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…
Above is a quick test I made using HitFilm, FXhome’s new super-amazing-does-everything video software. I may be biased.
I made a little tutorial to go with that video:
The lovely thing about making tutorials for HitFilm is how responsive it is – you don’t need to do any massaging of the screen capture to make it watchable. You can simply fire up Camtasia, switch on the H4n and put together the tutorial in real time as you use the software. It’s actually fun to do.
I’m not just working on FXhome-related videos. I’m also piecing together the first It’s A Trap sketch, which is taking a little longer than we’d hoped due to various post technical issues. Most of those have now been resolved so hopefully it’ll see the light of day soon.
The last week was an interesting one. For the last 3 years-or-so I’ve been working at FXhome on a brand new video product called HitFilm. For most of those 3 years it was entirely under wraps, which meant I spent an awful lot of time promising our video fans that we were working on something cool, without being able to give any details.
A month and a half ago we finally announced the product, and on July 1st it was released to the world. Turns out that releasing a product to the public after 3 years of development is a rather unique mixture of exciting and terrifying. Fortunately, most of the feedback so far has been very positive.
A big thing for me is the new website at HitFilm.com. Having nurtured the FXhome.com community for the last 10 years (!) I’m eager to make sure that HitFilm.com carries on the traditions of fairness, good discussion and tolerance that we established at FXhome and which are so rare to find on the internet.
There’s so much more still to do and we have a fairly limitless bunch of ideas (and that’s before we even start getting into suggestions from the community), so there are exciting times still to come. It’s odd to think that HitFilm has only been out for a single week – it feels like months. Feedback in the age of social media is so instant and so 2-way that everything becomes quite intensified.
Anyway, check us out over at http://hitfilm.com. 
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