Production Day 9

Lesson of the Day:
Mini-Vans works great for dollies!

Filmmaker of the Day: Alex Bleyer
For awesome dolly operation ;)

- Antoine Bandele (Director)

Production Day 8

No photos. Short day but it was a good day. I went back to watch dailies and the audio is horrible. We'll have to do major ADR on this scene and another.

- Antoine Bandele (Director)

A Look at the TDC Visual Effects

Hey all, I've been meaning to post for awhile, but needed something to show you until now. For "The Devil's Company," I'm acting as a one-man army on various visual effects. Truly no two of any visuals done are the same. From replacing a cigarette box logo to creating a 1,000,000-particle materialization intro, I tend to work on this stuff closely with Antoine in order to really help get the look he needs. I have a few things I want to show you, nothing too big, just to give you a taste for what's in store...

First and foremost, the blog background. It's a cool premise: have the actual characters on one side, and some BTS stills on the right. Depending on your monitor, the longer it is, the more you get to see, so look out for that.

Here's something most of you (should've) seen already: the intro for the BTS video. This intro took over 11 hours to render out, rendered 3 different times because of various trips back to fix mistakes. As I mentioned before, over 1,000,000 particles a second are being produced, which is no easy feat.

***A Devil's Company Blog Exclusive***

This one was left on the cutting floor, before there was even footage for it: a motel sign. The idea here was just a simple neon "motel" sign, but in the end was cut.

***A Devil's Company Blog Exclusive***

This was a pre-viz done to see if it COULD actually be done, which is illustrated. I didn't have much experience with tracking points and such, so this was kind of new. This method created on the spot effectively kills two birds with one stone: a perfect track, and a clean erase of the markers.

***A Devil's Company Blog Exclusive***

Possibly after post is done and the film is released, I'll show some bigger sequences, and some more pre-viz stuff that went down... When I'm not doing this, I'm working on other filmmaking projects, practicing piano, AND appearing in a few "Deal or No Deal" episodes, airing May 4th. Until we meet again....

Click here to see some of my other work.

- R.A. Elliott (VFX Wizard)

Production Day 7

Today was a big day. We were going to shoot in a really large park area.

It was great. The child actors were awesome, although I was very nervous about directing them.

Courtney was a tad late but that wasn't the worst of it.

We had to cut our shoot short because a park coordinator said we were not allowed to shoot at the park on Holidays or Weekends (Weekdays and non Holidays are fine). We got everything involving the kids done but we could not finish up Courtney's coverage or Sacha's coverage.

There was no way we could shoot Courtney without the location so we decided to reshoot on a later date during a weekday. But we could easily shoot Sacha's coverage because all of her shots were extreme close ups. So, we drove to look for a decent spot.

On the way we lost half the crew and I had to coordinate everyone back to one spot.

Filmmakers of the Day:
Chris Miller & Veronica Aguilera!

- Antoine Bandele (Director)