Forever Home: Creating Horror Comedy Magic on a Budget

Ready to peek behind the curtain of indie filmmaking and visual effects? Your guides for this backstage tour are none other than Sean Oliver and Drew Leatham, the masterminds behind the hilarious and spine-tingling horror comedy, Forever Home. Promise us your attention and we’ll reward you with a treasure trove of anecdotes, experiences, and the duo’s description of the creative process—starting from a simple joke about being stuck with ghosts in a haunted house to the execution of a script on a shoestring budget.

Your interest piqued yet? Good! Now, let’s get our hands dirty as we discuss the role of visual effects in indie filmmaking. Sean and Drew dish out wisdom on the significance of meticulous VFX planning, and how their understanding of technical aspects and craft-related terminology supported their creative journey. We'll also unravel the behind-the-scenes machinations that went into creating a perfect glass-shattering shot, and why sound design is akin to a secret weapon that can make your visual effects pop!

Fasten your seatbelts as we venture into the realm of ghostly apparitions. Join us as we explore the labyrinthine process of creating a ghost character—red gloves, green suits, and all. We’ll navigate the challenges of cutting a person out of a shot, and how clean plates were the heroes that came to the team's rescue. From layering multiple clean plates to the impact of camera movements, this episode is a roadmap to creating on-screen magic without breaking the bank. Hear it from the horse's mouth and learn how Sean and Drew spun straw into gold with their debut feature film.

Forever Home: Creating Horror Comedy VFX on a Shoestring Budget

Paul DeNigris: Hi, I'm Paul DeNigris. I'm a VFX artist, filmmaker, and film educator. I've made independent films, I've worked on VFX for film and TV projects, and I taught digital filmmaking at the university level for about 20 years. Now I run a boutique visual effects studio called Foxtrot X Ray, and we specialize in serving independent filmmakers and helping them use visual effects to tell their stories.

And that's what this podcast is about. The intersection between independent filmmaking and visual effects. Welcome to the VFX for Indies podcast.

With me today are Sean Oliver and Drew Leatham, the creators of a charming horror comedy, haunted house movie called Forever Home that my team and I were privileged to work on and produce. About a hundred visual effects shots for welcome to the podcast guys.

Sean Oliver: Hi, thanks for having us.

Paul DeNigris: So before we jump into forever home, and there's a lot to talk about there, let's give the audience just a quick overview of who you guys are.

What you've done and what led you to make forever home as a as a debut feature.

Sean Oliver: Sure. My name is Sean Oliver and I co wrote the script with Drew and I directed it and also edited it. I'm a independent filmmaker. This is my very first film. Feature film prior to that along with Drew, we've made a couple short films.

Our last very successful one called imaginary bullets which actually we played at a special screening sponsored by the red cross over in Japan about a couple of years ago. And yeah. I'll let Drew introduce himself a little bit.

Drew Leatham: My name's Drew Latham. I co wrote the script with Sean, produced the film and acted in the film.

I'm a piano teacher and a performer by trade. I've been teaching piano for almost 10 years now and I've acted all around the Southwestern states. Probably my, some of my favorite gigs with a Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival here in Arizona and some of my just favorite memories. Basically have been really excited to go through our little history here.

And I don't, I've been, I want, it's what I want to share is like almost five years back now, pre quarantine. And it's not, I wasn't paid. It's not the thing that is even that most important to my career, but a long time ago, I made the final round of comp. Backs for Blue Man Group. And that's just the memory.

I've been in more intense auditions. I did my first feature film before called House of Quarantine before Forever Home, that one I just acted on. It was nice to actually do a little bit more, but it's funny. People ask me for what's the most important thing? I was like, it was just these really weird auditions in Chicago, like before COVID.

And I keep coming back to that room and it's just important memory. Yeah. But I've been acting for 10 years as well and really excited to make this indie feature and talk about all the visual effects.

Sean Oliver: Yeah. Forever home like Paul said, is a horror comedy and it's that classic setup about a young couple who purchased a new home only to realize that it's haunted.

But switching up the, some on some of those tropes, instead of it always being such a scary fest, it's actually more annoying. It's more comedic. It's like having bad roommates in a lot of ways. And they do uncover some deeper mysteries in the house as they continue to live in it. But a lot of it came from just that idea of really wanting to make something that was very achievable for us at our budget and resource level.

So it was very much that exercise and writing a smaller script with a smaller cast. Drew co wrote it with me and he's one of the leads. So that was something that made it very easy for me. For us to work together and to craft that together and even our other leads were performers and actors that we've worked together for the last 10 years over short films.

So it was a community of us finally coming together to produce something a lot bigger than we had in the past.

Paul DeNigris: So it sounds like your little film, your film and acting tribe that you've put together for years and years and almost a decade. Yeah. That's a recurring theme. A lot of the guests that I've brought on, they talk about we were making our first feature and it was, who are the people that we've been working with all this time and and what, who are the people that we found along the way that were like, Hey, you need to come and do this project with us.

