticed this, for example, watching some of Star Trek Prodigy (earlier I had dismissed the Star Trek "cartoons" but this thing, I think, is actually pretty good; to my mind, with Strange New Worlds, the best of this last bunch of Star Trek shows.)

Anyway. Nice work and great progress :)
 
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Spike said:
Cool. I'm glad to read this and understand a little more, because I had thought before, is all this work for a maze? One of the simplest (and dullest) of puzzle games? One one usually finds on restaurant placemats for children. I had wondered why it wasn't more...ambitious.

The video. I get that this is a test reel and in that it seems wildly successful. The length and succession of the shots, the camera movements, feel completely transparent, as if this is exactly how they should be. In a more narrative pass, I Imagine your theme here--billowing, smoke and fire--would punctuate, every several seconds perhaps, bits of expository stuff.

I am being naive here; what strikes me as amazing may actually be, now, mundane. The ability to move the "camera" unburdened by actually having to have a camera, with a, I guess, mouse or something . . . when you see this exploited by a talented cinematic eye, it can be stunning. I noticed this, for example, watching some of Star Trek Prodegy (earlier I had dismissed the Star Trek "cartoons" but this thing, I think, is actually pretty good; to my mind, with Strange New Worlds, the best of this last bunch of Star Trek shows.)

Anyway. Nice work and great progress :)
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Ok, ROFL, about the simple maze. Semantics often fail me as a person. If you actually saw what this "Maze" was, and you kind of have to some degree. it's...... immense, filling up now with puzzles, stories, set pieces, significant decisions with unexpected consequences and the like. I wanted the simplest framework possible, not because I wanted to do something small, but because there would eventually be so many moving parts that the foundation needed to be simple, so as not to exacerbate the easily predictable issue of cascading increases in solve complexity on my end as it expanded in scope. If I had used the words "unconscious multiverse" instead of "maze" I would have meant the same thing, but of course I see how it makes a different impression.

You are not being nieve, the new wave of technology is objectively a genie in a bottle, and frankly, it's the people that are skimming by this once in a lifetime paradigm shift into a new era of filmmaking and considering it trite or inconsequential that are missing the point.

Save Point though, is just on a whole different level. It's intended to just be one project that I continuously expand for the rest of my life. Dozens of movies, interconnected, with one ring to rule them all.
 
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Nate North said:
Ok, ROFL, about the simple maze. Semantics often fail me as a person. If you actually saw what this "Maze" was, and you kind of have to some degree. it's...... immense,
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Yea, "maze" was a little simplistic. Maybe the project is too ambitious, lol. I found a lot of the cat stuff entertaining, and a lot of it, like the Labyrynth entrance, quite beautiful. My only quibble was with the cat him/her self, which you of course recognized. If the story started to get a little more involved, it would be nice if he could have a little more personality--a few cat gestures to indicate some emotion: an ear rotating forward, an eye narrowing, a pupil dilating, tail movements--that kind of stuff. I even imagined him having a little friend, like, maybe, mouse?
 
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Nate North said:
there would eventually be so many moving parts that the foundation needed to be simple,
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This makes sense. I kind of felt the same way with the Bach thing I've been putzing around with. I thought if I could just get the skeleton there--the points in the biography--I could start trying to layer in the meat: where does absolute, perfect, artistic beauty come from? (Represented here by the six Brandenburg concertos.)
 
Basically I know how I am, and things get complicated really fast, so giving myself a simple structure can help counterbalance that.

I do really like your design for the JSB thing, and I totally get the idea of building the structure to provide a base of stability for the more nuanced aspects of composition. In Scapegoat for example, the skeleton was pretty straightforward, but I'll have to think a lot about exactly how I present the core message, because that's where the actual art comes in. It's basically a novel about moving past our instinct to lash out indiscriminately when in pain. I think that's a very normal human thing, we all kind of do it reflexively, but upon inspection I don't think it's a valid enough part of the human character to be canonized within the machinery of the law.
 
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