Spencer & Things: A Day at the Park

My 2010 Chapman University Senior Thesis Film

I never ever keep a record of the things I do. Most of the time my work gets lost in the inevitable cycle of corrupt hard drives. Therefore my solution is this blog. I wanted to have my first post share some details from my senior thesis film "A Day at the Park" that myself and an army of fellow colleagues completed in 2010. It didn't flip the world upside down, or set any world records, and it even under performed in the festival circuit. None the less I was proud of my team and the product we were able to produce with our level of skill and coordination coming out of school.

Pre Production

Before you go and get all your friends behind a project you should probably know if it is something you can pull off. I knew I wanted to make a fun easy going visual effects short film. It also helped that this was required in order for me to graduate. My girlfriend and I don't really like the idea of kids. They are noisy, needy, and think they know everything, much like myself. So a story that involved kids playing on a playground and living out their wildest dreams was the obvious choice . As all this came together I took a regular camera to a park and shot some test footage to see if we could pull all those elements together. I got in contact with a modeler from Egypt, an animator from a local video game company, and the most talented visual effects artist in my class, Nick Guth, to create a test clip with our tentacle flailing around a playground. When it all came together I realized this was kind of cool.

Version 01

Version 02

With that little bit of confidence I rounded up a ton of eager students to work on set, raised $10,000 and had a buddy not only contribute his RED and additional gear, but also bring an extremely professional union crew from LA with him. Thank you Eric Ulbrich, I am very grateful for that help! Unfortunately behind all the fun team building and resource gathering is a ton of paperwork. People always joke about that but now I get it. Location permits, insurance, contracts, schedules, budgets, payments, equipment lists, and the list goes on. Fortunately my good friend Carly Pandza does paperwork for fun and agreed to produce my short over a delicious plate of carnitas tacos.

The project gained momentum quickly with a slew of ready to help friends. Samson Collins helped design and make the two main costumes. Dylan Shepherd and Gino Gherardini were cast as the two main kids. Black-belt/ninja David Gunther coordinated a sword fight between two kids witout anyone getting an eye poked out. Jacob Johnston filled in for production design and Ian Dalesky became my right hand assistant director. Everything was set to go despite an angry mob of neighborhood moms who claimed we were stealing their playground, no joke.

Below is our storyboard reel, drawn in two half day sessions by Nathan Wickhoff, and our tech work flow.

Production

Production was both incredibly stressful and a blast. The small problems like insurance hiccups, facing your unrealistic schedule, or getting overwhelmed by the huge work load faded into the background when watching it all come together. My average day would start at 5:30AM and end around 1:00AM. It was so busy, but so much fun. Here are a couple shots from set. The fear of knowing that we only had this one chance to get everything we needed for editing and the visual effects haunted me daily considering the sacrifices that were made to scheduling. I was constantly organizing and editing in my head to make sure we were not cutting out the absolute necessary shots. Unfortunately I am only human and when we got to editing we struggled a bit with a few sections.

Shooting Away

Gino in costume

Dylan in costume

Wide shot of set

Most of the crew

Post Production

Editing

The editing process was tricky because we were looking at a lot of bluescreen. It was hard to tell how the final VFX would feel while doing the first cut. After hammering away for about two weeks I had the cut about 80% of where I wanted it. I then called up my long time Park City friend Dylan Ragland who gave his fresh take on it and helped me finish it up. While it felt good to have the editing out of the way I was still extremely nervous when I watched it. We were still looking at a cut like this.

Sound and Score

My good friend Max Poling took on the task of making the audio happen in 5.1 for this film. Considering we came off set with about 2% usable sound he did a great job! An old high school friend of mine, Ryan Hunter wrote the score based off of some stuff I liked and we had used in the temp cut. Northwood High School just down the road from Chapman had an internationally acclaimed high school band that I got in contact with about performing the score. Ben Case was in conductor of the band and orchestra there and was a huge help. This was one of my favorite parts of the process. Hearing your music live and watching the film is really really cool. Here are some pictures.

Ben Case leads his students

Original sheet music

Animating the Tentacle

My girlfriend/writer/animation-sup/help-with-what-ever-needed-to-get-done, Siobhan Vanaman helped me coordinate 20 to 30 freshmen, sophomore, and junior aspiring animators from Chapman to help complete the roughly 50 shots we needed tentacles to fly around in. It can still be pretty tough to gauge whether things are going to work or not when looking at play blasts (term for rough/quick 3D previews) all day. Here is the updated cut with some animation in, but no compositing. Doesn't quite have the same effect as the final images.

Texturing the Tentacle

I textured the tentacle with scanned images of actual octopus I bought from a sketchy fish market in Santa Ana. I was able to get some really cool high detail images from it.

Diffuse Map

Sub-dermal Map

Nick Guth and Magic Composite Land

Nick Guth led a small team consisting of Jeff Belgum, Ben Smith, and Hunter Schmidt to complete all the visual effects in about a month. I would export them all of the needed passes from the tentacles and backgrounds on Chapman's render farm and deliver the shots around the clock. A shot that was 60 frames could quickly turn into a 500 frame shot because each tentacle render had its own 6 to 8 passes each being 60 frames themselves. That isn't including background images either. In hind sight I probably could have cleaned up this work flow a bit by consolidating passes or using a different file systems. I certainly would have loved to write a script that did a procedural set up for the render passes. The team did most of the compositing in Nuke. Here is an example node tree from one shot... all that for maybe half a second.

Nuke node tree

Nick and his team did an amazing job on a very tight schedule. The good thing about Nick is he feels no pressure, or fear, or pain... he is a compositing machine. Thanks Nick!

Premiere Night

A last minute panic on the night of the premiere almost stopped us from showing the film. We had a failed export about 3 hours before the premiere time. "Well that is irresponsible to wait until then to export." you might rightfully suspect and man if I could have had it any other way I assure you I would have. I was ready to drive my computer to the theater and plug it in myself. Ultimately we got it working just in time and were able to screen it no problem! It was a great night and everyone finally got to see their hard work pay off. The Lauffs family came down to enjoy the film as well. Paul Lauffs was my first friend at Chapman and had always expressed wanting to help me make a film. His family helped me get the resources I needed to even get this thing running in the first place so I was honored to show them what we had finally produced. So finally, some pictures and the finished product.