And it's very much about finding your tribe and finding common vision to to jump into the craziness of making an independent film.

Sean Oliver: It's always felt very similar to playing like a dragon age, but for filmmaking of like an RPG, you got to find your party and you need your archer and you need your mage and your camera person and your grips.

And I think it's hard to be for people who want to just jump start straight into a feature and you don't have a party. And it's you want to go kill a dragon. Like maybe it's just you. It's a little bit easier to hunt that dragon when you've got a good team of people behind you.

Paul DeNigris: People you know you can count on.

Right on. How long was the the whole process of making Forever Home? So pre production, post, break that down into those seconds.

Sean Oliver: So some of it really started to gestate. In the early COVID the, it was an old idea that I had written down, which was just this idea of, it really, it was roommates.

So it was roommates who move into a new house. And literally I lived with this, with a friend of mine, we moved to three or four different houses together. And every time we would go somewhere, you spend all your money on your deposits. And it was like if this place is haunted, we're just going to have to make it work.

And we always would say that if this one's haunted Oh I guess we're stuck with the ghost. And that was just a joke between us. And I had it written in a word document. And then sometime in COVID the lead, Sammie Ledeen, at the time was living in New York, but she had come back home during COVID because New York was totally shut down.

She was actually happened to be in Arizona when the flights stopped, so it was very much, she was like, I guess I'll just stay here. So we knew that we had her in the valley and I've always been wanting to work with her more. We had made short films in the past, but she'd been out in New York and it was almost this if we write something, we could work with Sammy like at the tail end before she goes back to New York and had that idea.

Instantly thought of Drew, thought of Sammy, thought of our friend Cody, who plays the third lead, Max, in the movie. And that those few elements really came together to crack the code and make the script that was going to be not only something we really liked and very funny, but like very achievable and something that we could film locally with what we had.

And very early brought drew in. I think there's a Facebook message at some point that was like, do you guys want to make this movie? And then it was like, yeah. So then drew just kept bugging me about it. And it was like dude, you just need to just write this. You're on it with

Drew Leatham: me.

Let's make it. Let's make it. And that what that was probably, I think I want to say October of 2020, Sean had put some stuff down on the paper. And I read it and probably had

Sean Oliver: a first draft March. No, I went, I,

Drew Leatham: yeah, I even, I made a little list just up March 18th, 2021. First draft done first draft. And then quite a few times just

Sean Oliver: hit the, we, I would slow things down if we did this again.

But Sammy had to go back to New York state and we were trying to meet that in the fall. So instantly just started raising money. Started, pre planning while rewriting. Cause we we know we needed a house. It's a haunted house. It's mostly going to be one location.

We were filming by August 2021. Wrapped in November, 2021. And then basically took about, about a year in post for everything to come together to about where we are now. How many shoot days was it? It depends on what you call a half day, but it's somewhere, I think we were like right about 19 days. Couple half days that would, double up in there did it over three legs because we're based out of Phoenix, Arizona.

And if you've ever been to Phoenix, it's anything that's old, we tear down and build something new on it. So it's hard to believe that there'd be this ancient. You're like, Oh, it's such an old haunted house. You're like, dude, that house was made in the 80s. So we had to leave town. So we went up to Flagstaff, which just has a bit more of a quaint area.

And the house we actually filmed in, I think was made in like 1905. So we got like a genuine old, could be haunted house.

Paul DeNigris: Very neat. Very neat. And that was an Airbnb that you used?

Drew Leatham: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The back of the house owner was an Airbnb. You happen to know the owner of the house was the creative director of Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival that I mentioned earlier, and she ran the back part as an Airbnb, so we just, we, Sean had literally.

Gone through a bunch of places on Airbnb, showed me pictures. And I was like, I know that place let's use that one. And so it was just super easy to book it through her. And then she was also us to kind enough to let us use the facade of her front as what looked like the actual front where they were staying.

And then we just cut into the back house where the Airbnb was. Gotcha.

Paul DeNigris: That didn't even compute for me. It's so seamless. I just thought it would be. It's all a lie. No, you're in the weeds, right? You're not worried about the entrance?

Sean Oliver: If you've ever, in the movie, there's no front door in the house and they always have to go through this tarp.

It's supposed to be an abandoned house. It's a fair thing to happen to it. But that tarp was because the doors did not match the front and the back of the house and it would give us this seamless kind of cut to cheat and trick the audience,

Drew Leatham: yeah, that's great. Very ingenious. You buy it.

Almost two and a half, two and a half years from, or five years, if you count the roommate joke, two and a half years of being a joke to two and a half years of actually thinking about it and getting that done. That's actually really

Paul DeNigris: astounding. The generally the average for an independent film from concept to completion.

The average length is about 10 years, or at least it used to. It's maybe a little quicker now. I would

Sean Oliver: add some on to ours if I could, especially just cause we finished wrote and just instantly were raising our money. We didn't even actually have money in the bank account in the first weekend just due to when it was coming in.

