*for a reasonable investment
They say you should never meet your heroes. But so far, mine have been awesome.
I once tried to tell Dermot O’Leary how much I admired his presenting style, how natural he was in front of the camera, and how I tried to channel my “inner Dermot” every time I was on TV. Sadly that third glass of charity pub quiz wine I’d drunk also wanted a word or two, and I think one of them was “love”. Dermot, being as perfectly Dermot as Dermot is, simply smiled, said “You’re the guy from Click, aren’t you?”, and gave me a hug. He was lovely, I was embarrassed, he swaggered away, I staggered home.
The people I idolise are all performers of one form or another. Simon Mayo is a God of radio, an arid wit on-air and a courteous studio host off-mic. The late great Steve Wright was an absolute craftsman who lived for the medium, working long hours to perfect the end product that was his legendary afternoon show. Both were warm and welcoming whenever I guested on their shows, and the shock and grief expressed by every Radio 2 host in the days after Steve’s recent, sudden passing, showed how loved and respected he was around the building. It reminded me of the loss of another of my radio idols, Terry Wogan, in 2016, the year when it seemed like everyone who was famous died.
Recently, another of my heroes, film director Gareth Edwards, also absolutely lived up to the image he didn’t know I’d built up in my head. His film The Creator was nominated for an Oscar for best visual effects, and when we chatted, he was every bit the geek that I’d hoped. We talked about the technical process, he told a few funny stories, and generally didn’t take anything too seriously. I’ve put a link to our conversation at the bottom of this newsletter - he’s great value, so do give it a listen when you have the time.
His personal story is one I’ve followed for a few years, mainly because I feel some similarities between his way of working and the way I’ve tried to work on Click. Which is basically, roll yer sleeves up, get stuck into the technical stuff and try and make everything look more expensive than it is.
He’s a real technician and loves trying out new kit and new techniques, which means he knows how to be efficient with his filming, and what he can get away with on a shoot without the expensive pre-planning that often pushes Hollywood blockbusters’ budgets into nine figures.
And what seems to be happening at all budget levels, from movies down through advertising to social media, is that new technology is lowering the barrier to entry, making things easier, and letting anyone, in any field (yes, that includes you), make content that looks amazing. The chances are, plenty in your industry already are (see me afterwards if you’d like some tips).
Work smarter, with cheaper kit
One of the most mind-blowing facts I learned about Gareth’s multi-million dollar movie was that it was shot on a relatively cheap camera. The Sony FX-3 is in the prosumer price-range, and looks like a normal, small mirrorless snapper you might take on holiday. Because it was lightweight and very mobile, he could shoot more footage, for longer, without taking a break. The main bonus though, he explained, was its sensitivity to light - it could pretty much see in moonlight, which meant he didn’t need giant lighting rigs. He could be more nimble, work faster, and generally get more bang for his buck.
As I said earlier, it reminded me of the way we’ve always worked on Click. We’d work fast, use minimal lighting, keep up with the latest prosumer production tools, and make sure we had enough footage to make it all work in the edit afterwards.
Hell, over the years I even taught myself visual effects, so I could add graphics to the programme during my train journey to the office. Yes, I’m your run-of-the-mill Lead Presenter/Visual Effects artist. But having an understanding of what’s possible in any shot allows one to be spontaneous on the day without creating problems that cost a fortune to fix in post-production.
Because, when all is said and done, time is money. If you can work smart and fast, and keep the crew small, that’s where you save most of your budget.
AI changes the game (again)
Working smart these days means using AI tools to help in post-production. Just as an example, the previously massively time-consuming chore of turning actors into CGI characters can now be semi-automated. Below is a piece I made last year trialling software that, unbelievably, motion-tracks actors in a scene, removes them, and replaces them with robots. All with just a few clicks.
There’s been a recent explosion in services that can do this type of image-processing - here are links to just a couple of examples.
The long and short of it is this - AI can now recognise the human form. And it can do all sorts of things with this information. You have been warned. As Jeff Goldblum once said: “...and you know what comes next - it’s running and screaming.”
Who needs the real world anyway?
Filming on real sets, in real locations, has always been much more appealing to performers than filming in green-screen studios where they have to imagine the scenery. But filming outside is not always a barrel of laughs. You have no idea how many retakes we sometimes need when my piece to camera is interrupted by a loud motorbike, a wheely trolley or a pair of high heels clicking across the pavement off-camera.
Honestly, I swear there’s a group of people who follow us around the world and wait for us to hit record before starting up building work behind us.
