and export oh hey folks perfect timing i just finished editing the beacon the short film that
we shot in collaboration with g4 based off of the four part build series uh we did of adam building
and constructing from scratch the two spacesuits that you saw in the short film now this is a very
special behind the scenes because it is a behind the scenes of our own narrative film uh usually
we do behind the scenes of major motion pictures large films but we are obsessed with filmmaking
the filmmaking process and we just jumped at the opportunity to make something of our own make a
narrative piece of our own um it was based off of a loose idea adam had that we then took and ran
with the team germinated brainstormed figuring out what we wanted to do there and eventually ended
up with a shootable script or storyboard rather that we took and shot and i wanted to cover that
stage going from pre-production to production to post-production now norm did a fantastic
production day behind the scenes if you haven't watched that check the link below
watch that if you haven't seen the beacon watch that as well it's about three and a half minutes
and then come back here and check this out because i'll be going through the entire process now i
wanted to start with again the pre-production stages was based just a loose idea that we had
based off some imagery that adam threw out and reference images now reference images storyboards
all the stuff but to talk about are very important to communicating certain ideas especially when you
have a team now we're a small team so it was easy enough but we still need to get the idea and the
point across to not only ourselves but to other folks involved and so we took a lot of reference
images of things like alien and just people walking on space i use shot deck it's a website
where you can look at reference stills from other movies based off of just a couple keywords
space man walking exploration and that stuff brings up stills that i can then grab
and we took all those images we took a lot of photos with uh with the norm took
a lot of photos of the suit i did some video reference imagery we took that saw what we
liked from the suit how the how it was posed the compositions we liked and we took that all and
created some boards but i glued all that stuff to whiteboards to give everyone an idea of
the look we were going for uh from then we needed to have a story or a script now we weren't going
to have a dialogue we were going to have a lot of it was more of a of a showcase a fashion piece
so to speak of of the suits in with a cinematic backdrop a narrative backdrop that was happening
while we're showing off the suits and so we really needed to know how it scenes and shots
were going to move not only for ourselves but for the shooting day to make sure that we were not too
ambitious which we were and we can get everything done in one day and so i made some storyboards
and from there i do what i typically do on on short films that i work on and that is making
animatic i brought it into my editing system and i cut that to music i gave a little narration on
how i think it should flow and from there i showed that to everybody so we all had uh an idea of of
what we can do and what i was thinking since i'd be shooting this whole thing and sort of editing
and putting together i needed to get everyone on board with what my idea was at this point
adam will gesture to kevin that he's got a lead on the signal and they start walking so we pull
out and this is where we get our establishing shots we get our suit shots we see them walking
we see that they have arrived in a world that is just full of decay uh this this will be your
kind of wide sprawling alien style shots just two astronauts you know on this large landscape
from there we needed locations we're in the san francisco bay area there's not a whole lot of
locations that we can use that would serve us exactly what we needed so we looked down to
los angeles six hours down south there is plenty of sound stages plenty of stages that we can rent
and los angeles is known to have facilities that have multiple stages within one building
so you would have warehouses where you would rent out multiple stages in that place so you can do
different locations at the same spot and not to do what's called a company move and take everybody
take the crew take the gear and spend time moving that to a different location you can do everything
there and fon davis at funko studios has exactly that he has not only a working facility where they
do a lot of their own their own maker stuff their own uh prop building costuming but they
also have sound stages within his facility and so we chatted with him and talked about what we
can do there they have a great spaceship that's a little bit modular and can be modified they
have large warehouse space they don't they had a bar which we used as home base but also could
uh be dressed up to be something specific if we do long lenses make it more abstract which
is kind of what we're going for so we locked that in took the storyboards took the animatics
took the reference images and went down for the shoot and then we we grabbed some gear we grabbed
a cinema camera this canon c500 mark ii is what we use it was a rental from scott sorensen the dp
of mythbusters along with atlas anamorphic lenses which i reached out to the company
and got a test kit for this short um anamorphics were a choice we decided to do based off of the
films of the the sci-fi films of the 70s and 80s where anamorphic was a big thing so with the gear
in hand oh fawn and his team helped us hire a small crew uh grip a gaffer to go down there and
all kind of crack this thing open and work on this for one day we had two days there we had
what's called like a pre-rig day where it was it was the core team myself um my grip and gaffer
and then the adam came as adam was sort of the artistic director of this whole thing and so he
needed to walk through every stage and work with the set decorator to figure out how we
were going to dress things up now if you see in the short everything's a little bit dirty there's
a lot of dust there's cobwebs all that stuff's very intentional um fawn shop is it has these
sound stages to do that too they're all kind of clean they have a they have a static sort of look
at the very beginning and then you come in and sort of manipulate that and make that
match your vision and so adam worked with them to get those cobwebs up get that dust get everything
the right kind of grit i worked with the uh with the grip and gaffer to pre-rigged lights get
the they get the sets kind of where they needed to be so that the cameras can
get all in place uh and then we had a laser and uh uh some haze and we had a laser guide again we
kind of have to have someone come in there to do that sort of gag and smoking haze was another
thing uh the smoke looked fantastic in photos it adds so much texture it kind of wraps around
light and becomes its own volumetric thing around spacesuits wraps and curls around things but in
in motion it's a little bit different and video it's a little different because it's tricky you
have to have someone sort of dedicated again to to gag that in to to help that activate at the right
time so that's repeatable from every scene but also to motivate it you can't just have random
smoke bursts you have to sort of have it coming from some place it also adds a lot of movement
