sIFF PROMOS HARNESS CReative community

When the opportunity to shoot a promotional trailer for the 22nd Singapore International Film Festival came along, TVC directors, Warren Klass from Two Oceans Film Company and Desmond Tan from Salt Films jumped at the chance to create something unconventional and close to their hearts.

Warren set out to recreate and reinterpret films within the genres of horror, war, romance, adventure and disaster. His film, “Script to Screen”, asked the question: What if you were privy to what goes on behind the lens?

Desmond’s take was far darker and more visceral. “Eye” tackled the idea of seeing the best and worst in the human condition through the eyes of the filmmaker, hence the entire production process is seen through gels/filters placed in front of the camera or every scene is graded and treated differently during the post process.

Both films were shot on 16mm film over two days in several locations around Singapore. Warren shot with award winning Singaporean cinematographer, Alan Yap, with an Arri SR III for a slick Hollywood-looking film. Desmond chose to use the Bolex for a raw feel.

Further enhancement in color grading and online work was done at Blackmagic Design, and scanned into full HD resolution to facilitate output to 35mm format for cinema projection. Both films were graded differently by two colorists who achieved very distinct looks.

Much of the post time for “Eye” was spent on offline, as the right balance had to be struck between the positive and negative aspects of 14 scenarios and getting the right pacing and duration of the film. All the effects within the film had to feel like it was produced in camera without any digital enhancement. To this end, every FX and transition created in Flint was seamless and felt integrated, serving the story and the overall dark mood of the film.

Warren’s film went through weeks of 3D in Maya as well as tracking and compositing work to create never seen before scenes of meteorites falling into Singapore’s cityscape. At Blackmagic Design Post Production, post producer Dixie Wu and creative post supervisor Damien Yang produced different levels of effects needed for the various scenes, from screeching meteorites to thundering bombers overhead.

The atmospheric soundtrack for Desmond’s spot, was composed and handled by AMX Audiophiles where guitar maestro, Adam Lee, lent his talents to create a multi-layered track where his wailing guitars brought an added dimension to the visuals. To top it off, a gravelly textured voiceover was added to provide a sense of mystery and gravitas to the entire spot up to the final frame, “I am... who you are.”

Presented with the prospect of an open canvas for creativity and having successfully collaborated on numerous award-winning projects with directors Warren Klass and Desmond Tan, the Blackmagic Design post team needed little persuasion to buy in to the two promos.

BLACKMAGIC DESIGN POST for ‘Script to Screen’ directed by Warren Klass

The unique concept and structure of ‘Script to Screen’ presented it’s own special challenges for post production starting with achieving appropriate edit rhythms for each of the distinctive film genres presented.

Blackmagic Design editor Pang Wei Fong explains, “‘Script to Screen’ features several different film genres, for each genre we had to carefully consider the pacing and rhythm of the edit to achieve an authentic and convincing feel.”

Blackmagic Design 3D/VFX Artist Ganesh Ghale was enlisted to create a devastating meteorite shower for the final Armageddon style end-of-the-world action sequence.

“I got a good idea of the flight paths Warren wanted for the meteorite shower. My biggest initial challenge was tracking the rough CG meteorites into the floating hand-held background plates as the regular tracking software became confused with tracking points on the similar looking tower blocks.”

Ganesh used an advanced Mocha tracking software to successfully match the live camera then set about designing his own CG meteorites, “I did a lot of tests using Maya Fluids to create a series of elements such as fire, smoke, sparks and particles to make up the meteorites and their tails and provided multiple layers for each of these elements.”

Compositing the final CG elements into the live plates was Blackmagic Design VFX artist Kean Au who combined all the layers of CG varying colour, contrast and transparency to achieve optimum photorealism, “to create a more realistic sense of depth we rotoscoped some of the talent and buildings so that the meteorite shower could appear to be raining down all around. I also added some extra lens flares and lighting effects to the CG elements.”

BLACKMAGIC DESIGN POST for ‘EYE” directed by Desmond Tan Blackmagic Design editor Randall Lee said “It’s not everyday that you get to work on such an exciting, raw and divergent spot. The challenge here was to take the series of disparate scenes that represent the thoughts of the filmmaker and create a coherent and fluid stream of consciousness.” Blackmagic Design VFX artist Kean Au further enhanced the offline edit creating customised effects for each separate scene, “The various scenes needed to to evoke a variety of different moods. For example in ‘The forgotten’ sequence we added a heavy vignette to simulate the deteriorated vision of the old man and lots of dirt and scratches to convey, on the image itself, the concept of old age.” “In ‘The boy who falls for the first time’ we wanted to achieve an old style 8mm look so we added a film strip effect at the beginning of the sequence to simulate projection and a vignette typical of the undefined edges of an 8mm frame,” explained Kean. Blackmagic Design colourist Noppasak Poonpipat, aka Aun, referenced 8mm ‘Ektachrome’ stock and processing from the 1970’s to create the distinctive colour palette for the ‘The boy who falls for the first time’. “We wanted to give the sequence an old fashion 8mm home movie look but also to bring out the heightened emotion of the young boy being in love for the very first time, so we went for slightly surreal, saturated colours. ASIAIMAGE