I always like to say we, we were racing to the starting line. And then we actually did the race. And that was just how this one had to happen. It was one of those moments of just We were done waiting for someone to say, Hey, go make a movie. And we're like, No, we're going to go make a movie. And we're going to make that happen.

And I think that was an important kickstart for us to just go and maybe even, do things maybe a little faster than we even should have. Just because, the alternative was waiting and not doing anything at all.

Paul DeNigris: You had put in your work, your, all your reps, your initial getting geared up making shorts and doing them well, and you guys had hit the ceiling for what you could achieve in the short form, so this was the obvious next step for you.

Jump in.

Drew Leatham: No, it is a little bit that sensation of building the plane while it's in the air, but I forget that you're, we built jet packs. First, right? That's what you're saying, right? Like we had we cut our teeth in a certain way. So thank you. Thank you.

Paul DeNigris: Absolutely. So it's a haunted house movie with ghosts.

Visual effects were going to be part of it from the get go. At what point did you realize during the writing process that there would be a lot of visual effects involved and yeah to add to that, what was your experience like with VFX prior to this? Had you used VFX on shorts and, so you were aware of it.

Totally. How did that factor in?

Sean Oliver: So we did a web series for a long time called Lucidity, which takes place in the dream world. And it's a web series about two roommates who share each other's dreams. So we had a ton of lo fi visual effects over the course of five years of making that show.

We never reached the likes of what, Foxtrot does and other people create, but it gave us like a really good foundation of understanding, masking, keyframes just even if you're not able to execute the effect the perfect way, you still know what those steps are from having that experience in the past.

So we were very conscious while writing. Then we'll talk more about some of the specific effects, but like the red gloves, which are these floating red gloss gloves that are in the movie. I always knew a couple different ways that we might achieve it, not even just Oh, only I have to know exactly how we'll do it, but just knowing a rough estimate of if we say this is floating, yeah, we can make things float.

We know how to make things float. And that just comes from that aspect of. Really writing something that was achievable, doable. The first draft, and even up until you came in, which was a little bit later, was always understood that we were probably going to do the visual effects ourselves. So it was written at a level that, worst case scenario, I can gut that out, I can make that happen, I can frame by frame mask that person out and then as we were able, we, genuinely it was, we, over raised and we were starting to raise more money.

And it was a question of where do we put that? And we put a big chunk of that money into music, which I think was found like super essential to our film. And then into visual effects was that like door that we unlocked by getting a little bit more support coming in. And so all of the effects are on the page.

They're in the script and we're very much planned to be in it.

Drew Leatham: And there's there's good examples though, of just going from draft to draft. Like originally we had a headless. Cello playing ghost, right? We're like, oh, we'll figure out. Yeah, we'll be able to but also how does this character play on that and through draft after draft eventually getting to production us just being like, oh, this isn't going to work.

What's something simpler we could do and ended up doing something more practical with just an aquarium pump and water. So it's there were certain things we were still worried about. It's not like we were like, oh, we'll figure everything out with just After effects, but that, that relationship varied as we got closer to shooting.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, I could tell right from our initial conversations that you guys had put a lot of thought into how VFX were going to be deployed, that there was an awareness of what you were going to need to provide to my team. We weren't starting from scratch. Sometimes. Part of the reason for this podcast is to help the indie filmmaker who is starting from scratch, who doesn't know, how do I even start with VFX?

How do I start the conversation before they even think about coming to an outside vendor? How do I write it? How do I plan for it? How do I shoot it? How do I get on the the same page so we can even just talk the same language and right out of the gate, you were on the, that level, right?

You were coming to us and I was like, have you thought about this? Yep. Have you thought about this? Yep. Yeah. You had had the checklist down. I

Sean Oliver: think that. That comes from, my advice would be to someone who hasn't had any of that foundation is, even, you don't have to do visual effects in a short film, but you could just to do tests, and experiment, and even if you're not going to do them, watch the tutorials, cause it's one of, I think it's true of most film, Like any job on a film set, you want to know what you're asking of somebody.

And it's, I think it's dangerous when someone just says to their, to their visual effects people and then you'll just fix, you'll cut that out and make it a monster. And I have no idea what that takes and I didn't light it very well. And my camera is shaky as all hell and it's got really bad shutter.

Like these are even some of these are some of the lessons I learned that we can go through about forever home. But it's really helpful to have made. Mistakes that you found for yourself when you're doing it and then wanting to avoid that for someone else You know, I always want to serve the best footage I can to like, you know My colorist and I want to have the best You know the all the best resources for you guys to be working with but I wouldn't know what that is Unless I had done that and myself a little bit.

I don't ever plan to do that again. But having just enough of a background to be, it's just I've ran sound on a couple of short films. So I'm going to be much more respectful to my sound person and their needs and what they need. And I think that's, I think that's important to filmmaker.

