Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s The Wanting Mare, a micro-budget fantasy epic over eight years in the making, is finally being released today, Feb. 5, on VOD.
With over 500 VFX shots on a modest budget, shot over several years in parking lots, warehouses, and friends’ kitchens, the immersive world of Anmaere comes to life in this 30-minute VFX breakdown of The Wanting Mare.
The making of The Wanting Mare is a testament to the resourcefulness of contemporary filmmakers like Bateman and the results you can achieve when you never give up on your movie. The drive, effort, and vision combined to create an immersive world in the way they’ve done here is an impressive feat.
Car interiors and backseats would be foregone for benches with cardboard flats for windows, house porches would be built in the middle of the room without the house, placed next to ship interiors made out of reused plywood and paint. Each set was built with the pieces of the previously disassembled ones.
Using limited quantities of basic green screen and blue screens, often reused and even underlit, you can still see the results achieved in post-production speak for themselves. It’s an amazing magic trick to see the before and after melt into each other.
From our interview with Bateman last year:
“For example: we had written a scene where the description was just that the wind was blowing through the grass. We of course didn't have the money to get the amount of fans to make the grass blow. So how do we get this out of focus grass moving? I keep thinking about digital grass being the most subtle but large change we've seen recently. The fact that we can make grass blow in the wind, versus trying to make an animated robot. The curtains blowing in the teaser, for example, those curtains were put in. The usage of things like that suggest less about VFX versus people just being able to make the movie they want to make.”
This kind of film shows us the possibilities we have at our disposal with modern VFX techniques, and even if our film isn’t a VFX-driven film, it opens our minds to even the most subtle of applications.
The Wanting Mare is available to buy or rent on iTunes, Amazon, and other VOD platforms.
