Texturing of the Voydarkatron almost complete!

It is with a sigh of relief and a tingle of excitement that I can finally say the Voydarkatron texturing and painting has almost been signed off. Once I approve the eyes, we'll be ready to plough through the next stage of the process and Henry Bramble will finally see light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel.

Here's a sneak peak at the beast himself in all his fully rendered coloured and textured glory. Unfortunately you'll have to wait to see his gruesome face!

The team has also been working on the inner trunk. I think this is going to be the most disgusting thing you've ever seen get close to someone's face - period!

Henry Bramble On The Move Again - Finally!

Here's a beautiful re-sculpture of the Voydarkatron's trunk just sent to me by Jan Daube and his team at Wham Bam Productions. Previous versions by the other vfx teams were not nearly as detailed and defined. This really does look like the flesh of an elephant! - Very happy right now!

Wham Bam! - Henry Bramble vfx get a boost!

So having lost all hope of getting the vfx completed, DiRoom, by the skin of their teeth, seem to have found a suitable replacement vfx team - Wham Bam Productions.

Although their showreel leans more towards drinks commercials and certainly does not include seven foot monsters, their test demo's they've sent me are very promising and after a productive Skype call I feel confident they know what I'm looking for. They have been briefed before I go on holiday for two weeks and I have to confess I feel a small surge of excitement by the progress they should have made by the time I get back. Fingers crossed this is third time lucky!

Here's their showreel below.

Henry Bramble suffers another VFX nightmare

If you haven't already heard, we didn't get into Cannes. There were just 8 films selected out of a whopping 3,500 shorts from across the globe. It was a relief to be honest, because if we had been selected, our film would not have been finished in time. It is now June and has taken the vfx team six months to deliver just one completed and approved vfx shot out of forty four?! - I can't tell you how frustrated and angry this makes me feel, but in these instances, you have to just set your emotions aside and find a way to move forward.

Currently DiRoom (who were responsible for outsourcing the vfx work) have found three UK based vfx compainies who are willing to do the work for the remainder of our budget. However, despite their impressive vfx reels I have not yet been convinced that they are capable of delivering such specific work - i.e. a life-like Hollywood level cgi Voydarkatron. having had such a bad experience with the last team, I am being more than a little cautious as I try not to let paranoia cloud my judgement.

I was never convinced that the previous vfx team were qualified for the job, but my concerns fell on deaf ears. After all the delays and additional funding, the temptation to want to believe that they could deliver what we wanted within such a short timeframe was just too great. Our judgements were clouded by the desire to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, but in doing so the problem just got bigger.

The lesson that should be learnt here is simple - you pay for what you get. In reality we hugely underestimated the budget required for the vfx. The actual cost of the work to be delivered in such a short timeframe (a month), through a professional hollywood level outfit like Framestore, The Mill or the MPC is closer to £30,000. But rather than facing that fact we seem to be still looking for a way to get them done for less than a third of that estimate still within a similar short timeframe. With vfx artists expressing their anger at hollywood for not paying them an honest fee, I find this situation very uncomfortable.

Please can everyone wake up and smell the mocha choca. I really don't want to watch us make the same mistake a third time! In my mind, the only logical solution is to either be prepared to wait for as long as it takes for a smaller outfit to complete it for the money we have or raise £30,000. However the only way we can realistically raise this in a relatively short space of time, is through a carefully planned crowd-funding campaign like Indiegogo or Kickstarter. So for now I wait in hope for the Henry Bramble team to follow my lead.

J. J. Abrams: on Filmmaking

Could The 'BitTorrent Bundle' Eradicate Film Piracy?

I hate going to the cinema, paying £10 for a ticket, only to find out that the film I was looking forward to was just in fact a clever piece of marketing and that the film itself was a complete waste of my time - I genuinely consider this to be daylight robbery. You should be able to get your money back if you are genuinely dissatisfied with the product. I also hate missing a film I really want to watch at the cinema. This is either because by the time you get round to it, the film has already been and gone (having kids is a killer for this), or the film had a limited release and is not playing at any of your local cinemas. The fact that you then have to wait a minimum of three months before you can watch it on the small screen just adds to the frustration.

I refuse to subscribe to Sky Movies, LoveFilm or worse Netflix as none of these providers have access to all the film titles I want to see. In addition to paying for each film you download, you also have to pay a monthly subscription, but why? I want to be able to search for any film and pay £3 - £4 to stream it in HD to a device of my choice. If after watching it I really like it, I should then be able to purchase a download copy to keep (minus the £3-£4 I have already paid) or be able to access it through the cloud for free at any time.

I worked out fairly recently that owning a video collection today is rather materialistic, a waste of money and environmentally unfriendly. Out of maybe 200 carefully selected DVD's that I have purchased over the last fifteen years, I have only watched about twenty percent of them a second time. I bought these films for the comfort of knowing I could watch them when I wanted to, but you can now probably download any of these films off the internet whenever you want, making a physical private collection completely unnecessary.

