With the trailer out, I wanted to break down some of the shots and their history here and explain my approach. I thought I would start with the shot that became the thumbnail for the trailer, wide behind Duggy as he stands up (after taking a shrapnel pellet to the arm and being exposed to gas) to find the shelling around him has got much worse.
“The place was turned to hell… I doubt if ever Fritz sent over so many shells on such a small stretch as he did around us.”
The shot is known as PBR_1004. It is the shot with the most revisions currently in the entire film, the trailer version being v016.
PBR_1004_v016, as it appears in the trailer.
The very number of the shot, 1004, tells me something about its origin, which I would have otherwise forgotten. Although the shot exists in the very first version of the film (the one I screened to my parents and sent to friends the weekend of July 4th), this must have been a shot I had not originally envisioned, as it’s number is not an increment of 5 or 10. It must have been created on the fly and assigned that number to fit it in the sequence (I discussed my shot numbering for Prazinburk on a previous blog post).
Here is the shot as it was first created, and in context in the first edit…
So the scene is about 10 seconds long, and 6 shots. Neither of which is a problem and I always liked that last shot. It’s a solid first pass. At this stage 1004 is a fairly mechanical addition, used at the last minute (it’s dated July 4th, 7:31am -hours before I screened the cut!) along with 1002 to get me to PBR_1000, which was the shot I expected to be first in the sequence (albeit flopped in this edit).
Continuing to develop the film, and trying to get a pacier edit, I cut most of the scene at the end of July. Duggy sits up as he does in PBR_1002, and then we just look over his shoulder at the carnage before cutting to Mr Preedy, watching helplessly from a distance (and I’d trimmed a few seconds of shoe leather with Preedy here too). With the addition of some volumetric gas, as opposed to the re-coloured billboard smoke from Unreal Starter Content, Duggy emerges heroically from the gas carrying the injured Private Kaur (a nice new development of the same shot from before)…
I cut 1004 entirely after that, and it stayed that way for a long time, the entire scene perplexing me for a while. I didn’t mind spending the precious 10-15 seconds telling this part of the story but there was too much shoe leather in the first version, and too little of anything after such a drastic cut.
Funnily enough, 1004’s route back into the cut started with the trailer. I made a first cut of the trailer at the end of August, and the shots I could choose from were fairly limited. I’d not done any facial animation (still haven’t, because I’ve not hired any actors to speak lines yet). A lot of the characters are very much placeholders until such time that I can afford to hire some help on the film. The gas mask would be useful to hide a lot of faces, but shots would need to be carefully selected to hide underdeveloped parts of the film.
I remembered 1004, and thought if nothing else it would be a useful trailer shot, and threw it in the cut. A month or so later, in early September, I felt it had the potential to be a powerful shot, and put it back in the proper cut, where it was before. Crucially, I much preferred v001 to v002, and because I maintained version integrity I was able to revert to an older, preferred version.
I soon realised what was bugging me about Scene 10 - the disconnect between Duggy and Preedy. When we look over Preedy’s shoulder, we can’t see Duggy because he’s in the gas cloud. This is an important story point, Duggy is momentarily lost to Mr Preedy, but it means we lose the geographical connection between the two characters. I thought I might be able to fix this in shot 1004.
Up until now, 1004 was animated with a blend of two Mixamo clips, one of which I’d manipulated slightly in Maya, but they were very much placeholders. If the shot was going back into the film it would need mocap. My approach with mocap is to record it and throw the raw, unedited version into Unreal to check it in shots. Afterwards, I do a tie-down pass on it to tidy it generally, before splitting it off into separate files for the different shots it appears in. For now, here it is unedited, in the new PBR_1004 v004…
Story-wise, the big change here is that we are losing Duggy in the gas, then we’re on the same page as Mr Preedy, so when we cut to him we understand what he’s looking at. Once we lose Duggy in the gas this way, his heroic return from the gas is a more resonant moment, on a story level.
This new action wouldn’t work with the previous shot though, which I always liked - the extreme close-up of Duggy’s wide eyes, through his mask, as he recovers from a gas attack. So, what if… I could get it in a “oner”…?
v006 - combining the CU with the shot and moving into the wide. Down the line I will need to do some lighting and/or material work to be able to see his eyes properly, but will worry about that once there is facial animation to be able to actually see!
With the shots combined into a oner, this really starts to take shape. But there was one other story problem to resolve - we lose Duggy in the gas, and the next time we see him he’s saved Private Kaur. In the first version he sees Kaur, and then runs in to save him. Duggy running into the gas to save his comrade, as opposed to it enveloping him, is much more dramatic. Could I work that story point in…?
A shell exploding behind the injured Kaur leads the audience eye quite nicely and gives us enough time to see, and then Duggy runs into the gas to save him.
After that, a number of cosmetic updates were made for the trailer - added shellfire and explosions, rain and water on the lens, Duggy’s new costume and gas mask. This, then, is the version that went in the trailer…
So, is it finished? No, but I guess these things never are. Certainly the trailer version has not been tested in the main edit yet and I certainly feel that we’re going to lose Duggy running into the gas to save Kaur, because I reduced the gas to be able to see everything! I will need a solution for that as it is quite important, but didn’t matter for the trailer.
Kaur is animated with an “injury” cycle but it’s hard to tell, there’s not much motion in it. I’d quite like for him to react to the shellfire nearby. And finally, Duggy’s costume and gas mask are still unfinished - his uniform should be more damaged by this point, having already been hit by shrapnel, and the gas mask I’m using at present is still incorrect (I wanted to fix it for the trailer but I just wouldn’t have time, and will discuss in a future post).
Thanks for reading! Please let me know if this is useful.