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| At long last, the premiere of Hookman: Redemption is upon us! |
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| Hookman: Requiem premiered here on the same date six years ago. |
So mark your calendars and tell your friends, Hookman is coming to the Charles on December 27th!
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Premiere & Trailer
So mark your calendars and tell your friends, Hookman is coming to the Charles on December 27th!
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Post-Production & Visual Effects
This is the first post to the blog in a long time because we've been focusing on finishing the movie. We are happy to report that principal photography is wrapped on Hookman: Redemption!
Now begins the long process of editing, visual effects, and audio mix for the film. In this Hookman movie, we've really stepped our game up in terms of visual effects. Hookman: Requiem had a grand total of three greenscreen shots - meaning actors were shot against a green screen and composited into existing footage to achieve a desired effect. Bonus points if you can name all three.
Now, in Hookman: Redemption, we eat simple greenscreen shots for breakfast. This week we're going to look at a shot where we put an entire car on a greenscreen stage inside a studio, shot a dialogue sequence on steadicam, then composited it to make it look as if the car were driving on a bright sunny day. Let's break that down a bit to show how complicated it is.
Step 1: Shoot the stuff. In this case, it's four people talking in a car, pretending to drive. We used a steadicam to shoot the opening shot of the scene because we're awesome. That means the camera is seemingly floating around the car while it's driving.
Step 2: Remove the "green" from the background and replace it with what you want. This is where we stopped in Hookman: Requiem, and can be fairly complicated. But in this new shot, the hardest parts are ahead.
Step 3: Track the camera in 3D. In order to make a shot look realistic that has a 'floating camera,' we need to create a virtual camera in 3D that moves EXACTLY the same way the real camera did. This is impossible to do by hand because it has to be very precise. We run it through a 3D camera tracking program that picks out hundreds of small details in the frame then tracks each one through the entire shot to reverse-engineer the camera move in a virtual environment (huh?).
Step 4: Backgrounds. So now we've got the car cut out from the green screen, and the virtual camera move matched. For the background of the shot, we want the car driving on a nice country road. So we physically go out and shoot 360 degrees around a nice country road while driving. This required rigging a camera to shoot out of the trunk, side door, and on the hood of a minivan while driving 40 mph. We shot this roughly six months after shooting the original car in the studio.
Step 5: Build the virtual world. Now we bring those 2D background plates into the 3D world and line them up so they're seamless. Do some final color tweaking, add a lens flare and some motion blur, and the shot is good to go!
I may have lost you after step one. That's okay because you don't have to really worry about it. If the visual effect succeeds, you'll never even realize it was a greenscreen shot anyway. Hopefully you'll just watch the film and say to yourself, "Oh, they're driving down a nice country road, isn't that lovely."
This shot took roughly 10 hours to get it to a "good enough for Hookman" quality level. Watch the video to check out the original footage and the various stages it goes through to get to the final shot (watch it in HD or suffer the consequences):
Now begins the long process of editing, visual effects, and audio mix for the film. In this Hookman movie, we've really stepped our game up in terms of visual effects. Hookman: Requiem had a grand total of three greenscreen shots - meaning actors were shot against a green screen and composited into existing footage to achieve a desired effect. Bonus points if you can name all three.
Now, in Hookman: Redemption, we eat simple greenscreen shots for breakfast. This week we're going to look at a shot where we put an entire car on a greenscreen stage inside a studio, shot a dialogue sequence on steadicam, then composited it to make it look as if the car were driving on a bright sunny day. Let's break that down a bit to show how complicated it is.
 |
| wow, we're getting fancy |
Step 1: Shoot the stuff. In this case, it's four people talking in a car, pretending to drive. We used a steadicam to shoot the opening shot of the scene because we're awesome. That means the camera is seemingly floating around the car while it's driving.
Step 2: Remove the "green" from the background and replace it with what you want. This is where we stopped in Hookman: Requiem, and can be fairly complicated. But in this new shot, the hardest parts are ahead.
 |
| what the turd? |
Step 3: Track the camera in 3D. In order to make a shot look realistic that has a 'floating camera,' we need to create a virtual camera in 3D that moves EXACTLY the same way the real camera did. This is impossible to do by hand because it has to be very precise. We run it through a 3D camera tracking program that picks out hundreds of small details in the frame then tracks each one through the entire shot to reverse-engineer the camera move in a virtual environment (huh?).