So if you don’t have the budget, the time or the patience to film out and about, there’s another way to make your production look huger than it really is. I’m currently working on a piece with Oscar winner Tim Webber and Sony Pictures’ Guy Wilday, about making movies using video game technology. Unreal Engine is a system that lets video games designers create photorealistic 3D worlds with accurate physics and believable non-player characters, and it’s now so good that it can sometimes be used to replace the real world entirely.
The two areas of video games and movie visual effects have been tightly interwoven for decades. Both are used to create immersive backdrops for the audience. The main technical difference is that while the computers creating a CGI movie sequence might take days to render a 20 second scene, frame by frame, the games console sitting under your TV needs to do something similar in real-time - at 60 frames per second, from whichever viewing angle the player chooses.
In this way, computer games have always been at the sharp end of CGI, if you think about it. Finding ever more efficient ways to put accurate lighting, explosions and reflections on screen in the blink of an eye.
So it’s no surprise that the movie industry has consistently used gaming engines to provide directors and performers with a rough previsualisation of their scenes. But the graphics have gotten so good that the pre-vis is not really that rough any more.
Tim’s film is called Flite - the story of a hoverboard champion being chased across a futuristic London. It’s an extension of his Oscar-winning work 10 years ago on Gravity, the film that really proved how good CGI had become. Pretty much everything in that movie was computer-generated - the only real things that appeared on-screen were Sandra Bullock’s and George Clooney’s faces.
Sony Pictures’ project is a short proof-of-concept Ghostbusters film, in which director Jason Reitman wreaks brief havoc on a few New York city blocks, before the situation is brought to a marshmallow-covered conclusion by our heroes in Ecto-1.
Both production teams were able to create an entire world in Unreal Engine, and although the finished products were still perfected with a longer rendering process, the software was able to give the director, actors and crew a live, interactive pre-visualisation of the virtual sets, allowing them to choose camera angles, and to improvise on the day.
The results are films which would have been nearly impossible to make in the real world, certainly on their respective tiny budgets. When a movie needs to close down parts of a busy city, it gets very expensive, very quickly. The paperwork alone would bring me out in hives.
Both films are great fun - and they’re well worth taking a tea break to watch:
The technology to make realistic video content, movies, promotions and socials is coming down and down in price, and it’s becoming the core skill of a new generation of film-makers. Realistic motion can be captured, realistic worlds can be created. It’s hard to keep up with it all, I know, but if you want to be a modern creator, you can learn a thing or two from the creator of The Creator…
Gareth’s story
Gareth Edwards started out as a visual effects artist - inspired by Jurassic Park, he taught himself how to put things in to, and cut things out of video footage, using his own computer.
After working for a few years in the VFX industry, he started to suspect he could change the way movies were made. He decided to make his own film, Monsters, in which he took a tiny crew out to Central America, filmed the two lead actors himself, and then went home and added all the CGI single-handed.
In fact I’d say he pioneered the art of shooting first, and working out the visual effects later. Which is not the way Hollywood does it at all.
Instead of meticulously pre-planning any VFX before shooting, he was confident enough to film the story, choosing the best shots and angles photographically, and know that he could add whatever he wanted into the shot after the movie was cut. No green screen, no motion capture, and in fact, no props either.
It wasn’t just the titular Monsters that he designed after the shooting was over - he added tanks, planes, but most fascinatingly, even frickin’ signage. For example, instead of building loads of “Infected Zone” warning signs, carting them across Mexico, deciding exactly where each should be, hammering it into the ground, trying to get the perfect shot, and then finding it would have looked better half a mile down the road, he told me he just filmed a bunch of road signs as they drove past, and decided later which ones to change in post-production. Sounds obvious when you think about it.
The pièce de resistance, if you ask me, was persuading the proprietor of a burger restaurant to star as a ferry ticket salesman, whilst gesturing at his fast food menu. Later, that was turned into a map detailing the journey our two heroes had to take past the aliens.
Monsters is one of my favourite films, in no small part because of how it was made, and Gareth’s latest, The Creator, is its logical successor - a bigger budget, bigger brother. Based on his previous work, he persuaded the film studio to let him make the movie the wrong-way round. Once again, instead of lots of pre-planning, pre-visualisation, set-building and motion-capture, Gareth took hold of the camera himself, improvised with the actors, and added the CGI later. Albeit this time with a budget of $80 million. Thing is, he’s made it look like it cost $200 million.
So here he is, talking to me about all of the above, beginning with his memories of making the film that started it all - Monsters.
See the Click piece about the Creator here (18’35 in - UK only).