APOLLO: The Legacy of Hayden- OFFICIAL THREAD

Brandon Rice said:
Cool stuff dude! Why'd your actor actually smoke? You know you can take the stuff out of the cigerettes and there will still be smoke and it'll look real... :) Anyway, nice BTS stuff... Oh, also, why'd you take the stock "mattebox" off your DVX?
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I actually didn't know that about the cigarette, it was totally his suggestion though and it seemed like something his character would do.

We took the stock mattebox off for that day so I could put on/take off a polarizer easily. When shooting on green screen, you run into a lot of reflections from the greenscreen off glass and shiny stuff, and the polarizer helped dampen or completely rid of those reflections. I very rarely take it off though.

The footage is coming. haha I don't want to release it too early because with this workflow we're using, the original footage looks pretty flat and dull in its current state... color grading comes last and that's when I polish the look. I am willing to do a comprehensive tutorial though on several effects shots as I work on them to understand how we did them.

Who knows, I may give in to your requests and toss up at least a montage of live action/raw greenscreen stuff just to give you a taste of the film. That might be a couple of days though. Right now I want to focus on getting this desk shot finished and polished and I will definitely post that once it's done.

Has anyone checked out the website? Just curious what you guys thought about that. I know there's not much content right now but in terms of ease of use and the look... what'd you think?
 
lol yeah I don't think hudson has seen it.

And in other news: I just did the first full-rez render of the desk shot, everything up until now has been just a quarter-quality preview of a few frames at a time because it's so demanding on my pc. It's looking really good but I goofed on match-moving one of the masks so once I change that and tweak the background a bit. I'll post that rough render, then I'll clean up the edge of his face frame by frame. THEN the clip should be done and it'll be on to the next one.
 
Actually, I take that back. There's a small section of the rendered clip that doesn't have a mask issue. I'll go ahead and throw it up here for now because I probably won't be able to post the full render tonight. I know the back and face jitter a bit, and I'm working on that. haha The clip is only a second long, but it should provide a small sample of the clip. Once the full render is done, I'll get it posted.

http://www.mooseheadfilms.com/ApolloTest.mov

sorry I don't have the full clip as promised, effects work can be really time consuming, and to perfect a clip, it can take a long time.
file:///N:/ApolloTest.mov
 
Alright last update of stuff for the night:

This is the original greenscreen footage with a green matte placed under the film to give it a little more leaway on either side of the frame.

http://www.mooseheadfilms.com/ApolloTestGS.mov

Hopefully tomorrow after I get done with class I'll be able to finish up the clip and get it posted for you guys.

Thanks again for checking out the thread! :)
 
Hey the cc'd clip looks good, although in the clip you posted for some reason it looks like its lagging a bit. I saw a bit of feathering around the guy's face like you said, but otherwise it looks great. The only comment i have about the raw shot is that the dolly movement looks a bit uneven - Other than that is good - Good luck with the post prod!
 
MalcolmOng said:
Hey the cc'd clip looks good, although in the clip you posted for some reason it looks like its lagging a bit. I saw a bit of feathering around the guy's face like you said, but otherwise it looks great. The only comment i have about the raw shot is that the dolly movement looks a bit uneven - Other than that is good - Good luck with the post prod!
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I thought it looked a little laggy, apparently AE rendered the video out at 12fps haha Thanks for pointing that out though, I didn't even think to check that.
 
Hey Daniel, I'd like to know a little bit more about the cape and insignia. What were you inspired by for the insignia, and how'd you get the cape?
 
Hey Brandon, first question: The insignia/logo. Basically while in pre-prod me and my two friends who helped write the film (Chris Voelz and Devin Lockrey) hammered out a bunch of rough sketches in the margins of one of our rough drafts of the script. We had already created the name, we were developing the character so the symbol was next. We created probably a dozen designs, variations all involving his name 'Apollo'. This is one of our later drafts of the script, where not only had we developed the symbol, but also used as our storyboard draft as well. An image can be seen of that here:

Script1.jpg

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We ended up deciding on the one seen in the teaser posters mostly because we felt it looked the coolest. After we had decided on this one, I took a crack at it in photoshop. It turned out even better digitally.
A.jpg


Your second question: So I then bought a big sheet of heavy velvet-type cloth from the same cloth store that we bought the green screen material from andprinted off an off-white version of the A onto iron-on transfer paper. After I cut it out with an exactoknife, I ironed it on. Pretty easy stuff, and ended up with the cape seen below.

promo6.jpg


Overall, we were happy with this method, although the iron-on was prone to wrinkles as you can see, but they were easily flattened out and are non-visible on film.


