Pendragon Sword of his father had over 270 effects shots in it. They were completed in about 56 days so there was certainly a lot of shots that were rushed through the process significantly. However, the majority of the shots turned out pretty decent and go fairly unnoticed. Since this kind of effects work facinates me to no end I thought I would post just a little bit of a look into one of the shots that was in the film and how it was completed. The example shot I'll use is labeled B23 in the shots sequence.

The princess is pushing through a set of doors in front of a greenscreen.  It calls for a portion of the mountain city "Arfon" to be added into the background. It was a bit of a tricky shot as the green screen had to be replaced and the composited elements needed to parallax in 3D space. As you can see there is a real lack of any kind of tracking markers on the green screen itself, which would have helped make the shot a bit easier. This also made it next to impossible to use after effects CS3's 2D tracking methods to get a clean track. This is where the beauty of 3D match moving comes into play. There are a a variety of match moving packages out there. Including such packages as Boujou, PFtrack, Icarus (which is free by the way) and Syntheyes. I have chosen to use syntheyes for it's affordability and feature set. There are cheaper ones which reportedly do jsut as good a job however. I have heard PFtrack to be highly praised and it's a bit cheaper than syntheyes as I recall.

Alright, but let's get on with the shot. The first step was to create a concept for the backdrop that was to be composited. Taking care to keep the layers separate which would allow for the parallax in the shot that is needed to sell it. Nick Burns worked on the backdrop concept. Once it was completed I began separating it into layers for the composite. I believe I ended up with about 8 layers for this particular shot.

Then it was time to get to the match moving. The dolly on the shot was pretty bouncy because we hadn't had time to properly smooth it when shooting on the go. So the first step was to run it through Deshake and get some of the kinks out. After smoothing a bit. I dropped the shot into Syntheyes to get a 3D solve on the shot for compositing. All the moving logs in the foreground threw it for a few loops and it took an hour or so to really start getting a good smooth solve on it without any jitters. Once the mostly clean track was obtained the data was exported to after effects.

After a little tweaking with keylight to get a good key on a greenscreen. I've got a nice matte.

This is where the fun begins. Usually I drop a temp image into the scene to see how solid the track is before going further if it looks good, then it's time to start layering in the background in 3D space. In this instance this was all done in After Effects because it's much easier to lay in actual video such as poeple, smoke curling up from a fire etc. But in many of the cases. Layers wouldn't do the trick and the data needed to be brought into a 3D program and an actual 3D scene created for the shot to get things to move more believably and not have a "stacked photographs" feel. We begin layering in houses, mountains, smoke, walls, atmosphere to the air, light glow. Care is taken so that none of the edges of any of the layers become visible during the camera move. And that wraps it up. Shot B23 is in the can! I hope you've enjoyed this little summary of the work that goes into a single effects shot. To pick apart all 270 of the shots in the movie you can go to www.pendragonmovie.com and order yourself a copy of the film!

Click here to download. UPDATED! 
The download is now about 3.2 and should look better too!

What a week!  Just one day after wrapping up the January pick-up shooting on "The Penny", we all packed up and started the long drive from Wisconsin down to Texas for the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival (SAICFF).  Twenty-four hours of driving later, we arrived at our motel in San Antonio, checked in, and headed over to the festival.

This is the fifth SAICFF we have attended and I would have to say it was probably the most beneficial of all of them.  Even though we ourselves did not have a film entered this year, there were still a number of films we had worked quite a bit on over the past year that were in the festival.  It was very enjoyable to be able to watch "Pendragon", "The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry", and "The Other Son" all on the big screen, and see our countless hours of work paid off by the finished products before us.  All three films were very well received by the audience, with "Jonathan Sperry" winning the award for "Best Score".

The highlight of the festival for me though was getting to meet with so many friends and acquaintances in the Christian film world (both old and new!).  We enjoyed a number of meals with these folks catching up on each other's lives and work, as well as making big plans for the future.  God is doing great things through these people's lives!

Following the festival the "Filmweavers Four" took a couple days off for some internal business meetings, after which we parted ways once again to each other's respective homes.  Back here in WI now it's -25 degrees with wind-chill and I'm having serious second thoughts about having left TX...

But alas, I will brave the cold and begin the long but enjoyable process of post-production on "The Penny".  Over the next few months we'll do our best to keep you updated on the progress of the film, and sprinkle in a few photos and such along the way, so stay tuned!

For now here's one photo from our time down at SAICFF:

(L to R) Micah Webster, Rich Christiano (Director of "The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry"), Ethan Ledden, Chris Staron (Director of "Bringing Up Bobby"), Dustin Ledden, and Yours Truly (Nathan Webster)

The Filmweavers crew has been back together again over the last few days working on some pick-up shoots for "The Penny".  Filming involved multiple scenes that were cancelled due to weather during principle photography.  It was fun to work with everyone again after being apart for a couple weeks.

We were able to accomplish everything we had scheduled for the two days of shooting, and survived a nasty Wisconsin ice storm in the process.  With these scenes complete, all that remains to be shot is a couple exterior scenes scheduled for shooting this spring.  In the meantime I'll be kept quite busy by one of my favorite parts of the whole process: Editing!

But before I dive headlong into the rough cut of "The Penny" I'll be taking a break, along with the rest of the Filmweavers crew, to head down to Texas for the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival this coming weekend.  I had the privilege of working on three of the films screening at the festival ("The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry", "Pendragon: Sword of His Father", and "The Other Son"), and look forward to seeing them all on the big screen.

If any of you are attending the SAICFF I'd highly recommend you check out these films and let us know what you think of them by using the blog comments feature below.  Maybe we'll even see some of you down there!

In the meantime, here are a couple of still frames from this past week's shoot: