Demise

Same cast, same location, 13 years later. Based on our first short film “Demise of the Republic” in 2003 comes this impromptu 2016 remake. We shot this in two half days during my little sister’s wedding while all of us were in town together again.

Finally Finished! Please enjoy Demise from 2016!

A Look Behind the Scenes

The first time, back in the early 2000’s, we were kids making movies, immature, naive. We had no idea what we were doing, but we were having fun and learning tons. There were no plans, just a bucket of costumes, bathrobes and broomsticks, and an dreams of making our own Star Wars movie. This time we had slightly more planning. But only slightly:)

Back then, I took the liberty of making all of the decisions by myself thinking that my siblings didn’t have much to contribute because they were too young. Boy was I wrong. Maybe at the time they were too young, maybe not. The problem was that a trend was set for the next several years: I ran the show, even when I realistically wasn’t the one most qualified to do so. Fortunately for us, all these years later, my siblings and I have each grown into ourselves, discovering our strengths and weaknesses along the way. In recent years we have worked on a couple projects together attempting to align ourselves efficiently and harmoniously, this project was an excuse to practice some more.

In 2003/2004 I also did all of the post work by myself, learning new things everyday and exploring a world I knew nothing about. Although it was a great way to learn/teach myself how to do every job, it took me nearly a year to complete and the movie could only be as good as I was. Time consumption aside, I wanted to make this new version to be better, but more importantly, to make it the right way.

Here’s our colorist Casey Wilson hard at work, this footage was particularly tricky as little of the footage was properly exposed due to our off the cuff shooting and made more drastic by the quick changes in the weather. If you look closely, you will find drops of rain here and there throughout the film. Casey did a great job of bringing our scrabbly footage out of the bleak flat SLOG color mess and into a more lively realm. The picture was colored in Premiere so that we could easily (well, with a bit of work relinking the LUTs and breaking down into the corresponding PreComps) move everything into After Effects for all the effects work and final conform.

Raw Footage Have a gander at the original footage before the color and effects. The production audio is still there as well.

Rotoscope

This time around I didn’t want to do all the work by myself, nor could I with my current schedule and demands.

Deleted Scenes sortof…

True to form, we filmed some winter footage completely unrelated to the actual film. If I remember correctly, these are a couple things that we filmed before we shot Demise. These were filmed Christmastime 2015, Demise was filmed April 29 & 30 2016 if memory serves correctly. Perhaps someday I’ll cut these into a fake trailer or something.

I took some of the snow shots to practice making some HUD graphics for some sort of Star Wars looking binoculars. I was never quite happy with the design of the graphics, but the composite was fun to do. It was good practice, I definitely need to nail down the design before I start putting things together.

Using the same project file, I made a countdown leader, for fun. I intended to use it as a playback slate for when I recorded folley alongside the video. I don’t think I ever used it for this as I ended up doing way less folley for this project than I originally wanted to, I just didn’t have the time, sadly.

This image isn’t in the film but I wanted to make the logo for old times sake. This is an Illustrator file imported into After Effects then textured and stacked up for the illusion of 3D with some fancy expressions.