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In this "making-of," I have tried to outline the process of making Unrewewable, from script writing to completion. My purpose is not to get into highly detailed technical discussion but rather to explain some of the background of the film, some of the techniques used in making it, the production process, and perhaps a few of the questions viewers have expressed to me so far. My hope is that this will make for some worthwhile insight into the film. Pre-Production For some time previous to the production of this film, I had wanted to make a detective movie. At the same time, I had written two different screenplays both set in a bleak, unsustainably developed future - both stories were based around the decline, decay, and collapse of civilization. Both projects would have been incredibly enormous to try to carry out and I never felt fully satisfied with either of them. I decided it might be interesting to combine a 40s film noir sensilibity with a futuristic, cautionary tale of sorts, and wanted to, for the first time, make a film with a real meaning rather than just settling for entertainment. After coming up with a basic outline for the plot for this film, I wrote the script in one evening in December of 2007, and after some revisions I concluded that the script was solid enough to begin further pre-production. A few people have mentioned that this film bears some similarities to other movies - namely, Wall-E and Blade Runner. Wall-E appears to be simply a case of amazing timing because I finished the movie on the day Wall-E was released and I didn't really know what the movie about. Having since seen Wall-E I must admit there are a few surprising similarities both visually and in the story, but these similarities are really pretty superficial. I haven't seen Blade Runner but I think it sounds like a pretty cool concept and I was aware going into this that my movie wouldn't be the first take on film noir in the future. If there is a film that influenced my ideas for this movie, it is probably Soylent Green. That movie is also a film noir detective mystery set in a grim, unsustainable future. I hope that people don't see this film as having a purely 'environmentalist' message, as the idea of conservation of nature/resources was intended to be secondary to the idea of greed/corruption destroying society by causing it to lose sight of what is important. The society in the story did not destroy the environment out of ignorance or malice, but because it stopped caring about what wasn't necessary for its survival. My previous films have had a pretty small voice cast, consisting of myself and usually some of my immediate family, but with this film I knew that I wanted each character to have a distinctly different voice from the other characters without resorting to over-the-top accents. I asked a few friends if they would be interested in providing their voices for the film, and they all graciously agreed. I was very fortunate to be able to get the cast together that I did; several of them are talented stage actors in their own right and in my opinion those that weren't delivered strong performances as well. Voice recording for most of these characters was completed a couple of months before filming began, though I did make Mr. Orsino and The Idealist come back for some rewrites during production. Knowing that I would need some background shots of dramatic skies for some of the shots I wanted to include, I was unable to find satisfactory stock photos on the internet. So, on December 31st, 2008, at sunset, I drove out into the country a bit where I could get an unobstructed view of the sky and took a number of photographs, which were used throughout the film as background plates for the sky. The sunset was as dramatic as I had hoped for that day, but unfortunately the temperature was below freezing. So that was fun. Production and Post-Production I began filming the movie on May 15th and finished filming a little over a month later on June 20th. This was a relatively short amount of time for me; though the entirety of Crown of Syracuse took only 10 days to film and was about half the length, this film was vastly more technically demanding. During this period of time I also completed the majority of the "post"-production work on a shot-by-shot basis, with the exception of some effects work in the opening scene and sound effects. The reason that I went shot by shot with the post-production was because I wanted to ensure that, based on the filmed footage I had, I could achieve the desired result before tearing down the set and builing a new one. I came into filming with one set that I built a few months beforehand, and because of the size of the sets for the film I had to tear down each set after filming the scenes set there. The first set was Jack's office, which included both the office and the sidewalk and building facade outside. The green lighting device in the office, which was intended to be a standard issue PolyTech air purifier though this is not stated, creates a blind effect reminiscent of very stereotypical film noir lighting. (There is a similar device in Jack's apartment, later in the film.) A flashlight provided the light coming through the door for the interior shots. Any shots showing Jack's hat required additional post-production work because the hat (from an Indiana Jones set) was brown and had to be grayed out in post-production to give Jack the proper noir detective look.
