My Little "Behind the Scenes" Blog

I'm very sorry for the lack of posts here in the last month and a half. My last month at Framestore was very busy. I just checked and the last post was from March 17. How time flies!

Since returning to the U.S., we have had quite a time moving back into our house. We've had the hardwood floors sanded and refinished, the interior painted, and the exterior painted. We still haven't completely moved in. We're trying to learn from our time in London and have less "stuff" around. We loved our minimal lifestyle in our little house over there, that we want to keep some of that here in America. So we're trying to move in slowly, and not move any extra stuff into the house.

But enough about that. Now that I don't work for Framestore anymore, I'm free to tell more production related stories about Prince Caspian.

In all, Aslan was in over 400 shots, Trufflehunter was in almost as many. Whenever you see either of these characters on the screen, they are 100% digital, meaning there was no lion or badger on the set. On the set they had what were called "stuffies" that were the right size of the character, and were basically big stuffed animal props for the actors to be able to know where they were supposed to look. At Framestore, we also used them for lighting reference. If the character had to move during the shot, a person in a green suit would crawl around right next to the stuffy and move it. The woman that was moving Trufflehunter around also did his voice for a temporary track.

For my part, there are two things to look for in the movie. 

The first thing to see is the river. When they went to film the river shots, there wasn't enough water in the river. There were sandbars and it wasn't rushing wildly enough. But they really liked the location and everything else was perfect, so they shot it anyway. My job was to add more water into the river. Whenever there is an aerial shot of the river, all the water you see was added by me (and some great compositors, of course). We didn't get to do the river god, but I got to do some nice looking water!

The last thing to see in the movie is the big oak tree at the end of the show that untwists itself to form a doorway. I built all the canopy: branches, twigs and leaves; and did the animation of the canopy. I also integrated all of the canopy into the trunk. There were about 270,000 leaves on the tree. Final render times for the tree, not including the simulation, were around 5 hours per frame, including 23 aovs (arbitrary output variables). Simulating the branches for the big untwisting scene took about 2.5 hours. It was less than that for the shots where there is just wind in the branches.

The wide establishing shot of the Beruna village, where you see the courtyard and the village with the castle in the background was shot as a miniature at WETA in New Zealand. But the tree is mine. We got the background plates for this shot very late in the schedule, but it was one of the more fun shots of the tree to do, because you can see the whole tree at once in this shot. And it was really cool to see the miniature with all the lights and blue screens around it before it went into the film. The bridge, the castle, the mountains and the gorge were all matte paintings, but the houses and the courtyard and the cliff were all miniatures. I haven't seen the final composite of this shot yet, but Framestore provided the tree, Aslan, and Trufflehunter for it. I think Trufflehunter is roughly 4 or 5 pixels tall in this shot. All the other people on the dais and in the crowd were added digitally.

The tree shots were the very last ones to be delivered, moments before reel 9 closed. All the shots were basically done by the time I left for home, but my friend Alex finished up some rendering issues and color things after I left. And I heard that there was one more change to make as Alex left for his vacation, so he talked Mark through how to do the changes while he was in the airport!

All in all this was an amazing experience, one that I will treasure for a long, long time. My friend John said from that reading my blog he got the impression that everything was a big pain while I was there. If that is the impression I gave, I must apologize. Even though there were trying times and challenges (the hardest being the month I was there in the beginning without my family), I loved it. I loved the work. I loved figuring out how to get around. I loved the people I worked with. I loved Calvary Chapel Westminster and all the friends I made there. Most of the time, the hardest things in life are the best things in life. If we don't have things to struggle through, how will we ever learn anything? I think that's what sanctification is all about.

I'll write again in a couple of weeks, after I've seen the movie at the El Capitan Theater. And check out the website for Prince Caspian. There are loads of stuff to see and do there. I've even seen activity books and coloring books and young reader novelizations at the supermarket.

Thanks for reading,

Dave

Patience and Endurance

On Saturday, I was working at Framestore. We had two new shots come in that I was involved with and Robin has asked me to extend my contract until April 11. One of my tasks for Saturday was to estimate how long it will take me to finish all my shots.

I took one of the ones that I hadn't started yet, estimated how long it would take to finish it and then started in to see if I was right. The first step took me about three times as long to finish as I thought it would and I started to panic. Trying to control my panic, I just kept working, trying my best to get back to my estimate. But the harder I tried, the more problems with the scene I found. I realized that if all the scenes had this kind of problem, I was in very serious trouble. I finally went and talked to Sam about it. He is the artist that did the modeling for the lower half of the tree. He had some solutions for the scenes and I went back and tried them for the one I had started. It still didn't work. Now I was really starting to panic. 

Then I decided to give up on that one shot and try a different one. The next one I tried, Sam's idea worked perfectly. So working quickly, I was able to get three scenes into the render queue before packing up to go home.

As I was submitting the last of the three to the farm, suddenly a great wave of peace came over me and I realized that I actually had had quite a bit of success that day, even though one of the scenes had problems. My next thought was that someone must be praying for me.

I went home and told this story to M and K. They said that they were happy I got so much done, but they hadn't prayed for me. Then I told Kelly, and she said that she had prayed for me. I was so happy. And I was also relieved to remember that God is in control of everything, and that I don't need to stress out over schedules. After all that God has done in this adventure, I should already have known this one.

