Day 4 and my last day filming in Sweden… thankfully all but one shot was inside, as these night shoots get cold, (Ok the Swedish crew did not notice as the temp hit freezing – but I did !).

After a very busy Day 3, today were were doing a lot of data wrangling with shooting only three major shots, and a lot of element plates against black and green screen.

The major studio work meant we go to film with the Cyclops from Mark Roberts Motion Control – one of only a few in the world – this 4.5 tonne robot reminds me more of a transformer than a tripod.

Due to the extensive pipeline work done at Stiller the Cyclops is very easy to use, all the lenses are calibrated and multiple “pixel on pixel” work is easily done without the need for tracking markers.

It is easy to quote stats on how accurate the Cyclops is, but I think an example is in order. If you put a laser on your Red Epic at one end of the 8 metre track and fly back at an incredible rate (arm and rig) then fly back again and repeat, the accuracy from one end to the other is half a laser beam wide. “In your face tracking software… ” (to paraphase Matt Damon).

To make life difficult for themselves the Stiller team scaled and matched perfectly Phantom 4K Flex footage filmed high speed on the Bolt with Red Epic footage shot high speed but scaled on the Cyclops. This allows for the director to view a combined keyed ‘pre-comp’ live in the studio for timing and performance matching.

Interestingly, when talking to the DOP Marcus Dineen, not only was the height and speed etc scaled to match the 1/5th model to the actress but the depth of field is matched exactly. By adjusting the f-stop you adjust depth of field – thus a an f-stop of 11 may be needed to match an f-stop of 2.8 when scaled. This means accurate control and direction of the lighting. Of course, this makes sense but much of the miniature work we have done at fxphd was shot fully in focus to make the miniature look big, but with the vast pull back we were doing here in Sweden, this would not work, or rather having the fall off in focus match will sell the shot much more effectively than just filming with everything in focus. The focus, like all the rest of the camera settings are controlled by the motion control software, there is even a pop up tiny robotic clapper on the end of the Cyclops Arm, that folds away during shots.

Dineen is a native Aussie (- not sure why many of the world’s best DOPs are Aussies – but I am damn proud they are). Dineen has been full time at Stiller for about 18 months now. While he has all the tech in the world at his disposal, he is not afraid to just grab an Epic and a mini-gib arm and hang it off the studio roof to get a very graphic final shot for our Skateboarding TVC for Tip technology.

For fxphd, we shot a lot of element passes on both green and black, while perhaps not as sexy as the material we filmed last night, – shooting real reference or elements is something I am always keen to do, and something Victor Perez wanted also for his 300 Nuke course.  In total, we shot about 5.5 Terabytes of high speed 4K footage.

And finally the good news, it took us until 5am but we got the killer shot I hinted at in yesterday’s blog. I have no doubt you guys will love it – but for now it is top secret… it is both old school and uber geeky… I can’t wait to show you but for now it needs to be graded and … well you know…

Huge thanks to everyone for making the fxphd team so welcome in Sweden.. with only 4 hours sleep I am off to the airport for the 22 hour flight home, “tack”.