Archives for March 2011

March 25, 2011 - No Comments!

The Sky is the limit

Regents Park, London

Whilst in places like Zurich and London summer isn't far away, we "Norwegians" have to deal with late March snow storms blowing around the studio corners whilst we're shooting the details of my film. Summer couldn't feel further away.

Still image from Sky shoot.

We have spent some time shooting the remaining sky backgrounds. Some of the things we've managed to re-create: star sky, thunderclouds with lightening, overcast sky, snowy night sky, bright sky and a sun-rise. To achieve this, we used several canvas pieces that I painted, cotton clouds and the superb lighting techniques of Øystein and Stian (considering the by now extremely limited budget). What we haven't managed to re-create yet is the Aurora Borealis. Strangely enough, I haven't yet even seen the real Northern Lights even though I've been living in Norway for a while now.

For the star sky shoot I painted a wooden plate black and drilled different sized holes into it.

Øystein and myself then shot the black plate with the RED camera and a light from the back so that we got some lens flares and other pretty light effects.

Fixing the lights for the cloud shots.

The cloud doctors testing LED lights.

Stian Eriksen playing god with some LED lights.

The final picture for the thundercloud shot.

The shoot is now almost complete and my plan is to update the film edit until the end of next week. In April, I'll be able to focus on finishing the detail work and coloring whilst my collaborators in London can properly start working with sound design and music. Exciting times!

March 18, 2011 - No Comments!

Voice Recording in London

Henning Knoepfel and Shearan Thomas during the voice recording.

I just got back from a successful voice recording session at Soundtree in London.

We used two evenings to record all the seven voices for the characters in my film. Next to a few sentences for each character there were a lot of off screen sounds we had to record such as sneezing, breathing etc. In some instances, the actors were asked to talk whilst chewing popcorn or to perform after having inhaled helium.

Henning Knoepfel had previously cast all the voice actors. Within two days after putting up the add we had over 100 responses (!!!) and most of them from people with very professional voice reels. That gave us enough material to cast the right voice for each character.  Everything went according to plan and I am very pleased with all the performances. The next step is to listen back to all the recordings and to choose the best clips.

Thank you to the people from Soundtree who kindly let us borrow their brilliant studio, to Henning Knoepfel who has arranged all of this and who saw to it that all the technical aspects went so smooth, thanks to Shearan, Leonor, Chris, Will, Charles, Deeivya and Lisa for their time and their great performances.

March 2, 2011 - No Comments!

Background Shoot

Together with my cinematographer Øystein, his assistant Stian and my assistants Viveca & Sondre we've been shooting some extra material to work with for the backgrounds in my film.

The action included heart balloons being poked, throwing glitter and confetti, dressing up balloons wit hats and making clouds with cotton wool.

I recently got inspired by the wonderful miniature work of Matthew Albanese and decided to try using some of his technical tips to make my own backgrounds. Painting canvas and making cotton clouds fits in better with the rest of the miniature shots than using stock footage or painting the backgrounds in Photoshop.

It looks awesome. More to come in a few weeks time. Thank you again to all of you amazing people who have been helping me so much to make this film!