Aurora – Steampunk Short Film Q and A – Tuts+ Workshop

Aurora – Steampunk Short Film Q and A – Tuts+ Workshop

on Sep 28th 2012 with 21 comments

A while back I had the below email waiting for me in my inbox. I watched the film and truly enjoyed what these guys were able to do with so little. I thought it might be fun to post their film and see what you all thought. Do you have any questions you’d like to ask the director?

This was the email I had received:

My name is Chris Kellett and I’m a young film maker in Australia. I just come off a film that has taken an independent crew 3 and a half years to make for a budget of only $1,800. The film contains over 375 VFX shots and was only made possible by people like AE Tuts who guided so many of our VFX artists in our early learning in After Effects. I’m writing to not only share our story about making an action adventure epic for no money but to deliver a thank you to the community you’ve established here online because it really is a brilliant resource that made our film possible. Numerous tutorials were relied on to learn what we needed from the opening titles to the gun shots in the climax of the film.
Thanks for everything you’ve done for the online community and if there are any questions on the film please don’t hesitate to ask as its the least we can do after you’ve answered so many questions of ours at Aetuts+.

Watch Aurora

Let us know what you think or if you have any questions.

Adam Everett Miller is everettoptions on Videohive
 
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I am the editor of Aetuts+. I also run Hello Studios as my 9-5 job. I'd love any feedback about Aetuts+ so don't hesitate to drop me a line. ae@tutsplus.com  

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  • http://allbetsareoff.com/ Aharon Rabinowitz

    This film is not perfect. But it is amazing. Great visuals, and enjoyable.

    This no budget film (and really $1800 is NOTHING) should make any potential filmmaker stop wining about not having what they need and force them to get off their ass an film something.

    • Chris Kellett

      Hi Aharon,

      Thanks for the kind words. I’ve been following your tutorials as long as I can remember so it means quite a bit. Regardless of what this film does for us as far as a career move, I can safely say that it was worth it for the knowledge that we gained from such an exercise. It was a pretty hard slog, especially the post side of things, but totally worth getting off of our asses for.

  • Ali farahani

    yeah its amazing & great visuals. good keying but not perfect. some shots have nice lighting for chroma shooting. but some shots have bad lighting. for example some shots on boat have a little problem in lighting.

    but main problem is in script. its stereotype and repetitious. These versions of script are used today in the porn industry.

    wowww 1800$ is very low and Aurora is amazing with this budget.

    • Chris Kellett

      Thanks for the comment mate. When we first started out we were 19 and basically hadn’t had the experience necessary to really shoot bluescreens other than ‘make sure its as flat as possible so we can key the damn thing’. Fortunately for us we know it now because Aurora was the real test. We wanted to make something where we didn’t hold ourselves back just because of the budget, so we would end up having a finished product and not just a bunch of tests. It was worth it to get a better sense of the entire process rather than our small version of it in a backyard.

      Problem with shooting over such a long time is things date or you learn more. Script is out problem with it too because it was written when we were pretty young and didn’t know better. Looking forward to the day we can show off what we’ve learnt in a large format.

  • Ali farahani

    oh i forgot this. plz talk about cameras , lenses and accessories.

    • Chris Kellett

      We shot on 2x Sony EX-1s back in 2008 when it was pretty impressive we could get our hands on them. Didn’t use any adapters for new lenses or anything. Our basic setup was a small jib, tracks and the two cameras with tripods. The dolly was a Wally dolly which we used for just about everything, Miller tripods, nothing out of the ordinary really.

      Our bluescreens were giant blue sheets which were really bad for keying. Lots of roto work throughout.

  • http://vfxbyjames.info James Whiffin

    The final product looks amazing regardless of the budget. I’d like to ask Chris how he kept the VFX team together for 3 and 1/2 years with (presumably) no pay. Unpaid independent VFX people often go missing when tons of roto pops up.

    • Chris Kellett

      G’day mate, thanks for the question.

      Its one of the hardest things to do and also as a question sometimes difficult to answer. The VFX team was really small and essentially Jeremy (VFX Supervisor) and I were the only two members really working day in and day out with a few roto pieces going out to other people. In that regard there wasn’t a huge team to keep together, but I can certainly speak on the main crew because we actually shot the scenes over a year period with each shooting day being separated by a month or two generally speaking. This was purely because of the budget and availability.

      The main things I will say about keeping people together is that they need to be inspired and well fed. Knowing they will be treated well counts for a lot, as does having a good meal on the day, but more than that a sense of ownership is really important. As much as possible I want to stress that this wasn’t just OUR film in terms of a key cast or crew, but it was a project only made possible by the 100 or so people that put their time and effort into it. A sense of ownership comes from listening to their ideas, involving people as much as possible, while also being professional as much as possible.

    • Jeremy Kelly-Bakker

      Hey James,
      Chris and I were the main driving force behind the post production. Having conceptualised and written Aurora from the beginning together we knew from the start we’d be in it for the long haul. We did have a handful of friends and artists come in and contribute small sections to the VFX workload (roto, matte paintings, paintouts of modern things (you wouldn’t believe how many fire hydrants and lightswitches were in that mansion)) But majority of the work was handled by the two of us.
      We were lucky enough to have an office space we could use where we essentially bunkered down for a number of months and churn through the 370+ shots while we held down dead end jobs to pay the bills. Nearly everything we did was self taught through online tutorials, books and general experimentation.

