'Negative Image' - Darkline Entertainment

Matt Harris said:
Just... awesome. so impressive. i have to watch again before i give a full review but, Darkline, you really nocked this out of the park! The building reminded me of the asylum in the movie "Session 9"...
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Thanks Matt. Means a lot as I think your film is ace too. I don't think I've seen session 9, but now two people have mentioned the location I will have to take a look. If it's an asylum then I believe they were all designed by one of a handful of architects and they were all built in one of 4/5 distinctinve patterns around the same time period. So I bet they all look very similar. I'm actually really into them now since I did the research for this short. This film almost never happened because if I couldn't get to film in one, IMO it wasn't worth making. I tried rewriting with a derelict house (something at least more obtainable) but it raised too many script questions. So it was asylum, prison, or back to the drawing board.

Jaime V said:
PS. My wife yelled "Argggh! He's got a leaf-man!" :)
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When you say it like that, it sounds creepy as hell eh? lol. I once made a demon that manifested itself as a shapeless blowing blanket (another M.R. James tribute), but a friend of mine laughed and said it looked like the washing has come back to get them
AJ Brooks said:
Darkline, truly great film.

"Ahh, f***, there's number one" I think was what I said after I watched it.

I feel so conflicted. :)
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Thats really nice of you AJ, but you never know how people will vote. I learnt that a long time ago. I've seen many film-makers disappointed with their placings based on thread feedback. Im just so glad I made something, and that is something people (as a whole this time) sem to understand. It's been 2 years for me! For a smaller number of films I actually think (maybe Im bias) that the quality is high this time round. You always produce work in the top tier and I'm pretty jealous of your consistency and regularity in these fests. It's only a matter of time before you win, and it may be this time.
Marlon Ladd said:
...your actor, although he didn't have to speak, did an excellent job. People sometimes don't understand how hard it is to act without having to say a word. You have to emote through your facial expressions and body language and that's not easy.
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Thanks Marlon, he'll love hearing that as this its his first short film. He went to great lengths to make this short with me. Damp, asbestos, and acrobatics were only part of the demands placed on him. I would say 'and he never moaned once' but I'd be lying. He did moan and we both got into a strop match at one point, but we laughed about it afterwards. Each time he came back and continued filming, he was pretty dedicated.
 
lawriejaffa said:
Personally I find the wealth of ideas in horror short fiction especially the classics to be refreshing in terms of ideas (especially compared to what seems used in films normally) - the short stories of M R James, Henry James and H P Lovecraft are among my favourites in particular.

I think a feature would be awesome, i mean you should surely have a producer working with your or interested in your work?!
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What I love about the MR James 60's adaptation 'whistle and Ill come to you' the ghost is never explained (not sure about the original story), but the very rational logical scientist has his belief system turned upside down. A smug character who is stripped of his aloof nature that everything is explainable by science. He is almost a wreck by the end of it. I personally like that way of working, not 'here are my bones' or 'I was killed for a crime I didn't commit and look he's the real killer'. Those leave nothing to the imagination by the end.

and no I dont have a producer...lol I barely had a crew this time round. Of which Id like to thank John. Both him and Pete had to multitask and help in all sorts of ways to get this on screen. I'm very lucky to have that dedication.
 
Chris_Keaton said:
I do believe this makes a great short that will play well on the film fest circuit, so don't sit on it. Go get your name out there.
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Thanks Chris. It's funny but even though I did get Halfway into Screamfest and Frightfest, and Eddie Loves You into the NYC Horror fest/Chicago/Eerie and some more; We got tons of praise for Eddie and won Audience Choice at NYCHorror, I even got a call from CAA. But bottom line....nothing came of it. lol. As a rule of thumb you need a feature to make a splash, shorts are just appetisers unless you get really lucky.

So I need to step up considerably if I am to do anything with my life! But yes I will get this out there for next years horror circuit, in the meantime I think I need to start working on something longer length. Thanks for the encouragement.
 
Michael Anthony Horrigan said:
If you don't win I'll eat my socks.


