Quick Facts
Release date: December 21st, 2004
Completion date: December 18th, 2004
Starring: Simon Plant, Liam Comerford & Michael Connor
Filmed on location in Cotton & Werrington, Staffordshire in August 2004
Pickup shots: Final photography finished in late November
Running time: 10 minutes 23 seconds
Time spent in post-production: 4 months
Number of visual effects shots: 22
About The Forest Part 1 : Death Or Beer
The Forest remains, up to the time of writing, our longest, most successful, and most importantly, the most technically challenging release we've made to date. At the time of it's filming Master Mike was a university student living back at home for his summer break. Inquisitor Liam and Simon Plant, the other two who were most prevalent in the creation of this project, were gap year students doing various jobs to get themselves money. Mike was due to return to his university digs in Liverpool, and after the success of Boxmobiles earlier that summer a new project was needed. Thus, The Forest was born.
Inquisitor Liam quickly knocked up a script entitled "It's a bit weird". And it was. Simon Plant, long-time friend of the Secret 7000, had expressed an interest in being in one of our projects. And, good lord, he was. The script was simplistic and called for Liam and Mike to run out of beer, have to go through Cotton Dell and be attacked by a horde of Simons. This looks fine on paper, but as we filmed and began the post-production process, it was clear that this was going to be the toughest thing we'd done to date.
Cloning is in many respects the quintessential visual effect (apart from Mike's favourite the Lightsaber, obviously). We had done it before in Boxmobiles - we wouldn't have, but we were trying to keep the project fairly secretive and as a consequence only Mike and Liam knew about it, so they had to reprise all roles. Before Boxmobiles Liam was new to Adobe After Effects and had only done more basic visual effects. Mike had in the meantime been plugging away at gaining a whole host of skills that would help him create his visual wonders. He past his knowledge on to Liam for Boxmobiles. For Boxmobiles, the cloning involved simple use of separately greenscreen footage, and all that really had to be done was to put the keyed material next to each other in a shot. At the end of Boxmobiles, Liam gained a small taste for something he'd be doing a lot of over the coming months - cloning by masking. Look out for the shots of three Mikes and three Liams which was a fairly basic animated mask "split screen" as it's traditionally called. The Forest, with its overlapping Simons and camera movements, would mean that several new techniques for doing cloning would have to be devised (more on that later).
Post-production on The Forest was an odd affair. Mike being at university in Liverpool all week about a hundred miles away from where The Forest was filmed, and Liam working part-time as a lab assistant meant that the best time to work was at the weekend. Mike would hop on the train or coach on a Friday evening (or, in one case, at 6:30 AM having not slept) and get to Werrington, Staffordshire, where Liam had two well-equipped computers in the same room. Fueled by sandwiches, alcohol and energy drink, editing sessions would typically start at 9 PM and finish at 10 AM the next day. The alcohol, typically red wine or Stella Artois would allow the brain to mellow whilst completing the more tedious tasks and the caffeine-high energy drink, usually Red Rooster, would keep us sufficiently alert to continue. These all-night, 13-hour editing stints allowed a lot to be done in a short space of time with the disadvantage being that it was impossible to do anything the next day due to a combination of exhaustion, hangover and caffeine overdose.
As production continued, it was clear that the 40-second long big cloning shot (affectionately given the title of the "Simon's Face Shot") was going to need the most attention of anything. Therefore, Liam worked almost exclusively on this shot, using a combination of masking and vector painting to get the job done. Mike did just about everything else - the compositing of the space shots, the deinterlacing & colour correcting, the other clone shots, the muzzle flashes, continuity correction. High Order member Paul Canning (Lord Pablo) rendered the CG Meteor using 3D Studio Max, and Mike composed it into the space shots. Paul also did one shot completely in 3D - the flyby at the end of the intro sequence. Mike then added a glow and that was done. Liam composed the music completely by himself using a borrowed synthesizer.
It was always our intention to have it done for a christmas party we were throwing on the 18th December. We'd gone to the trouble of hiring out a venue for the party, so it seemed fitting to also hire an LCD projector and premiere it at the party. We managed it - just, the final render was completed just five hours before the party! So after a long, arduous four months of intensive editing & scoring, The Forest was completed. Five A3-sized glossy posters were printed for the party. It premiered to an audience of 25 at the Secret 7000 Christmas Party 18th December, 2004. Thankfully, it was well received, which has encouraged us to continue our film-making hobby.
Almost a year later in October 2005, the new Secret 7000 website was due to be launched. It was clear that because of the loss of our dot-com domain, all the videos would have to be rebranded with .co.uk. The Forest was the first of these to be done. Since the original source files for The Forest, being very large and taking up a fair portion of Liam's 500 gigabytes of storage, had been deleted Mike had to use a high-quality master copy to make the changes. Using After Effects, he masked out the ".com" part of the branding at the end of the film, and carefully replaced it with ".co.uk". The effect is fairly seamless, although it can be seen that the rain disappears around this part of the URL. Mike also took the opportunity to make one or two changes that had been niggling him for some time. The full title of the film "Part 1 - Death Or Beer" has been added to the start, foreshadowing the future completion of the story. Mike was wearing a different t-shirt in the indoor scenes, and in one or two shots a label or logo appears on his back. These were carefully rotoscoped out. A continuity error occurs at the end of the "lock & load" montage shot, where Mike having put jeans on in the previous shot, is shown wearing black trousers again. By zooming in to the footage and adding a virtual camera move, this was rectified. The Forest scenes themselves were changed by adding a little more green into the colour mix, and one shot where the sun appears on the other side of Mike's face was flipped over.
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