I
based on an idea from Steelers Studios.
It started as a technology demonstration
from technology that Thomas Wall and Thomas Humber invented.
The initial idea of this project
was basically to shoot something interesting,
both visually and in a technical way,
that was challenging enough for us to say,
look, this is what we did.
And why not contact the best person, in our opinion,
to do something like this with us, Victor Perez,
who is very passionate about directing,
as well as visual effects.
He mentioned that he had a new technology
he wanted to discuss with me.
He wanted to discuss how to put it in practice,
so how to use that technology to tell a story.
I started developing this story, I remember,
when I was at the film school.
I never had a real idea on how to do it.
But it was the idea of having someone
interacting with himself or herself, in this case,
in front of a mirror.
It's like you are someone else entirely.
But it's actually you.
It's just you are not aligned with yourself.
I think it was just one week later,
we get this script of the full short film.
Victor has already figured everything out.
Conceptually, it's not that difficult, that complex.
It's quite easy, yes, for me to understand that.
The mirror is repeating the structure
and is repeating the nightmare.
So on so many levels, it's an echo.
The film itself was all against green screen,
with motion control, not just for the main action,
but also for the mirror that was in the frame.
So we basically had a camera that was on one motion control
filming the image that's presented on the mirror,
and another one presenting the live action,
both at the same time, all in one take.
We had the big motion control cyclops sitting behind me.
That's the biggest motion control that Mark Roberts produces.
It's very precise.
It's on a 16-metre long rail and weighs about four tons.
We also used the bolt from Mark Roberts,
which is a high-speed cinebot.
We had the cyclops shooting what would be the main framing
of the shot.
And when we saw the mirror in shot,
the actual image in the mirror was shot on the bolt.
So what we delivered from the Steelers Studio
site for this project was probably
the most optimized plates and camera data,
motion control data, that you could possibly
get out of these kind of robots.
It's very difficult to get the contrast and the lights
in the right position to work for both cameras.
I mean, obviously, if you backlight one camera,
then that's a front light for the other camera,
and so on and so forth.
But also, you have the challenge of trying to actually
get a good key out of it.
So not only do you have to light from two directions
and get it to look good and to match the background,
you also have to find a way of getting
green behind the subject from two directions,
and also having good enough lighting on the green
to pull a decent key without having to do a mountain of rotoscope.
And then also the lighting for the background
is more or less set because it's made from the plates that we
took when we were with the live environment.
Look, I can see in real time the cameras
is with the whole environment.
In terms of visual effects, this is probably
the most complex project I ever worked in my whole life.
In terms of compositing, it's so complex
because long takes, 3K, two plates that
needs to be perfectly synced.
You have to get the proper proportion of the mirror
just to match what's going on within the mirror
and outside the mirror to get everything balanced.
And every single frame of this short film is green screen.
So every single frame has heavy compositing.
Sometimes we are going to not only
to make the reality to be out of sync,
but also it's going to be in a different speed.
And that is something that attract me so much
is to mix two different planes of speed
of the same reality contemporarily.
What we ended up doing was speed ramping directly
in camera to create a speed ramp that
changes the time of the action, but doesn't change
the speed of the move going through the shot.
Since we were doing very precise speed ramps of the camera
move, we also needed to be able to control the frame
rate of the camera accordingly.
And we did this by using something called frame triggering,
where the motion control system generated a trigger pulse
for each frame taken by the camera, basically.
By combining a speed ramp shot for the mirror,
but not a speed ramp shot for the actual shot
from the cyclops view can create this almost traveling
in time effect.
The cameras are not operated manually,
are not operated even in real time.
We create the movement based on a 3D model,
which is really cool.
But then you have to be prepared, because it's not
the camera following the actress.
It's going to be the actress following the cameras.
I've never been in a place like this before.
This is a whole different world.
This is my first time shooting in green screen, actually.
It's been quite fun so far.
You have to be very present, also very focused,
because there's many things you need to have in count
as positions are very important, are crucial.
We were rehearsing with music.
So what Maria was performing on set was kind of a dance.
So she was in every single beat of the music
in a certain position in the space,
and with a certain aspect of reaction to an image
that wasn't there.
Maria was supposed to look in the mirror
and see herself in the future, for example,
and react to what was happening in the future.
So it was very important that we knew how much
we were offsetting time.
So we had to come up with a good way to previous that.
It's really abstract when you are on set.
The guys at the Sealer have amazing software
to put them together right after the shooting.
We actually developed a plugin for Maya,
where we could previous the speed ramping in 3D
and then export the speed ramps out of Maya
into Flare, which controls the motion controls.
So we could import speed ramp curve
to achieve the effect in the real world.
It's quite a magic when you look at both together
and you see like she's reacting perfectly.
And it's not about like the typical,
you know, you are in front of a green screen
so you don't know what is going on in that space.
No, it's about yourself being in a certain position
later in the reflection of a mirror that you don't even know.
So in terms of imagining the story was really, really complex.
After getting the shooting, that was of course
the most important part because the story
is highly conditioned by the shape.
Then we have to create the environments.
We have to create the interaction with the environment
and also create the sound and the whole thing.
So for me it was very important,
the sound conception in terms of the breathing and the heartbeat
because I wanted to feel every single sound very close to you.
That's why also we decided to get with the Dolby Atmos.
You have a possibility to bring the quality of the sound
in terms of the ambience that you can get within the scene.
So we have this huge space to move sounds and move music.
I compose the score thinking in this way
that we have a lot of space to put things around the audience.
We start developing this idea of a very unique sense of music
blended with sound design.
The result of these ideas is the combination of organic sounds
that comes from the orchestra, the live orchestra,
and the electronic sounds that comes from the synthesizers.
The interesting thing is that we use the orchestra as a synthesizer
and the synthesizer as an orchestra.
When we start recording the orchestra,
we don't record in a classical way,
but we use the orchestra as a layer of sounds.
So we have this suspended harmony at the bottom
and on top of that we have this sort of breath of orchestra
and other strings effect.
In between of this layer,
we try to build these soundscapes with synthesizer.
When you listen to the score,
you can't understand what is the live orchestra
and what is the electronic sound.
The challenge is to keep people in a mood
that they don't even understand why it's happening,
which is more or less what is happening to the character in them.
So we founded the company with a vision
to produce groundbreaking motion control
in the same pace as we would shoot any ordinary movie.
Then just seeing what the guys have done makes my heart warm.
It's so brilliant. It's fantastic.
It's probably the best stuff I've ever seen
coming out of motion control.
I don't know if you've heard of motion control.
It's the best stuff I've ever seen coming out of motion control.
I don't see other examples of this kind of crazy job.
The team did a fantastic job
and I'm really proud of what we've been able to achieve
to pull this together. It's a pretty impressive shot.
This project is really special
and what we're going to do here is something that no one has done before.
So to be part of a film where things are so new
and special, I mean, it's just like a gift.
What else can I say? It's an achievement.
I know it's been a ride for everyone.