And they're not too clean after just getting back from a long walk with my dog. :happy:
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it's almost worth not winning to see that. I want at least a 720p version filmed at 60p!

anyway Im hogging the board. I need to go watch the final 7 and post feedback. Laters guys...
 
Some fx'y stuff Pt1

Some fx'y stuff Pt1

Ive had a few request to show how the leaves were done. Sorry to those who find the tech boring but I said I'd do it for Broadcast and forgot!

So firstly. The shadow on the chair. I could have done this with 2d planes in after effects, but I decided to do this in 3d too. Mainly becasue I already had my figure and a walk cycle for him. Also calculating shadow distance/distortion may have been a bit harder in 2d. With 3d it's kinda automatic.

So I just loaded in the shot as a bgd plate and literally just eyeballed a chair into place (was an existing 3d model which I scaled and pushed/pulled till it fit), just for this shot. For the c/u of the chair I repositioned everything again.

chaira.jpg



Then I took my walking figure and put a light behind him, casting a shadow onto the chair.

chairb.jpg


The figure walks (which I wont go into here) and a matte/shadow material applied to the chair means only the shadow element goes through. Comp this on the original shot in any compositor and thats was it.

The magazine. This was also a 3d shot. I did most of the covers myself, in total I made 5 front covers for my fake mag and also made the one with the pumpkin on for a bit of halloween reference. So this is fairly simple. A few boxes, a bit of bend/noise and apply the texture. It looked a bit plastic at first so I got some creases and layered them on as a kind of 'bump' layer in 3dsmax. I think that makes the end shot more believable.

maga.jpg



[
magb.jpg



Flies.

Only the fly at the end is a real motion fly. I found one dying in my living room and it kept flying to my window. So I shot it for about 30 mins until I got it landing into shot. Because I was overexposed I could just to a multiply layer with a bit of masking and it looked ok.

The swarms were done with particle systems. Very much like the leaves. Unfort everything had to be tweaked per shot, but this is the basic set-up...

Model fly $30. animate the wings flapping over 2 frames and loop. Create a particle system and apply the fly to all the particles. Make it follow the motion and you end up with :

flya.jpg



This is the particle flow settings - pretty basic. birth : 90 flies are born at frame -50. Position is the particle icon in the viewport. Shape instance is choosing the fly mesh. Forces : add a wind to create the motion of the flies. thats it.

These are the particle parameters :

flyb.jpg



wind is applied in a spherical direction with a small force. spherical is important becasue wherever you place the wind icon in the viewport is where the particles will be 'sucked in' from all direction. This gives the illusion of the flies swarming around a single point as they pass though it and then are attracted to it again. Turbulence makes them more random and act more 'flyish'. I just played around with these settings till they looked good. Each shot, depending on the scale of the flies, had to be done differently.


flyc.jpg
 
Pt2

Pt2

Leaves.

Same principle as flies. But I took a box, texture mapped with a leaf and told that box to be the mesh for a particle system with 1000's of particles.
The version here is an early draft, but the final one had multiple images of leaves applied to the particle flow. particle is randomly assigned a different leaf texture (think I had 10 in total) to give it a more random appearance than here.

So firstly here is the particle flow/instruction for the leaves

leavesb.jpg


Dont worry it really isnt as complex as it looks. I'll talk though the basic process.

First I created a biped with a basic walk cycle to it. Then hid it.

leavesd.jpg


The particles are told to birth from a plane to screen left, move across the screen with wind with various speed variation. I created a deflector for the floor and then with 'forces' told it to use that as a collision which the particles would bound off.

Next I created a 'find target' or 'lock target' which is an operator that tells the leaves to fly and hit an object - in this case, the hidden biped. But obviously I didnt want all the particles to do this.

So I created a spherical/eliptical defector and told the flow that any particles that entered this area would then be told to 'find target' and stick to the biped. Any particles that dont enter the deflector ignore this command and continue on past.

