Yoda, Star Destroyer, Stormtroopers, and Imperial Officer

It's been a busy week!

Theresa delivered another Yoda "lip sync" test clip:

Pretty good, huh?

Jay's ADR + Theresa's CG = CG Yoda

Yoda still has a long way to go, but he looks more and more realistic with each iteration. Theresa's spent a lot of time animating Yoda and her hard work is paying off. Very impressive...

Don't ask me why, but I decided to re-texture map the Venator-class Star Destroyer... AGAIN! Here are before-and-after shots from our "Star Tours" shot, along with a reference photo from "Revenge of the Sith":


The original Star Destroyer model is beautiful, but it was never designed for the extreme close-ups that we're using. Since our model needs to hold-up to closer scrutiny than originally intended, I completely switched some of the texture maps. If you compare the "after" picture (2nd pic) to the "Revenge of the Sith" reference picture (3rd pic), you can see that the new texture maps are much more accurate.

Here's another before-and-after comparison:

I still need to fix the texture maps on the side of that reddish sticky-outy thing, but I'll deal with it later...

Here's a before-and-after comparison from the scene when the Star Destroyer exits hyperspace over Dantooine:


Finally, here are some side-by-side comparisons with reference pictures from "Revenge of the Sith":


Especially in that 2nd pair of pictures, the lighting conditions are different, but it's close enough to check the texture maps.

We shot 2 days last week -- Stormtroopers and Imperial Officer! Sweet...

Here are before-and-after shots of Scene I524a. It's the scene in Bibble's Bar when Katinka shoots the Stormtroopers:

I LOVE the original shot, but unfortunately we didn't have a scorch mark on the Stormtrooper's armor. The original intent was to add a digital scorch mark, but it ended up being a huge pain to rotoscope and it still looked fake. :(

I racked my brain trying to figure out how to achieve scorch marks without permanently discoloring my Stormtrooper armor. We finally achieved the effect by taping black Cinefoil (cut into a "scorch mark" pattern) to the armor. It's such a simple solution that it's embarrassing that I didn't think of it sooner, but you'd be surprised how hard it was to figure out.

If you look at the Stormtrooper's chest in the 2nd picture, you can see the super-cool scorch mark. Here's a reference picture from "Star Wars" showing that blasters leave scorch marks on Stormtrooper armor:

They MUST have had rubber "stunt" Stormtrooper armor in "Star Wars," because I don't see how they could have done some of those stunts in plastic armor. I speak from painful experience. More about that later...

Anyway, here are before-and-after shots of the Stormtroopers escorting Brad in the Star Destroyer hangar:

Brad and the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper are still missing from this shot, and I still haven't figured out how to add realistic digital reflections in the floor, but it's still a huge improvement over the CG-only animatic (1st pic).

A few scenes later, Brad uses The Force to snatch one of the Stormtrooper's blasters:

Again, Brad and the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper are still missing from the revised shot. We'll add them later.

After snatching the blaster, Brad shoots the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper in the head:


(Brad is represented by the CG Stormtrooper until we shoot his live footage.)

That fall looks pretty real, right? Unfortunately, that's because it WAS a real (and unplanned) fall:

Ouch! Remember when my tailbone WASN'T shattered into 18 pieces? You know, back before I started peeing blood? Ah, the good old days...

Anyway, my worst fear was almost realized Monday night. I always feared that I'd accidentally fall, crack the Stormtrooper armor, pierce my kidney (or spleen, or other organ) with a sharp piece of broken armor, and bleed-out on my mats. :(

GN, BN. The good news is that I didn't pierce any important organs. The bad news is that I still fell flat on my butt. It completely knocked the wind out of me and I was sore for a few days. But you know what they say: pain is temporary, film is forever.

Lesson Learned: ALWAYS practice stunts beforehand! In this particular case, the problem is that in all other "Stormtrooper getting shot" scenes, I'd backpedel a few steps and Brad would stop me from falling over. But in this particular "shot in the head" scene, I fell straight backwards like a sack of potatoes.

When we shot the earlier animatic of this scene, Sarah caught me -- Brad wasn't there that night. Since he'd seen the animatic, I assumed he knew I'd be falling straight back. Well, never "assume," especially when your spleen is at risk. Just trust me on that one...

On the plus side, not only did we get a real fall for that scene (YES, we're keeping it, and NO, I'm not re-shooting it!), but we also got a good blooper. The actual fall isn't that funny because you hear me hit the ground pretty hard, so I had to mask the actual sound with a cartoon "falling" sound effect to make it funnier.

Perhaps even funnier is that I've literally "fallen and I can't get up!" (Now I know how old people feel.)

Since I can't bend my legs very well in the Stormtrooper armor, Brad had to lift me up. The problem is, I outweigh Brad and I couldn't bend my knees, so I was dead-weight. As a result, Brad had to use his body weight and fall backwards in order to pull me to my feet:


It was only after we were both on our feet and recovering from our mutual falls that we realized the camera was still rolling...

Anyway, after Brad shoots the "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper in the head, he shoots the retaining clamps holding a storage container that's suspended from the ceiling:

The 1st picture shows the sparks after he shoots the retaining clamp on the right.
The 2nd picture shows the 2nd laser blast hitting the retaining clamp on the left.


The 1st picture shows the storage container starting to fall. I also like that "molten metal" look on the scaffolding where the laser blast hit. That wasn't intentional -- it was a nice side effect from the stock footage we used for the falling sparks (available for free, along with a ton of other cool stock footage, at Detonation Films).
The 2nd picture is a reference shot from "Revenge of the Sith" showing where I got the camera angle and sparks idea.
What?!? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? It's not like we're real filmmakers. We need all the help we can get!

Here's a shot that I wasn't sure we'd be able to get since we don't have a crane. It's a point-of-view shot as the storage container falls on the Stormtroopers:


The original plan was to replace all 4 CG Stormtroopers with live Stormtrooper footage. However, when I composited the shot, I realized that as the camera approaches the Stormtroopers, the perspective changes on the 3 Stormtroopers that aren't directly under the camera. In other words, at the beginning of the shot, you can only see the top of their heads. But as the camera falls towards them, you can see more of their bodies as the camera's perspective changes. Since the live Stormtrooper footage didn't have a corresponding perspective change, it looked totally fake. :(

Since we don't have motion control equipment, our only choice is to use live footage for the "main" Stormtrooper (i.e. the one who looks up a moment before being crushed by the storage container), and use CG Stormtroopers for the other 3 so that their perspective changes realistically.

Fortunately, this workaround also made my life easier when motion-tracking the live Stormtrooper footage into the shot, because I had 3 CG Stormtrooper size references that allowed me to accurately scale our live Stormtrooper to match the camera's rate of descent.

I know... I know... the live Stormtrooper looks different from the 3 CG Stormtroopers. We'll fix that later. This is still just an animatic, so I didn't want to burn a lot of time on it.

Here are behind-the-scenes pictures of how we achieved that shot without a crane -- guerrilla filmmaking at its finest!

Fortunately, Brad held the camera rock-steady, which made post-production much easier! The last thing I need is a jittery shot that I have to motion-stabilize.

Here are before-and-after shots of the next scene, which shows the storage container actually crushing the Stormtroopers:

The revised shot still lacks digital reflections, Brad, and the dead "Hover Gurney" Stormtrooper. We'll add those details later.

Here are 2 more screenshots from that scene:

CRUNCH!

The arrow in the 2nd picture shows Brad's (digital) lightsaber rolling on the floor. It falls free from one of the Stormtrooper's belts when he gets crushed. This is important, because in a subsequent scene, Brad uses The Force to retrieve his lightsaber, which he then uses to fight Darth Vader. I almost forgot to add the lightsaber to this shot, so we would have had a continuity "goof" for the astute viewer.

That wraps up the Stormtrooper footage we shot on Tue. On Thu., Sarah's dad came over to shoot Imperial Officer footage.

Here's a behind-the-scenes picture of Sarah looking on as her dad gets "in character" and practices his lines:


And here are before-and-after pictures of his scenes. The 1st one is in the Jedi Temple's central security station as he addresses a Clone Trooper:

His eye line was off (my fault), so that's why I had to move him up-and-right a bit. Also, since the digital set isn't final yet, I didn't bother to add any color correction -- that's why he looks too bright.

Here's a hologram of Imperial Officer on the Star Destroyer bridge, reporting to Darth Vader:

This was a tough scene for Mr. Stevens because it was a lot of dialogue involving lots of unfamiliar words ("holodisc," "databank," etc.). Some of his more interesting (and funny) takes involved a "homecoming beacon" (instead of a "homing beacon") and "clown troopers" (instead of "Clone Troopers"). :D

To make things even worse, about halfway through the night, Brad noticed that Mr. Stevens wasn't wearing his belt! Yes, in case you were wondering, it's completely, 100% Sarah's fault. :D

Fortunately, the other shots were too close to show his missing belt. Unfortunately, this shot (above) had to be re-done and it was his most difficult scene. So not only did he do a great job on the 1st 4 takes, but he had to re-memorize his lines and deliver another 4 takes after a long night of shooting. We're grateful to him for being such a good sport.

