Mike Conway is an amazingly multi-talented filmmaker/composer/musician/editor/etc., who could accurately be described as a movie studio on two legs. On his most recent film, Exile, he's decided to take on the CGI and compositing work as well. I haven't seen the completed cut as of today, but what I've seen of his CGI work so far, it looks better than the earlier scenes he'd farmed out to people with a lot more experience. Creating posters and promotional graphics for his films isn't always one of his strengths, and this ad for one of his earlier films, The Awakening, is one that didn't really grab me. It's tough to create posters and other key artwork for your own movie and being a good director isn't the same as being a good graphic artist, so there's no shame in that.

Good artwork is important for creating "shelf appeal" to inspire moviegoes to head out to the theater to catch your flick and movie buyers to pick up your DVDs off the shelf for a closer look...and ideally take it up to the checkout counter rather that set it back down.

Usually, at least in my experience, Thai distributors will take your key artwork (poster, DVD cover, advertising, etc.), slap some Thai words right on top of or next to the English text, and add some random image or character from the movie to one corner of the DVD case, and off it goes. Sometimes that random character has been me, so I'm not complaining about this approach. But here's a cover that was on the copy I just got from Thailand that truly impressed me. So much so that I'm tempted to see if they'd consider creating new artwork even for movies they aren't distributing. I don't do a lot of outsourcing to other countries, but this certainly has potential.

Especially when you consider that some years, for most of the deals I've signed at a film market (as opposed to coming to an agreement a week or month later), the distributors never actually watched the movie--they looked at the poster, usually (but not always) watched a trailer, and decided that this was enough information to know that they could sell the movie to consumers.

So I always tell filmmakers that it's never too soon to start working on your poster and advertising--and that it certainly doesn't hurt to come up with several different designs to see what appeals to people other than yourself--since it's got to appeal to people who didn't make the movie and haven't seen it.

Principal photography is about 80% done on Gathering of Heroes. It's been an extremely ambitious project, with far more locations (and more elaborate setups), a much larger cast, and a lot more devoted to special effects than is normally seen in independent films. We've been shooting it all on RED, which lets us still use all 35mm film lenses, accessories, and equipment, but shoots directly at 4K digital RAW resolution, bypassing the need to send out the negatives to the lab and have them telecined into a 4K digital intermediate. The workflow still has its rough spots, since the resolution and capabilities of Redcode RAW's format go beyond the capabilities of traditional video formats. Notably, the adjustments of contrast, brightness, sharpness, and other processing of the electronic data coming off the image sensor are done non-destructively; even the adjutments done on the camera itself only affect the metadata and can, thus, be changed or undone at any later time in the editing process.

One thing to be aware of when shooting RED is that it's a *lot* of data. In the last few months, I think I've gotten in upwards of 60 terabytes of hard drives for the studio. That's not just for Gathering of Heroes since we do a lot of work on other films, TV commercials, etc., but GoH is taking up a pretty large chunk of that.

Jon Firestone, co-director and DP, uses an 8-core Mac Pro running OSX and two quad-core PCs running various flavors of Windows to manage the editing and compositing workflow because different tools are available (and/or work better) on the different platforms. Adobe and RED have been promising native REDCODE support via a plugin, first for Premiere Pro CS3 and now for Premiere Pro (and possibly After Effects) CS4. We keep getting closer to the supposed release and then it keeps getting pushed back. I bought upgrades to CS4 for the various editing systems on the same day that Adobe announced that CS4 was available (once again being way too trusting of release schedules), but this way at least I'll be ready when the native REDCODE support plugin *really* comes out.

One of the castles we use in the movie is Bishop's Castle in Southern Colorado which has an organic, rough-hewn look appropriate for the band of knights in exile. We did quite a few interior shots in the castle itself, and built sets on the soundstage with matching stonework to continue shooting interior scenes set at that location later on in the production.

Some of the other castles and fortresses that are only seen in the distance or needed to appear more precisely or traditionally constructed had to be done with mattes and CGI.

Here I am with Christopher Atkins who plays the king in the most kingly-looking of those castles. We built a series of sets for the interior of this castle on our bluescreen cyc stage so the windows could look out upon the appropriate mountains and seascapes (which will be added in post).

You can see that I dressed in blue myself so I could be edited out easily if I accidentally stepped into frame. :)

One challenge that directors Mark Grove and Jon Firestone are facing is how many night shots are called for in the script. The RED camera isn't a great low-light camera by video standards, but it's still more sensitive than even a fairly fast film stock, so it's easier to light than film, harder than most HD video. And with 4 to 12 times the resolution of even HD video, it's not nearly so forgiving.

We ended up doing a lot of the outdoor shoots in the valley I own outside of Black Hawk, Colorado, which has several advantages: a variety of interesting and visually different locations with no visible city lights, wires, or other obvious signs on modern life.

But it has the major drawback of no available power, so everything has to be run on generators and batteries, which means carrying generators hundreds of feet away from the set through the forest at night so the noise won't be audible.

And in the middle of everything, I managed to dislocate my knee jumping through a window on an unrelated stunt...while I still have an active shooting schedule that includes striding through the forest, climbing mountains, clambering up a several-hundred-foot rock wall up to the caves where some of the sequences near the end of the movie were set, and engaging in sword battles on another movie. Ow.

Everything's all better now, but it did slow me down more than a little bit for a while. Mark was kind enough to schedule most of my scenes for earlier in the day and I had someone carry a camping chair around to the various sets so that any time I wasn't before the camera's eye, I could take the weight off my knee. That helped a bunch, plus even with a balky knee, having an extra hand or two worth of reach in my arms and legs does help a lot when it comes to getting up steep rock walls. Even with the knee injury I wasn't having to work nearly as hard as either the sound crew of the camera crew.

Most of what's left to do has been planned for sets in the studio, but it's been a very warm fall out here in Colorado, with temperatures still in the 60's and 70's past the middle of November. I'm sure it has the plants all confused. But it also means for us that we can take a break from constructing the next stage set and go grab some location shots that Mark and Jon have thought of while making rough cuts with the earlier footage. If winter had proceeded according to its usual schedule, we might have to wait until spring to get those into the can. So, at least some things in the movie biz are actually ahead of schedule. :)