The Traveler

taylormade

taylormade

Well-known member
Last time out I vowed to do a film with no special effects. Ha! This has more than the last one. If my music guy gets me the track I'll make the deadline. Edit completed, two effects left to finish, sound work completed. 5:48 running time. Tons of greenscreen, roto, 3D modeling, motion tracking and other effects. Great working with adult actors - the kids were great last time, but it helps when you use pros.

"The Traveler "
Never Ride With a Stranger


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Some Frame Grabs. We went for a saturated Technicolor look: Hitchcock in the fifties.

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JudyLook.jpg



Car.jpg



HeathFace.jpg
 
All in post. In the original shot he was a happy, heathy pink with no head wound. A ton of Mocha tracking and roto to get it to work though - I think it would have been less work to just make him up!
 
Some BTS shots at Spenser's Diner.



The actor's life. "How did I get roped into this!"

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The diner owner's son reading the script. "Hey Dude, this ain't half bad."

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"Any time, Kent."
"The #%*&! boom won't extend!"

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"I knew I should have read the script before I agreed to be in this thing!"

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The score arrived last night and our composer Steve Neale did an outstanding job as always. We designed this film to look like a fifties horror flick, lots of over saturated color. Rear Window meets The Blob. Probably a little archaic for some of the youngs guns on DVXUser, but we had a blast creating the look. Just a few more tweaks on the green screen scenes and well be wrapped and ready to download. I have discovered that our night scenes look a lot different projected on a forty foot screen than they do on our compressed file for download. Basically two versions of the film are necessary - one graded for the internet and one for projection/Blu-ray.

I'm really looking forward to the films this time around - looks like some terrific stuff is coming up on the 28th. Good luck to all.
 
Man, what a night. Bumped the film over to H.264 in anticipation of downloading The Traveler. Check the file. All my beautifully graded night shots look like they were photographed in a coal mine with a flashlight! What the...!

Spent the hours from 9:00PM until four this morning reworking, re-grading and finally got things straightened out - I think. I was so tired I had trouble staying awake long enough to view the film in its entirety, all 5 minutes 58 seconds of it.

Thanks to all co-workers, friends and family who worked on this project. I hope you all had as much fun as I did.

Good luck to everybody who made it in and to those still struggling to meet the deadline. I feel your pain.
 
Yep! I hate h.264 color correction "correction." I forgot about the gamma shift.

Glad you got that monkey off your back!
 
taylormade said:
Man, what a night. Bumped the film over to H.264 in anticipation of downloading The Traveler. Check the file. All my beautifully graded night shots look like they were photographed in a coal mine with a flashlight! What the...!

Spent the hours from 9:00PM until four this morning reworking, re-grading and finally got things straightened out - I think. I was so tired I had trouble staying awake long enough to view the film in its entirety, all 5 minutes 58 seconds of it.

Thanks to all co-workers, friends and family who worked on this project. I hope you all had as much fun as I did.

Good luck to everybody who made it in and to those still struggling to meet the deadline. I feel your pain.
Click to expand...


Haha, I watched mine for the first time in it's entirety last night. Good luck!
 
Mobie540 said:
Haha, I watched mine for the first time in it's entirety last night. Good luck!
Click to expand...

taylormade said:
Man, what a night. Bumped the film over to H.264 in anticipation of downloading The Traveler. Check the file. All my beautifully graded night shots look like they were photographed in a coal mine with a flashlight! What the...!

Spent the hours from 9:00PM until four this morning reworking, re-grading and finally got things straightened out - I think. I was so tired I had trouble staying awake long enough to view the film in its entirety, all 5 minutes 58 seconds of it.

Thanks to all co-workers, friends and family who worked on this project. I hope you all had as much fun as I did.

Good luck to everybody who made it in and to those still struggling to meet the deadline. I feel your pain.
Click to expand...

I uploaded our film 15 mins before the deadline :)
 
Freaking awesome, i loved this short. It was so alfred hitchcock/twilight zone and those are two of my favs of all time.
But you put your own spin on it, the old guy was great, i'd watch a whole show of him giving people what they deserve,
it was so fun. You went to town on the CGI as always, and even though some of it was not 100% convincing, it was still really inventive
and totally worked. The trains scene, the deaths, very cool.

Here is the one thing I did not like, but I came up with the best solution ever:
I didn't like your color grading, or the overall color scheme of the interior of the diner and the people's clothes. It needed some sort of a "look", something to tie the colors together.
More importantly, the fact that you were doing a 50's throwback... i think you missed the most obvious thing - convert the movie to black and white!

I converted it to black and white in quicktime, then rewatched the film and it makes a HUGE difference. Your film totally feels old school and all the effects even look better because they are more subtle. My 2 cents. Lose the color.

Otherwise, great man!
 
Interesting idea, Matt. I've watched this on computer monitors, a 40 foot theater screen and on blu-ray on a 52 inch monitor. It looks different on everything. I was happiest on the blu-ray. Maybe black and white is the answer. The colors in the diner were kind of there and a repaint wasn't in the cards, needless to say. To me the color remined me of the original Blob, garish and very fifties. I'll do an alternate B&W version on the Blu-ray disk I make for the cast and crew and see what the reaction is.
Glad you liked our effort and thanks for the review..

Joe, the train scene started out as a photograph of a railroad crossing near my house taken at dusk. I reworked it in Photoshop to make it a night scene. The train and the car are three dimensional CG models inserted into the scene in AfterEffects after they were animated. The biggest challenge was getting the perpective to match the tracks in the photo. The fire and debris was added along with motion blur and some distortion of the car model during the crash. If you don't blink you can see the woman victim inside the car just before the crash. She was shot on greenscreen and insterted into the shot via AfterEffects.
 
REVIEW

Definitely a fun film, I enjoyed watching it.

What I liked - classing older film style (though as stated above working that color grade could bring it to a whole new level) I think the main guy did a really good job, very convincing and just a cool character overall. The story in itself was really good, a lot of the sound was very good and synced perfectly. Also, FX stuff is hard to make work and some of yours worked really well.

What I didn't like as much - On the flip side of the FX stuff some wasn't as believable, but there is some forgiveness in that due to timeframe and budget stuff. I didn't like the line of the cop when he asked if she was depressed, sad, glad, mad, bad, rad ;) it rhymed a TAD bit too much, and was too "happy" for me.

Oh also I really liked the titles in the beginning, really helped set the mood.

Overall fun to watch, I think if you looked into B&W or grading it a little more I think it would add a lot, but still a solid piece, good work!
 
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