After we had the cape and 2d version, I thought it might be beneficial to make a 3D version of the logo. So in Wings3d, I modeled the logo as best as I could, and then in Maya, I applied some close, fast-moving camera shots to be used for various materials such as the trailer and DVD.
apollo3d1.jpg

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Howdy guys, my apologies for not getting the shot up last night. I've been really working with the masks and edges to get the cleanest possible image as I can. I just got done with my first "successful" render, it's still rough. I made a laundry list of things to change about it... but I figured I could post it so you guys can get a rough idea of what we're working with here.

the link is:
http://www.mooseheadfilms.com/JasonKaneRotoWS.mov

I'd really like some help with this clip though... Here's my list of issues to address:

-Get rid of Duct tape motion trackers
-Clean up left edge of desk (can't see it very well, but there's some black grain that's showing up I need to mask out)
-Clean up Devin's back, remove black border
-Clean up the transparency feather on the paper from the typewriter
-Rotoscope face (haha obvious error in this clip.)
-Redo rain (right now it's just not looking natural. I made 7 frames in photshop and randomly generated them. It's not convincing enough, any ideas?)
-Add in lightning to background (not necessary, but might add a nice element)

And here's where I need your help.
-Fix wall motion

basically, SOMETHING is slightly off in the motion here, and I have no idea what it is. I'm afraid to tweak the wrong layer and set all my masks and stuff off-kilter, so if we can pinpoint what it's doing that's wrong, I can change it in one motion instead of guess-and-check. Maybe I've just spent too much time with the clip and it's not a glaring issue, but it's still bothering me.

Hopefully I can solve this wall motion issue and I can get this shot perfected. This is honestly the most complicated shot in the film, and if I knew it was going to be this bad, I would have gone another route with it. haha I'm pretty happy with this, but I still consider it a very rough version. I know I can make it 100x better.

Anyway, I appreciate you guys checking this out, and I'd REALLY appreciate you guys helping me solve the motion issue. Thanks! :)
 
Daniel, nice work my friend! I think the shot looks good, even the wall looks good to me. I'd say on the rain, I can give you some particle effects from particle illusion that may solve that problem. The rain just looks like it's moving slow/stuttering... other than that it looks fantastic! Is that a 2:3:5 crop on there?
 
Brandon Rice said:
Daniel, nice work my friend! I think the shot looks good, even the wall looks good to me. I'd say on the rain, I can give you some particle effects from particle illusion that may solve that problem. The rain just looks like it's moving slow/stuttering... other than that it looks fantastic! Is that a 2:3:5 crop on there?
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Yes, it is 2.35:1. I'd be your best buddy if I could get 6 or 7 seconds of that rain lol
 
Hmm, it looks better - haha the face thingy.

Anyway, imho the rain looks...lowres? to me at least, thats the main bug. Oh and i think another biggie would be the uneven dolly movement. Other than that its some nifty compositing going on. If you're determined enough you could fix the dolly issue by speeding up/slowing down where necessary. lol.
 
MalcolmOng said:
Hmm, it looks better - haha the face thingy.

Anyway, imho the rain looks...lowres? to me at least, thats the main bug. Oh and i think another biggie would be the uneven dolly movement. Other than that its some nifty compositing going on. If you're determined enough you could fix the dolly issue by speeding up/slowing down where necessary. lol.
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I may just do that. I'll do some stabilization... of course that'll involve another pass through the motion tracker, and then I'll have to reapply those mattes, but it might be worth it.

Do you have any issues with the wall motion? I am still trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with it and I just can't seem to find it. If it wasn't a glaring issue when watching it, then I don't think I'll mess with it... I just want this to look nice, you know?

EDIT: Just watched it again and this is more of a note to myself when i get home, but I think if I were to apply an ease-in on the keyframes for the 3d wall, that might smooth things out.
 
Sorry I haven't updated, school and work have been pretty nuts as of late but here's what's happening:

I spent all weekend working on the desk shot. I ended up pretty pleased with it. The face outline is still bothering me and I may go back and fix that but for now we'll call it done.

I tally'd up the effects shots and we're looking at about 25 shots remaining.

In a day or two, we'll get some more stuff up. Are there any specific questions you guys would want us to go more in-depth about on the BTS for the DVD? We'll probably have a dozen BTS coverage pieces concerning the effects and our methods of piecing it all together.

Also, thanks to John for moving this to the User Films section :)
 
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