Twelve*7

 I recently read an article on The Guardian's website by Simon Pegg from 2008 arguing against the 'fast' zombies that have been surfacing in more recent years via films such as 28 Days and Zack Snyder's re-imagining of Dawn of the Dead. Pegg's story was in response to E4's new release 'Dead Set'.

Pegg's argument is sound - referencing Romero's bringing forth the 'origins' of zombie's in modern film; detailing how Romero adopted the myth and combining it with the viral transference of the disease (originating with vampire and werewolf myths) and introducing cannibalism. He reference's Romero as the inspiration for his own film Shaun of the Dead, commenting that 28 Days has been misrepresented by the media as a 'zombie' flick and observing that Snyder's re-imagined Dawn of the Dead appeals mostly to the MTV Audience - those with the need for faster EVERYTHING.

Pegg goes on to comment that as the Zombie Genre has been pushed into the mainstream it has diminished the quality and essence of the genre. One quote that I will pull from the article is 

"I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist..."

It's interesting to note that the argument of how zombies should move and act is of course based upon the preconceptions of the individual and their exposure to the genre and it is nice to see that Pegg is aware of the futility of arguing a point which is largely based upon opinion and purely based in fiction. I think at the end of the day zombie's should not run. Why? Because why the hell would people have more vigour after they're dead? 

Full article.

Nine*7

Portfolio site V8.5 has been online for almost a week now. Go and check it out at www.dkirkland.com. With this complete and fully functional I have finally been able to move on from that (revisiting for the occasional update) to working on some vfx for my new showreel. You know, the sort of stuff that I have saying and been meaning to do for the past 4 years whilst at uni but when it comes to doing it my inspiration wavers to the point of non-existance. Uni Holidays will do that to you. So I spent a bit of time scouring through old backups of projects, both uni and personal - looking for things that need starting/finishing/touching up. One that I am focusing on at the moment is a re-envisioning of Nick and my zombie short film disaster 'Perennial' from first semester 3rd Year (2008). I was abysmally disappointed by the project, possibly due to a combination of my not taking charge as I possibly should have and letting Nick take the reigns. Mind you, I am equally at fault as he is. So you could call what I am now doing MY version of one of the scenes. Mind you, the footage isn't the ideal for this sort of work. Nor are the actor's non-existant makeup.

A brief history; Perennial originnaly appeared as a rotoscoped piece with digital backgrounds insterted and lighting added later on. It turned out ok, but not fantastic in my books. So here I am nearly 2 years later attempting something that may or may not work with the footage. I am still going to attempt digital backgrounds - which in itself makes my job harder, despite the fact that we filmed in the blue/greenscreen studio down in TV Land at CSU Wagga we were making use of the space opposed to the bluescreen itself. Thus my first hurdle - keying out the background manually using masks is a hug task, and as is attempting to get the optimum "key" from the background as is possible.

Original Footage:


Masked Footage:


So you can see there that I am getting a decent result, but I have no hope of handling that hair better than I have in the above shot. But I think once it's all blended in it may be reasonable. The major issue that I have is that obviously the actors are lacking in the appropriate makeup - due to the rotoscoping there was no reason for us to worry about makeup - time saving back then, painful now. I have a number of options however - go for the 80's Dawn of the Dead style zombies which could be achieved very easily by playing with the saturation and colour balance, or of course there is a bigger transformation that would require essentially frame by frame edits of the actors into zombies via photoshop and some motion tracking. It's not the worst idea in the world, but time-consuming and my aim is to have this completed somewhere in the week of the 11th - 17th of January. Which is also something that may or may not happen with me moving to Sydney on this coming Tuesday. We'll see. I am hoping that the masking of at least these 3 actors will be done before I move - hard push but it could be possible. After that it is a bit more straight forward (in regards to the masking). For those interested here is what the original styling looked like;

This is just one of the things that I am doing in attempts to improve on both my skills and the work that will be shown to potential employers. I am slowly making my way through the VideoCopilot tutes as well, which are great for learning and relearning quickly. We'll see how I go.