Strategy in action – Warp (cousin of Warp Australia) releases a short on the net to support financing for a feature, gets kudos, spreads details of production.
Once upon a time, four friends at the Kent Institute of Art & Design created a group called Shynola, and the fusion led to this strange and wonderful film –
The_Littlest_Robo_-_Short_Film by dekku
They went on to make bits of madness like this, The House of Jealous Lovers for a post-punk band, The Rapture –
TheRapture “House Of Jealous Lovers.” from phil tidy on Vimeo.
After founding member Gideon Baws died from viral myocarditis in 2008, at the age of 33, Jason Groves, Chris Harding and Richard Kenworthy continued to work on clips and commercials, and became involved with Film4.0, “the talent and idea driven hub within Film4 that works with emerging and established talent, supporting them to tell unique stories and connect with audiences in new ways.” That is a fascinating initiative in itself, and could inspire a certain broadcaster here.
By the end of 2012, they were in post with Dr Easy, produced through Warp Films.
The short linked to ‘The Red Men’, an optioned book by Matthew De Abaitua, is pretty nifty. Shot by shot, we can see how costs are controlled and the fun is pushed into the robot’s POV shots, which are animated.
Dr. Easy from Shynola on Vimeo.
The online echo-chamber is pretty inspiring, and helps to reinforce the financing power of the film. The world of the film is being developed through a website for the imaginary company providing the robots.
Jellyfish did the VFX, and also worked on the underwater material for this short from Shine –
The Film4.O blog on that work is detailed and instructive –
Each film had its own challenges. We were working with lighting and environment data not collected by us, which is not our usual approach. In the case of Jonah it was challenging for the team on location to shoot the necessary underwater shots – apart from anything else, many needed to be so fast moving and dynamic that it would have been impossible to shoot for real. We recreated those shots entirely from scratch, and where we could, we found stock shots that matched what we were looking for. We had to match both the created and stock shots to location shots, which wasn’t easy. When you are using a mixture of back plates like this, it’s always hard to find matching formats, frame rates and grades. A big challenge with Jonah was to get the very complex seaweed and accumulated debris to feel natural and real on the older version of the fish. We spent some time working out the rigging and simulation but in the end decided to use a hair/fur type solution combined with our own software to get the rubbish to stick to the CGI fish in a natural way.