  • Curtis Dart

    Fun movie. My fav Shots was the Zeppelin at night with the stars in the background, and when the Zeppelin entered the city for the first time. Loved it thanks and Congratulations on finishing after 3 and a half years. Hope my projects don’t take that long.

    • Chris Kellett

      Thanks for the kind words mate.

      The shot of the Zeppelin with the stars in the background is actually inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. There is a very similar shot that I always really loved, this sense of isolation from not even knowing where the sky ends and the water begins. There’s looks a bit shinier but the idea is there. If you get a chance check it out, its a really beautiful finished shot and an even better idea and metaphor.

      Usually a project going for a long time leaves ending with mixed feelings but in this case we wanted to get it out, show people what we’d done and move on to the next project. This project was in development for so long because no finance was there to make it move faster or help solve problems but as much as we loved it, three and a half years was just a bit too long.

    • Jeremy Kelly-Bakker

      Hey Curtis,
      Stoked to hear you enjoyed it! Those shots you mention were some of the most fun to create and were the kind of images that kept us excited about the film.
      None of it would have been possible had we not stumbled on the technique of ‘Camera Projected Matte Paintings’. Once we learned about it and how to pull it off it was a total game changer for the look of the CG elements of the film and opened up a whole world of possibility when trying to create epic looking shots.
      The Aurora ship itself could be a nightmare to work with and would often crash my computer it was so big, but we learned many important design lessons in building it. The most important was that when designing any kind of vehicle or building that practical design beats ‘cool’ design every time.

      • Curtis Dart

        Jeremy I really think you guys should put out a few tutorials. I know that there are tutorials out there covering what you did. but there are a million ways to do something in AE. And I’m willing to bet that you ” found/Stumbled” onto a few different ideas! Also you could release some of the green screen footage/models. and let the community play with em. For me , Id like to see a tut on the Aurora ship as it enters the city. The scene right after it passes the rock cliff. Thats a beautiful scene. and I can see my self using that technique. SO tut get my vote. Thanks for sharing with us.

  • http://www.creativedojo.net VinhSon Nguyen

    I agree, the final product looks fantastic. The vfx was great, everything was well composited especially for people who just started learning After Effects. The 3D work was good, the keying was a little edgy, but decent. The film was a little slow at parts considering it’s only a 30 minute piece, but great nonetheless. Awesome work guys!

    • Chris Kellett

      The effects fluctuate a little bit and at times for us its hard to look back at some of them in terms of how we would do them now. With only two artists working on all of the shots for the most of it, we’d figure out how to do something better, go back and try to fix other shots, only to find out even better ways of doing things. Its a cycle that you have to eventually just say ‘Do what you can and move on, the next project is allowed to look better’. Its a hard decision to make but we had to make it for some stuff.

      The keying on this was extremely difficult due to the screens we had. Essentially big blue sheets which we ended up rotoing a lot of but even with that said we learnt a lot from it that we’d utilize next time. I’d hate to think what ILM would say if we handed over our original plates and they saw the screens lol.

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/playplaynirmal Nagesh

    nice. one.. I loved this one… and the same somewhat funny question , james whiffin sir, (i call him sir), asked… even i am one of the missing guys because they gave me to mask out so many ropes stuff… and do not plan to pay as expected..

    • Chris Kellett

      G’day mate, I wish I had a quick solution but unfortunately we ended up rotoscoping most of the ropes by keyframing them. Our screens weren’t great so we couldn’t key most of it. The silver lining was that at least with screens there was a pretty obvious edge so we knew what we needed to key and what we didn’t, but we ended up keying almost every rope that was hanging from the ship. The ship itself is actually a restaurant that is dry-docked near a town. We put the blue sheets up and filmed what we needed but had to key a lot of stuff. Some times when the sheets weren’t big enough you could just see trees and a line of buildings that were surrounding the area, so while we had a bluescreen up, it was more to make the lines more obvious so we could roto against colour rather than rotoing against buildings and trees which would make things more difficult.

    • Jeremy Kelly-Bakker

      Hey Nagesh,
      Fortunately there was never any illusions of people getting paid on this job. We were so totally broke. All the work you see was willingly donated time by everyone involved. I like to think of it as a film that was funded on infectious enthusiasm rather than money.
      But don’t worry, we had no shortage of people who didn’t deliver on work they said they would. Whenever that would happen Chris and I would just have to do it ourselves.

  • Patrick Brouwers

    Like a lot op people already said the film is not perfect, but I still have a lot of admiration! Not only for work you put into the VFX, but especially for your persistence. Working on something for so long is not very easy I think.

    • Chris Kellett

      Thanks Patrick. Honestly the hardest part is probably finding ourselves two years in and wanting to go back and change things that we simply couldn’t. The project was certainly never supposed to take so long but continued to grow as a pretty organic process and due to the many constraints of working on an independent low budget film, its hard to speed things up. As I said earlier the film was worth finishing purely for the knowledge the end product gave us, but putting in the long hours so far down the track is definitely difficult.

  • http://www.facebook.com/ImRockaSta Tendai Francis Chiura

    good stuff ignore what people say