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...

Casting, Original Script and first VFX tests

OK - I was gonna share the original script idea I had with everyone on here, but decided - just as I was firing this blog up - to hold onto it for another day...sorry guys!

Basically, if this whole venture goes tits up for any reason, I will revert back to that idea!!! If not, I may apply it to another (original) film that I have in mind for when this is complete...

All I will say is that it involved a battle scene with terminators against the Resistance (of course), but that the scenario was not quite what we're expecting: there was a delicious little twist at the end that I think people would've liked! But it restricted what I could do with the story as a whole, which is why it was ditched very early on.

But it would still make a an excellent short story! One for the future, methinks...
Aerial Hunter Killer - or AHK

Anyhow, I was now at the stage where a story was forming - and very quickly, I might add!
I was fortunate enough to have a few truly excellent friends who were willing to help me out on this film by being in it, free of charge! At the level we're at now, we all lack money - certainly not enough to pour into the making of a film - but we all shared one thing in common: a deep rooted love of films, filmmaking, and anything connected with it. Plus we all like spending time with each whilst on a film set! :-)

So - I had my John Connor (a friend, who to me, looked like the 45 year old Connor we see at the start of T2), and I had a particular person in mind to be Kyle Reese, but would he say yes? I'd known this guy since filming on that Greek island all those years ago, and we had played soldiers and coppers together on numerous film and TV productions, so I was fairly confident!

However, little did I know that I was shortly to suffer my first set-back...

I had deliberately selected people that I knew could act, that also had weapons training and military experience, so they would actually look like they know what they're doing on film with the minimum of fuss!! Plus, it turned out that most of these guys either had police "black kit" (the armed response uniform - which of course, we would use WITHOUT any of the police tags on it!) and/ or military fatigues, so that element of the production was safely secured - and no budget spent yet!
Armed Response Police Black Kit Uniform

They all had replica weapons too - for the early stages of the future war before Connor and his men procure plasma rifles and similar technology, so that element was taken care of too! Before you ask any questions about that, they are all registered for use in films and TV, so no worries there.

The plasma rifles would be another challenge - but that's for a future blog...

My first 3D rendered test (that I previously mentioned took 33 hours to render) was basically Marek's AHK take-off animation from "The Dock" - but with a different background and a camera animation by me.

I also tweaked the volumetric lighting - but made the mistake of rendering it in 3D: I'd have saved HOURS if I'd added it at the compositing stage! Because of this, I wasn't able to render the ruined buildings I had originally dotted around the landscape - the render time with them added in was just horrendous! Lesson learned...Hence the barren landscape you see here, in this first test - the test that grabbed everyone's attention enough to want to be in the film - along with test #3...!

AHK Take-Off - Test 1

So I had most of the main actors, plenty of people offering to be extras, I had costumes, I had key weapons - and all before we had even finished the second draft of the script! I also had help from two very important people as far as making this film a reality was concerned. Marek - my fellow writer and CG animator, and Ben from Australia, who is a very talented VFX artist that I had been talking to for over a year through YouTube. Although still at school (about to graduate, I hope!), his work has to be seen to be believed! He has an eye for detail that not a lot of people starting out have - and a knack for comedy that might prove useful at some point....

I stress at this point that Future War is NOT a comedy in ANY way - in fact, it's one of the darkest stories I've attempted.

(It's the second darkest - the top slot for that title goes to a short film that I came close to making when I was very depressed about a year and half ago. I'd just been kicked out by by my ex, moved into a pokey little bedsit, that had no heating during a bitterly cold winter and a terrible internet connection...
I opted NOT to make it when someone pointed out to me after reading my second draft, that you have to give the audience SOME hope for them to stay interested, even if there is none: basically EVERYONE died at the end...!!! People were getting killed from the first scene, getting taken over by an alien entity and either killing themselves or murdering everyone else until they were stopped. Permanently. Oh, and the Earth got completely obliterated into the bargain - that was the last shot of the film...)

Anyway, I digress. (I'll probably do that a lot, so please bear with me...!)

The first stage after managing that lot without really trying, was to run some more tests (mostly stills to get a feel of how it might look) so that I had something to show to people that I might have had to convince to join this crazy venture...!

Here are a few of those tests that are less cringe worthy than some I did (which may never see the light of day)...!

I started looking at which techniques to use to pull off these future city shots I had in mind - everything from 2.5D (2D images mapped onto planes projected in 3D space), to camera mapping (or camera projection) - where a still is taken and mapped onto basic 3D geometry, thereby enabling camera moves, making the shot look more cinematic.

This first one uses 2.5D - and is my least favourite one to date! But it did give me idea of how 2.5D works, and how to move the camera more effectively to get the best results. For realism, the key is the same thing my acting coach always told me: "Less is more."
Pity I didn't apply that here...!
(Please ignore the crap acting of me as a terminator...! My acting coach would DIE of shame if she saw this...!)

2.5D camera movement experiment - VFX Test 2

However, this next one met with more success - and I didn't dare move the camera this time...!

Future War: VFX Test 3

Then of course, there was full 3D itself - of which I had very little experience.

I have to stress here: I knew very little about 3D modelling or rendering techniques, and was using a 3D model that I had found online that I thought was very good - and a good starting point for ideas.

Initial render tests for destroyed city - pre-visualisation stills.

Obviously, when the time comes, the digital sets will have more detail, more buildings, more wreckage - more everything! But these renders gave me an idea of how it might look - and how long such a render might take. These shots have NO post production effects added (as you can see), so with those in place, it would up the quality quite considerably!

Now all I had to do was ask my friend if he would play Kyle Reese in this madness...

"Terminator: Future War"

I would imagine that every film fan and sci-fi fan is familiar with the character above!

I was on set one day, having spent over a year pouring over my own Star Wars fanfilm script (most of the basic plot was written while filming on "Golden Compass"!), refining it til I was satisfied, and experimenting with VFX techniques til I was happy, when it suddenly struck me: there are THOUSANDS - literally thousands - of Star Wars fanfilms already online. Although mine was to be a new approach (to date, no one has yet attempted the approach I had in mind - fingers crossed it stays that way!), it was, none-the-less, yet another Star Wars fanfilm.

Don't get me wrong - I LOVE fanfilms! Especially Star Wars ones that are done well, ie, good story, good acting and top notch VFX (of course!). But I had NEVER seen a Terminator fanfilm that I could recall, and so I went on an extensive internet hunt to see what had been attempted.

And I found - virtually nothing. Not counting re-edits of the original movies, and not counting numerous shorts of teenagers (and younger) running around their back gardens and hometown suburban streets (with very basic VFX), I only found one spoof for a comedy show.

I did discover that someone else had the idea of doing a film set in the future world of James Cameron's amazing vision- but it was to be a full CG offering. No-one seemed to have attempted a live action version of those future war flashbacks that made the Terminator films stick in my mind! I was soon to find out why...

My initial thought was to do a quick 5 to 10 minute short, tops - that would involve 3 or 4 of my friends running around against a greenscreen in as close an approximation of the original action sequences, with the sets, machines and all explosions, etc, to be created using photos, reference footage and CG animation on the PC, and composited in afterwards.

I ran a "quick test" (the initial animation took over 33 hours to render...!) and showed it to my friends on set one day, whilst performing in my supporting artist capacity. The guys were bowled over, and immediately asked to be involved! I didn't even have to beg! :-D

Early Aerial Hunter Killer (AHK) shots

This shot of an AHK is taken from my first render test - the 18 second take-off sequence took around 33 hours to render!

Anyway, we came up with a quick, original script, based on the future war scenario - but with our own ending, and a neat little twist. Things were looking good!

Until I went online to look for reference shots and 3D models that other people had created and would be willing to let us use. I hadn't really had that much 3D graphic work experience at that stage, but was keen to learn - but we didn't have the time (so I thought), as we wanted to get this done in the next few weeks.

Early Test render of a T800 endoskeleton

I found some 3D models and animations that just knocked me out (the first was used in that first test) - and I also stumbled on a copy of James Cameron's ORIGINAL script for T2: Judgment Day - which included an extended opening sequence, showing the defeat of Skynet and Kyle Reese being sent back in time...

My mind started racing - I'd always wanted to see these scenes filmed and was disappointed to discover they had never been made, only scripted and storyboarded. But boy, what storyboards!!! Absolutely exquisite renderings of familiar characters and machines - and some new, as yet unseen creations.

The technology may not have been in place back then to pull all of these off convincingly, but it was now...and I very quickly saw how it would be possible to create a lot of it using greenscreen techniques and digital sets.

Well that was it. I couldn't not do it now! I started writing, and came up with a shortish script, showing a lot of the final battle elements originally scripted with a lot of my own ideas and visions thrown in to spice it up and flesh it out!

That was just the start...

I showed it to the guys originally interested, and they were even more enthusiastic about it! Well, what red-blooded heterosexual male WOULDN'T relish the chance to brandish a plasma rifle around, run amok on a film set pretending to take out multiple terminators??? It's the ultimate "playing soldiers" scenario!!! Getting people to play various parts in this film was NOT a problem! :-)

Early Lighting test of a T800

My problem was that this thing had now grown beyond what I'd first anticipated - a one to two day shoot, with an estimated completion date of two months for post-production. It was now a twenty minute short, showing everything that every Terminator fan would like to see - and more.

I found a chap online, based in Poland - Marek - and his animations were astounding to say the least! Have a look at this short vid to see what I mean...


The Dock - by Marek Paterczyk

Most people had only created 3D models, and even provided them with basic animations - but he had tried to take it one step further and create animated short films or clips: I was convinced he would be the perfect person to help us on this - but would he be willing to put aside enough time to give us what we required?

As it turned out, he was a HUGE Terminator fan, and was more than willing to help out - once he had seen a copy of what passed as a script back then. (This was way back in May 2008.)

I struck lucky! Not only was Marek onboard to help us with the 3D aspect of the production, but it turned out he was quite talented when it came to the ideas section of the script and developing what we had into something far more special...

We are still writing, and every version of the script is dramatically better than the last! Which is not bad when you consider that I had heard on the grapevine, that an old friend of mine had managed to see the 3 rd draft of the script (even though he wasn't involved in the project at the time) and had proclaimed my script to be "visonary" and ambitious"...! I had heard this from a mutual friend who had worked with him on set and I was, needless to say, quite chuffed!

This other friend is a writer and doesn't beat about the bush if something sucks. He has now offered to give the completed script a once over when the time comes!

My view? Well, if it WASN'T ambitious, what would be the point of making it??

More to come, on the ever expanding script, cast and crew...

TrigFX, Visual FX and films - and the Future...

OK - so I'm new to this site, but not that new to blogging.
Sadly, the majority of my blogs were lost forever when Stage6 shut down - those of you that remember that site will know what I'm talking about!
Anyway, just a quick summary of who I am and what my intentions are - for this blog and the future...

I started out in the film industry in the year 2000 as a film extra - or supporting artiste - and my second ever job was a month on the beautiful Greek island of Cephallonia, playing a German soldier on "Captain Corelli's Mandolin". Although I have worked on hundreds of jobs since then - both as a film extra and an actor (I did two years acting training along the way), this job still ranks as one of my all time best experiences with many memories I shall always treasure.

Anyway, some time further on down the line (I believe it was around the summer of 2005 when I was filming on Flyboys) I discovered the joys of creating visual effects in the comfort of my own home - and that I had a knack for doing them!

Fast forward to the end of 2007/ start of 2008, and I find myself working as a freelance VFX artist, doing mostly music videos and showreels for contacts I have made in the film industry over the years - and an independent feature film that eventually went to the Cannes Film Festival that year!


VFX Showreel 2008 from TrigFX on Vimeo.

We are now in the recession of 2009, and things have gone quiet on both work fronts (for the time being) - but I haven't stopped doing what I love most: being creative! Even if there is no work to be had, I just don't stop.

I currently have one complete script ready to film - my take on the Star Wars universe, a spoof called "The Waiter Chronicles", and another sci-fi film in the pipeline, which is currently in its fifth draft.

The Waiter Chronicles - Teaser 1



The Waiter Chronicles - Teaser 2


However, work on The Waiter has been postponed while various personal problems in my life are resolved (hint: The Waiter himself is my landlord!) - but in the meantime, work continues apace for my other sci-fi "opus" - for which I have created this ongoing blog.

And the film in question? "Terminator: Future War".

I know what you're thinking - with Salvation just around the corner, why not jump on the bandwagon? Sadly, this is NOT the case! I started writing "Future War" about 4 months before Salvation was even announced - who knew?? There must've been something in the air...

My main intention was to create this SHORT film as a test of my VFX abilities - as well as to learn some new ones, and push myself further - kind of show the world (and any potential clients!) what I could REALLY do...

Over the coming months, I aim to share with you some tests that I have already performed, as well show any upcoming ones, to document the development of this production - and the trials and tribulations of making this movie.

Yes, movie - cos although when I started out it was only gonna be a ten minute short, more and more people have become involved, and this thing has just EXPLODED!

I will discuss this more in my next blog...so hang on to yer hats - cos this could end up being a VERY bumpy ride!