Tom Ellingsen
VFX Artist/Director/Actor
Consumer Electronics Retail dept. Manager Tele communications.
Freelance VFX artist
Direct and act in my own stuff mostly.
Father of 2.5 children
Panasonic ToughPad. Not Samsung :)
In 2011, on my brother's birthday, he asked me if I could pull off a Doctor Who regeneration effect. I loved the idea, and we took my Rebel T2i out for a spin.
Fast forward a few months, and we had a tiny short about a time lord that regenerates.
It took us about 2-3 hours to shoot, and took me months to edit, as per usual.
Then, in 2013, we decided to up the ante; make a series out of it. We wrote a season arc outline, the first three episodes(which were about 10 minutes each), and felt happy about the project.
Now, as for budget: next to nothing. We had money to buy food for the crew for two days worth of shooting, and we shopped some new gear to go along(a couple of lenses, and a cheap-ass Røde VideoMic knockoff from ebay), and that was it.
We gathered a tiny crew with myself directing, a director of photography, a production assistant, and two actors.
As we always prefer to shoot guerilla-style, the locations were mainly outdoors - where we could just put the camera in one direction, and hit record.
This time around, it was a multicam setup, using the aforementioned T2i, and a 60D to go along with it, for BTS material, and also for reverse shots.
Then the problems began.
The shoot itself went alright. We had to stop here and there to adjust the shooting script, like you do, because when we started shooting it, we realised we'd fallen into the George Lucas trap: You can write this, but you can't say it. All our lines were delivered poorly, even though they looked just fine on paper, and my direction helped the performance. The actors did a good job, it just didn't feel right at all.
After we were happy about the takes, we called it a wrap, and went our separate ways. I imported the files as usual, and began pounding away at the edit.
A month or so later, I had, what I thought would be, a finished edit. I didn't like it, but brushed it away as being the only guy staring at it for one month. After sharing it with a few friends, however, they confirmed my fears, as this was pure and utter crap. Pacing was off by miles, and the general tone came across as perplexed at best.
I decided to put the project on ice for a little while, but then it happened. My harddrive failed on me. Now, you'd assume I had backups, but this is one of the times I didn't, and all the footage seemed lost forever.
Thankfully, a colleague of mine told me about a fancy app called "DiskDrive" that should be able to pull all my old files from a drive, if it span up to life again. The drive did just that, and I was able to fetch most of the files.
Most, however, being the keyword here. About 90% of the files from the short episode was recovered, and in a bad way, as well. The files didn't play back right, and had to be converted to new files via Premiere.
After all this was done, I had to try and re-cut back to a viable edit. This was when the missing 10% came into play. All the footage missing was key shots linking scenes and progression. Without them, the story made no sense, and suddenly the protagonist would teleport from location to location, without any means to do so. I was devastated.
But then I began to think outside the box. Like an editor. Like someone who had just gotten a huge chunk of footage, and the assignment to make a film out of it. And so I did. I took what I have, and basically rewrote the thing as I went along. The finished product? 2.5 minutes long, and lightyears better than the original 7 minute cut. I'll have you know, though, it wasn't perfect this time around either, but it was a lot better.
The sound was also an issue, as it wasn't even present anymore, and I had to get people to help me build the entire thing from scratch. Thankfully, only the protagonist talks, and he does so for two lines. And being a Time Lord thing, the other protagonist was myself, so ADR wasn't much of an issue, really.
I recorded all the ADR during an hour, and I did it all by myself. The other actor had since moved, and was unavailable for the next 8 months or so, so getting him on board to do it, was nigh-impossible. Luckily I still remembered all the lines in the short, so delivering them again, was no issue whatsoever.
But I digress.
We released it as "Whoish! part 2" in February this year, and had great fun, and all within a micro budget of only pizza-money.
We shot part 3 this summer for a bit more money(namely gear), and had loads of fun, and by the looks of it, it'll be millions better than part 2, which I still don't like that much.
We also did a road trip thing on a message board. Some 20-odd people in a virtual car, using clever editing. We never met each other during the filming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AII9of2fuF4