If you're going to, if you're going to be on that director side and you're going to be asking these things of all of these people.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. I firmly believe that every filmmaker. Currently working or aspiring to work today needs to understand every technical aspect doesn't mean they need to be an expert but If you want to communicate with your colorist, watch some color videos, watch some tutorials about DaVinci resolve.

It's all

Sean Oliver: usually fun. Yeah. Like it's not tedious stuff. It's cool.

Paul DeNigris: Understand the terminology, learn the difference between a boom mic and a laugh so you can communicate with your sound mixer, that those sorts of things doesn't mean you need to be an expert at visual effects.

It just having a little bit of visual. forethought and a little bit of foreknowledge and doing some research. The internet is a treasure trove of. out there for you to learn, so if you're thinking like, Oh, I'd like to do this effect that I saw in this movie and I'm writing it in my script.

Somebody figured it out. If it was in a movie, somebody has figured out how to do it. Either the people who did it, either the

Sean Oliver: people who

Paul DeNigris: did it have published a tutorial for it or a channel that's targeting independent filmmakers, riot or something, they have gone and figured out okay, how can we, how can you do Dr.

Strange's portal on no budget? And they've done that. And then you can go, okay, I want to do something like a Dr. Strange portal. Now I understand how to execute it. Doesn't mean I'm going to do it perfect, but at least. I could communicate to my team how to get there.

Sean Oliver: Yeah,

Paul DeNigris: That's fantastic.

And obviously you guys with the amount of work that you've done in shorts and your web series and things like that, like you put in the reps, you really earned your stripes to get to the, like you said, you're racing to the start line. You earned your stripes to get there.

And it wasn't just a mad dash with no prep and it showed, it shows in the writing. It shows in the acting, it shows in the music. It shows in every step of the film that you guys put in the time to get good at your craft.

Sean Oliver: I'm glad that shows through. Yeah, absolutely.

Paul DeNigris: So let's dive into the visual effects cause there were a number of different gags that we did in the film. My list, I remember we worked on the gloves, which you mentioned, which we can dive into all the ghost effects, like ghost appearing, disappearing, passing through walls, all of that, that non corporeal stuff.

The energy barrier that's around the house that prevents the ghosts from leaving. The decaying flowers, the box of flowers that turn black. And the doorknob gags. There's, you guys had two, two conceits in the movie that sort of lampshaded the idea of when characters are in a haunted house, why do the hell, why do they stay?

Why don't they just get the hell out of there? So you had two things. You had the, we can't afford to move, and then at one point the house is you can't leave anyway. Yeah.

Sean Oliver: Once the characters finally decide we should leave the house locks down. That's Nope. We got a brand new problem now.

Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: And so we, and we achieved that by some various things that we did to the doorknobs. Did I Another one? Forget any,

Sean Oliver: Go ahead. The. Exploding and recreating a bottles. That's right. That's

Paul DeNigris: right. Describes your your matrix. Matrix and matrix for those of you who have seen the Anna Matrix.

Matrix. Matrix. Yes. We've

Sean Oliver: got a wonderful Anna Matrix. No for all thousand of you that still remember it. Why don't we start there? I say it all the time and people are like, no, I didn't see it. And I'm like, I, why are we all sleeping on the NMA still?

Paul DeNigris: I love the iMatrix. It's still

Sean Oliver: good.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. The second Renaissance. That goes to haunted night dream. I don't know

Sean Oliver: why sci fi filmmakers aren't just still ripping off the animatronics. Yeah,

Paul DeNigris: some amazing stuff in there. So yeah, why don't we start with the bottle? So at the beginning of the movie, a couple of kids go into the haunted house and they, there's you go ahead.

You describe it.

Sean Oliver: Yeah, do you want to describe the scene?

Drew Leatham: Oh, sure. Yeah. Basically the couple of elementary school kids two brothers and their friend and they come inside brother runs away and the two kids just weird stuff's going on, but they've brought these leftover bottles cause dad had a bad day.

And they go ahead, they throw them down onto the rug and they start breaking. And what is that they like. Fizz in and out, basically, they shatter and then they hang there, suspended, frozen, and then zip back up, almost like they get stitched back together and just fling back with their original momentum right to where they threw them from and the kids just catch them.

Sean Oliver: So yeah, the big, we, we did it with a mix of practical and visual. So we got sugar glass bottles created. And so the kids, which they loved doing, got to actually throw the bottles and they actually exploded. And then we just got a clean plate, and then that's where you guys came in and did that magic of Stopping the explosion.

And I think about we definitely had like, how many should it have I don't even remember should it like hold and freeze or does it need to re explode and come back down and re explode? And it did go through some iterations on the visual effect to get it to that place where it felt warbly enough, warbly, that's a good

Paul DeNigris: word.

Sean Oliver: And then I know that was one where lessons learned on that effect. I think we really should have shot it at a much higher shutter just because it would have given you a lot more pieces of glass with cleaner edges that you could have cut off. You guys still definitely made it work at the shutter speed that we shot it at.

