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Friday 9.3.2001
Mammoths Or Minis
Digital Film Makes it All Possible
Digital film making equipment enables cheap small-scale movie production in the corner of your own living room as well as those breathtaking massive productions. There were examples of both ways when the two-day seminar on digital film began on Thursday. Digital Film making seems to be slowly fulfilling the expectations.
Sophie Lodge has walked with the dinosaurs. On Thursday she explained the digital production of the series.
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BBC's Walking with the Dinosaurs was an example of a large production. Sophie Lodge worked in the series as an animator and computer modeller, and was here to tell about the production of the series and the use of digital technology in it.
Complex Work
According to Sophie Lodge, there was a lot of preliminary work. She did not go into details on research or writing the script, but still there were many stages to explain before she could even begin with the designing of the animals' movements.
Lodge told how the animals were first crafted by hand, as carefully and meticulously as possible. Then they were scanned in three dimensions and modelled on the computer. To design the dinosaurs' skins was a stage of its own.
They filmed backgrounds on locations which looked like places where dinosaurs could live. Every rustle of the branches, every bit of meat being pulled about and every splash of water was made by humans. The assistants were erased later on and replaced with the images of the dinosaurs. Sophie Lodge told it was quite a lot of work to get the animated dinosaurs' movements fit those of the humans in a natural way. First they used rough models against the backdrops, then they animated them without the skins and so on.
The resurrection of dinosaurs by the means of digital film seemed labourious and time-consuming work which required the efforts of many specialists during the various stages of the work. Undoubtably the work had its funny side as well, for example when the stunt man was splashing about in shallow water in his dinosaur boots.
There are so many new things in digital film making, especially when the subject is as fascinating as dinosaurs, that it can make two interesting films: one of the subject itself and one of the making of the film.
From the Studio to the Living Room
A completely different perspective to the production of digital film was given by the American filmmakers Syd Garon and Eric Henry. They both told they make their movies at home, and that Eric Henry does not even have a separate study for that. Syd Garon used to make advertisements, among other things, but then he got fascinated by the all-inclusive nature of digital production. He said it was interesting to notice how he uses nearly the same equipment but how his working methods are now completely different, and how his kind of digital filmmakers are more all-round professionals than specialists in any single area. They have the power over every aspect of the sound and the picture when they do everything themselves.
Do it Yourself - If You Have the Time
Production on the small scale takes time, and the DIY filmmakers seem to think that it is better to fool yourself when you begin and think that the film is going to be finished quickly. In reality when three people worked on a 45-minute film, it took them three years' full time work to finish. On the bright side, the production is affordable and much can be done with quite common computer programmes.
The two men called the style they used in their examples visual sampling. They had liberally but elegantly used previous material: cartoons and bits were dancing with the film, along with a touch of humour. The story in the short digital film of a person eating wood could hardly have left anyone cold.
The seminar on digital film continues on Friday at 9.30 AM in Hall B of the Tampere Hall. The subject will be digital distribution, the first session is about Mobile Micromovies.
There is a seminar fee.
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