With all the "For your consideration" threads popping up around the forum with the announcement of the FXhome awards, I thought I'd write up a little topic about my latest film here, which was released quite some time ago here, on July 31st last year: Campsite! Sorry if the following text is a tad long, see it part as a motivation behind the nominations I'm aiming for, but mostly I thought it'd be fun and hopefully helpful to share some behind-the-scenes stuff for my last film! Even half a year since its release
Not sure how much of a
"for your consideration" thread this really is, it's more of a behind-the-scenes thread, but I thought I'd try to make it work at building some attention towards the film for the upcoming awards!
First off though, here are some links to the film so you can watch it if you haven't already - I have included links to Vimeo in case my website doesn't work for some reason:
Watch Campsite now!
FXhome Cinema
Vimeo
The latest film me and my crew over at Redhawk Productions made is really our biggest effort to date - the first pre-production meetings started in early June of 2008, when all we had was an idea, a few locations and absolutely no money to be seen (the last thing lasted throughout the project
). I partly wrote the script along with some old friends of mine - mostly since I felt they had much more experience in the thriller genre with some added horror/supernatural bits. Earlier with
Cell and
16 we had basically tried to tackle the thriller genre - while they had some jump-scares as well, we really tried to hone in on the almost clicheic nature of jump-scares, characters, story and aestethic with "Campsite". It turned out it was difficult to pull off - we had the actors and the locations but we didn't have a realized script, and our production start date of August was rapidly approaching! Writing the first draft of the screenplay was basically a four-day process, and I tweaked some of the dialogue on the evenings while shooting the now, soon-to-be-released, FXhome film project "Rapture" during the summer of 2008. Had a script done and finished by the middle of July which meant me and the cast and crew had some time for rehearsals and location scouting. Did we storyboard the film? Nope, although with hindsight I probably should have
The film was partly made as my project for my last year in high school. I'm quite unfamiliar with how it works in other high schools around the world, but here in Sweden you are obligated to create a pretty big project related to what you're studying in high school as your main subject for your last year. I studied science, so while the film wasn't very much of a related subject in any way, I was able to make it due to a great project manager at school who was very interested in films and let the rules slide a bit
.
I thought I'd include the entire film's script right here, if anyone wanted to give it a read-through. It also includes more cheesy dialogue than made it into the final film, as well as some scenes which were either never shot or removed from the final film:
Campsite - The screenplay (.pdf file)
The production started in the middle of August with what is actually the first scene of the film - we didn't really plan for it to rain on the day, but the shoot date was solid and couldn't be moved. We only had the car for one day, and we really wanted to use it as I thought it would add some production value to our no-budget film. ^^ The scene was shot in very, very poor lighting conditions, which had me bumping up the gain on the camera to 15 dB. Never a good sign
This is basically why the first scene of the film is in black & white, to hide some of the terrible grain. It was a very hectic first shooting day due to it being very cold (this is Sweden after all).
The rest of the film was shot throughout September to December, during some very planned, and also quite stressful, weekends. This was due to neither the cast and the crew having loads of spare time. It was the last year in high school for many of us, and besides finishing with good grades in our core subjects, we each had (as mentioned) a project we had to finish before spring. Therfor, many of the scenes leading up to Thomas and Johanna leaving to the forest were very seperated shoots.
The forest was located about an hour or so from a summer vacation house which was used to house the cast and crew during the two weekends we spent shooting in the wild. Apart from one of our main cast members catching a cold the second weekend, everything turned out fine and was on schedule - even though I'm pretty sure some people might have found me a bit annoying towards the end of the quite long days, especially since all I could offer them to eat were home-made sandwiches and some pretty ghastly soup.
The last few scenes of the film - namely the driving away from the forest, the arrival with the car breaking down, and the final interrogation scene was all shot on the same weekend in late November. Now, with the film actually shot, next up was the…
Actually, I started editing the first few scenes right after we shot them, to save some time in the editing room.
There were quite a few issues during the post-production process though: most notably the audio. As the entire film was shot using the on-camera mic, over 90% of the film's dialogue had to be recorded using ADR. Also, it's more difficult than I thought to shoot a large portion of the film as day-for-night ^^ I had previously done some day-for-night grading on Ashley Wing's Between The Lines, but as the footage was much more prepared for the process, it was way easier. Basically, what had to be done with the Campsite footage, which included both handheld, steadycam, static and dolly shots was to basically crunch all the black levels quite a lot and remove pretty much all of the original saturation. Only problem with this process was that most of the shots involving actors, especially the actress playing Johanna, had some black make-up around her eyes, making them go completely black when applying the grade. Hence, her eyes had to be tracked in basically all shots during night so some brightness could be added. I've included some pictures below so you can see a taste of the quite time-consuming process
Higher-resolution images available here: 1. Original Shot |
2. Rough Matte |
3. Eyes keyed out |
4. Eyes tracked |
5. Final Shot
Also the car scene, which was shot on greenscreen, added about 5 or 6 weeks to the post-production. Time was running out for the film to be finished before finishing high school in early June! At first the sequence was intended to be a pretty rough and basic composite, but after watching some tutorials I decided to go out and add relfections and much more just to make the scene more realistic. So spent another day with my dad (who is always an enormous help on my productions) basically driving around the countryside filming both interior and exterior shots - two passes for each shot in the film (one background and one reflection pass). Some pictures below of the compositing process of the scene:
Higher-resolution images available here: 1. Original Shot |
2. Matte |
3. Background keyed out |
4. Background plate |
5. Background plate inserted |
6. Reflection Plate |
7. Composited |
8. Final Shot
The film was originally planned to be shot and delievered before Christmas of 2008 - it featured a whole lot less of obvious VFX shots than my previous film,
Zombie Exterminator - but as it turned out, Campsite really became the most VFX heavy film I had shot to date. Another example of VFX which had to be figured out was the car window being smashed. It still looks a bit dodgy in the final film, but I think it turned out pretty good with the circumstances. Had to figure out some way to animate a window into particles, and since I had basically no 3d particle experience, that added a few weeks as well
Some images from the car window being smashed open below, sort of a VFX breakdown of sorts
Higher-resolution images available here: 1. Original Shot |
2. 3D simulation |
3. Masking |
4. Simulation masked |
5. Rough composite |
6. Final Shot
Most of the film's sound effects were custom made - me and a couple of friends went out to the countryside and basically recorded footsteps, glass breaking, sticks snapping and loads of other fun things, with a newly bought video microphone. I probably should have purchased that before deciding to shoot the film using the on-camera mic.
