Idiots in Time Part 3

Part 3 of Idiots in Time is a special effects masterclass, if I do say so myself. When the film was first screened, admittedly to an audience who were both film illiterate and too drunk to care, the biggest impression seemed to be caused by the time machine fading in and out as Cracktown travelled thru space. Obviously, a pretty easy effect to achieve, even shooting hand held (I was to lazy to drag a tripod around everywhere, it took too long to do each set-up and time was running out, plus the hand held thing gives the film a bit of energy)

The space-time continuum effect was done using a chromatte studio I blagged for 30 minutes - chromatte, for anyone that doesn't know, is a sort of blue screen process which uses reflectiive lights, glass beads and a chicken sacrificed to the Gods to get the compositing effect working properly. The big blue swirly thing is just a pre-set effect from Apple's LiveType software. I did ask someone to do me something a little more hi-tech but they took too long and this works just as good. After all, we only needed a swirly thing...

The volcano matte was ripped directly from Google Image Search and then the bottom half was made transparent in photoshop, with another Magic Bullet filter to make it look hot - although it was actually snowing the day we short the pre-history scene. I knew vaguely that I wanted this shot to look like it did, but I wasn't sure it would work so well, It's a good job I shot the nice wide shot with the volcano effect in mind (Did I mention, the film wasn't story-boarded, I just made it up as I went along?)

And finally for this scene, Cranford the dinosaur. We asked the fantastic Wendy [AKA Timmy Lives in my House] to make a dinosaur puppet, expecting her to come back with (and in keeping with the spirit of the production) a glorified sock puppet . However, after some months of work, she turned up with an AWESOME glorified sock puppet, which everyone agreed would have made Ray Harryhausen cough up his coffee if he ever saw it. The only dilemma then was how much to show of said puppet - after all, a lot of work had gone into it, but to show it too many times would be to reduce it's impact and thaat of the gag. So only two shots, plus a few later on, which we'll talk about next time...