But that was one of my lessons about visual effects and how normally I'm locking that shutter in and leaving it, in re just in relation to my frame rate. But there are these moments where, this shot isn't about getting a cinematic quality out of a picture. This shot is about.

Obtaining data that is going to be manipulated in the visual effects later. And that needs different considerations in the settings that we lock in.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. The, for me the thing that I kept bumping on as we were working on it, and we figured out pretty early on that, that you were going to want to have that control of how much and how far and how many times it warped in and out.

And so I was able to essentially take all those attributes and put them on one slider that I could key frame. So that, that worked really well. And I could even add a. like a wiggle expression to it so I could have it have some randomness to it. So like it starts here and it ends here, but in between it's just going to fluctuate and do its thing.

But what I was bumping on was when the shards, when the bottle hits and breaks apart in order to convincingly suspend them in air, I felt like. I needed some frames where there was no motion blur, right? And that's where the shutter speed comes in. It's like they were flying outwards.

So they had this motion blur trail behind them. I wanted to be able to freeze it, turn off the motion blur, and then have motion blur go the opposite direction as it came back together. And I was limited in terms of what I could do and how. Yeah, a

Sean Oliver: hundred percent. Yeah. And That was like, that is really like a foundational lesson I took from forever home, like with that also that I don't know why we didn't get an awesome punch in and break another bottle for a closeup.

I just think that would have been cool to have gone into a closeup of the warble, but it's all done in a master and a wide shot, which is good. Cause you get the kids reactions and that's nice.

Paul DeNigris: And it's that's my other regret. It's nice punching. I get it. It would have been a really cool thing to show off, the effect.

But what works really well in the master is that the two kids, their frame rate and their reaction stays normal, right? So they're still doing their thing and reacting to it as if it's happening on set. And then we're manipulating. So time is playing differently on the floor than in Then where the kids are seeing

Sean Oliver: that relationship does help.

Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: I think it helps to sell it as this quote unquote happened in camera. Yeah. And it's a subtle thing, but I think it works really well. And then the sound that you guys did for the break and the reassembly works well, and then the the one kid gets, He, he forgets that it's coming back at him, throws it, and then

Sean Oliver: he gets distracted.

So when it comes back, it just,

Paul DeNigris: yeah, don't beans him right in the head. Yeah. And so that, that works really well too.

Sean Oliver: And the sound that was a sound design element. We had to wait till we had the effect, right? Cause we, we needed to score it basically to the movements and yeah. It's 10 layers of different kinds of glass.

No, I said,

Paul DeNigris: yeah, it works really well. Let's let's dive into the ghosts. Cause that's another big thing. And you mentioned when we were talking about the bottles here, you mentioned something called a clean plate. Obviously, I know what a clean plate is, you know what a clean plate is, but maybe somebody watching this doesn't know what a clean plate is.

So what did you mean by a clean plate? So this would be a

Sean Oliver: clean plate.

So if we were doing a visual effects shot and we wanted a shot of me beaming in like a Star Trek or something like that. If we got the shot of me acting like I'm beaming in and then we got this If you think about cutting me out of a shot, if we don't have that background clean, and you chop me out, there's gonna be a big black hole where I'm supposed to be.

But, if we have this shot, where it's on the same shot from the exact same angle, tripod hasn't moved, Lighting's the same. When you chop me out, you stitch back in that other piece of the wall, and it looks seamless. Like nothing has, is suspiciously happening. And that would be a clean plate. So like we had to use those we have a ghost character with the red gloves we talked about.

And that's a person in a green suit, and they've got the red gloves on them. And then we can just erase all of the green, and then the background fills in itself with the plate. I don't know if that's the best explanation.

Paul DeNigris: No, that's, I think that's the easiest explanation, as non technical as we can make it.

But you're right, we used clean plates everywhere. We used it for the bottle gag, we used it for the red gloves, we used them for anytime ghosts walk through doors, walk through walls. Or doors pass through them. There's one point, one point where the door swings and it swings through the kid goes trying to think of some other places.

We might've used clean plates. You guys shot a ton of clean plates. It seems like you shot. Yeah.

Sean Oliver: Almost every effect was paired with a plate. Yeah. Honestly,

Paul DeNigris: probably 60 percent of the movie. You guys shot every shot twice.

Sean Oliver: And That's one of the funny tells sometimes where, and it changes how we shoot the shots around it.

Cause I don't want to be handheld handheld. And then suddenly we're like on a tripod clean plate. But we shot all of our plates on, a tripod to make sure that it could get the cleanest cut out. I remember talking to you early on. You were even like if there's some shots you want camera movement don't be afraid of it.