This shot, the first filmed, seemed simple enough to me but the greenscreen proved fairly challenging to composite properly; for the second set of blinds, inside the office, I realized that a piece of printed paper would work just as well. Greenscreening in the film was achieved with FXHome CompositeLab Pro, a program I bought while making The Oven and have for the most part been very pleased with. The phone conversation in the office was the first mouth-animation in the film, and these effects were accomplished by creating and animating the faces in Axogon Composer, then mapping them onto a cylinder (to match the curve of the characters' heads) in Carrara, then compositing them on again in Axogon. The face animation is, as some have pointed out, not perfect, but for the most part I was satisfied with the results and I certainly improved my abilites in this area.
Because this set was built far ahead of time, it also found its way into Cashman, filmed before Unrenewable for the 5th 24-hour contest, with the few changes including a street, motorcycle, bike, and plant -- all things that would not belong in the world of Unrenewable. I covered up the window and behind the door as well.
Though the film was produced in a very non-chronological sequence, the next scene filmed was the meeting at the beached whale. I wanted to have a really wide establishing shot of the restaurant so that I could show the nearby PolyTech complex; in order to get the correct angle I put the camera on a tripod and used a wide, high angle. The matte painting used to fill in the blanks took me four days to make, as matching the perspective of the in-camera elements proved very difficult. The image below is the original shot. (With some blacking-out to spare you the sight of my living room.)
And here's a still from the completed shot:
Everything not in the original shot is computer generated, with the exception of the aforementioned bit of sky photography. You may notice the folks on the left are in a different location while Jack is not - this is because I animated their part of the frame after filming Jack then spliced the two together. This was much faster and easier than trying to juggle all three walk cycles at the same time, and Jack does not come near the other two anyway. The boat in this shot is one of several modeled in MLCad for the film; the others are only visible in one very wide shot so perhaps I should not have spent so much time making them detailed. The implication here is, of course, that the sea-level has risen in the future, so the city uses a canal system similar to Venice. The interior of the Beached Whale brought many of its own challenges. I wanted to have colorful, dim lighting that would give the setting some character and set it apart from other locations in the film. The answer? Christmas tree lights. This ended up being very hard to work with, particularly because they had to be very close to the set for the full effect of different colors in different parts of the room. This made it very difficult to avoid touching them while animating.
The corner of the restaurant has a small bar with some pretty involved lighting of its own; I used white Christmas lights with red and green transparent in front of them to create a reddish-purple light, then build a wall of black lattice-pattern fence pieces in front of this. This part of the set is never seen clearly, but it visible in the background during much of Jack's conversation with Crowbar.
I wanted to have a long shot of the two conversing with the "Hitchcock effect," at a very slow speed, in the scene. The effect creates a sort of compression or decompression by dollying the camera backward and zooming in at about the same rate. I filmed a long shot of this, but parts of it turned out to be too bumpy so in the end I only used a little segment from it.
After finishing this scene I decided I needed to get the most complicated sequence in the film finished to ensure I had enough time to do it properly - the chase sequence. The original script called for a slightly longer, more involved chase, but this was slowly scaled back a bit for a few different reasons. Aside from the issue of feasibility, I was concerned that the sequence might be too long in comparison with the rest of the film, as it does little to move the plot forward and is mostly there for the "fun" factor, and to build up some tension. This sequence was so complicated that I decided to storyboard it - something I hadn't done in quite some time for a film - and this proved so helpful that I storyboarded most of the scenes prior to filming from this point forward. Some people have commented that perhaps PolyTech should have had more than one old, drowsy guard protecting their greatest secret - this is may be a valid point, though in my mind only a select few were aware of the item's existence/signficance anyway.
The toxic waste being dumped from the recycling facility into the water below was a lot of fun to do; I had experimented with some of Carrara's particle effects in Bane of the Sith to create a splash of water; this time I made a sort of waterfall of brownish-green particless with some small bricks mixed in to give the waste some substance. After a series of test renders I was able to find the right consistency and texture.
While there appear to be many particles in the slime, the actual count was relatively low as demonstrated by the image above; Carrara has a "metaball" feature that can turn many smaller particles into a larger, cohesive glob. This is not a technically realistic simulation of fluid, but it provided the thick, slimy consistency I wanted. After finishing the chase sequence I went on to Jack's visit to the PolyTech regional headquarters. To simplify the process a bit this time (after patching together several backgrounds on a shot-by-shot basis for the chase sequence) I decided to make one high-resolution video clip of the city background, which was then resized as needed for the individual shots in the scene.
