'Singapore International Film Festival'

I Am

Presented with the prospect of an open canvas for creativity and having successfully collaborated on numerous award-winning projects with Directors Warren Klass, (Two Oceans) and Desmond Tan, (Salt Films), the Blackmagic Design post team needed little persuasion to buy in to the two cinematic promos for the Singapore International Film Festival.

Commented BMD Editor Randall Lee, "I've always enjoyed working with Desmond, he gives me the creative freedom to experiment with the edit, it's also not everyday that you get to work on such an exciting, raw and divergent spot. The challenge here was to take the series of disparate scenes that represent the thoughts of the filmmaker and create a coherent and fluid stream of consciousness."

The BMD VFX team further enhanced the offline edit creating customised effects for each individual scene. In keeping with the concept of Director Desmond Tan's 'I Am' the various scenes needed to look like they were shot on different cameras, in different periods of time, evoking a variety of different moods.

In 'The forgotten' sequence a heavy vignette was added to simulate the deteriorated vision of the old man and dirt and scratches applied to viscerally convey on the image itself the concept of old age. In order to achieve an old style 8mm look for 'The boy who falls for the first time', a filmstrip effect was added at the beginning of the sequence to simulate projection along with a vignette typical of the undefined edges of an 8mm frame.

Further enhancing the ethos of 'The boy who falls for the first time', Blackmagic Design Colourist Noppasak Poonpipat, aka Aun, referenced 8mm 'Ektachrome' stock and processing from the 1970's to create its distinctive colour palette,

"We wanted to give the sequence an old fashion 8mm home movie look but also to bring out the heightened emotion of the young boy being in love for the very first time, so we went for slightly surreal, saturated colours. I had a lot of fun working with Desmond on the project as we could approach each sequence in a different way. In 'The forgotten' we heavily de-saturated and crushed the skin textures to draw attention to the skin and emphasise the wrinkles to make the man appear really old." Commented Aun.

Script to Screen

The unique concept and structure of Director Warren Klass' 'Script to Screen' presented it's own special challenges for post production starting with achieving appropriate edit rhythms for each of the distinctive film genres presented, as BMD Senior Editor Pang Wei Fong explains,

"'Script to Screen' features several different film genres, for each genre we had to carefully consider the pacing and rhythm of the edit to achieve an authentic and convincing feel. Although this isn't as obvious as the content or visual effects in a feature film, viewers are subconsciously aware of pacing and if it's not just right the film wont work."

On top of some deft editing the BMD 3D team was also enlisted to create a devastating meteorite shower for the final Armageddon style end-of-the-world action sequence. The biggest initial challenge was tracking the rough CG meteorites into the floating hand-held background plates as regular tracking software became confused with tracking points on the similar looking tower blocks in frame. To solve the problem the BMD 3D team used advanced Mocha tracking software to successfully match the CG and live cameras.

Armed with a multitude of meteorite references from the internet and feature films Armageddon and Transformers, BMD 3D Artist Ganesh Ghale set about designing his own CG meteorites, "I did a lot of tests using Maya Fluids to create a series of elements such as fire, smoke, sparks and particles to make up the meteorites and their tails and provided multiple layers for each of these elements to give online as much control as possible."

The BMD VFX team then combined all the final layers of CG with the live background plates varying colour, contrast and transparency to achieve the optimum level of photorealism. To create an enhanced sense of depth in the meteorite scenes some of the talent and buildings were roto-scoped so that the meteorite shower would appear to be raining down all around the buildings. Extra lens flares and lighting effects were also added to the CG elements and film grain was applied to the CG to match the live plates marrying everything perfectly together.