And I was like, nah, it's going to be locked down and to make it, I knew how many red glove shots there were going to be, which I should have looked up the number before this, like 30 or so. Like it was a lot of shots with the floating red gloves. And I knew that with having a stable lockdown, clean plate, it was going to make it a lot easier on, on your guys's end.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. And that's not to say it was, they were without their challenges. Yeah no, even when you're shooting a clean plate, there were inconsistencies in lighting and it was mainly because you had a. A six foot person in a green suit acting in the scene with the red gloves, casting his shadow and casting green bounce all over the kitchen or whatever.

And then when you key him out and try to drop the clean plate into the hole that we cut it out

Sean Oliver: here.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, you're cutting shadows and all of that. And so a lot of those shots we ended up the clean plate became instead of just a filler to fill in the hole where we pulled the green out so we'd have a man shaped hole where the green suit was instead of just plugging clean plate in there, we would actually rebuild the shot with the clean plate as the source.

That makes sense. And so then that added a reverse. Yeah, it was the reverse. So we were still keying the green. Suit, but we weren't as concerned with the edges of the green suit. We were mostly concerned with where the gloves met the green suit and, keeping that clean. And then we ended up having to.

Rotoscope, hand trace, the fingers and stuff on the red glove. We could pull a key on the red. Cause it was unique enough that we could get like the beginning of a mat. But there was a lot of manual, frame by frame fingers and your red glove guy can't talk. And so he's gesturing wildly and you can see,

Sean Oliver: it's probably another one that a higher shutter would have been.

Really nice again.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. So it's a lot of rebuilding. You can see like my fingers are blurring like crazy when you have that happen, you end up having to, create hard edge mats around the finger and then rebuild manually the motion blur around it as it moves. So those shots they definitely were much more complex than just click an eyedropper on the green guy and it's done.

Oh, 100%. And even

Sean Oliver: when we filmed him, I knew we, we have a green suit, but it was. It wasn't lit in a way that was ever going to be what it was. It would just give a hard cutoff line, where that person is for, even if I always knew, even if we were doing it on our end, it would have been rotoscoping frame by frame, cutting it out with a mask.

It was always the way, and then you guys really took it a step much further than we ever would. And it's that level up that you guys were able to add to us is that the shadows of the hands are just the extra depth of an effect that make it go from this 2d pasted on effect to something that's in that world.

Cause obviously there's this six foot man attached to every shadow with the gloves. There is no floating. But if you, when you guys watch the movie and hopefully you will because of the way that we lit where the shadows are coming from your team always matched that and added it. And it just puts so much presence on the gloves and so much immersion from the effect.

Paul DeNigris: Thanks. Yeah. But the trick with that is, now we have the mat the outline of the gloves, right? And so then it's just a matter of taking that and duplicating it and using it as a. A mask for a color effect to darken and create the shadow on the plate behind. And we always had the reference we, your original plate with the green suit gave us the reference of where the shadow of where it would fell, where it might land, building those shot by shot.

And when he was against a, just a blank wall, it was no problem. Those are relatively easy. There's a couple of places where the shadows the counter and like travel. Wall side of cabinet, front of cabinet, top of counter. And it does this sort of three dimensional thing.

And we're, it's cheating. We had to cheat. We didn't build a bunch of geometry for those things. It was like simple 2d manipulations to make it follow the contours. But thankfully those are few and far between. The other thing we discovered pretty early on was when you've got the back of the glove.

And now the hand inside of it is supposed to be invisible. We were, we'd get this line. You have to fill that hole somehow. We'd get a line for the edge of the glove, but nothing on the interior. So we ended up building, what did you guys call it? The glove anus? We called it the glove

Sean Oliver: anus. Oh no and whenever another one came up, cause we were trying to avoid that on set and it's one of those ones where you would ask me, I'd have been like, we did a really good job and then we're looking at all the shots.

But then you go back. There's another one. Oh, there's another glove anus we have to send to Paul. And it, it was a, it's one of those ones. It could have been a lot worse if we, without our background. The. In the green suit was Cody, and he's the guy that I did almost all those visual effects with in all of our short films and our web series so he him and I have a little mini effects supervisor hat that we can wear on set of Knowing we tried our very best not to ever cross behind.

So if we have a green screen arm, and I have my red glove, I'm like covered in dog fur now I can bring my hand up here, that's fine, because it's, you're just gonna cut out what's behind it. But if I go back here, you're gonna have to rebuild every piece that you don't see. So sometimes we were overly conscious about that, but we weren't conscious.

About the glove anus and it's also just a, in terms of like learning and lessons, some of this, if we had just done some more tests and every practical effect in the movie and almost every visual effect in the movie. I would, if I could go back in time, I would have just taken a day, and I just would have gotten some test shots, didn't, I always, I think I always stop myself thinking it needs to be a big production, we need to bring out all the lights, do it all the perfect way.

But honestly, even just taking my phone out and doing a couple tests with that, would have illuminated some of these problems. Potential pitfalls that I could have hit.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I definitely recommend when there are complex effects that there's testing, that's something that I will often do with clients on bigger projects is we will do proof of concept shots, here's what we've written in the script.

