Everyday Apocalypse: Behind the Greenscreens

This two & a half minute romp through the world of Half Life 2 was produced by us (The Dada Factory) in collaboration with the University of Utah and Ron Hill Imagery.





Behind the Scenes:


The Pre Production:

Early last year the folks down at Ron Hill offered a mind-blowing deal to local production companies, a day of shooting in their green screen studio. They used it as a chance to drum up some potential business, we jumped on the opportunity to shoot with the latest and greatest film tool, the Red One.

The script spawned from my seemingly un-avoidable obsession with the apocalypse. It was a chance to incorporate real world footage into the Half Life 2 game engine. Half Life specializes in gunfights, zombies, explosions so the script arose naturally from that. The idea of a disinterested, stoic, main character seemed like a good fit. Furthermore, the recent overabundance of apocalyptic films leaves us with a general feeling of disinterested monotony!

The Production:

With the tech help from the Ron Hill staff (JC & Sara) and the wizard eye of Lonny Danler (the DP of our 48 Hour Film Halcyon) we raced through the shots getting glorious 4K footage of Chris being a total badass.
More production stills are here.

Ron Hill again proved their awesomeness by letting us use the $30,000 Arri Prime Lenses, a full barrage of lights, and the giant greenscreen wall. Epic win.

The Post Production:

Everyday Apocalypse then sat on my hard drive for almost a year. I needed an elite team of nerds to construct and film the backgrounds. That opportunity came when Bob Kessler from the University of Utah gave me the opportunity to work with a team from the spring Machinima class.

For those who don't know, and think Machinima (pronounced Ma-shin-i-ma) is a strange word, check out the wikipedia page. The gist of it is to use videogames (and their modding tools) to orchestrate and shoot movies. 90% of the time this turns into incredibly nerdy, poorly shot, awkward pieces of fluff. That's not true for Bob's Machinima class, he gives students a chance to learn some real film skills, and produce decent Machinima stories.

With a group of four students we set about building and filming the sequences. Some of these were scripted and controlled by the games AI. Others were live sets: The shot below required participation of the full team, one person filmed the scene, another triggered explosives, another fired rockets, and the last threw the car across the road. I danced around behind them cuing the effects.
With the backgrounds shot, I took the composited the footage into After Effects, matching as best I could the size of Chris with the backgrounds, the angles of the shots, the speed of the bike, etc. Color correction helped to mesh Chris into the background. The final task was a comb through with sound FX and foley work, which really made the film come to life. 

The film was a fantastic first experience with greenscreen compositing. As the quality of videogame engines increase (Half Life is 6 years old now), and the tools become more accessible, I think we'll see a whole new direction of animated films emerge. When I go into the EAE masters program next year I plan to explore this exciting new world of greenscreens, motion capture, and Machinima!

Everyday Apocalypse will screen with a host of other Machinima films April 30th @ 3:15 pm in the UMFA auditorium. 


Up Next: Keep reading for the release of 'This Place' our official submission to the 48 Hour Film Project International Shootout, later this month.

Dada Painting Night

Tonight I had a painting night with Davey, Jessica and Luke. They can take credit for the idea, I decided to tag along. 


Recently I had tacked up a whole slew of reference photos I used for this piece in the 337 face off event. The reference I used was a Pygmy owl, a tiny creature that can fit into the palm of your hand. They're fantastic birds, beautiful feathering, & there's something so perfect about the proportions. 


So anyway, here's the painting, I think I'll give it to my mother for her birthday next week:

- higher res version -

Episode 1: The New Game Theory & Atemporality

I'm going to start posting 'episodes'. Each one is designed to take about an hour to fully consume, through video, articles & related readings. So instead of watching an episode of a mind numbing TV show, you can learn a little about this crazy new world we are living in.

This episode is about the current trend of online culture, games, and how that can be used as a vehicle for social activism and awareness. The two videos are from 2008, so a little dated, but they outline perfectly the trend we have been seeing in recent years. The integration of real life into games and vice versa.

The first talk is by Clay Shirky delivered at the Web 2.0 conference back in 08. Shirky talks about the idea of cognitive surplus. The huge amount of free time that we as Americans are blessed with, yet squander needlessly. He drops some scary statistics on TV watching, building to his beautifully simple statement "it's better to do something than to do nothing". (16 min)

What I love about this talk is shift to positivist thinking. No longer is the internet a mess of uncoordinated data and childish humor, it's the nascent form of something great. Maybe, yes, it's infantile in parts, but there are sparks of brilliance like wikipedia that shine through.

The second talk is from the New Yorker Conference that same year. Jane McGonigal, the force behind the experimental MMO Superstruct, talks about the history, psychology, and future of gaming. She nails down some of the theoretical notions that Shirky brings up, and illustrates just how effective utilizing the cognitive surplus can be.  (15 ish minutes)

Saving the World Through Game Design

I want to work at IFTF. McGonigal's next project is a game called Evoke. Its again a social MMO, designed at solving real life problems.

"Our goal: to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start tackling the world’s toughest problems: poverty, hunger, sustainable energy, water security, conflict, disaster relief, health care, education, human rights."

It launches in March 2010, so sign up now to become a part of it, it could be really interesting.

The last entry in this eposide is a post on the Wired blog Beyond the Beyond. The blog is authored by novelist and Fururist, Bruce Sterling. Sterling is an interesting character, he not only helped to define the Cyberpunk genre, but co-authored with William Gibson The Difference Engine, the seminal work of the Steampunk sub-genre.

What Sterling alludes to is an idea brought up by Skirky and McGonigal, Crowd Sourcing. The technique of pulling knowledge from a common database, rather than an 'academic'. It is the idea that fuels open forums, and projects like Wikipedia. It functions on the assumption that the cream naturally rises to the top, and that the shit sinks to the bottom. 


There of course also a darker side to this type of "internet meme ooze" that Sterling mentions timidly; crowd sourcing can rewrite history. Rumors, if they are told by enough people, and they resonate enough with the reader, become part of history. Indeed it is clear that a battleground is forming. On one side you have the guerrilla troops of 4chan and the like trying to undermine authority, and on the other you have the corporate publicity machines attempting to right their image. In the middle of this the internet academics are maintain some sense of credibility.


Atemporality for the Creative Artist

"I think there is a large hole there that could be filled, from an atemporal perspective. Not at the lowest end of artistic expression, but way up at the top philosophical end."

Throw out grand historical narratives, or pull them apart anachronistically, fill them up with relevance, because dignifying them does no good to anyone. Post-Modernism was a cute jab to the ribs, 'look how clever I am when I mix old and new'. Well fuck that, that's old school. I want to mix past, present and future. Mash it up so much you'll forget whether this is old or new, to the point it becomes irrelevant. To the point that all that matters is your visceral reaction. Forget post-modernism, it's time for Atemporality!

Related Watching:
This is a 30 minute lecture that goes a little deeper in to the game world. It is a talk delivered by Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell. It gets technical and numerical at points but ends with some comical speculation about the world of disposable technology and omnipresent games.