Shooting Wizards in Staff Entrance

At the beginning of the summer I was shooting a short film that brought together a colourful bunch of characters. Recently I came across some snapshots of the shoot, so decided I should share them and some of the experiences of the shoot. The setup: In a scenario men are mostly familiar with, a group of famous wizards are lined up outside of a nightclub trying to work their way in to get jiggy with the hot, young ladies that keep skipping the queue.

We used the Westmount location of the Red Brick Café for our night exterior setting and arrived plenty early during the daylight hours to start setting up lights so that we wouldn't have to fumble around in the dark. The wizards required a bit of wardrobe and makeup so we knew we had time to wait.

One of the tricks we had to employ was shooting at two different locations to make it appear as one. At one point we see a limo pulling up along a downtown street and we see a group of foxy ladies step out. Next we see them walk past the line of oggling and frustrated wizards straight into the nightclub.

The problem with this sequence was that the location we were using for the nightclub exterior was on a suburban street and had a stretch of green grass and shrubberies that did not belong in a downtown setting. So we shot the girls exiting the limo at a completely separate location. We were able to plan the shots ahead of time so that the edited sequence will bring both locations together.

Right now the project is finishing up in post-production. I'll be handling a few visual effects shots that I'll bring up in a future post.

Real Particles: Going Up In Smoke

Usually for my visual effects projects using After Effects and particles has been more than enough to get the job done. But sometimes you just can't beat the real thing. For one of my latest jobs I was given very specific directions for achieving a look for a certain magical effect. After coming up with a couple different versions in AE and still not producing the right effect, it dawned on me that it might just be easier to think outside the box. This MO is a new one for me, and I've always shied away from using other pre-comped elements (like Andrew Kramer's Action Essentials collection...although I certainly don't hold anything against them being used in projects, I've just usually found it more fun and interesting to generate the elements from scratch digitally), so it was pretty exciting to approach the task this way.

Long strands of wispy smoke is what I was after. So I set up a camera with some strong lights, a black BG and with the right camera angle lit some incense sticks. Playing the Mass Effect 3 OST in the background made it feel more epic waving incense around the bottom of the screen like a magic wand (I may have gotten a little caught up in the moment and let out a little "Expelliarmus!").

Oh my god, Merc shot FLuffee!

This past weekend meant ConG for many of us local nerds. It was a lot easier than traveling to New York or Calgary for a decent con, it was right down the road. So myself and my teammates at Synn Studios set up our Instant FX booth in the lobby and offered the cosplayers (a lot of which were pretty slick with the costumes) some digital superpowers to show off. Our neighbour was FLuffee from the YouTube channel FLuffeeTalks, and I overheard him saying he wanted to blow his head off. Must have been having a rough day. So I did what any caring vfx artist would do to help a person in need...put a gun in his hand and told him to go for it. Of course, it was a prop gun and we got him to do it in front of the green screen.

If you're going to shoot yourself, do it safely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWwpX55L0Ms&feature=channel_video_title