The background was also recycled for the opening PolyTech commercial, with some recoloring work. This scene was really pretty straightforward to film, with a substantial amount of mouth animation and greenscreening complicating the process a bit, to say nothing of Jack's brown fedora. Sadly I don't seem to have any raw footage from this scene; I had to delete a lot of the non-essential production files during production because I kept running out of space, with a 250 gb hard drive. You have to make some sacrifices for high definition, I guess. I kept production files for shots that I thought I might want to refer back to. After finishing the balcony conversation, I decided it was time to film the opening scene, Jack Darter overlooking the city on a rainy film noir night. I had wanted to experiment with an idea for a rain effect for a long time, and this was my chance. My idea was to spray the set with a spray-bottle of water between frames. The first attempt didn't come out well; the drops were enormous. I found a bottle that sprayed a much finer mist, and was able to get better results this way. Of course, water droplets are naturally not going to blend with a LEGO scale perfectly, but in this film, unlike some of my previous efforts, I really had no intention of trying to minimize the fact that the characters are LEGO bricks, (I will explain this later) so the scale issue did not particularly bother me. I was fairly pleased with the results, though they do have a very imperfect stop-motion look to them that reminds me of the surface inconsistencies of clay-mation characters. This hand-made look is, in my opinion, not a negative factor and I really wanted to use real water as I felt it would contribute to the gritty, dirty look I wanted the film to have. I found that it really took about 6-7 sprays each time to make a significant difference in the droplets.
Yes, that greenscreen is shielded by clear plastic, and yes it did make greenscreening difficult. I ended up outlining the shots manually in photoshop because the combination of a poor screen and water droplets messing with the edges made the traditional greenscreen technique ineffective.
The water made a pretty big mess. The first shot of this scene (the long dolly shot) was entirely digital other than Jack in the foreground at the end of the shot, and was one of the last elements of the film to be completed, shortly before the final cut was edited together. In addition to the long render time for a 15 second shot in high definition, each of the 225 frames were processed manually in the Gimp with a "lense blur" filter to create the depth of field effect (intended to create consistency with the very small scale of the sets and minifigs).
The depth of field was created by rendering a separate 'depth map' in which white is furthest from the camera and black is closest, allowing for objects far from the camera to be out of focus. The reason I used the filter in Gimp instead of the built-in Carrara depth of field effect was because I wanted to have "circles of confusion," the circles of light that result from out-of-focus points of light filmed with a real camera. The shot took about a week to render with a single computer rendering non-stop. The smoke and rain were each rendered separately and composited together with the other elements in Axogon Composer. Here is a breakdown of the components:
Raw render
Lense blur processing in the Gimp
Rain
Smoke
Smoke Opacity
Finished Shot Incidentally, the billboard in this shot was the first visual element of the film to be completed. The next scene filmed was the big reveal at the end, which was only three shots long. This was really pretty straightforward to film, with a series of plates and bricks animated in stop-motion to raise the device encasing the item.
There have been some criticisms that this scene unfolds too quickly and abruptly. Perhaps a dramatic, slow reveal could have been effective, but that was not my intention. The story is essentially seen through Jack's perspective, and Jack doesn't really care about the resolution to the story, he's just glad it's over. To Jack, the "big reveal" is really not a big deal at all, so my approach with this scene was to make it very plain and nonchalant.