Leavesa.jpg


Then the spherical deflector is linked to the position of the biped. So wherever the biped moves, so does the deflector. I start the shot with the biped just outside the paricle zone. This way when the biped walks into it, so does the deflector, and the leaves that enter the defector redirect to stick to the biped. Its important that the defector is right next to the biped, otherwise the leaves would seem to u-turn from wherever the deflector was and 'find' the biped. I wanted it to look like the leaves were just sticking to it so the deflector is v close to the biped to minimise this blip.

I wasnt quite happy with it, so to make it look more natural when the particles hit the deflector I told a % of them to find target but another % split and go into a seperate flow. This flow tells a the particles to swirl around the biped using a 'vortex' as a force. This just gave a few extra particles to swirl around it and give it a more ethereal quality. I do this twice, creating an inner and outer swirl. It looked a bit cooler and drew your eye to the centre more.

I played with the walk cycle, to get something slow and creepy, but in the end I chose to keep the camera really far back from the effect, so it made little difference.

Finally I applied a bit of wind to the particles sticking to the mesh - an important step as this gave them a more fluid, floaty motion, and also defined the shape less. I didn't want to see the exact outline of the mesh, just something moving with human qualities within the leaves.

leavesc.jpg


you can see here the kind of effect, but the biped is hidden for the render.

The next step is an age test. So you say 'when the particles are 7 seconds old with a 20% variation, send them into a new event'. The new event applied a new wind force which dissolved the leaves as they join the flow of the rest of the wind piece by piece.

It probably took a week to do this right, a lot of back and forth on the parameters and test renders.

There was also a much more complicated flow for a scene I cut, of the leaves flying towards the house and scattering over the patio frame. But I think you get the idea of how this works.

Compositing :

the shot I used it in was a moving camera jib shot. So I used a program called Syntheyes to compute the 3d movement from the footage. You can then import that camera into 3dsmax so the shots align perfectly. It wasnt as easy as I first thought and took about a day to get them to align (all my fault - i never created the leaves to scale in the first place... doh).
 
Simply amazing. Without a doubt, you do great work that is very inspirational to me.

Keep 'em coming!
 
Mike Manning said:
Didn't notice either. Of course, looking at it now it seems obvious. :)
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Well if I had been able to light in the asylum I could have maybe done this as a practical effect with a real light and shadow. But I had no lights, power, or anyone to cast the shadow. So it was all a post effect. In a way it works because nothing else in the scene is casting a shdow, it's very omni lit - that perhaps gives the shadow a spookier nature.

EDIT : Ah... the chair is not 3D - actually it would have been easier to do this. I went about this wrong and shot the chair in my footage as we found it in the asylum.. So I built a 3D chair to match the existing one. This was a proxy object only, so the shadow could glide along the surface in a similar manner. So i only use the 3d chair as a receiver for the shadow..... It was overkill, but the easiest way I could think to do it once it had all been shot. As I say I could have got close in AE, but I had the shadow falling across the legs, which were cylinders and that you prob couldnt fake in AE as convincingly
 
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Oh thank God, MAH! I'm looking at this and like "huh?" It's like in the movie Yentl, "Story books for men, picture books for women." OOo, look at the pretty pictures.

Next fest we expect you work with 10 actors and 3 dogs. Just saying...
 
Charli said:
Oh thank God, MAH! I'm looking at this and like "huh?" It's like in the movie Yentl, "Story books for men, picture books for women." OOo, look at the pretty pictures.

Next fest we expect you work with 10 actors and 3 dogs. Just saying...
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I have a script with 40 kittens and 1 meatgrinder, will that work? ;-)
 
Wow! I think this is the best one I've seen on here! I loved the editing/FX/sound. And bonus points for no dialog from your main character!! Excellent work!!
 
GLF said:
Wow! I think this is the best one I've seen on here! I loved the editing/FX/sound. And bonus points for no dialog from your main character!! Excellent work!!
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Thanks GLF. I actually wanted the short to have no dialogue at all, but there seemed to be no way around the set-up at the start. I removed all of David's lines and used his silence/scraping as his disapproval, but I still would have liked to have found a way to have got rid of the phone conversation.
 
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