The first film to put me in debt...
It all began back in nineteen-hundred and eighty-eight, when both Nate and Alex were brought into this world, a mere eleven days apart respectively. Uh, maybe we don't have to go back quite that far...
We'll skip ahead 19 years. The night LCC V was announced was an exciting one. The Canon HV20 had been announced just days before, and it was unknown quite when it would be out, but we were sure it would be soon enough. It felt like a sign. I called Alex, my friend Tim, and my other friend Chris. We began planning a 2v2 duel in the dark, featuring Alex and Chris (tall dudes) vs Tim and myself (shorter dudes), using ForceFX sabers. We were also going to involve CK Hicks (DVeditor on TFN) in this, but the scheduling between everyone didn't coincide with UNL's spring break in March, when we planned on shooting.
Thus we had to omit several people from the project, and we brought it back down to a 1v1 duel, with people cast specifically for the parts so as to allow Alex and me to remain behind the camera. Alex later had second thoughts about one of the performers, so he replaced him with himself, since we'd still have our wonderful DP Kyle Stebbins and myself behind the camera: a deadly duo if all would have went well. But it did not. By the time the week of shooting rolled around, we found that the other actor would not be back in Lincoln until that weekend, which was no good because we planned on shooting during the week. That on top of our inability to acquire the steadicam for the week made it clear: this would have to become the "official" Alex vs Nate, trumping the sixty-second short we made one afternoon in Lincoln in 2005.
Somewhere in all of this mess, including a $3,000 loan on my part, and the selling of Alex's Sony HDR-FX1 and quite possibly maybe, but not necessarily some sort of hinting at mob-involvement, between the two of us, we ended up with the following equipment:
-Panasonic HVX200 with 4GB P2 Card, since the free 8GB card wasn't going to ship for 8-9 weeks (Alex's)
-15.4" Apple MacBook Pro; 2.33GHz, 2GB of RAM, and 256MB Video card (stock middle model, basically the same as the high-end, just smaller screen and smaller hard drive) (Mine. Had to get overnight shipping).
-New, second ForceFX saber; red. I already had a Blue one.
-Four brand new 1/2" aluminum prop blades, along with two old ones for choreography.
Stuff that we didn't have to buy, or already had access to...
-Kyle's homemade dolly.
-8 ft camera crane from the studio I work at; had never been used until AvN.
-500 GB external drive to dump the footage onto (mine).
-Alex's Power Mac G5.
-Final Cut Studio on each of our machines, and I had Shake 4.1.
-And of course, aluminum lightsabers I machined my senior year in high school.
I set off toward Lincoln on the afternoon of March 15, the cab of my dad's pickup packed full of equipment, and plenty of caffeine and chocolate, and an iPod full of Podcasts. I arrived at UNL around 4:30 or 5, at which point Alex and I threw a couple things in his dorm room, grabbed the HVX that had arrived the day before, and set off toward the location that had already been chosen, and had also been featured in a previous film they shot down there. After a bit of playing with the camera, Alex and I began to choreograph. Since we still kinda wanted to shoot at night, we kept choreographing into the night so we could see what kind of lighting conditions we would be dealing with, and shot some test footage with ForceFX sabers as well as our regular props.
It was quite clear when we dumped those clips back at Alex's dorm that a night shoot was out of the question. We opted to get up the next morning and finish choreographing the end of the fight, which was basically from where I get thrown against the pole to where Alex gets zapped. We enjoyed some lunch at the UNL food court and then headed down to the location again, this time with Robert, one of Alex's friends. We were basically waiting most of the afternoon for Kyle to get off work, but attempted to shoot some stuff anyway. The only shot that survived from that day is the opening crane shot with the close-ups on the lightning, shot by yours truly ;)
Eventually, Kyle showed up right as the sun was beginning to set, but we tried to continue shooting anyway. We were loosing our light very quickly, and eventually opted to go for the ForceFX sabers, but these hindered our performance as we couldn't put near as much force behind them, for fear of them breaking as well as how much they flex. We got up to the circling after the first exchange of saber clashing and had a little meeting, where we decided that we would cut together what we had and then reshoot everything the next day knowing exactly how it would later cut together. This worked remarkably well and really showed how well animatics work, although ours were live-action. I may post this cut online some time, maybe in the Lightsaber Effects thread for people to play with.
The following day (Saturday) was a hell of a shoot. We shot all afternoon, and overall things were going fairly smoothly, minus a few hiccups here and there. For instance, when Alex throws me on the ground in the beginning of the duel, that was not choreographed originally. He was supposed to just throw me back and I do what had come to be my signature move in the duel: stumble. What happened on Friday night though, is that Alex accidentally put too much force behind the push, and I wasn't expecting that, thus he actually threw me onto the ground. Instantly we thought "hell yeah! let's keep that!" But the first take of that move on Saturday...I accidentally kick Alex in the nuts and I land on my arm funny, halting shooting for ten-fifteen minutes.
