Aurora Australis

Since I took the name Film Australis, I have tried to come up with a decent enough logo for it's bumper at the beginning and sometimes the end of film projects. Nothing that I have done leaves me with a good enough first impression, and most are rather dull. I generally contribute this to using some form of object in the shape of Australia.

I always tend to go that route, forgetting that it is Film Australis, and not Film Australia. Instead of taking inspiration from the shape of the country, I should be focusing on the spectacle that is the southern lights... Aurora Australis.

It really needs to be worked on, on a PC.

Above is something I quickly came up with using Photoshop Touch on my Android tablet. I figure if I do something like this, and really flesh it out using Photoshop on my computer, then I can come up with something stunning.

Throw in some animation using After Effects to simulate the actual southern lights, and it should look excellent. Stay tuned to see how this one proceeds.

Showdown At The Blast Furnace

And here it is. Shot, edited and uploaded in under 24 hours on no budget whatsoever.

Enjoy.

Making of Showdown

At the moment, I am uploading a new piece of work that I shot yesterday. The video is still uploading to Youtube and is also being processed at the same time... for a change. I got inspiration from playing with the kids yesterday with some toy guns, and ended up going around to some local ruins of an old iron furnace.

We shot some quick shots with the whole western shootout angle, getting my dad to take a hold of the camera when I needed to be on the screen. Once we were done shooting, which was no easy feat, as the kids started getting bored by the end and were generally unresponsive to any direction (no wonder they say not to work with kids), we headed home where I began editing the footage together.

Next, I imported the footage into Adobe After Effects and got to work on the look of the footage. The comparisons between the original shots edited, and the final shots are below. You can tell the difference almost immediately.

The kids had fun, and so did I. I showed them this morning when they woke up and they loved it. I hope that others do as well. The video should be uploaded soon, and when it's done, I'll add it here to the site.

Green Screen

For quite a while now, I've been trying to get a hold of materials that I can use to create a green screen. Needless to say that this has been utterly unsuccessful.

The embodiment of evil, stuck inside
the hideous world of the 70's!

In what was some dumb luck, I stumbled across a few rolls of green wrapping paper which aren't quite the colour I was after, but will do. I went and put the stuff up on the wall in the spare room at my parents which currently only houses toys for the kids and a mattress I sleep on when I crash there.

I stuck it on the wall using some Blu-tac and it is okay.

To the right is a quick test I did with two of my children. I got them to stand in front of the screen whilst I quickly filmed them doing something. Anything.

The test did not have proper lighting, and was done with an incredibly poor camera. It had a lot of grain, and the resolution was at 720x480, so I didn't really have a lot to go with.

The two problems that I have at the moment are the fact that I do not have proper lighting and the fact that if I get some proper lighting, it might cause the paper to reflect it.

This would be bad, as it would defeat the purpose of having a green screen to shoot in front of.

In the next few days, I will be using a much better camera to film in front of it, and see how well it turns out. Hopefully I have solved my green screen problem, and this will do for a cheap method until such time that I can buy a proper kit.

Not bad for $8 worth of wrapping paper, and $2 worth of Blu-tac.

About Time... Travel

It has been a while since my last update on the Doctor Who series, and the main reason for that is that I haven't been able to do anymore work on the series apart from some writing. This is because I had not been able to use The Movies due to some sets going missing from my save game.

It seems this was due to the unlocking.ini file being in the wrong place. Odd, because it was in the place I had always had it and the day before the problem started, I had been working with the sets that went missing.

During this time, I have been working on scripts for the first episode and the last episode. Now that I have The Movies working again, i'll be working on getting the first episode done which means I need to finish off the first script. After that, I will be doing some voice casting, which means posting on number of Doctor Who forums as well as some other places that I can get some professional style voicework done.

So, until that is done however, which could be a while still... hopefully sooner than later though... here is something to whet your appettite. The pre-credits sequence of the first episode of the series, 'Skinwalker'.