I' m especially grateful that Mr. Stevens delivered a great performance in the re-shoots because otherwise I would have had to digitally-add his belt to the original (beltless) footage. (I figured I could get away with a composited belt since it's a hologram and thus the seam would be harder to spot.) Fortunately, he gave strong performances in the re-shoots, so the compositing was unnecessary (phew!).

Here's an example of Mr. Stevens' great acting as he's being choked by Darth Vader:


And he also did a great job collapsing to the floor, suffocated to death:


We've shot a ton of live footage recently, and the master animatic is coming along nicely. It's amazing how much progress we've made over the past 2 months.

Jen is coming over Mon. to shoot some live footage. She's going to be the female arcade game character in the Bibble's Bar scene. I don't expect her footage to take very long, so I'm also hoping to shoot Darth Vader footage Monday night.

Later,
Bob

Dogfight Animatics

As mentioned last week, Sarah and Theresa came over to work on Brad's Jedi costume and our CG Yoda, respectively. A perfect time to take an impromptu, behind-the-scenes picture, right? It seems so simple on the surface, and yet hindsight being 20/20, I now chide myself on being so naive:

I swear, women can sense when a camera is present. It's kind of like how dogs can smell fear or birds can sense an impending earthquake. I don't know how they do it, but the second women sense a camera, they strike a pose. It's one of those natural phenomena I'll never understand...

Anyway, want to know what Theresa worked on? Separating Yoda's teeth!

Unless you've worked on digital models, you can never understand or appreciate how tedious and complicated it is. Digital artists work on the tiniest details -- things the audience will NEVER notice -- but only because if those tiniest details were omitted, the audience WILL notice. They might not be able to put their finger on it and identify what's wrong, but they can just sense that something's not quite right.

In this case, Theresa had to separate Yoda's teeth because only having an "upper" and "lower" row of teeth gave him a "clenched jaw" look when he's talking.

On the CG-side, I added 2 new animatics to the dogfight. Here's Scene D209d, along with "Star Wars" reference pictures:

In the picture above, Brad's Jedi Starfighter zooms towards the camera, climbing as it flies right past the camera:

Of course, a TIE Defender follows in pursuit, shooting at him. We (and by "we" I mean "Brad") will rotoscope the laser bolts later. :)

The camera whip-pans to the right as the TIE Defender zooms past:


And we see Brad's Jedi Starfighter zooming off into the distance with the TIE Defender right on his tail:

(Brad's Jedi Starfighter is hidden behind the TIE Defender in the picture, above.) Here's a better shot about 1 second later:

I'll probably add a Star Destroyer to our shot, not only because it matches the "Revenge of the Sith" reference picture better (and thus looks cooler), but also because the Star Destroyer probably should be in this shot.

Here's the 2nd dogfight animatic, Scene D209f:

This shot is pretty self-explanatory. A single TIE Defender zooms past the camera, shooting at Brad's Jedi Starfighter.


Again, Brad will rotoscope the laser bolts later.

The last thing I worked on last week was adding some light to our "Venator" Star Destroyer bridge. Here are before-and-after pictures:

If you look carefully, you'll notice that I added more light on the right so that we can see that window better. Again, it's such a tiny detail that you can barely tell, but it's those tiny details that matter.

We're supposed to shoot Sarah's dad as "Imperial Officer" tomorrow night. I can't wait, because I've been waiting to shoot the Imperial Officer footage for a long time. It will be nice to replace our static animatic with live footage. However, Sarah's sick (again) so we may or may not be able to shoot her dad tomorrow.

And in case you were wondering, no, a "monkey poo" fight is NOT responsible for her illness this time. The kid she nannies sneezed right in her face (not unlike the scene in "Jurassic Park" when the Brachiosaurus sneezed on Lex). Is it wrong that I get a huge smile every time I think of a huge blast of nose boogies being spewn all over Sarah's face? Man, what I would pay for a video of that wonderful moment... :D

Fortunately, we have 2 nights of shooting scheduled this week, so whether or not we shoot Sarah's dad, we should still be able to shoot Stormtrooper or Darth Vader footage on Thursday. Next week's blog entry should contain some cool before-and-after shots.

Later,
Bob