It's been awhile since our last update (almost four months!), and although things may have seemed quiet we're actually right in the middle of one of the most exciting times during our lengthy post-production process. Before I get to that though, let's talk about our premiere. We teased on our Facebook page a few weeks back that we'd announce our release date soon, and while we do have one picked out I don't want to announce it (or the final, kick-ass design of our poster) just yet because I'm working on getting that announcement covered by a horror news website (keep your fingers crossed). I will say though that while Halloween is easily my favorite holiday it's going to be especially awesome this year.
For those of you who aren't filmmakers one thing you may not know is that post-production is easily the longest part of a film's creation; in fact I'd estimate that it's easily 75% of the total work (and possibly even more for our FX-heavy movies). That said, we're finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel for Invasion, and the reason these past few months have been so exciting is that it's the first time where Invasion has actually started to look like a real movie. That may seem like an odd statement, so let me go into a little bit more detail about our status.
Currently, the primary team working on Invasion consists of myself, Quyen, Hsiang, Tricia and Jay. Tricia is working on the final remaining make-up and creature effects (most importantly Z'athax, Invasion's stop motion-animated, fireball-throwing 'last boss') while Jay is editing our behind-the-scenes documentary. Quyen and Hsiang are working on the sound and music respectively while I'm simultaneously color-correcting and creating visual effects scene by scene. What does all this mean? Well, as an example this is what Scene 58 in Invasion looked like as shot:
Colors are flat and lack contrast (the Blackmagic camera shoots this way, known as RAW, to maximize color information and thus creative possibilities in post), there's a weird fake head in the background, and while you can't hear it the sound completely sucks (trust me on this). Now here's the same shot with color correction and visual effects:
As you can see there's a pretty big difference. The colors pop, we can clearly see Jake's severed head behind Allison, there's a cool 2.35 letterbox crop and everything sounds great (again, just take my word for it). It takes a fair amount of work to get here though; scene 58, which runs a little over 30 seconds, took over eight hours to complete, and that's not including the time Quyen (and Hsiang) is putting into the audio mix. Of course, some scenes take much less time while a few others (such as the final fight with Z'athax) will take much, much longer, but overall we are getting close to the end of this long journey.
A few other quick updates: anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of CGI in horror movies, but apart from the fireballs and glowing eyes there is one major CGI effect in Invasion: Allison's mansion. We couldn't afford to shoot at a real Southern plantation, so instead we shot here:
We chose this place because of its porch (and also because it's on my parents' property and we didn't need a permit) since I knew we could just replace everything else with a 3D model. Here's the preliminary test comp:
Obviously there's a ton of work to do but it's still pretty exciting to see this start to come together. This was actually from the first day of shooting (I think it was our very first shot if I'm not mistaken) and I imagine a lot of the crew was confused as to why we were shooting at this place. Fix it in post, indeed! For the record, Invasion will contain no CGI creatures- all of our monsters were either live on set or stop motion models.
The Invasion video game: We posted some concept art from this on Facebook and this blog several months ago, but we haven't said too much about it since then... well, it's definitely happening!
This is a beta build, and it's several months old on top of that, so please excuse the quality. The game designer would probably prefer if I didn't post this video, but I did want to put something here other than a screenshot to prove we're actually doing this; being a huge gamer (especially 8- and 16-bit) I just think it's the coolest thing. The final game will be playable in a web browser (and possibly Android devices if we can figure out a decent control scheme) and will feature Allison and Jake as playable characters in addition to Desmond. We're going to use it to help promote the movie once we get closer to our release date since we're going to need all the help we can get in that department (marketing a movie is at least as difficult as making one).
Desmond's webisode: Greg bugs me about this almost every day, and it is most definitely still coming; it just keeps getting pushed back in favor of working on the feature film. But we will release it to further help with the marketing for Invasion closer to our premiere.
So that's where we're at! I do have to wholeheartedly apologize for the constant delays; I thank you all for your patience and continued support, and please remember that we're not a major studio, or even a minor one. We're a group of friends who decided to band together and shoot a feature film and who are now working all hours of the night beyond our day jobs to finish it up and bring it to you. Stay tuned for more updates, and as always thank you for reading!
