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The year is 1944 and the Allied Air Forces
are launching a very dangerous and risky daylight
bombing mission over Nazi occupied Germany. Along
side escort cover from P-51's and P-38's, the bombers
deliver their payload to the targets with only marginal
success.. As fighting breaks out and the heavily damaged
bombers turn back, intense dogfighting rages and ground
targets are pulverized while both sides suffer tremendous
losses.
The film, while not intending to be a historical
documentary, will show a moment in the struggle for
air superiority over Europe in late WWII and also
the excitement and horror experienced on both sides
of the conflict. This project has been very close
to me since it's conception in 2001, and it's all
I can do to just finish it soon!
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| The airplanes that will be making an appearance
in the film are probably the most well known and
best planes at the time for getting the job done.
Click on the images below to get information on
a specific plane: |
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In
my story, I have a fairly large flight of B-17' s on
a bomb run to a large cluster of factories and other
strategic locations, while there are simultaneous attacks
on a nearby bridge which feeds a main artery to the
Nazi war machine. Meanwhile, a dogfight of 20 strong
is taking place right above an anti-aircraft fortified
train yard as everyone tries to escape certain doom!
The story began
as just a simple idea as most ideas start out, then
just got completely out of control in no time at all.
Basically, I wanted to build a working model of a P-51
Mustang in Maya that you could control without even
touching the model using 'driven keys'... After it was
completed I decided to do a P-38 because the 51 was
so fun and was such a challenge. It was a few months
after I built those two planes and had moved to Seattle
that I actually decided to do a short film with the
two and maybe a few more.
The idea was really
small at that time, just a little 3 minute dogfight,
no story, no dialogue, just fighting... So, after about
2 months of off and on work, I knew that I needed to
do this right, for myself at least. I immediately constructed
a binder to house the project while it's building on
paper and started to amass everything I knew about what
I wanted to make. The binder was filled with lots of
paper and off I went to work with what soon outgrew
the half inch binder and into a 1 inch, and onto a 1.5
that's its in now... I'm estimating the film length
in its entirety will run for roughly 25-30 minutes including
credits. The whole reason that I even decided to do
this in the first place, and especially do this entire
thing alone, was the fact that I have always wanted
to do a movie with my favorite planes and actually see
what it would have looked like and try and recreate
a feeling to then totally experience what those kids
actually had to go through. -I realize that the whole
WWII genre of films are a bit more niche and there's
a narrower audience, so I should say that I'm only doing
this one because the aircraft and subject matter are
special to me and this is what I love to do... Basically,
it's something for people like myself who wish that
they wouldn't have ruined Pearl Harbor with a damn,
sappy love story!.. and who are aviation enthusiasts...
Besides, this one is just a warm up because the next
one will be much better and a full length as I will
have help from a team of more than just me, and a scheduler
to work with quite hopefully. |
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Pre-Production
Shots
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Using
what little knowledge I've soaked up from the game industry
as far as project management, I decided to take this
project on completely alone. -And since this project
is so big, to help manage it I've split the files up
into a file tree that holds each piece of terrain, objects,
shaders, and the lighting and camera rigs separately.
This will not only allow me the luxury of importing
and referencing objects into a master scene file, but
also the safety of having separate files in case of
a mishap. The pre production is starting to kill me
here, I really just want to get to work but I know the
importance of this step. I make games for a living,
and THIS is the most common step overlooked and it throws
the rest of the project out of whack from the get-go!
Once this step is out of the way however, I should really
be able to get cracking at a pretty good pace. The story
board was finished recently and and will likely go through
one or two more revisions before final. |
The next step then would be to move onto a
rough animatic with all stand-in objects and a rough
audio pass to get the rhythm and pacing down, so that
later on I can just drop all the final models and
animations in and hit render. -Speaking of rendering...
I'm also going to need a better machine than the one
I have now. I plan to just set up a new one, something
along the lines of a dual-dual core cpu and just having
my current machine as a server and storage for images
and possibly have it grab a frame or two to chew on
every now and then to help out the beast.
If you'll notice the chart on the right, you
can see a graphic representation of the project status
as individual tasks broken down and a total at the
bottom. For the latest, come back here and view this
table and any of the "behind the scenes"
material that I post below throughout the process
to get your intel! Check
out the animated images and asset list below..
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P r o j e c t C
o m p l e t i o n T a b l e |
Story
Board |
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Dialogue |
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Audio |
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Terrain |
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Locations |
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Models |
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Characters |
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Textures |
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Effects |
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Animations |
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Light
Rigs |
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Camera
Rigs |
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Total
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As I get scenes done and completely rendered, I'll
post them here and continue to update it with test
animatics and basic stuff, but no final scenes or
anything that good yet!
Rendering will be done with Maya's default scanline
renderer, which has proven to be a total pain and
there will most likely have to be extensive compositing
and post processing done through After Effects in
the end. Afterwards, when all the scenes have been
completed, I'll then take it through Premiere to edit
and lay in the audio and score. All of the audio will
be cut with Adobe Audition using sound files from
various aircraft cds of the real aircraft and an original
score purchased for the project. The final step will
then be to put it all together into a DVD compilation
and master it for 5.1 surround sound in Encore DVD.
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Test
Renders
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The plan right now is to have the main feature in
a somewhat muted color scheme with a small amount
of film grain for a touch of authenticity, nothing
major. However, for the end credit sequence, I'll
switch to a really poor, scratched and grainy film
quality to give the authenticity the story will require
to convey the feeling and emotion I'm after in the
end... There's not really a set look or feel to the
film yet and will most likely be subject to some level
of experimentation to achieve the desired result in
the end.
The following videos are tests, the equivalent of
doodles on paper, just to see how I was going to set
some things up and see how they looked while in a
scene, or just as an exercise and and to learn from
the mistakes. None of these are final quality and
won't be until the end, but are only here as supplemental
material of the project. I'll add new clips as they
are freshly pulled from the renderer throughout the
process. Keep checking back
for updates to this section!
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