We later had a panic attack as something I said the night before regarding that fall nearly came true. I had said "Meh, I'll take one for the team. Pain is temporary, P2 is...well, forever...unless something gets corrupted." During the second or third P2 dump to my MacBook Pro, about half the clips wouldn't transfer over, giving us the idea that it may just as well have been corrupted. After some swearing and crying, we found we could get the clips over by importing them one by one. Other than that, the main annoyance was every five minutes having to yell "Car!" and move the crane and dolly and such, then "Game on!" and having to move it all back into position. Oh yeah, and then the part where Alex and I forgot to ensure the batteries were fully charged the night before, and we essentially had to shoot until we ran out of juice, thus we were only able to get a couple inserts here and there, but not all of them I wanted.
Overall I enjoyed the shoot very much. It was the first time I had ever worked with a dedicated DP, so it was the first time I could ever ask "Did that look good" and trust him when he said "Yes." Also, for once I didn't have to think of all the shots. It was pretty much to the point where I just had to pipe up every now and then and remind them of key shots I had in mind before hand, because Kyle was so on top of it. But obviously it was worth just letting him work ;)
I ended up leaving Lincoln that night, and began cutting it together as soon as I got home, so obviously I was quite tired by the time I hit the hay. I was so excited to start on the VFX that I wanted to get the editing done ASAP. Alex and I worked together on the editing, sharing our own rough cuts and then picking the best cut out of each sequence and also refining and sending H.264 previews back and forth via iChat. We completed the edit in a week or two and I began doing the VFX work within March yet.
The workflow for the effects was quite simple. I would right click the clip in my Final Cut Pro timeline and simply choose "Send to Shake," at which point I would name/number the clip and name the project, and then Shake would automatically boot up and be ready to roll. I made my own script for the lightsabers, and am working on making it into a Macro that I can share very easily with other folk, but in script form, it still worked pretty much the same.
Quite a few details were paid attention to as well, such as film grain. Every single shot had Shake's film grain node applied, where I would sample the grain from the shot to make the saber blend in better.
Since I was using the send function of Final Cut Studio to send shots from the FCP timeline straight to Shake, I actually didn't have each shot exported as a separate video, Shake was simply referencing the correct portion of the original shots dumped from the camera. So when it came time for force lightning, I would render a DVCPRO-HD clip from Shake to use as reference in After Effects, from whence I would render the lightning element on black and apply my standard lightsaber glow back in Shake. All finished shots were rendered out of Shake to QuickTime Animations and then dropped back into the FCP timeline manually. It's possible to do this automatically, but it puts a place-holder in the timeline and hides it from you at first and generally keeps everything in your editing codec (in this case DVCPRO-HD)...I just found it less of a hassle to bring things back in myself, plus I wouldn't be forced to recompress more than I really needed to.
Now, I've been receiving some questions regarding our lightning. I will do my best to describe how I did it, but I'm not sure how much of it is going to be "OMG I never would have thought of that!" It was mostly just using my best judgement of how I thought it should look, and fiddling until I got it looking right. I used Advanced Lightning in AE, and mostly utilized the Breaking preset. This gives all those outward arcs yet keeps the lightning going in the direction I want. I could control it a bit with masks and using the wall setting if I needed to keep it contained, such as the lightning struggle at the end.
In addition to the breaking preset, I used Two-Way Strike for the main arc between us at the end, and then another Breaking layer coming from whoever had the upper hand (Alex in the first couple shots, me by the end of the struggle). For additional information and tips, I recommend checking out Spiff’s “Guide,” which is where I started. Beats the hell out of Backlash’s lightning at least. Also note that what you see in Spiff's guide is a lot closer to what our opening titles will finally look like. As the deadline approached for the contest, I had to cut some corners, so I just threw something in quickly to get the point across, but it should be pretty neat looking when it's all finalized.
I think the only thing left to cover now is color grading. There was none. What you see came right out of the camera. There was a little bit of color correction here and there to match a few shots that were off a bit, but other than that, no overall grading whatsoever. Pretty neat, huh? =D
Overall, other than time restraints restricting us from polishing all of the effects or getting sound and music all finished up, post-production went remarkably smoothly. Rotoing is never a concern for me after Movie Spoof 3's Ring of Fire sequence, so I didn't even think twice—even on May 1st—about rotoing my hand/profile/hair, whatever since the lightning had to stay behind me, or figuring out which sparks in our long wide shot had to be in front of us and which needed to be behind.
I am very proud of what we produced, and am so happy so many people enjoyed it. I agree with the comments out there about the choreography, I even mentioned before submitting our final entry that we probably won't steal the show there. But I am so honored that we've been hailed as the best overall fight scene by some. You don't know how encouraging it has been for us to go out there and top ourselves (LCC6 anyone?).
Thank you to everyone who commented on this film, be it on TFN or YouTube, everyone who voted, and congratulations TigerCraneFist, Darth Carl, and JediPastor (I voted for guys)! I hope this has been worth the read, and be sure to check out the other entries over at SaberComp.com!
