home stretch i n g o u t slow motion

Posted by Jeff Orgill

June 6, 2008

I’m going on no sleep again. Seems like this comes up every so often where I’m pulling overnighters to try and complete some aspect of the movie before I have to go to work the next day. When you’ve got the opportunity you have to jump on it before it goes away. And it’s a nice feeling to know that you’ve pushed through on your dream in spite of all the mundane demands of life.

So this last week we’ve been onlining the film to HiDef. Most of the online was completed, but the last 20 or so missing shots, effects shots, titles, etc. ended up being really time consuming. Each shot having it’s own special problems. For instance I was struggling with a motion tracking effect where I wanted to replace a street sign with wording that was more relevant to the story and also dislocated the film from a specific place. I must have done this effect shot 10 times trying different fixes, but the sign just would not stick to the old sign. I was getting desperate and on no sleep. I asked other people good at After Effects, I called a friend in San Francisco for help, even offered to pay him a bit (he was booked though), but it turned out to be a really simple solution that I had intuited all along, but just been too tired and desperate to finish that I kept thinking it was too easy of a solution. Turns out I was trying to track a squeezed shot with a not squeezed overlay and the overlay was moving faster than the shot below it because it was actually made of different sized pixels. This only became appraent though when the two were brought together into a new composition. If I rendered it out first to marry them in the squeezed shot and then stretched the shot out proper in a second step the whole issue was solved. This is probably dull stuff, but I figure it’s a blog about the filmmaking process so this would be a place to tell these war stories.

SO lack of sleep and filmmaking don’t mix too well.. and above is one of the many ways working on no sleep can cost you! But I’m sure I’ll find myself there again. I do like how quiet it is that late. A nice kind of loneliness. Interesting thing too is my movie is about a guy working the night shift. Hmmmm….

I thought these final shots would take a day or two and it turned out to be 4 gruelling graveyard shifts. And there are still loose ends with the effects. And then color correction. But I’m very happy with the results and it’s coming together really well. Nice to see it full resolution at last. Very pretty. Thanks team Boppin’