And as a side note on patience, I just got word that Logos Bible Software for the Macintosh has entered into it's alpha program! I've been patiently waiting for this powerful Bible Study software to get ported to the Mac, and now it is a significant step closer to reality.

Dave

Turned Ankle

Yesterday, I was coming down the stairs at Queens Road Peckham train station on my way home. But I wasn't just coming down the stairs. I was kind of running down the stairs, taking two at a time. I was very eager to get home and see my family. 

But about 3/4 of the way down, I misjudged a step by a fraction of an inch and turned my left ankle over. I caught the rail with my hand, and didn't fall, but I hurt my ankle pretty badly.

I got to the bottom and was in a lot of pain. But I realized that there was nothing for it but to walk home. So I grit my teeth and started walking. I think the adrenaline was pumping through me pretty well because each step felt better and better. By the time I got home, I was walking fairly normally.

Then I sat down on the couch with some frozen peas on my ankle. It started hurting again, which I expected, but the pain was pretty bad. Then I found that we were all out of ibuprofen. So I put my shoes on and laced them up tight. M went with me down to the corner market. Each step this time was worse and worse and by the time I got there, I knew I had made a bad decision. I bought the medicine and hobbled home.

By this time, it was dawning on me that my feet were my main form of transportation and that not being able to walk was going to make getting to work much harder. So I sent an email to a couple of friends and family who I knew would pray for me, took my medicine and went to bed with frozen peas on my foot.

When I woke up this morning, my ankle felt much better, though it was a bit sore. I got ready to go to work, figuring that if it started hurting, I could call in sick and go the doctor, and if it didn't, I could go to work. It didn't hurt, in fact it started feeling better and I went to work.

I took it easy on the way, standing on the escalators rather than walking up them, but by the time I got up to Soho my ankle felt about normal. Throughout the day, I kept wondering whether it would get worse, but it never did.

I'm going to take it easy on it for a few more days, until the soreness is completely gone, but I'm praising God for His mercy in healing my ankle so quickly.

Dave 

Some Things Can't Be Rushed

I don't usually post many details about my day to day stuff from work, but this story must be told.

Last week, some top executives from Disney and Walden Media came to Framestore to see how things were going. They went into the screening room with our production team and were watching some of the latest images that we had made. They had been in there for about 30-40 minutes, when Robin (our producer) came to my office and asked where Joe was. (His desk is next to mine.) I said that he had been there just a moment earlier, but that he must have stepped out for a minute. She asked if I knew where a particular thing that he had been working on was, and I looked and he still had it up on his monitor, but it was hidden behind a few other windows. I brought it forward and left it alone.

A few minutes later, Robin came back and asked if he had come back. Then all the executives and their entourage, our production team, Robin, Jon, our VFX Supervisor, and Mike, our CGI Supervisor, were crowded around the door to my office, waiting for Joe. Mike went to find Joe, and found him in the bathroom. Joe told me later that he actually knocked on the door to his stall and said,"Wipe faster." Joe replied from inside the W.C.,"Some things can't be rushed."

Joe eventually came back to his desk and showed the work to the people and was quite brilliant about the whole thing. They all apologized for lying in wait by his office, thanked him for his hard work and went away.

It was one of the funniest episodes in our office the whole time I've been here.

Dave

Leap Year Tomorrow

Tomorrow is leap year day. I'm not sure if that's what it is officially called, but it's the day we add to the year to make up for the fact that a solar year is actually a little less than 365.25. So we have to adjust it a bit every so often. And tomorrow's the day we do it.

I hope you weren't born on a leap year, but it might be kind of cool in a way.

Dave

Larry Norman Dies at 60

One of my all time favorite artists passed away last Sunday, Larry Norman. I started listening to his music in the 70's, and have been listening and collecting his music for many years now.

I'm not sure how this is hitting me yet. I'll have to mull this over quite a while before I have something interesting and insightful to say, so for now, I'll just defer to the news. There's a pretty good article that Kelly's got on her blog. Just click on Kel's Blog up there to the right.

Dave

I don' know. Where do you wanna eat?

I went to lunch with my friend Brian. He's from Cape Town, South Africa. We had the usual "I don' know, where do you wanna' eat?" back and forth conversation for a while until he said,"I know a place. But I don't know how to describe it. Let's just go and you tell me how to describe it."

So we went down by Framestore on Noel Street, to a place called "Bodean's". They had tin signs on the wall with pigs and cows on them and long tall tables with tall stools at them. There was a long queue to order and we stood talking for a while. Then I realized that I would need to order soon and grabbed a menu off the counter.

It was a BBQ place! They had pulled pork sandwiches, ribs and barbeque chicken, cole slaw and the works. I told Brian what kind of place it was and he said they only call the thing you cook on a barbeque, not the whole place. So I explained that it's not just what's on the menu, but it's practically a whole culture down in the southern U.S.

My "Soho Special" was pretty good, but it needed a bunch of BBQ sauce to make it so. But the main effect of the whole place was to make me homesick for Lucille's in Torrance. It was quite fun to get to tell Brian all about the place that he took me to.

Oh, and as we were sitting there eating, I looked up and saw Jacob and Dan with a couple of other guys from Framestore at another table eating. I was quite surprised at this and decided that though they said they were my friends, they couldn't really be, since they had not told me about this fun American style BBQ place before. (Just kidding.)

I'll probably be back there again before I head back to the states.

Dave