uh when we're trying to do a piece that's sort of uh slow and atmospheric smoke adds a
an intensity it you know it works for aliens when ripley is running away from the alien queen
smoke's coming through it adds that movement and adds that intensity um but for alien haze
as they're kind of walking through is something more appropriate for what we're trying to do so
because of the amount of people that we had because of what we were trying to do
we opted for haze most of the time it adds uh or decreases the contrast so to speak of like
the backgrounds it helps light sort of bloom out and gives us like hellation of light uh
that really adds to that sci-fi look now haze was pretty easy again you just have a couple people
turn that thing on i think all of us sort of took a hand at pressing on that thing and then
just walking that around and letting that sit and you sort of monitor it make sure it stays at
the same level it'll go down you add some more haze it gets too big open doors throw it out
but it's a lot easier to deal with than smoke when it comes to wider shots or large frames or large
scenes so after pre-rig after effects were kind of nailed down the general blocking and the locations
we went back to the hotel i created a shot list based off of the storyboards
and based off of what we learned being on the pre-rig day and the next day we had a whirlwind
of a shooting day uh i could barely remember it we were moving at 11 the entire day
and again watching arms video to see the sense of how that energy went how the day went what we were
doing how we moved through the entire day because he does a great job documenting that process but
from there it was not over it was over for a lot of people was not over for me as the editor
i came back with a bunch of raw footage and my next steps were to make this thing give it life in
other ways uh the video element of it is just the beginning i this was all shot mos so if you watch
the raw footage you would hear me yelling a whole bunch of things i had to move over here action
over there we're getting lasers smoke you're good to go get out of the ship actually chris
for fantastic there it is now right like unusable in terms of audio and needed to have sound design
you can't have a sci-fi film of exploration without any sound design whatsoever and so
the first step here was getting the right sounds getting the sounds that the suits would make the
footsteps the movement the cloth the beeps the clicks all the little things that just make up
the make up the blood of this piece and so uh we went back to adam's shop i grabbed a microphone
grabbed a zoom and we shot a little foley session of just me capturing noises while adam made those
noises but we didn't have sound on location we ran the whole thing mos it was all just scratch
sound uh you can hear us talk in the background um so we really need to make that atmosphere with
sound when i watched the rough cut and i was like oh i have to turn the sound off because
you're just like okay push the button there all right move your head yeah it's very unromantic
oh hey one thing about that shot can you pause for a second um one thing about that shot is
i'd love it if we could hold it long enough so you actually see breath bloom on the thing
and then we cut yeah so again that should probably be we get at least one sound to me
yeah we should have good a good amount of you guys breathing just to run through and
maybe some heightened you know some some areas of heightened breaths yeah exactly right
okay so that's definitely a whole pass it's just some breath yeah exactly that kind of and
like you choose the moment of like when it goes past our faces when it go is the loudest yeah
i feel like what we're gonna end up getting today is more like a library rather than a live track
yeah i was sort of picturing us doing all this fully against this but i realized now
there's a lot of piecemeal stuff and you might grab some electronic sounds from sound libraries
exactly yeah yeah i was thinking of jim cameron when i put the strobes on there because he's
really good at using flashing lights for calm scenes that become not calm and then all of a
sudden there's like a swinging light right right virgil bregman is fighting with michael bean
yeah the gaffer the gaffer was like hey should i cover that is a sign i was like
i like it the shot came up and i'm like that's that's yeah
actually i thought it was a light that looked like an exit sign the boot zone bore fruit so lift them
that's my first pair of moon boots and i literally cast some uh boots into silicon under
and silicone in there that's some weight these i've been saving forever they're prison boots from
space from face off but they're also in aliens and then i have these fire boots which are just
hmm yeah i mean they sound heavy right yeah and there is a little bit of like uh
like yeah it sounds like you're being pushed to the ground with some a lot more
weight than you are that's great let's so let's walk around we've got carpet
all right cool
i like that a few of those oh wow all right
i may need apple box help with this norm
set okay here we go this is adding of bearings to the breathing sounds
great
uh
that is so clearly a lamp
all right i think i think we're good now just picturing stanley kubrick because apparently
bowman's breathing is kubrick himself in the helmet just recording oh wow right it's like
the greatest director cameo ever all right um i feel good um we have a nice like this is a great
like bass sound bed then i could just build on top of it and layer and augment everything else and
then we can go from there awesome after that that wasn't quite enough that gave us some good suit
noises as a base but i really needed to start layering it with much much more sound i used
sound libraries i purchased a couple sound libraries and just started going through the
piece essentially just running through it adding more sounds listening to it layering more sounds
those little things that just populated the entire century overload and just gave noises so that
this world would feel as real as we were trying to portray it on screen again no audio whatsoever so
the entire sound library had to be built out by me in post-production which was harder than probably
most things i've done regarding this film having a close connection with adam the team to get their
feedback and sort of hear what they have to say about it coming back and sitting there and just
adding more again layering layering adding more until it came to a spot i was happy with added
a little bit of music i found some some like piano libraries i grabbed my piano i had a little couple
little tunes to kind of creep it up a bit at the right times and from there we exported it out
and shot it off to the internet for you guys to watch this was an insanely fun thing to do
again we are film obsessed film making obsessed and so being able to take this take something
that we built months and months and months of hard work especially for adam and being able
to pay it off in something that we enjoy and that we're proud of was incredibly rewarding
and makes doing this stuff just awesome and this is all thanks to you guys for watching us all of
these years and this is all thanks to your guys's support uh or else we couldn't have done this so
i hope you guys enjoyed this behind the scenes video i hope you guys have had a good year and i
hope to see you guys next year when we hopefully do a lot more stuff like this until then bye