Save Prince Plutonium on YouTube!

So, here’s the finished little epic. It took two years to put together, mostly due to interference from ”real” life. For instance, this spring my little studio, an old boiler room connected to my house, was flooded due to melting snow. It was the start of endless problems and very expensive repairs. It’s still not over, but I’m getting back to something similar to ordinary life. About six months were eaten away by this problem. It’s tough keeping your spirits up when you have a lot of worries to take care of.

I also made a little behind the scenes film. It’s very compressed, but shows some of the process behind putting this project together.

Save Prince Plutonium Trailer!

The poor people who appear in my films are almost always in for a long wait to see the finished piece. I sort-of film first and then later try to figure out how to make the film hold together. I've also learned to film WHEN people are available, and stock up on footage. Anyway, for the young actors in "Save Prince Plutonium", my space movie, I put together this little trailer as a "Happy Easter to you" message. Hope you enjoy it too!

Save Prince Plutonium!: Go green!

I was lamenting a couple of posts back about how badly my BLUE screen compositing experience turned out. While filming "Save Prince Plutonium!" this summer I used a GREEN screen instead and the results have been like night and day. I've been able to key my diminutive actors into new backgrounds without any heartache. Just take a look:



I hardly have to do any adjustments in the Keylight keying software to get everything the way I want it. Apart from this I've had tremendous difficulty actually getting the footage into my PC. I shot all of the live-action scenes using a HDV cam borrowed from a boarding school, where I help out teaching art on occasion. Problem was all of the footage was saved on a memory card and I needed the necessary software installed on my PC in order to have the camera "talk" to the computer. The CD with the software had been mislaid by the very slack drama teacher of the school and I've spend the past two months trying to figure out ways of saving my precious footage. This past weekend, with the help of a friend working with cameras and different softwares, I managed to transport the film clips from card to PC. I also found and bought a software that will transfer HD footage into standard DV footage, `cause I really don't need it in HD. In fact, I can't edit HD on my PC at present. But my plan had always been to utilise the higher resolution of HD even when transferred to DV, and this software allowed me to do that. So I'm happy again!

So now there'll be a few months of piecing together of footage, backgrounds, pyrotechnical effects, model work and stop-mo animation. I haven't started on building puppets yet, since I have a bunch of older stuff to finish first. But I'm already happy with how this is turning out. The kids did such a good job acting in the film, I'm really happy to know now that the chroma key effects and all the other stuff will turn out very well, and they'll have a film they'd be proud to show their friends.