Step 4: Backgrounds. So now we've got the car cut out from the green screen, and the virtual camera move matched. For the background of the shot, we want the car driving on a nice country road. So we physically go out and shoot 360 degrees around a nice country road while driving. This required rigging a camera to shoot out of the trunk, side door, and on the hood of a minivan while driving 40 mph. We shot this roughly six months after shooting the original car in the studio.
Step 5: Build the virtual world. Now we bring those 2D background plates into the 3D world and line them up so they're seamless. Do some final color tweaking, add a lens flare and some motion blur, and the shot is good to go!
I may have lost you after step one. That's okay because you don't have to really worry about it. If the visual effect succeeds, you'll never even realize it was a greenscreen shot anyway. Hopefully you'll just watch the film and say to yourself, "Oh, they're driving down a nice country road, isn't that lovely."
This shot took roughly 10 hours to get it to a "good enough for Hookman" quality level. Watch the video to check out the original footage and the various stages it goes through to get to the final shot (watch it in HD or suffer the consequences):
Monday, June 11, 2012
Leaked Set Photos!
This week we have super top-secret photos from the set of Hookman: Redemption that offer and unauthorized look behind the scenes of the epic production this past weekend!
Monday, June 4, 2012
Pre-Visualization
Making a movie requires a lot of planning (duh), but certain types of scenes require more than others. For example, a scene where two characters sit and talk isn't all the complicated. For something that will require visual effects or very specific editing, it's better to figure out the blocking for the actors and cameras ahead of time. Case in point - a fight scene.
There's a confrontation at the end of Hookman: Redemption that is slated to be shot one week from today. Rather than waiting until we're on set to figure stuff out, we assembled a crack team of pre-visualization artists and utilized state-of-the-art techniques to figure out just how we're going to film that scene. Below is posted the final edit of the pre-visualized fight scene, with lifelike analogs of the major characters.
Warning: This video contains mild spoilers that will not necessarily give away the end of the movie, but may ruin some small surprises (if you aren't privy to the shooting script or haven't read it yet (Robbie)).
 |
| A frame from a not-so-well-planned-out fight scene. Notice her face, which seems to say, "Gee, I sure do wish we had pre-visualized this scene in some sort of virtual environment that we could then refer to on set!" |
There's a confrontation at the end of Hookman: Redemption that is slated to be shot one week from today. Rather than waiting until we're on set to figure stuff out, we assembled a crack team of pre-visualization artists and utilized state-of-the-art techniques to figure out just how we're going to film that scene. Below is posted the final edit of the pre-visualized fight scene, with lifelike analogs of the major characters.
Warning: This video contains mild spoilers that will not necessarily give away the end of the movie, but may ruin some small surprises (if you aren't privy to the shooting script or haven't read it yet (Robbie)).
Monday, May 28, 2012
Special Double Update: Jim-Bob
This weekend we have a special second update because news this hot can't wait until next week!
A new character will be introduced in Hookman: Redemption, a character who plays a key role in the early part of the story: Jim-Bob. Up until this weekend, that role was to be filled by Molly (aka Tum-Tum) because she has such a good dramatic range. However, an opportunity arose to cast that character with another actor who is well-known as a creepy character actor in B-Horror movies: John Karyus.
"Scaryus Karyus" has been in such films as The Summer of Massacre, Poultrygeist, and Silent Night, Zombie Night, among others. We are lucky enough to catch him after he wraps acting as a demonic clown in a new Full Moon movie. You can see his partial credits here.
Look for "Jim-Bob" in Hookman: Redemption!
A new character will be introduced in Hookman: Redemption, a character who plays a key role in the early part of the story: Jim-Bob. Up until this weekend, that role was to be filled by Molly (aka Tum-Tum) because she has such a good dramatic range. However, an opportunity arose to cast that character with another actor who is well-known as a creepy character actor in B-Horror movies: John Karyus.
 |
| John Karyus as "Freddie the Holy Hobo" |
"Scaryus Karyus" has been in such films as The Summer of Massacre, Poultrygeist, and Silent Night, Zombie Night, among others. We are lucky enough to catch him after he wraps acting as a demonic clown in a new Full Moon movie. You can see his partial credits here.
Look for "Jim-Bob" in Hookman: Redemption!
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