Teaser trailer

I have edited together a teaser trailer for fracture now that we are 2/3 weeks away from completion
http://youtu.be/sXXcyn4KkIU?hd=1

its a wrap...well 50%

Fracture live action filming has now officially wrapped, it has been an extended period of filming starting on the 21st March & ending 6th April. I had to re-cast the part of Kal 8 hours before filming his scenes due to acto illness, and almost had to re-cast hte part of doctor luminal for the 3rd time, on the last two days of filming I had to use body doubles for the reverends interrogation scene due to rich jack & David conatybeing unavailable to shoot their scene at the same time.
I also had to fight health & safety precautions when filming the corridor scenes with a tight timeframe. Due to conflicting attitudes from members of university staff we were originally going to shoot some scenes over the weekend of the 2nd/3rd but finally a memeber of staff blocked us from filming in the university room set we'd been using.
Lines were changed, scenes trimmed or aborted, elaborate shots were jettisoned for time & cinematography reasons & innocuoss little mistakes from crew almost caused massive problems....HOWEVER Fracture live action wrapped & some brilliant performances & lovely cinematography was caught on camera.

Now its back to animation for me & Andrew, the two animator graduates we enlisted to help have dropped out without having helped out yet, so its back to square one of long nights animating. I will be supervising the editing whilst animating next to our editor Kiara next week. I have been talking with Dean Cuthbert on our media course about helping me with the workload of colour grading the footage to help free up some animating time again.

I need to check up on the musical score for Fracture from Josh Todd also a.s.a.p

finally I have to follow up on the framework I have set up for marketing Fracture before may 4th
Theres alot on & a lot at stake, but so far the live action directing & producing has been a massive challenge that has been overcome, so with a good work ethic, bit of technology, luck & a few sleepless nights, We should still be on schedule for may 4th

getting the cavalry in

We have enlisted some fellow animators Darren hammond & Bernice Hobson who are animation graduates from sunderland university & friends of Andrew. They will help out with parts of the day to day animation process such as line & background clean up. So far I have sent them a guideline to clean up on the reverends tale



With the live action shoot only 6days away, I am having to start to devote my energies back to producing & directing again. I am creating shotlists, call sheets & organising new locations & possibly havng to replace an actor within the week. This means having the new animators take on some of the tedious work frees up my time without completely burdening andrew.



We have put together a rough cut of the film (minus some live action scenes) so we have a rough idea of timing & what needs cutting, to accomodate our 10/11 minute finished cut. The Hermits tale is coming along well for the basic animation before tidy up & effects, here is an example:

moving to promotion

Despite being busy with animating, producing on two projects & preparing for directing the live action shoot in April, I have started to look ahead towards marketing & promotion for fracture, both digital & traditional.
I met up with Richard Thompson the design graduate who I have asked to help with posters & promotional material, after a Designers conference. Talking through Idea's I wanted to include elements of the films story & iconography such as tarot cards, graphic style, title sequence design & I wanted ot include a prop trinket I had bought for a promotional item (as well introducing it into the film). Richard picked up on the idea of havin Kal dragging Alices hand in a dark alleyway as a poster idea, I thought it was a strong image added in the idea of having tarot cards & other iconography as items or in the text of the poster. We also came to the idea of using the missing girl posters of Alice on the walls of the alleyway.

I sent a starter idea to Richard, who will refine it over the next couple of months.

To richt_biscuits@hotmail.com
From: rich white (ricardo_blanco@hotmail.co.uk)
Sent: 18 March 2011 17:15:02
To: richt_biscuits@hotmail.com

Hey dude psyched to get your design-age skills on board for promotional poster & marketing designs!
ive attached 3 instances of animated character & background tests to give you an idea of the animation styling, Ive also attached the script for the film (Fracture) for when you have a spare time to look through the story.
theres also a very quick & crappy mock up idea of a poster just to have some kind of starting point for thoughts!

I also would like to use along with the main Fracture website which will be online in a few weeks, a viral promotional website using the idea of the police investigation into the dissappearance of Alice, this would be similar to campaigns such as whysoserious.com for the dark Knight & the blair witch project. I would also like to engage street artists to draw, paint, post up & chalk fracture art around Newcastle, this would involve easily removed/ temporary art (eg chalk drawings, posters) so we would be within the limits of the law.

Photos of the production process on facebook

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=582260365&aid=569491

rev. scene breakdown

http://tinypic.com/r/xkuj69/7

animation process

we have started the animation process for fracture using the greenscreen footage we have as a guide.
As seen by the concept Art andrew had a style for the lover he wanted to try out using photoshop cs4. I have decided to use illlustrator cs4 for the reverends tale to have a graphic black & white style.

Hermit Jacks tale is using the life size armature so Andrew assisted with the face casting process, then I have been working on the latex face with paints, make-up & pencils to create a lifelike look.


The reverends tale appears to be working smoothly using a background colour layer as the foundation, copying that layer & adjusting it to be black & white & more of a inked graphical look.
The lover/ Jessicas tale didnt go as smoothly...using the photoshop method looked good but took a ridiculous amount of time (around 5 hours a frame) using brushes, layers, and the lasso, dodge & burn tools. the 2nd attempty with photoshop favoured filters to minimise the brush & lasso work, however the filters were too random & innacurate & changed wildly the colours & shadows inbetween frames. With the illustrator cs4 work going well I persuaded andrew to embrace Illustrator for the first time. Using the live trace & brush tools in illustrator, the images kept the colour profile & did not vary so wildly.

After a talk about the background animation for the Hermit, we decided to use the greenscreen footage behind the hermit in a semi-pixillated style. the armature will speak the voice over & the filtered footage & motion graphics added will comprise the final product.