Where to start?

Been thinking about where's the best place to start with my blog about VFX stuff and for some reason have decided Deathilating Machine is the best place to start, the film was shot some time ago and for one reason or another (mainly other projects coming up in between) it still needs finishing on both the 'film making/ editing' side and in terms of the visual effects. Though we did screen a very early edit with very rough visual effects, it is still not quite complete in terms of how Matt and I visualise the final product. And as work is currently still ongoing on it, I figured why not talk about things as they happen and take us up to the final version? So from the start, here is my side of the story.....

Matt and I had been out of contact for quite some time for one reason or another and when we did finally make the effort to get back in touch we had a a good chat in which we discussed film-making, how Chainsaw films was going etc etc. I mentioned that I was now into CGI, something Matt was unaware of as I had gotten into it during the period we had not been in contact, and shortly after this initial chat he came up with the idea for the short film Deathilating Machine, as a response to one of the Brighton Film Coalition's film making challenges. So he called me up with an idea that he wanted some CGI in the film, nothing too fancy or challenging, just a burning house way off in the background for the final scene. Of course I said that would be no problem, I would start doing some test stuff and was sure we could put something together for the initial screening in around a months' time.

In the meantime Matt was also shooting the crane/stunt sequence for the promo for the film Zombiez, and I attended the set and helped out with some of the stuff on set. Having not seen Matt at work in a while I was impressed with the scale of the shoot that day and realised that Matt was still extremely ambitious in what he wanted to achieve in his films. This should have been an indication of what was to come in the visual effects requests he was about to throw at me but I was oblivious at the time :-)

So, Matt did an initial screening of the film based on his first shoot but was still working towards a more ambitious final product in his mind and we had regular phone conversations about visual effects for Deathilating Machine in which Matt threw many weird and wonderful ideas into the mix. So what started as a simple burning house way off in the background turned into:

A camera track and fly-through a CG keyhole shot

A knife fight scene with fully CG knife

A shot with one character 'falling into' another and being 'absorbed'

A scene with a boiler tank being 'crystallised' and turning into a glass heart (!!?!!!?!!???!) then exploding

And best of all, the ending turned into an epic sequence of multiple CG shots where the sky rips open, a single teardrop falls down to the main character's hand where it then morphs into a protective shield around her which protects her from destructive teardrops which smash up everything around her. Phew. A far cry from the simple burning house way off in the background....

Still, never being one to turn down a challenge, I set about the task in hand..... check out the gallery of early vfx shots......