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.
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!!!
On a day, kind of like most other days, i decided to hop into forbidden planet ( I do that actually every day in the vague hope it would be the one day they have a sale). Amongst all the things that are ridiculously expensive but i have no interest in (un-posable busts, seriously) in the corner of one of the display cases was a 2001 a Space Odyssey Moon-bus. Having just watched 2001 with Guy I actually ended up very drawn to this ship and the sequence it had appeared in the film. However, at a price-tag of £64.99, double the price of my cherished and beloved Zero X model I decided to give it a miss. This strange craft lingered in my mind. I liked the design, there also isn't probably many of them in existence.
In the end I decided the only way i'd end up buying the thing is if i made a movie with it.
The set up we used featured:
A 3x1 meter Blackscreen.
A pole.
A bent clothes hanger.
Blue Tack.
A G-clamp and table.
Underpants (Black)
Cloth and other soft things to catch the models if they fell off.
The Models where held in place by the clothes hanger which attached to the pole through a hole in the cloth. The underpants where then used to hide the pole. This technique worked great with the moon bus but not quite so well with the Eagle, as its heavier.
To achieve movement we tried various methods, holding the camera like a stedi cam, trolleys etc. In the end we duct taped the camera to a rowing machine and moved it back and forth with that. It greatly limited the distance it could go, but at least it was smooth.
To get y axis movement we wound the tripod to maximum height, loosened the winder control, and let her drop back down slowly.
Once we had the shots we needed we put them into final cut, changed the composite method to "screen" and there you go. Any background issues can be graded out and things like stars and landscapes can be graded in.
