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