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The making of Heatwave

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Heatwave won a Diamond Award and the Best Humour Award at BIAFF 2008. It was also selected as part of the programme to represent Britain at the UNICA 2008 Festival, where it won a Silver medal.

The Making of Heatwave

Our first film featuring Gordon Bullock as the wacky inventor Walter Ruddles, Flight of Fancy, was made over ten years ago in the pre-computer age, using 'clockwork' technology. It did fairly well and was followed by PET, where we made our initial foray into the world of blue-screen compositing. It was perhaps a bit too daft, however, but the third film in the series, Extinction Event, which also depended heavily on special effects, was rather more successful.

All of them had been based on topics that were familiar to the public and which had been covered in at least on Hollywood blockbuster; genetic engineering and Jurassic Park for Flight of Fancy, space aliens and ET for PET and comet impact and Armageddon for Extinction Event. This meant that audiences would already have some familiarity with the subject and valuable screen time could be saved by not having to spend so long setting the scene. Of course, none of these films took their subjects at all seriously.

Should we risk doing another one? Climate change was becoming a hot topic and, although making light of it was becoming rather taboo, I decided to throw caution to the wind, along with political correctness, and give it a go. What about a feature film to share the ribbing? The James Bond films seemed to be asking for it but spoofs had been done so many times before. It's also said that one should never 'parody a parody' and the Roger Moore Bond films are often seen as self-parodies. But there were no better ideas and, so, Heatwave was born.

It needed all the essential Bond ingredients, including a villain, a 'Bond Girl', a glamorous gambling establishment, lots of unlikely gadgets, exciting chases and a huge set where the baddie carried out his plans to dominate the World.

We were very fortunate in having the services of Michael Ashby (a member of Nuneaton Moviemakers) to play the part of the villain; his flawless performance showed the benefits of seeking out actors with talent and experience. Our 'Bond Girl' was Helen McClaren. Unfortunately, I had not been able to meet her face-to-face before shooting her first scenes, and was depending instead on a friend's recommendation. I need not have worried. She was asked to dress as provocatively as she dared and turned up with two delightfully revealing costumes in which she gave a perfectly 'tarty' performance. It was only later, when I first saw her in her 'day clothes,' that I realised what a genteel young lady she actually is.

The first scene involving the 'baddie' and his girl was the spoof gambling session. Careful choice of angles and background sounds made a local club sufficiently unlike one of Bond's glamorous casinos to give the desired effect. This proved to be one of the easier locations. For the headquarters of 'MI 7', for whom Walter was working, we were kindly offered an office at the Town Hall. Despite there being carpets and soft furnishings, and using directional microphones as close as possible to the actors, we struggled badly with echo. Taking out most of the treble in post-production helped only a little. It's easy to see why professionals like to use purpose-built sets, ideally without all four walls and a ceiling, to give clean sound recordings.

Next, the gadgets. Many were simple props but others were computer-generated images (CGI) created using 3-D animation software - an ancient version of 3DS Max. This software takes quite a bit of learning but, once mastered, is capable of creating and animating almost any objects. It works by generating simple shapes and then joining them together, distorting them and adding artificial textures to their surfaces. All sorts of movement can be introduced and shadows added to improve the realism. The CGI shapes can be incorporated into the live action either by giving them a blue or green background, and then using blue / green screen keying, or by bringing the background footage (as an avi file or bitmap) into the CGI scene.

Heatwave Fig 1 Fig 1 Heatwave Fig 2 Fig 2 Heatwave Fig 3 Fig 3 Heatwave Fig 4 Fig 4

Fig 1 shows one of Walter's inventions, made entirely from a few hundred CGI shapes. This may sound a lot but many shapes are duplicates and the software makes it fairly easy to re-use them. In Fig 2, the same assembly has been rotated and repositioned and in Fig 3 we see the machine superimposed over the live-action background. You will notice that it doesn't blend in very well. In Fig 4, however, matching shadows and a garden fork have been added along with some extra grass around the base and, for a short time at least, we can now believe that it's really there.

All bond films involve a chase, using cars or speedboats, so we needed a humorous take on the subject. What could be more different? Well, canal boats, which normally travel at 3 - 4 mph, had potential - as long as they were speeded up to over 40 mph. They would need a lot of reflections and moving shadows and, as I was still not proficient enough to do this by GCI (I'm still not!), the boats were mostly models shot against a blue screen. Moving shadows came from small branches moved between the models and the light. Actors were then blue-screened in along with background shots, water and other components to give the final scene. As always, sound effects were important for creating the illusion and preventing the audience looking too critically at the visuals.

Having outrun his pursuers, Walter arrived at the villain's lair.

It needed to be a huge building, full of amazing machinery, as it takes quite a lot of gear to take control of the Earth's climate.

For the background, I used still and video footage of various buildings, ranging from airports to factories.

The machinery, once again, was created by CGI and Fig 5 shows one of the assemblies. Some 'architectural' objects, such as hoses, stairs and railings, are pre-programmed into the CGI software, which saves a lot of time. The rest consist of many simple shapes assembled together.

Heatwave Fig 5 Fig 5

Having outrun his pursuers, Walter arrived at the villain's lair. It needed to be a huge building, full of amazing machinery, as it takes quite a lot of gear to take control of the Earth's climate. For the background, I used still and video footage of various buildings, ranging from airports to factories. The machinery, once again, was created by CGI and Fig 5 shows one of the assemblies. Some 'architectural' objects, such as hoses, stairs and railings, are pre-programmed into the CGI software, which saves a lot of time. The rest consist of many simple shapes assembled together.

It's worth mentioning the central tank which, in its original state, looked far too clean and unconvincing. This was improved by giving it a surface texture from a still photograph - in this case a rather rusty container found in a local car park. Regular users of CGI collect photographs of textures for just this purpose (although you can get some pretty strange looks when seen taking pictures of old brick walls, dirty oil tanks, etc.) It is also possible to download textures from dedicated sites on the internet; there are thousands to choose from.

Heatwave Fig 6

Fig 6

In Fig 6, the machinery has been put into its background location and some falling feathers added (they were part of the plot; you'll have to watch the film to find out why!) It still looked fairy unconvincing, however, but the addition of some shadows, foreground feathers and a few actors made it much better, as in Fig 7. Heatwave Fig 7 Fig 7

Without the resources enjoyed by Hollywood studios (mainframe supercomputers, hundreds of full-time experts and several million pounds to spend) it will never be easy for amateurs to match the quality of CGI that we see in feature films. There are, however, several ploys that seem to help the audience suspend their disbelief. Firstly, have plenty of movement, both in front of the actors and behind them, to distract the eye. No one will have time to see all the ragged edges. Apart from hoping for a comic effect, this was the main reason for having falling feathers in the film - they did a great job of stopping anyone looking too closely at what was behind them. And, keep each scene as short as possible. It's also worth remembering that, in real life, background and foreground objects are often slightly out of focus. By adding blur to these parts of the scene (easily done in Premiere) we produce a more natural effect. Finally, add plenty of sound effects; if someone sees a machine working, and hears whirring and clanking sounds, their brain will tell them that it was a real machine making all the noise.

Another thing that many Bond films have in their later scenes is thousands of uniformed employees working in the villain's lair. As it's hard enough to get half a dozen actors together at once, and because I could not afford thousands of uniforms, this posed quite a problem. The answer, I thought, was Poser (pun intended.)

The Poser software promises to provide realistic human figures and animate them sufficiently well to allow their incorporation into live-action films. It doesn't! As still pictures they looked reasonably good (Fig 8), and it was not too difficult to give them all uniforms, but I found that their motion was wholly unacceptable. The Poser software comes with several pre-programmed movements, such a walking and running, and it's also possible to animate custom motion, such as bending, swinging arms, etc. Some of these are not too bad. Walking however, the movement that I needed most for the virtual actors, always looked stiff, jerky and unrealistic.

I suppose that one should not complain too much about software costing less that £200 attempting to recreate extremely complex motion.

Heatwave Fig 8 Fig 8

The human gait is after all something that our brains are especially good at analysing; think how you can identify a familiar person at a great distance simply by recognising their walking style. Poser's CGI figures were so disappointing, however, that they were used only sparingly, in the far distance and with much foreground action to distract the eye from their limitations.

Towards the end of the film, Walter assumes the mantle of a 'superhero.' As you all know, superheroes wear their underpants on the outside and, with Walter being fairly new to the role, we needed to kit him out with a very large pair indeed. After a lot of traipsing around the shops, I discovered that, although it's easy to get very large undergarments for ladies, us men are less well catered for. I will not speculate about why, as I have already used up my supply of indulgence when it comes to political correctness. Eventually, I found a market stall that looked promising. "I want a pair of very large Y-fronts, please." "How large?" came the reply, as the lady stallholder eyed-up my girth. "As big as possible please. They're not for me." Quizzical look. "They're for a film." At this point she put on an "I'm not going to ask" expression and we concluded our business as soon as we could. She is probably still wondering.

Heatwave did better than I expected in this year's BIAFF and now it's fingers crossed for UNICA. And what about a fifth Walter Ruddles film? I have promised myself that this is the end of the series but he is a great character and we already have a few ideas, so….

Alan Atkinson, May 2008


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