My Name is Chris Thompson, and I represent one half of the film company S.K.P.B.
We create films about highly relevant social aspects, such as possessed houses, Crashed alien space craft and the horrific Pokemon Card Underground of the 90s.
This blog will serve as our work in progress blog, as well as a place to vent out all the things i've learnt and anything that may help other movie makers.
After various trials and tribulations leading up to it, we where able to rap the main Skyhawk around 1:30. This time in addition to John we where joined by actors, Andrew Clements, Alex Willis and Guy Taylor. With Dale Morgan acting as assisting Director.
Despite an atrocious weather report, we battled on adding the rain to the script to pretend it was a deliberate creative choice.
Needless to say everyone went over and beyond the call of duty and the resulting shots pretty much speak for themselves.
After a Long uphill battle we have finally found an Actress and tomorrow the major sequence of Sky hawk goes before the camera. The Cast are set, the Props are made and the locations are booked. Now my biggest fear is a giant cloud of rain set to hit us at 12:00 tomorrow. I've had write it into the script in anticipation of the worst. I only hope we can catch a break.
In other news, i've had to say goodbye to the Star of Skyhawk. My faithful Seat Ibiza, luckily we filmed all its scenes but I am still sad to see her go. She served me and my family faithfully for several years.
Braving an insane heatwave (28 degrees inside the car), Myself, Lead Actor John Logan and Assistant Director James McMullan took to the streets to film key scenes for Skyhawk.
With less than a week to go till my car gets traded in and getting an actress still up in the air, I decided to proceed and do part of the shoot in order to wrap the shots with the car.
My only real worry the the final shoot date will not match up with the shot footage, some of Johns stuff can be reshot on the day however, in order to balance it out.
Overall I think today went really well and everyone did great... Nearly there...
A busy day today going from shoot to shoot and generally Kicking ass.
Logically the best time to film a death defying high speed car-chase is at stupid-oclock on sunday morning. This way you are extremely unlikely to run into anyone except possibly the occasional saddo who is also shooting a car chase.
At 7:30 am myself, fellow Stunt Driver Conor Bannon and Stunt cameraman Guy Taylor, rendezvous to film the first action sequence in Skyhawk, up in Gilnahirk.
Needless to say all went according to plan. While i'd like to shoot more the main complicated bulk is done. In a slightly more worrying note, 10 days till I loose may car.
Special thanks goes to Conor for risking life and limb and extra thanks to Guy for hanging out of an open car boot at 50 miles per hour with a 600£ camera. :)
Before my car transforms into it's helicopter mode, there is a brief car chase involving 3 cars. Naturally being a student film, and not having the ability to close off roads, this quickly becomes a logistical nightmare.
Bar the quick swerving around corners and the high speeds which can be solved in editing, the main concern is safely allowing the camera to shoot exteriors of the car. On films vehicles can have camera stands built into them allowing cameras to be on the outside of the car. Also they can have another car in the other lane or in front to get exteriors. This again would be tricky to do safely.
My solution is my GOPRO Hero 2, A small "Stunt" camera designed to be attached to cars etc.
Using the GoPro I can put the camera really close to the ground which will give an illusion of speed due to perspective. The suction pad is also very resilient at high speeds. After shooting it is a simple matter of driving smoothly and speeding the footage up.
Well, Macgyver obviously won that fight, so it looks like i'm going down the route of the 80's movie.
However, there's one key sequence in the film that will require some out of the ordinary FX sequences, I figured it would make sense to make sure these are doable before I commit to the film.
The film will mainly focus on the two shows, "Knight Rider" staring David Hasstlehof. Featuring a crime fighter and his talking car.
And Airwolf, Starring Jean-Michael Vincint and Eernest Borgnine , an action show featuring a super Helicopter.
Naturally I have a car at my disposal, my own SEAT Ibiza, while not quite a Black Trans-Am, it will still make an amusing replacement for the film. The real challenge will be how I incorporate an Airwolf like craft into the film. One possibility was to have two separate vehicles for the main character to use allowing him to jump from one to the other during the film. This was cool, but these shows had always been about the one craft, treating it like an extra character, so this left me with option 2.
Make the car transform into a chopper...
Airwolf was designed by Andrew Probert (who I was lucky enough to chat with back in 2007 during my A-level Art Dissertation) based on an existing Bell Helicopter, the idea being, with it's guns retracted Airwolf would look just like a normal executive copter, "A wolf in sheep's clothing"
The Additions Probert made to the un-modded bell where interesting, primarily adding the two massive engine intakes on the sides to make it a faster meaner craft. I decided to use this same approach with my Seat.
It would be easy to simply just copy Airwolf and just tack helicopter bits onto the car with little thought other than that they looked cool, however I wanted to create something that would look like it was designed together with the car and seamlessly blended in as the car transformed. Interestingly, both designs already shared the same grove on the bonnet.
I started with a really basic 3d model of a Seat Ibiza mark 3 (mine is a mark 4) i got off the internet. It wasn't too hard to replace sections and upgrade it like mine.
Another thing I established early on was that I didn't want the car to outright transform as that wouldn't look terribly feasible. (Bearing in mind Both Airwolf and KITT had to actually do a lot of the things they did on screen in some capacity.
I came up with the idea that the helicopter section is a separate unit that could fly over when summoned and dock with the car creating the entire aircraft. This would also help retain the recognisable features of the Seat Ibiza while at the same time make it look far more advanced.
Just like Probert did with Airwolf, I added Large intakes to the side, this helps give an added sense of power to the craft.
I added a large swept back tail section to balance off the massive intakes.
I then rescaled the intakes and the fins to make the craft yet more balanced, and added running lights to the wings for added realism.
As reluctant as I was to break the shape, I felt I had to include the Rotor blades and properly make the car a Helicopter.
And thats the basic shape done. A few details to add, but they can come later :)
End of year projects finally starting up and I'm at a loss on what script I'm going to do.
At the end of the day it boils down to a dramatic character revelation involving a Yeti, or an 80s action film featuring homages to all the best shows of the 80s.
Well theres only one way to settle this... Fight!!!
