October 13th, 2003.
Amsterdam

Director: Patryk Wawer
Theme Music: Loïc Desjardins (Lowweek)

Owen Hill: Patryk Wawer
Arthur Gumpert: Andrew milne
Barnett Reader: Ray Ducette
Michael Callahan: Michael Green

July 16th, 1903.
Manilla Bay

John P. Holland creation, a Holland VI submarine commisioned as SS-5 "Moccasin". In her royel service for the US Navy. The crew consist 7 heads.



From left to right.
The captain "Owen Hill", chief machinist "Artur Gumpert", chief gunner "Barnett Reader", gunner "Harry Swanson", gunner "Michael Callahan", gunner "William Wahab" and electrician "Augustus Bowie".
These seven brave man have been send on a mission to sink a Spannish warship 'Vizcaja".

July, 2002.
Amsterdam

Light onboard a submarine, it's dark in there and you got this red light while is night. SS-5 lighting is showed not in the right way, it supposed to be darker overday. Totay computer technology would allow me to make the picture darker, but it would make the whole image darker, and that's not realy what i wanted. cos you had daylight shining inside and that would now look dark. I kept what i had.
The red light, to be honest im glad with the result it looks realistic, nothing much to add about this.

While i was shooting the movie back in July 2002, i was a very big fan of making andvanced rigs for my lights and worked with small 2 watt light bulps. They gave enought light to light up the set but the rig made animating difficult. i wasn't able to to move the figs with my hands, i had you stik my fingers throught the rig. it was horrible and time wasting. The next day i removed the rig and just used two lamps to light up the set.
You might notice a change of light in this two shots



The left one was shoot the first day while i had the rig above the set, the right one is without the rig, just only two 60 watt lamps.
the funny about the intensity is that when i used three 2 watt lapms i had more light intensity while i was using two 60 watt lamps. Well that's because i used filters on the two 60 watt lamps, to decrease the intensity.


The shots with the red light are been made with the same light setup as for the daylight shots only then i used a red filter.

October, 2003.
Amsterdam

Just like Wolfgang Petersen did on his directors-cut of "Das Boot" did i too.
He remastered the audio and made improvements. Sound is very imprortant while you in anboard a submarine, your view is very limited and you have to trust your ears. i added more sounds in the movie and gave it a delay like it would sound onboard this submarine.

Listen to this two examples and hear the diffrence.

Example from the original version

Example for the special edition

July, 2002.
Amsterdam

12 fps was the first setup, but it was to hard for me so i tried 10 fps. Still it was to hard, i dind't wanted to animate at 6fps cos i already did that i wanted to show that i can improve my animation skills. 8fps, was the best sollution afterall.
In these day's i was using webcams for making my animation movies. i was really proud of my logitech quickcam pro 4000 cos i was one of first owners of this new webcam at brickfilm forums. This was also my first movie made with the pro 4000. i was amazed about the pixel quality. So that convinced me to use green screen in this movie.
It was not easy to animate this movie, the set of the internal submarine was very small and there was a rig hanging above it. The first day of shooting was a drama, it went slow and had to re-shoot many shots.
In these day's my animation skills were very bad and even today i'm having problems on that (probably that's why i love cgi animation so much).

July, 2002 - October, 2003.
Amsterdam

More than a year has passed and today i own the equipment and knowlege that i only could dream about in the time was shooting the movie. Today's i would not even try to greenscreen, only if that's the last thing i can do then i would.
I had to shoot external shots of the sub. i wanted to look it so realistic as possible, i was sure that the pro 4000 would be power full enough to capture good looking frames with high contrast between foreground and the greenscreen.



This shot finally reached never the first version of the movie, it looked too bad, the fig had a green border and there were holes is the ship hull, so i couldn't key it well. The reson why was cos the light setup was wrong and had to much reflections from the screen.

Well that was in 2002, totday i did it in a diffrent way.



I've made a masker in photoshop and just splitscreened/ masked the whole foreground. i also changed the background, i found the first ship looking unaceptable for these day's and used the one that i modeled once for a movie but never used it afterall.



The result is better and the shot appears in the special edition.

This shot is been also restored for the special edition. Some parts in the frame have been coloured in 3ds max to cover up the green trash.

July, 2002.
Amsterdam



This shot wouldn't be possible to make with out using green screen and most important splitscreen.



The aditional shot was first processed for green keying so it would have his background. Now the ugly foreground was masked using splitscreen.



There was a small problem with the colours of the layers, the backgound was more ligher and lost some blue and the foreground had still his original colours. i did a colour balance (HLS) and made it lighter and loosing the blue colour.



the result looks good.

October, 2003.
Amsterdam

i know now why i didn't make all the externall shot cgi, my skills were these day's poor. Today's i can almost model and animate every model is 3ds max, exept for andvanced bone models.
Today i would choose to make these external shots cgi, but that would steal the fun.
For the special edition i used a new model of Vizcaja.



The old model you see on the left. The new one looks more gigantic and more real, i also added the water track that a ships leaves behind on water.

The final sequence when ss-5 crew hit's the Vizcaja and it starts with sinking. In the first version it was a cgi shot but it looke bad in the special edition it's a cgi shot too, but much more improved.



From left to right.
Wire models seen in 3ds max viewport windows, shooth and highlighted view in 3ds max viewport window, rendered with out textures and the final result is rendered with all options on.

Thanks for your attention and paying a visit on this page, i hope it served you well.
If you may have more questions about some techniques showed up here above you may freely ask me questions, you can contact me on this e-mail adress

patrykwawer@titanpictures