Is this doable before we go commit to, 50 scenes of this thing, let's figure out if we can actually do it.

Sean Oliver: Okay. It's doable, but never from this angle and that angle.

As long as we never do that, we're okay.

Paul DeNigris: There was one shot of the Red Gloves where he puts his hands on his hips and and his hand

Sean Oliver: The finger disappears.

Yeah, his hand goes behind The thumb's behind the hip.

Paul DeNigris: And yeah we had to rebuild his hand. And it's, you end up taking pixels from Before and after it disappears and building a, building a bunch of faux fingers and putting them on there and trying to keep the texture and all of that stuff, it's it's painstaking but doable, but it's, yeah, that's the kind of thing we did it once to have done it, multiple times would have been,

Sean Oliver: And like the red gloves, I think are always an interesting effect that I do reflect on because you could have done them or we could have done them in several different ways.

You could full CG those gloves and have 100 percent post manipulation and they're made in unreal engine or whatever. And you do it that way. We could have filmed them on a green screen separately. And had really nice clean, and actually used a keen for a lot of it. The one benefit that we got, and I think it really is just a question of your budget.

Knew that we could always gut it out ourselves. And I think that was why we chose it. But the cool thing that we had was the gloves were always there on set. And the one thing I would have added more of knowing that is it's so magical when the gloves Pick things up, or they shake hands with the character, or they're actually touching stuff, and you can cheat those effects with the other methods but for an indie film at our level, we never could have afforded to make a full CG gloves look.

The way they need to look. Sure, if you've got the Marvel money, you can. And even then, they get a lot of flack for some of their effects because they're so overworked and there's so many. But doing it on set with that half practical, half visual effect really adds, I think for just a moment, people ask themselves again, how did they do this?

Which we don't, anytime you watch a major movie, we know how they did it. It's a full green screen. It's a full, some of that movie magic of like how they pull that off. You, I think we get that with the mix of that on set and that visual effect, like really marrying and supporting one another.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, when he picks up the duffel bag and dumps it out or when he's filling the the water guns shakes the hands with Sammy and they do their secret handshake and she realizes who it is. And when he gets thrown to the floor. And he skitters across the floor and all that's left are his gloves you feel the weight of the body that you can't see.

Yeah, all the the

Sean Oliver: way that it would, and you'd have to fake that all the other ways.

Paul DeNigris: And it, yeah, it just it works so well. And then you never had to worry about matching lighting because he was in the real lighting. Yes. And a lot of times the it's the lighting mismatch that gives the effect away.

Yeah. It's the tell. And Here, we never had to worry about that because whatever you, however you lit the kitchen, that was the same lighting on the clean plate, same lighting on the glove plate, same lighting on whatever, to your point,

Sean Oliver: almost to a fault, we didn't change the lighting because, really, maybe moving a few things here and there, it would have helped those clean plates stay, without the shadows.

Yeah,

Paul DeNigris: we had one other clean plate that gave us gave us a little bit of a problem and it was. There's a shot where two of the living characters and two of the ghosts stomp past camera. Yes.

Sean Oliver: Yes. I know. Okay. I know. You know

Paul DeNigris: what I'm talking about? And,

Sean Oliver: This is, and this is, yeah. And so you have your two

Paul DeNigris: human characters and they close the door behind them and then the two ghost characters, phase through the door.

And as they all sort of stomp past, cause now they're, they're moving fast. The camera just really subtly does this little jitter. And so getting like stabilizing all of that sort of stuff. It's not as easy as it sounds like you would think you just drop a stabilizer on there and just pick a few points.

Cause it was the kitchen. There's all kinds of countertops and stuff you could lock down. But sometimes when there's enough of a jolt on a camera on digital digital cinema cameras, you get a little bit of that weird, Sensor wobble.

Sean Oliver: Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: And so the shape of the frame actually changes in a very subtle way.

And you don't notice it until you put it up against one that's totally locked down and not moving. And you could see yeah, everything was just just got jello there. When when they walked past that,

Sean Oliver: that was definitely one of the drawbacks of being in a house that was built in 1905 because we had that all the time, the tribe, anyone, anytime we had anyone walk by that tripod you just saw that heavy movement.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, but by and large, the clean plates you guys provided for us made all of those effects possible because we weren't, particularly on the time that we, the timetable that we were working on, the budget we were working on, right? If every time a ghost passed through a wall, we were having to build a new clean plate.

What you can do, like we, we do it all the time. There's always instances where, somebody moves. And so you grab some of the clean plate from here and then they move and you grab some of the clean plate from here, and then you do a little paintwork in a spot that you never actually could see and you build a new.

You build a new clean plate. We do it all the time, right? Sometimes there's moving shots or stock shots and they're like, I want to remove the guy in the red sweater in the background. And you have to do it. It's not a visual effect shot that was planned, but a, an after the fact fixed.

