Casting issues and possible locations...

My initial idea for filming - and this was way back when the film was still only a five minute short - was to film in and around derelict buildings, building sites, waste ground - that kinda thing.

When the script developed further, it became less and less likely that we'd be able to do that. Even with permission, it would cost us - and we had no budget. Besides, even if we could stump up the cash, running around anywhere in broad daylight with replica weapons or props in this day and age would not go down all that well!

Although it is possible to film night scenes at night time these days, with current technology, if ya have a zero budget, it's cheaper and easier to film during the day instead. The night look comes in at the post-production stage. More on that later...

So it was back to the original idea of doing it all greenscreen with digital sets. Besides, keeping the whole film like this would enable a consistency that we might not have had if we mixed and matched. Also, that way, we would be more likely to get away with a slightly stylised look, if need be.

I wandered around London taking snapshots and footage of various building sites and derelict buildings for reference, and it is more than likely that they will pop up in the final film! (They will certainly make an appearance in some VFX tests in future blogs...)

You will have already seen some these in my previous entry in the initial tests that I ran. The digital set that I had created in 2.5D in After Effects (which took me three hours to build) was taken from my reference footage and some online photos that I had researched.


The location photos were taken of the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square as it was being knocked down in the summer of 2008, sadly. They used to do some superb food in there, dirt cheap: their steak and chips was outta this world!! That's one place I shall miss.

These photos were taken with my girlfriend's digital camera on one of her stays in London.

I had previously spent a few hours trawling the net, looking for suitable ruined building images...and they seemed to have worked a treat so far!

I had filmed some other rubble footage - which you will see in later tests - from a building site near
Three Mills Studios, in Bromley-By-Bow, which is where they filmed "Sunshine", among other things!


(It's also where I had my fight training under Pat Johnson for "Green Street" - aka "Hooligans" - where I got to fight Elijah Wood in the movie - but that's another blog, another time!)

Next stop: casting.

I had already chosen my John Connor, and he had said yes - he even jumped at the chance! My friend Brian had said that it "would make a change from playing coppers all the time..." - and I know he's played a fair few soldiers in his time too...

Only one problem: the first person I had in mind to play Kyle Reese hadn't even returned my e-mails, and the last few jobs we'd worked on previously, he'd seemed to be a bit disillusioned by the whole film-making thing.

I bumped into another old friend - Pascoe - on yet another film shoot some weeks later - they used to be best friends (they may even still be!). When I told Pascoe about it, he confirmed my worst fears. Our mutual friend (who shall remain nameless) was not into the whole fanfilm thing, or doing acting for free anymore. Which is fair enough - when you've been in the acting game for as long as we had, you expect a little more after ten years of hard graft!! You don't expect to still be doing films for free - and I know for a fact with various previous conversations with him that he'd been looking to get out of the film business and go back to soldiering...

For me, it's different: I've changed my plan from acting into Visual Effects, and it suits me and my skills a lot better.

But in the process, I had stumbled onto an incredible piece of luck: Pascoe was a HUGE Terminator fan and jumped at the chance when I asked him to take our mutual friend's place!!
Pascoe was the right age and has the right experience - both acting and military - to be able to pull it off, and he had enthusiasm by the bagful!!

I showed Pascoe some of mine and Marek's VFX tests, but I didn't need to - he was in.


T800 on Guard test that convinced Pascoe to join...

However, these things are never as straightforward as all that, and my casting decisions would change as the script developed...

By this time, I had also created a short teaser - with the intention of following it up with a longer teaser, almost a trailer length affair. That is still the plan, but it has moved on from there, hence it not having been filmed as yet - although it IS fully scripted, and even has an original music track. More on that later...


First Future War Teaser test

The next step was yet more tests! The teaser here was just a test - and as you can see, was still in the early days of writing when we were still planning a five to ten minute short, hence the reason it says "Coming in 2009"...! (The current release date - if we manage to film all the elements we need by the end of 2009 - will be nearer 2011 sometime.)

I started running some other specific tests, geared towards particular scenes I wanted to see in the final film - here are some stills of the T800 head provided by Marek, coupled with a 3D representation of my own head.

T800 reflection test - with a CG version of my head as the cyborg element.

The human head was generated in FaceGen Modeller, which uses up to three photos - front and both profiles - to generate a 3D image, which can be modelled in the 3D application of your choosing. I chose 3ds max, which I had been dabbling with for a little while - which was lucky, because it turned out to be the very same program that Marek uses!

I carved up my CG face in 3ds max (a weird feeling!) and applied a very basic skin shader that comes with the in-built mental ray renderer, and Marek took it away at a later date to fit the T800 skull into my CG head a bit more accurately (which I will show in a future test, currently being worked on).

I also ran some motion graphics tests for the T800s POV (point of view), for which I used footage of my sleeping beauty - my other half - as a test subject!
Lynda has very kindly agreed to let me upload this here to share with you:


There are other tests to share that have already been completed, but good things come to those who wait...! ;-)

The way things are going now, with the story we have to tell and the amount of visual effects needed, we'll be lucky to finish principal photography in 2009...!!! I said before that our estimated completion time is 2011 - well, it all depends on the length of the final cut: as things stand at the moment, it takes around 6 to 8 weeks to complete 5 minutes of screen time - especially as we are doing this in our spare time.

But trust me on this: we now have a proper story to tell and everyone in on it so far agrees that it's worth waiting for. Time will tell on that one...