The "item" itself was computer generated with the intent of looking like a real plant rather than a plastic one. The leaves were scanned from a real leaf in the effort to have the highest level of realism I could. The reason for this is that, in my eyes, this plant is intended to be the only element in the film that is really "real." The declining society of the movie is built around the manufactured and artificial - this is reflected by a world made of plastic bricks - so I wanted the plant to contrast everything else in the film. The final shot is a very deliberate visual pun of sorts, building on Orsino's talk of the "beautiful plant." The shot is a closeup of the plant, with the camera slowly rotating around it. There is one other shot very similar to this, in the opening scene of the film, this one focusing on a different kind of plant:
After filming the end scene, I went back to the scene prior, in Jack's apartment. This scene was actually an afterthought, conceived about halfway through the filming process because I realized that the film would rush too quickly to the conclusion otherwise and I needed show some release of Jack's frustration. Also I felt like the film needed a little jolt of excitement as the ending would otherwise be coming after two scenes that were somewhat low-key compared to the first part of the film, and I wanted to resolve the Idealist thread a little better. Some people have asked about why Jack did not ask The Idealist a few questions before knocking his lights out; I do see this as a very valid criticism, but if you want to know, my rationale for it was that Jack has already asked the guy questions, dismissed the man as crazy, and moved on - now this crazy guy has broken into his apartment so he's just doing what anybody would and defending his property. I would have liked to open the scene with a wider shot of the apartment complex, but by this point I was on a very tight schedule to finish the film on time for the contest, so that was one corner I had to cut. Another visual element of this film that bears mentioning is digital grading. Grading is a term used to refer to the processing footage to adjust colors, sometimes for consistency from shot to shot but also more heavily to create a look or mood. I have done some color adjustments in previous films, but the grading work in this film is much heavier than anything I had done before. I filmed the movie with a digital camera and I wanted it to look like grungy, and film-like, almost as though the film print is not in excellent condition or low-quality film stock was used in the first place - this is a common element in the 40s film noir this film was to some extent modeled after. The dark scenes had a green or turquoise tint to them, and all of the movie was slightly desaturated. A fuzzy film grain effect was layered on top, and the black levels were adjusted to mimic the look of shadows on real filmstock. Here are a few comparisons:
Before grading effects
After grading effects
Before grading effects
After grading effects The opening PolyTech commercial sequence had a sort of grading effect of its own, a bad VHS tape look that was accomplished with a VirtualDub "analog noise" filter.
That is a PolyTech Television watermark in the corner. I liked the idea of an enormous, all-encompassing corporation that does business in every market possible, so I made an effort to include the PolyTech emblem wherever I could in the film. I created several different posters, billboards, other printed items that are not always fully legible in the film but were fun to include nonetheless.
At the landfill
Across the canal from the PolyTech Complex
Outside The Beached Whale
Billboard near The Beached Whale
The Beached Whale's delicious menu The Credits Artistic credits were something I had been wanting to do for a film for quite some time and never really had a good opportunity for; many of my shorter movies did not really merit long credits, and with my Star Wars films I wanted to make them look like the original movies. I hadn't thought much about the credit idea for this film, but I love the opening credits in Catch Me if You Can, so I thought an old-movie-esque cartoon feel might work. I came up with the visual style while making a poster for the film (available on the film download page.) I decided to use a 3-dimensional image of the city in a similar style to the poster, with the camera slowly dollying down until it eventually goes below the water. Using some of the sky photography and some renders of the city skyline and factory 'nuclear' smokestacks I had made for the film, I processed the images to give them an illustrated look, and cut together a mockup of the credits in Photoshop Elements, then created separate layers from the different parts (the sky backdrop, the city, the smokestack, and four levels of waves of water) then mapped these onto planes in 3D space in Carrara and animated a camera slowly dollying downward, pointed at the series of planes. The end result looks a bit like a series of wooden cutouts.
The Music Early on in pre-production I decided on a main melodic theme for the film, and I worked with this melody for sometime prior to composing the actual score. The music was composed a few bars at a time, in order to ensure that it would match the scenes it accompanied. I knew I did not want to have the score playing non-stop in the film; I decided that relying more on atmospheric sounds in a few scenes (such as the conversation at the PolyTech headquarters) would provide greater variety. I have some experience in jazz music which proved very helpful in writing the music for the film as it gave me an idea of what kinds of chords to use, etc. The music was composted and synthesized in Acoustica Mixcraft, a program I have recently learned how to use, and I was pleased with the level of realism that the program made possible. I have a friend who plays the saxophone and we did try to record some real saxophone for the movie, but matching it up with the other parts proved too difficult for a tight schedule so unfortunately that idea had to be dropped. In addition to saxophone as a solo instrument I included some vibraphone because I think it has a graceful, haunting sound that contributed to the mood I wanted to create. Well, that and I play vibes so I'm biased. The Final Cut Putting together ten and a half minutes of high-definition footage into one file created some challenges of its own. I divided the film into 7 segments, and from there assembled these into one, 19.3 gb uncompressed video file at a resolution of 1280 x 545 in VirtualDub. Despite the rush I was in to finish this film, I managed to complete it about a day ahead of time, which was a relief considering that compressing for the Web and finding the right bit-rate took a little more time than I had expected.
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