MattHawkins Online - Film Making Forum

A little predictable, but nicely put together. Good work.

Some stills: http://www.secret7000.co.uk/theforest/forest2pics/1_0.jpg http://www.secret7000.co.uk/theforest/forest2pics/1_1.jpg http://www.secret7000.co.uk/theforest/forest2pics/1_2.jpg http://www.secret7000.co.uk/theforest/forest2pics/1_3.jpg http://www.secret7000.co.uk/theforest/forest2pics/1_4.j...

Just thought people might be interested in seeing this track dolly we built for The Forest II, following the basics of several designs you see on the 'net. The frame itself is plywood. The handle is from an old ironing board. The wheels we got from a friend of ours who works at a bakers - they're de...

ctbullet wrote:wicked teaser,

wow, that cloned guy is ugly, sorry if its you

looking forward to the final vid

LOL, yes he is, it's not me (I'm the bloke that shouts "NOOOOO!!") and he knows it

Hi all, It's been in production for almost a year, we're approaching getting it done - a sequel to our film "The Forest - Death or Beer", a deadpan, action-horror-comedy. A collective mickey take of pretentious action and horror. The first film was hosted on this site a long time ago (I ne...

Yep - once you've finished tweaking your effect, go to Layer > Time Stretch and set the stretch factor to -100&. This will run the layer backwards.

"Freehand masking" - I used a vector paint technique on The Forest http://www.secret7000.co.uk/theforest.htm which meant I didn't mask every frame for a lot of the cloning, but instead painted the characters in. I wouldn't recommend this as a time saver device, as the edge of our painting ...

I'd stick with AE personally. It IS a little rough round the edges in places compared to some other apps, but it's infinitely more flexible and I've never had any problems compositing with it. If your problem is with slight camera changes between shots, can you not just keyframe - move your footage ...

A couple of coats of matte varnish would finish this off nicely. Well done.

If you have access to After Effects - use a Median filter of about 2-3, and possibly a little Grain Removal (will take a while to render, mind). Both of these are in the "Noise & Grain" effects tab.

There's a bit of information about how we did the big cloning shot in my film The Forest on its page, here. I'm in the process of writing an advanced cloning turorial at the moment.

If it is white noise you're talking about, I can very easily mock you up some in AfterEffects. Give me an email (mastermike AT gmail dot com) and I'll see what I can do.

As your manual will explain, you should use the render queue.

It was a test for realistic motion blur. Mental Ray has the best motion blur we've seen, which is why we decided to render using it. We put it way up though, which eats up processing time. As far as a farm is concerned - there are 10 computers in our house, when the time comes to render out final sh...

We render out our CG shots in two passes - one for the foreground objects, one for the stars. I composite them together in After Effects, then as any starfield blur occurs, I up it's contrast just for the blur with keyframes. Works a treat.

Have a look at The Forest in the gallery section. There's a bit of 3D at the front of that. We're remodelling it now, with decent motion blur. (but it's an a*** to render now - we left it rendering overnight last night and it'd only done 3 frames. That's Mental Ray for you.)

mickcar73 wrote:pretty good, how long is the next one going to be?

We want the second one to be no longer than the first; so that's 10 minutes. The third one might be 15 or so as it's a little more complicated.

We've storyboarded the second one completely, and are storyboarding the third. Also we've come up with the name for The Forest II: Relentless Thirst. Nice and fitting and wonderfully pretentious I think :p Also, our 3D artist Lord Pablo and I have been working on 3D spent bullet casings to come out ...

Very cool, nice tip, I will be using it!

Excellent, I'll be making one of these myself in a month or two! Where can I get the wheels from? Is there somewhere online that sells them?

This is pretty much the technique I've been using for flashback / dream sequences. Personally, I wouldn't use it all the way through though.

Use an animated mask in After Effects.

Anyone can do this with enough patience. 75% of the work with VFX is patience rather than expertise. Turned out pretty nice in the end.

This question is as vague as a conservative manifesto - can you be more specific?

Have a look at the vid.