So for all these reasons above, I have recently found myself illegally downloading more and more films off the internet. This may seem rather contradictory from someone who is passionate about filmmaking (I do genuinely feel guilty at times), but as an audience member I am sick of paying to see rubbish, and as a filmmaker I am reluctant to pay to watch a film for research purposes (especially if you just need to see one or two specific scenes). To be fair, the films I do genuinely like, I often purchase on DVD anyway (Drive, Dragon Tattoo and Super 8 to name a few). The ones that I enjoyed, but don't want to purchase (Another Earth), I'd happily pay £3 - £4 for. Unfortunately downloading illegally doesn't offer that option and that's when I start to feel guilty.

However, I was delighted to read a fascinating article on nofilmschool about the new developments of technology company BitTorrent. It is launching the 'BitTorent Bundle' designed to empower those in the content creation business. I am not going to say anymore except that if you really want to get ahead of the game, as a viewer and as a filmmaker, you should read this article. Have we finally found a way to watch and distribute films online, legally, fairly and efficiently!

Final Design for Henry Bramble poster by Richard Davies

I'm very excited to reveal the latest and final poster design for The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble, created by the amazing Richard Davies (TurksWorks).

20 years since the making of Drakkon

We are now well into 2013 and in a few months it will have been a whopping 20 years since I made my first 16mm film on location at West Burton Falls in North Yorkshire. Drakkon was an incredibly ambitious first film filled with stunts, explosions and special effects puppetry.

The final results may not have been up to Hollywood standards, but they were certainly no worse than Peter Jackson's Bad Taste. For a crew that were mostly made up of national diploma media graduates from Harrogate College, who had never made a film before, it was an impressive feat in 1993.

On the surface the short is now construed as a rather embarrassing and somewhat amateur attempt of filmmaking, but for myself and many of the filmmakers involved, it holds a much deeper sentiment.

Peasant (played by Derek Boyes) being confronted by Drakkon (notice the Alien 3 homage).

We were very inexperienced at the time, attempting something far more ambitious than most other beginner filmmakers. To our Media Production course leader, we were seen as egotistical mavericks who were heading for failure, yet through naivety, passion and sheer stubbornness we proved him wrong.

The experience bonded many of us at a pivotal moment in our young adult lives. It symbolised our hopes and dreams for the future. It was a time of innocence and optimism, when anything seemed possible. I look back on the whole experience with great fondness and despite all its faults, I am still very proud of the short film we made.

Twenty years later, it seems Drakkon has made a lasting impression on our middle-aged lives, so much so that on Saturday August 10th 2013, nine (maybe eleven) out of seventeen original cast a crew members, will be heading back to the enchanting waterfall in West Burton for a 20th anniversary reunion - can't wait!

DVD sent off to Cannes - Fingers crossed for a miracle!

I have just spent the last 24 hours creating all the elements for a region-free DVD of The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble, to send with our submission to The Cannes Film Festival. 

I had to roughly mix the most up-to-date dialogue, sound fx and music tracks together alongside the picture from the locked off Final Cut offline. I then exported out to ProRes 422 (LT) version, which I opened in Quicktime to convert into an MPEG 4 720p version. I then imported this to a new iDVD project, creating a menu from one of the more tasteful template designs on offer. I also added a small section of Henry Bramble music to it, to get you in the mood. I then burnt off four DVD's (3 extra just in case I messed up along the way), opened a new photoshop file and using the elements from my poster design, created the images and text that will be printed onto the DVD.  

I had to drive to my Dad's to haul my decrepit Epson Stylus Photo R200 printer back home, only to find the cartridges were empty. I sped off to Tesco's to get a cheap compatible set only to discover it was £70 - The same price as Epson's own?! Frustratingly there's plenty available online for £15 or less, but the earliest they could deliver was Monday which is cutting it a bit fine, as the screeners have to reach the festival office no later than March 7th. 

Eventually I found a small ink cartridge refill shop in Maidstone and rather than going to sleep (I've just worked a 12 hour night shift), I jumped back in the car to collect a refill set for a more reasonable £36. I then get back home and installed the cartridges and a new printer utility software for OS 10.7.5, only to have to clean the nozzles three times, before I was satisfied it was safe to print. Finally at 12:12 on Friday 1st March, I have my God damn DVD. All I need to do now is bag it up and pop it in the post via Airsure for a mere £9.24! 

All this just to have our film considered  -  but just imagine if we do get selected in competition, I'll get to meet Steven Spielberg (this years president of the Jury) who can then convince the jury to hand over the short film Palme d'Or.   ....oh it's good to dream!

Roald Dahl on writing

"When you're writing it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk bit further, maybe up on to the top of a hill, and you see something else, then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long slow process."