The film was basically finished with just a few days to go for the project's deadline in late May of 2009. There were still quite some things to figure out - some additional ADR lines had to be recorded, some of the music was missing and some pick-up shots were still to be done. Nevertheless, the film was handed in, in a somewhat acceptable condition on time, and it moved on to win the Best Project award at my science high school, which was a very fun experience (especially since the film wasn't officially done yet) :p
Before I move on to talk about the final stages of the film's post-production, the cinematography and some more special effects talk I just wanted to give out a very very big thanks to everyone involved around here on FXhome in making this film actually being finished. I had a pretty big test audience which in some way or another participated throughout the entire post-production process, from early January 2009 to its release late July 2009. So a big thanks to the entire
FXhome team, Ashman, Andreas, ben3308, Atom, B3N, Sollthar, CX3, Waser and many many more! Without your help the film could never have been finished!
The rest of the post-production time was devoted to fixing some of the issues named above, as well as creating the final sound mix. The film was then released on the internet and submitted to FXhome on July 31st, and it was up in the FXhome cinema a few days later. Unfortunately it didn't get too many reviews, something which probably could be related to the length of it - a film over 30 minutes might not be the best for the internet, something I'm taking with me towards my next film project which starts shooting in a few weeks. Also releasing my new Swedish time travel comedy SpexArn in a few weeks! =)
The film's look was mostly based on horror films from the 80s - they had a specific look that was partly stylized, and almost shot in a documentarian manner in the way they presented locations and always had new shots. I tried to somewhat copy the same look for Campsite, using many different angles, sometimes covering a short dialogue scene from over 20 angles so none of the shots of the film looked repeated or similar to another.
It was also the first film I've shot using a steadycam (mostly forest scenes, when Johanna is running away from the scary monsters
) as well as one dolly shot. Much more of this film than anything I've done before was also shot entirely handheld - I tried to avoid the shaky-cam look for most of the film though, as I thought I could try to use it more effectively when some scary characters are introduced, or, for example, when Johanna meets her dead little sister in the forest. Basically, I tried to link the film's look and cinematography with the characters feelings and mood changes: the film starts off (discounting the very first scene) with a very colourful palette. Throughout the film more and more colour is drained from the picture as the characters descend more and more into darkness. The colourization of the dream sequence is to symbolize the monotone dream (which is mono-coloured in the film's beginning, i.e. black & white) which has now come to life. The final interrogation scene's green colour palette tries to symbolize the one-sidedness of the police officer and the hopelessness Johanna feels in the situation - but after the final reveal a tad of colour is returned to Johanna's skin and eyes. If this means she is guilty of the crimes she is accused for or not, is up to you
"The eyes are the mirror to the soul" is a famous expression, so I tried to base a lot of the framing and the look of the footage in the character's eyes - whenever they are on screen their eyes are always the most prominent, and in a few scenes later in the film they actually change colour to symbolise the changing mood (something which can be seen in Johanna's eyes when she meets her sister as well as the standoff scene at the car in the forest towards the film's third act).
Loads of grading and visual effects work went into the film, as you might have seen from reading the excruciating text above
I decided to put together a small before/after comparison video so that you all can see the work which went in to the final film! Hope you enjoy it, there are a few editing changes as the no-VFX version is from an earlier edit but most of the shots should be somewhat identical:
Campsite VFX Before/After comparison (on Vimeo)
I hope you found Campsite as fun and entertaining to watch as it was to shoot it! If you decide you want to nominate it for best picture/best special effects or best cinematography, that would be flat out awesome
Also if you consider nominating me for best filmmaker, even after reading about all the mistakes I've made above, that would also be very fun.
It was very straining at times at a total of almost 14 months of production, but this thriller/horror epic is also the most fun film I've directed so far, and hopefully you'll like it as well!
Again, here are the links to both the film here on FXhome as well on Vimeo in case my site behaves oddly when trying to download the film:
Campsite links
FXhome Cinema
Vimeo
Last but definitely not least, wanted to give out a huge thanks to all the FXhomers here - you guys and girls are truly amazing and this surely is the best community on the internet! Thanks for reading my post, and good luck to everyone in the FXhome awards!
