One of the side events for EIFF delegates was an introduction to Special Visual Effects for Low Budget Filmmakers. The presentation was primarily a promotional event for courses that filmmakers can take at the London Film Academy, but it was quite an eye-opener.
I knew how much video-editing technology has fallen in price and how much more productive animators and effects teams can be with modern software, but I still find it staggering just how quickly everything is changing.
Where ten years ago you needed to drop £100,000 to build a suite designed for visual effects editing, today you can get an industrial strength set-up for around £8,000 (you can get started in this game for a good deal less than that as well, basically the cost of a reasonably powerful computer).
Alan Marques, the first of the two speakers, pointed to the cost of hard disk space as a good example of this massive fall in the cost of filmmaking in this area. Historically disc space was a huge expense, since 3D effects and animation take massive amounts of digital storage. Ten years ago 15 to 20 terabytes of disc space would cost you in the tens of thousands of pounds and take up a room. Now you can get half-terabyte (500GB) drives for £60.
A lead tutor at LFA's new digital Film course, Marques has created scenes for the likes of GoldenEye, Sahara, and Seven Years in Tibet. He gave us a tour of the various editing programmes he teaches, with a particular focus on creating 3D animation.
He showed us how quickly you can create simulated 3D environments and characters.
Here's a wall. Click. A room. Click. A man. Click. Furniture. Click, click click. A door. Click. Let's make the man walk out of the door. Click.
A scene began to take shape before our eyes within minutes.
Many of the software programmes - there's quite a few - that he introduced, rely on previously created libraries of content and actions (such as man scratches himself, man falls over, and so on) which are accessed and manipulated by dragging and dropping from one window to another. It could be characters, props, and common character actions, or it could be for creating a simulated environment such as, in Marques example, a rocky island textured in clay, terraformed with different tree species and then rounded off with a particular weather setting.
In literally an hour, you could create the effect of flying above puffs of cloud, with a dense jungle below climbing up to steep rocky escarpments. The only thing left to do is the rendering of the work. It takes even a powerful computer hours to process your edits into something natural-looking. But the creative work can be very brief.
Marques was joined by Dave Barnard, who managed the team of special effects animators for the British children's fantasy feature Mirrormask. The film was made on a low budget of $5 million in 2004. Many said it looked like a $40 million film. The extract he showed us seemed very complex and teeming with visual effects.
Barnard seems to have achieved this by employing recent animation graduates, and surfing at the forefront of the new technology wave. At the time he agreed to take on the project, he knew he couldn't make the film for the kind of money available, but he could see that High Definition filmmaking was on the horizon and that would make it possible to do the incredibly detailed effects that appear in the film on a tight budget.
There were also many, many long hours. The director apparently had 17 interminable months of 16-18 hour work days. This kind of filmmaking is definitely not for the faint-hearted.
It was an illuminating and exciting hour even for someone like myself, with experience in digital video editing. It's a pity that there aren't more widely available events like this at the EIFF, as this technology is becoming increasingly relevant not just to editors, but writers, producers, and for that matter curious filmgoers.
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