A little bonus to thank you all for wartching and sharing the video: here is the Making of “The Wall”. Inside you will find effects breakdowns, sound design techniques, and of course, outtakes…
Made for Reporters Sans Frontières, the object was to make a funny, under 45 seconds video that show why information is important to us everyday. This is what I tried to put forward in this short clip, shot on my Canon 7D, using the camera cran, the tuper rig, and a “wall” in the middle of a field.
I often talk about visuals: effects, angles, camera techniques… but one musn’t forget sound recording, which can be, in many cases, as important, if not more, than the picture itself.
Take Le SMIC for example: thankfully, it wasn’t a film centered around dialogue, because most of them were hard to understand. Just having a microphone on the camera was clearly not enough, and a lot of the dialogue had to be dubbed over in post (with not-very-convincing results). For a film with a lot of dialogue, production audio is essential.
So, aswell as my Rode Videomic (shotgun mic), I got my hands on a boompole, an extension cable, and a deadcat / windscreen. Albert, the new “soundman” for Tuperhero, than recorded an improvised chat between Anne and myself. The microphone was placed just above the shot, so as to get the best sound possible. Albert then kept swapping his aim from one to another as words were exchanged. The recording was done externally with the Zoom H2, and re-synched in post.
The end result is quite impressive compared to the original, in camera mic. Check out the video and see hear for yourself.
It was a pretty busy weekend for Tuperhero, from making props for Bagass to building sets. But it was also time for a brand new project. Lots more info on that coming very soon, but in the meantime, a test: can you guess what happened in the above photo?
Any rapper with a little self-esteem has his own swimming pool… Such is the case of 50 who, after his breakthough in the hip-hop business, had one built just pour him.
The above is what we filmed last saturday. It was a sunny day, the water temperature was nice, everything was perfect. The only little obstacle was a technical one. For the shot to work, we had to be directly over the pool, looking down. Logically, we used the crane, but the problem was it’s rotating head doesn’t turn à full 90° downwards. With help from an L-bracket and a few nuts and bolts, we were able to make it work!
Here are a few pictures of the crane being used, at maximum length, to film Florent in context that could have been worse!
Thank you to Alice for the lovely photos, and to Albert for his ever lasting help!
Here at Tuperhero Films we take care of our cast. Proof is that even for a blood burst special effect, we insist that a condom be used at all times.
Well, the condom isn’t really there for the actor’s protection, except for the fact that it replaces the otherwise used exploisives. We’re no pyrotechnicians, so we needed another, safer way of doing and actor getting shot, rather than risque severly burning out rising star. This is were the condom comes (without any horrible play on words). A technique I found browsing around the Internet and had to try.
Here are the steps:
make some fake blood: I used chocolat syrup, red and yellow food coloring, and water.
glue a washer with some invisible wire (we didn’t have any, so for the test we used string) to a condom or other latex container (a glove?).
fill the said condom with fake blood, without overdoing it, and close it tight to add pressure
attach the setup to the actor (on a tight top, or directly onto the skin)
cover with an old tee-shirt, with a small hole cut around where the impact will be.
pull hard on the wire, to make the blood bag explode.
And it works! I could have been a lot better with better preperation, but with this rough test, I think it can do wonders. Good points are that it’s neither dangerous, nore expensive.
Improvements for next time:
- fishing wire
- a smaller, more discrete hole in the tee-shirt
- a highier pressure in the bloog bag, for a more explosive effect
You’ve all seen timelapse videos before: in a documentary where a flower opens in a few seconds, or a night vidéo of a busy road, with cars driving past at amazing speeds, leaving long light streaks behind them… So I thought I’d give it a try.
The idea is quite simple : first of all, you set your camera, here a Canon 7D, to take a series of pictures at equal intervals. Once all the pictures have been taken, you bring them all in to an editing software (here I used After Effects) as a JPEG sequence, and you have your amazingly fast timelapse video. So I bought a timer remote for my 7D, which allowed me to set the interval at which it would take pictures, and how many pictures it would take (up to 400).
The end result is superb, I’m especially happy with the plant growing and the last sunset. However this kind of effect can only occasionnaly fit into the style of film I want to make (for a transition, a special effect…) so I don’t think I’ll be going any deeper into the subject. I am happy with what I’ve done, but for now I have given the remote to Florent (for whom I originally bought it as a gift!) who will, no doubt, be a lot more creative with it than me.
Bagass is a world full of original characters. Some play an important part in T-Yupz and 50′s adventure, and some are just briefly seen. This is case with Sebastian, played by Richie.
His mother may be Australian, but Sebastian is a real South-West frenchmen. Born and raised in the small village named “Bagas”, he quickly starts playing the town’s favorite sport, Rugby, and instantly becomes the village star thanks to his naturally dominating physique. Playing as a flanker, he decimates his opponents, and at 15 years of age, is logically called up by the Toulouse under 16 squad. But it just wasn’t the life for him. After only two months, he begins to miss his dear hometown, and Sebastian leaves Toulouse to return “home”. He goes back to playing rugby for ASB, and lives peacefully in Bagas ever since.
Always up to lending a hand, Sebastian first meets the Bagass when his neighbour, a certain T-Yupz, asks him to help them make a music video. Despite de clear lack of experience and technique the Bagass have, Sebastian goes all out to help his fellow Bagassons, and quickly is given the name “Carshaker”. If you think about it, Sebastian was an important part of T-Yupz and 50′s rise to fame…
Today for a few hours, we were able to shoot one of the film’s first scenes: The Bagass, still running after success, decide to shoot their own homemade music video. But unlike the below pictures, they do not have a Canon 7D, a shoulder mount, or a camera crane to do it.
The day was lit up by Richie’s first appearance as “Sebastian the Carshaker”, but also by the change encounter with Baptiste Sola, a VFX supervisor. His flawless enthusiasm helped us get all the shots we needed for the day. Baptiste should be helping out with some of the VFX in Bagass, which will hopefully allow us to take the film to new heights.
As for the equipement, we did a lot of shoulder shots, using the Tuper rig, or even straight handheld. But we did get to play with the Glidetrack and the Camera crane for some nice angles and shots.
However, we did encounter an obstacle… the clear lack of cooperation shown by the cats of Bazas. Indeed, a few shots that seemed pretty simple on paper, with the only loose end being a cat, ended up being impossible to do… and here’s proof.
