Waterbird Productions
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The Making of SUPER BATTLESUIT X-1
| OVERVIEW: I got the idea when I saw some robot toys for sale at Walmart. I thought they might look cool on screen, so I bought two of 'em and made this movie in about a week. The toys are called Motorized Attack Robo Squad (M.A.R.S.) and are made by Cybotronix (www.happykidtoy.com). The special effect's program used for compositing was Composite Lab Pro. Muzzle flashes and such were created using Effects Lab Pro. Both software packages are made by FxHome (www.fxhome.com). The explosions were created by Detonation Films (www.detonationfilms.com). All military stock footage is from the Internet Archive (www.archive.org). |
| THE PROCESS: I planned the shots around my home. I didn't story board this. I just took the camera outside and filmed around my house. I just visualized the shots in my mind as something like this:
I then took all of this footage and loaded it in the computer. Next, I filmed the robots in front of a green screen and attempted to match these shots up to the angles from my previous footage. The robots are small (about 7 inches tall) and are made of plastic. The plastic reflects light so this made filming them in front of the green screen difficult. Since my normal green screen seemed to be reflecting too much green onto the robots I tried a different approach and used a piece of green cardboard instead. This worked much better. The board was a trifold project display board measuring 36X48. These can be purchased at just about any craft or office supplies store for less then 5 bucks. I filmed in my basement using the overhead fluorescent lights and three utility lights positioned to the left. right, and front of the robots. The green screen was about four feet behind the robots. The robots were on a work bench that I created using 2 standard sawhorses and an old cardboard box. I placed a black piece of craft paper on top of the work bench to simulate asphalt (since I knew the robots would be fighting in my front driveway). The robots are motorized, so I set them on the work bench and filmed them walking left to right, right to left, forward, backward, and so on. Then I filmed them standing still from various angles and distance (again, all the while trying to match the angles to the outside background shots). When this was done, I loaded the footage into the computer and performed some basic editing to determine which shots looked good and which shots simply didn't work. I picked the background/foreground combinations and then went about combining them one shot at a time. For example, I the first shot I worked on was the scene where the evil robot is walking up the driveway. This was the establishing shot for that character and I figured if I could not pull that shot off then there was no reason to continue with the project. All compositing work was done in Composite Pro by FxHome. This is an amazing product and quite easy to use. Prior to purchasing this product I had zero experience with FX work and never thought that I would be able to make something like my first film (Distant Salvage) or Super Battlesuit X-1. The user interface can be seen below (click image to enlarge). |
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