Firefight Released

Second complete production from Northern Legend Productions, this short action packed film follows the survival of two fellow men through Finnish nuclear winter woodland, as they try to survive from cannibals in a post-apocalyptic world. First one in the Cyberpunk-universe, the follow-up to this movie is in production right now, principal photography is almost completed and the project named Firefight 2 is soon to be entered to post-production state.

Short explanation of what's going on in terms of VFX:

-Irritating rolling shutter effect caused by large sensor of DSLR being incapable of capturing one frame at single point in time. Rolling shutter removal procedure was derived from example where rolling shutter was removed from Nikon camera footage.

-Tone-mapping applied to the image to greatly improve specious sharpness and pump out the details from the footage.

-Noise reduction applied to get cleaner tone-mapping results, and deblocking applied afterwards to clean out image structure-artifacts of the encoding process.

-Beautiful color-grading to improve desired moods on the film.

-Muzzle flashes and blood effects.

-Vignetting and letterboxing to improve the film-like visuals.

-Added grain to make a bit more organic feel to the movie, to unify the image-structure across a frame (grain makes it harder to detect blocking patterns caused by encoding and deblocking) and to add micro-level specious sharpness.

And with these words, here is the link to the movie. Enjoy!

Dim Light

Dim Light is the first publicly published film by Northern Legend Productions. Main goal of the film was to test out the low-light shooting capabilities of our filming gear. We used two cameras to shoot the film. Both were Canon EOS 550D's, another geared with Sigma f2.8 18-50mm EX DC Macro and the other one with Canon 70-300mm (can't exactly remember the exact model). The film was shot during last winter (winter of 2011), and the principal photography took 3 days. Pre-production phase included making the choreographs and training them to be fluid movements on camera. Post-production, cutting and editing took uncounted amount of days. Here below I will shortly described the used workflow for editing this film.

1. Noise reduction
2. Color grading and letterbox
3. Adding grain 

1. Since the footage was shot completely during dark conditions, image noise was taken granted for. The 70-300mm lens produced more noise to the image due to the smaller aperture. However footage from both lenses could be cleaned to an acceptable extent using advanced noise reduction techniques. However, noise reduction caused artifacts to the footage, severity depending on the lighting conditions of the certain shot. This can't really be avoided.

2. For color grading we went for classic desaturation and adding one overall dominant color, which was blueish tint to invoke feel of cold and creating unity throughout the shots.

3. Noise reduction always reduces details from the image also, and adding grain is a fine way to add subtle sub-image detail to the footage, and also create unity accross the image structure. Grain makes the image artifacts harder to notice, and adds to the film-like feel in general, because it replicates the actual movie film how it reacts to light.

And with the workflow introduced, here is the link to the movie. Enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoP051V0W_M

Visions of Visual Style

In the pictures below is shown sketches of the visual style to the project TT300. As it is noticeable, the style is pretty more advanced to the previous visual style, which can be seen in the Tribute to 300 teaser. New camera is a big difference ofcourse, when it gives more spirit to the picture overall in terms of depth of field, color vibrance, sharpness, everything. And then learning on the color grading techniques have brought a bit more that 300-feeling to these shots.

Of course complete replication of the 300 visual style is not possible, since there are few restrictions: the movie was filmed with a very advanced movie-camera featuring 12.5 megapixel sensor and 150 fps-shooting. And they shot the movie entirely on green screen, so the surroundings have been made digitally, which gives the possibility to make them look more painted than real environments. But if these things are not noted, then I think it is possible to make somewhat equivalent style to our film. From what we have started, and looking the visual style now, there are many improvements. For example, I have learned to isolate the red of the Spartan cape and crush the blacks of it, and realy make out the red stand out more, as the rest of the image is somewhat desaturated. And with advanced tools, I can separate areas which I want to bring out more, in this case helmet, shield and vambraces (that they wouldn't look like plastic), and increase their highlight, which increases contrast and is one basis to achieving that cartoon-like look. Hours and hours of learning are starting to pay off, slowly but steadily. I maybe construct somekind of VFX breakdown on some of the shots for you all to see what is happening in the editing table. But for now, feast your eyes on these shots:

Two EOS 550D's

After some quite hard times of just simply bad luck and army, the new memory card arrived and quality proved to be something we had expected, and most important, the camera was fine. We have shot some test materials and even edited some for our upcoming trailer, which is planned to be released during the next fall/winter. And our director bought Canon EOS 550D also, so now we have two of them. Expands possibilities widely.

The main use for this project of two 550D's is the sequence, which has been inspired by the Leonidas' freestyle tracking-shot in the movie 300. In that shot, along with the quality speed-ramping is also an effect I like to call "zoom-ramping", when camera zooms back and forth quickly, even when the footage is slowed down. This has been achieved by bolting three cameras on the rig side-by-side, and everyone of them has been set to shoot at differenct focal lengths. In the editing table these three views have been combined to create dynamic and action-packed effect to the sequence. We have only two cameras for the use, but the third camera can be "emulated" by shooting some of the shots after the main shots, and then combining them. Plan is that we could do somekind of test shot in this year before good weather is gone, but that remains to be seen.

Canon 550D appeared with a few drawbacks

After checking on the HDSLR-world and the capacities of those devices, we were just amazed at what quality they can offer. Soon as I realized their full potential we put our old device HV30 for sale and look forward to the EOS 550D. Time came when we bought it, but as unfortunate it sounds, we did not get battery charger with it! We did not get battery charger with brand new camera bought from netstore. We informed this onwards and they said they will send the charger. Time passed on and then the charger came. I had bought Class 4 card for the 550D, and even before we get to use it I realized that it will not be enough for the video, so then I ordered Class 6 card. That wasn't sufficient either, movie recording stopped always after a few seconds because the card could not keep up with the camera. Then we bought a bit more expensive Class 4 card and then it was sufficient. Finally the long wait had been over and we get into shooting some test materials. For great disappointment the materials not what we expected as of quality, there was some inappropriate settings or the new Class 4 card is not good enough. However we are trying to figure this out and hopefully get to shoot new material soon, with the quality it should be.

Not anything bad, unless something good (06/21/2010)

We were preparing our "second attempt" of the Tribute to 300 project as fast as we could with the limited time we have. And then, out of the clear sky one of our main actors broke his leg in an accident in work, so actual filming will take place after a year, in next year's summer, if all goes well. But because of the accident, the beginning of his military service got delayed also, to the January of 2011, which means he'll be free at earliest in July, or if he is ordered to stay year there, then the filming won't be possible even in the next summer. Plans have been taken to alter the story to include only one spartan, which is not clearly as good as the story we have now. Let's hope for the best and fear for the worst.

But something good has happened too. We managed to update our shooting gear, and from now on we'll be using new fresh Canon EOS 550D. And we have also updated the gear for our actors, better looking helmets, capes, and so on. We have collected a list of ideas we could shoot during this post-production year and release them in somekind of teaser or trailer in the web. More of that later.

Small Clip of Rampage In YouTube (05/09/2010)

We published short clip of sequence called "Rampage" on YouTube from our movie. Unfortunately the I did not have the time to edit the video properly, and the digital enhancements from the background were left completely undone. However, this is a little taste of our project, a little scratch on the surface, with much more to come. The clip can be seen here: