My new short film is now online for all to see. I hope you enjoy it – let me know if you’ve got any feedback.
MAJOR thanks to everybody that worked on the film, you’re all spiffy, and of course to FXhome for giving me the opportunity in the first place.
One of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on at FXhome is the upcoming short film Extraction Protocol. It’s a sci-fi love letter to the cyberpunk genre and the Deus Ex: Human Revolution computer game and it’s going to be released next week.
It’s by far the biggest production I’ve directed and it’s been a thoroughly satisfying challenge from start to finish. It started in the autumn last year, when we brainstormed a few ideas for short films we could put together that would show off the new HitFilm software and appeal to our community. At the time I was hugely excited about the impending release of DE:HR (it turned out to be one of my games of the year, as I wrote about over on Potential Gamer recently) so I couldn’t resist using that as inspiration.
The entire short was shot in one day (except for one shot which I grabbed as a pick-up a couple of weeks ago) back in September. The shoot was just the right scale: professional and well crewed, but keeping the numbers to a minimum so that we could move fast.
Speed was the word, with over 40 shots to contend with, some of which were complex VFX and action shots with multiple elements and setups. The ‘story’ (it’s fairly bare bones!) was designed to only require 5 locations (plus 2 major greenscreen setups) but even that number was pushing it, requiring the cast and crew to move from one to the next quickly and set up in double-quick time.
Thankfully I had a superb team headed up by DP Ross Turner (who masquerades during daylight hours as an FXhome web dev) and FXhome newbie Tom McLoughlin (who certainly isn’t new to the video production business) who was my AD for the day and also produced the project.
Then Christmas happened, which at FXhome means you’re incredibly busy for several months. Post-production happened when there was time, but only began in earnest in mid-December. It’s been a lot of fun pushing the limits of my understanding of HitFilm, a product of which I’m still only scratching the surface despite being involved in its design.
The last element was the music, for which we have an original score composed by Michael Powell (no, not that one). It’s really quite marvellous and successfully evokes spy thrillers, Blade Runner, Batman Begins, Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex all in the space of 2 minutes. I don’t know if Michael deliberately touched on those reference points or whether it’s just thematic correlation, but I like it. It’s one of the few occasions I’ve had where the original score easily matches up to the temp music I’d been using, so I hope we get a chance to work with Michael again.
Extraction Protocol is a small thing, being only a couple of minutes long, but it’s had a lot of effort poured into it. I’m really pleased with it overall and hopefully The Internets will also take to it when it’s released next week on the HitFilm YouTube channel.
Posted in Filming, Potential Gamer, Work
Tagged cyberpunk genre, deus ex, extraction protocol, fxhome, hitfilm, human revolution, tom mcloughlin
Time for a quick pre-work general update…
Rather surprisingly given my own intolerance to physical exertion, a couple of generations back my family has a genuine polar explorer, who even accompanied the (in?)famous Captain Scott on his first attempt to reach the South Pole.
Dr Reginald Koettlitz was a true explorer from a heroic age when the world was still an enormous, undiscovered place, as yet unconnected by aeroplane and the internet. When men set sail for distant lands they would be gone for years without contact, entirely at the mercy of nature with only their survival skills keeping them alive.
Koettlitz travelled to the North and South Poles and also journeyed up the Amazon and through eastern Africa. His story is a fascinating one of the British establishment colliding with the harsh realities of polar survival. There is an argument to be made that had Koettlitz’s expertise been acknowledged on the first voyage of the Discovery to the South Pole, Scott and his fellows should never have died on their second expedition.
For several years my father, Aubrey Jones, has been writing the first biography of Koettlitz, a figure who until now has been largely ignored by history despite his notable interactions with Scott, Shackleton and Nansen and his achievements in medicine. The book, titled Scott’s Forgotten Surgeon, is released this month through Whittles Publishing with a launch event on board the Discovery in Dundee, Scotland.
I’ve had the privilege of being involved with the creation of the biography having edited the first draft of the book and contributed to its overall structure. This marks the first book I’ve worked on to be published, which is hugely exciting.
Scott’s Forgotten Surgeon can be purchased, of course, from Amazon and all good bookstores. It’s a fascinating tale and one I’d recommend to anybody with an interest in exploration or polar history.
A man called Alessio Rastani trended all over the internet in the last 48 hours due to a remarkable interview he gave on the BBC. You can read all about it here.
What he talked about isn’t particularly startling – it’s what any slightly cynical or rational person will have observed about the world. It is quite startling that he said it at all, though. As with all these things, banking and dodgy News International journalism and political lobbying and capitalism in general relies on plausible deniability. Even if everybody knows dodgy stuff is going on, as long as nobody actually says it out loud, it’s fine and can continue.
Already rumour is going around that Alessio Rastani is a hoax or prank, a character created by anti-capitalists to stir up trouble/spread awareness. The BBC are stating that he is legit. Even if he isn’t a hoax, though, you can bet there are vested interests drawing up smear campaigns and trying their damnedest right now to undermine his credibility however they can – the corrupt and deceptive economy and society we find ourselves in relies on a kind of global sleight of hand, or a voluntary mass ignorance (or perhaps an obligatory look-the-other-way). When the cogs of the machine start to shine a light on the inner workings, it’s a lot harder to maintain that plausible deniability, and a lot harder to paint capitalism and markets as an uncontrollable, natural force – rather than the man-made, controlled system that it is.
Anyway, this is really just a long, self-indulgent excuse to plug a short story I wrote a few months back. Titled Wikimoku, it’s about the creation of the first truly infocratic society, in which This Kind Of Thing wouldn’t happen. It’s a theme I’d definitely like to expand upon, either in further short stories or perhaps a longer form.
You can read it here. I’d really like to know what you think of it.
Posted in Mostly serious, Writing
Tagged alessio rastani, infocracy, recession, traders
|
