Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Hey guys, it's already been 3 months since the release of Sands of Fire. We're getting a lot of feedback, mostly from the Youtube channel and we're very pleased with the comments. Looks like most of you enjoy the final movie. That makes us very happy. And again, it proves we made the right choises. In the end, it turns out to be all worth it. Thanks for all the positive comments, it really means a lot to us.

For those that haven't seen it yet, here's the embed from Youtube:



Anyway, the reason I'm putting this post up, is that a lot of people have been asking me to post some behind the scenes material. So, here it is. Some rough material I collected from the 6 years of production, and this is only a small portion of the many hundreds of gigs of data we have of this movie. Mostly it consists of testfootage we shot and quickly/roughly put together, without compositing, without any special effects, just the raw footage that we captured from the game. Many of you will definitely recognize the scenes, and I bet you'll all be amazed how the shots were worked on the achieve their final looks. Again, this is why we spent so much time on it, we wanted it to be perfect.

Well, for those interested, here we go.

1) The Intro. I think we haven't spent more time on anything else but the intro. We have dozens of different versions of the intro, all taking a different direction and look/feel. Some were done with onscreen text, others were done with voiceover, some only graphic, some text and music. The intro we ended up with was very much the same like the intro we did for The Fallen One, the flyover of the Blackhawk, we felt we had to stick with our directional style.Introducing the story or giving background information is not easily done as we slowly found out during production.

 

2) Part 1 - The Insurgent Suicide attack. As you will see, the early test footage pretty much turned out to be the final cut. Early on, we had a clear view on what had to happen and how the action should flow. The post-production made it so much more dramatic, especially the 3D explosions.


3) Part 1 - The rescue team debriefing/departs. These scenes are after the events of the attack. A recue team is sent to the last known location of the missing soldier and they will have to fight their way into town. These scenes lack a lot of shots, much action and battle/fighting shots had yet to be recorded. But this edit lay out the blueprint for what we had to accomplish, a parallel cut from the fighting happening at the mosque and the rescue of the soldier. We tried to reach a climax (the rescue of the protagonist) while at the same time, we wanted to have an anti-climax (the slaughter of the rest of the team at the mosque). Pushing on the dramatic moments of rescuing one person for the sake of loosing all others.

 

4) Part 2 - Operation Sands of Fire. For those not knowing what the title is about, well this is your answer. Sands of Fire is the name of a Military Operation. Much like Operation Iraqi Freedom or Phantom Phury. But this name is fake, we made it up. However, many of the events in Sands of Fire are inspired by real operations or events (such as the Blackwater insurgent attack and the Battle of Fallujah). These scenes are just one big exposition, establishing time and place. We tried to create a desert storm look and feel, with lots of yellow/orange and red, darker colors in general. For the final cut, we were inspired by the effects and compositing of Jarhead. For those that have a sharp eye, you can see that one burning oilfield is exactly the same as used in that movie. Yeah we copied it :). Just saying, we were going after that Iraqi desert feel.

 

5) Part 2 - Extraction. For this next clip we're skippig in time. We're in the middle of the operation and Soldiers are being extracted at various locations, by Blackhawk (fastropes) and by ground vehicules. Their goal, try and find their lost men. These men (former rescue Team and our protagonist), are hiding in a small room at the town market square, waiting for their rescue. In an attempt to make contact with their teams, they sent out a radio signal. Now the various squads have to move on and fight their way to the location of that signal. These scenes show some heavy close combat fighting, we wanted to create a claustrophobic feeling, with tight alleyways and insurgents being all over the place. One thing I really wanted in these shots, was blood, a lot of it, excessive use of it. I wanted to show the true horrors of war, soldiers being shot at close range. If you look closely in the final cut, you will see an insurgent laying on the ground with a leg torn off.
   

6) Part 2 - The final battle. These are the big battle scenes at the town market square, a map that was especially created for this movie. And it took us forever to capture. If Peter Jackson had his Battle for Helm's deep, we had our Battle at Market Square. Seriously, we were going nuts on the days of recording. Sometimes we had to manage 30 different players at the same time and put them all in place for the acting. Imagine how stressful that was. But eventually we got the shots that we needed and we were perfectly satisfied. It helped us a lot to have a storyboard in these huge scenes. Some of the shots in this clip will actually show some of the storyboared shots I'm talking about. So don't make a funny face if you see them :). As it turned out, soundfx and music would be very important in this scene. Lots of things happening, explosions, weapons firing, soldiers getting hit, soldiers dying... If I remember correctly, the final battle scene runs 11 mins, and we worked on it for almost 2 years.

 

Isn't it amazing how all these raw images turned into the final movie? I still can't believe how much work and time we put into this. I still have lots and lots of stuff to show and talk about, maybe one day we should release a bluray version with all the extras on it. I can only hope ;)

Anyway, hope you liked it, leave a comment or post any questions you may have. I'll be happy to answer them for you!  


3 comments:

blogg said...

=HUNS= gerald72 :
merci de votre vidéo, c'est un super travail de titan que vous avez réalisé. J'ai vu 3 fois votre vidéo au moins pour comprendre le temps, apprécier tout le travail d'équipe que vous avez fait.

Merci, merci, merci

***************************
= HUNS = gerald72, www.team-huns.fr
thank you for your video, it's a super huge work you have done. I saw your video 3 times at least to understand the time, enjoy all the teamwork that you did.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

Gas2Gas said...





In one of my previous incarnations of Gas, my home was Gamerztheatre.com where my friend Crazycanuck and I collated the best machinima movies out there. While Youtube did exist, they at that time had not introduced HD quality while we at Gamerztheatre had. Part of the attraction of Gamerztheatre for film makers was the array of experienced fellas willing to share there skills in the forums. I saw that as part of my job to bring those experienced film makers to us.

Two of those lads just happened to be Strupie and Little Donkey, active members of the LRRV clan. Sands of Fire being their last movie which took a mammoth 6 years to complete was released earlier this year.

Sands of Fire ... Reviewed.

From the opening credits we are treated to some real digital eye candy, the sumptuous colours in the sky warn the viewer not to move from his chair for the next 45 minuets. Loosely the story revolves around the capture of an American soldier in Iraq and the effort to have him freed by what ever means possible.

Strupie and Little Donkey are machinimas answer to Joel and Ethan Coen or Scorsese and Mendes, their mix of arch, sculpted dialogue, film-history homage and scrupulously-framed cinematography has never failed them or us yet.

So what makes the film so special, well it's the time and effort to add simple things like lights to the Humvee's or the time taken to add smoke leaving the barrel of a gun. Things that just don't appear in Battlefield 2. It's the over all direction the movie takes us and takes machinima. The bar had been raised to almost unreachable heights in my eyes. Watching the film you can see the directional aim the lads wish to take us, think "Desert Storm" and your half way there.

I know from talking to Strupie in the past that he wanted to keep most of the action in the movie limited to what movements EA Games and Dice gave us in Battlefield 2, however due to those limitations he very wisely brought in another movie maker with some CG experience .. Dainious (Gintalas) to add that cutting edge to the movie. Also brought in was "Glowing Ammram" another flight sim movie maker. Strupie and Little Donkey as these CG and "Lock On" (Flight Sim) elements seamlessly.

So all in all the Battlefield 2 Community waited 6 years for the final version of the movie and what a movie it is. I am sure at times the boys wish they had not even started this movie but what a satisfaction they must feel at completing it.

Well done you two, you deserve to have smug little smiles on your faces now. All I have to ask is ... whats next and do we have to wait another 6 years for that?

ABTC said...

nice post
thanks for sharing