So if we had to clean plate every single shot, we'd still be working on it. Yeah. So the fact that you shot clean plates, even though it, I know it had to have slowed you guys down.

Sean Oliver: Oh yeah. Cause you do the shot and then you got to make sure, and then if you change anything, get that plate again, at the tail end, it's just extra shots at the end of the day.

Drew Leatham: But I think that was always the thing that like indicated people who who had done effect effects work in the past be like, Oh, we're getting the plate. Whereas people other like us, like some actors would be like, what are we like? Why haven't we moved on? Yeah.

Sean Oliver: They just

Drew Leatham: see this, there's, why aren't we doing the next setup?

Like, Why are we taking so and it's just not like this is saving us hours of work. This 45 seconds is literally saving us hundreds of dollars. I think a lot of

Sean Oliver: that thought process too. And in trying to save, your guys's time or whoever was going to end up doing our visual effects.

We knew before filming that it was you guys. The more we could do on our end, the more time you had to spend where you wanted and needed to spend it on your end. Cause it's like, yeah, you can rebuild a plate, but I would rather you be working on a really cool flower wilting effect, which we can talk about a little bit, right?

To open up the opportunity to not having to be doing salvage work, but actual creation work. I think it's something that I'll continue to try and do more moving forward and forward. Instead of that. Fix it in post mentality more of the no, this is our we're saving this creativity to be in post for this moment instead of just Oh, we'll fix it,

Paul DeNigris: spending the VFX budget where it matters.

That's everything

Sean Oliver: with an indie film, right? You want to pace your dollars in the right spot and you want it to end up on screen and not in the catering budget, but we had really good catering. So actually

Paul DeNigris: Delicious,

Sean Oliver: very

Paul DeNigris: cool. Very cool. So yeah, let's let's.

Let's talk about the wilting flowers and the doorknob and I think that probably, oh, and the energy barrier. That's the other thing we haven't covered. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. The wilting flowers

Sean Oliver: are a good one because that was an effect that even I, I knew what it was in words. I don't know if I knew what it was actually in visually, like until I could like Vulcan mind meld with you.

And I don't know if we would see it the same way. But and I was. It's basically, it's actually like a quote unquote real thing. Not the name, we call it a Rosa Sacris, but in ghost hunting there's this idea of taking these white roses, read about this on the internet, and when there's an evil spirit around, they will turn black.

So we use this as our You know, our little beep, to find out where the bad ghosts are. And so they start white, and it's a visual effects shot where they needed to turn black. And how exactly they turned black and it wasn't really in the script exactly, whether, we ended up at a wilting, which is very awesome.

But I remember, One of our earliest meetings on that one, you were we're working on this shot, but we don't have it yet, so I don't know, and then you were like if you want to see what we've done these are all what it's not going to look like and you showed me like an ink drop where it was like ink had dropped on the flowers and it was spreading, but it just had this, I don't know, 2D ish, like it just didn't work.

There was something about it. It's like in concept, I would have thought that would have worked. And then you had, I don't even remember another one. You showed me another version and then you were like, what I'm really going to end up doing is I'm going to hand wilt these flowers. So it looks like a time lapse.

So manually adding this warp onto each petal. And then it's like this. This burn of of blackness coming into the shot, which was really awesome. You told us not to toot your horn, but I'm gonna toot your horn a little bit. I was just super impressed. It was super awesome to know that there was work that you guys were doing that we weren't seeing and that things go across your desk that you send back instead of even like with us working on like an indie budget, someone could very easily just say, we did one.

Here it is. But to have that level of you caring about it as well meant a very great deal to us as creators to know that there was stuff that you were like, Nope, like my name's going on that and that's not where I want it to be yet. And so the final effect that we ended up with, I think is one of the more custom hand built ones in the movie.

And it actually looks like maybe we set some flowers up and did a time lapse and let them wilt. That was the idea. It really does.

Paul DeNigris: That's a really good example of manual clean plating, right? Because. I wanted to separate. So you have all these pedals stacked on each other as the, the roses are like sitting and every rose is multiple layers of pedals coiled around each other.

And then you have multiple roses packed in this box. If I want to take the Pedals that are in the foreground and have the, their edge turned black and have them get shrink and wilt and dry out. I have to reveal what's behind. And so it's pull this part out, paint it out of the back layer, then take the next, yeah.

And you just are building, multiple levels of clean plates and extrapolating what, what does. When I have two pedals, this one in the front, what is the one that I can't see in the back? What does that look like? How do I continue this texture? That's in this pedal down, through this area.

So that is this one shrinks and reveals pixels that were never filmed. What does that look like?

Sean Oliver: Don't exist.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, they don't exist. So you end up having to build all these clean plates. And then there's a bunch of cheating. Like the deep background stuff is just changing color while the foreground stuff is doing that, that, individual, little manual animated shrinking and warping and discoloring.

And it's a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Sean Oliver: And that's probably like an effect that we couldn't have gotten that same vibe as easily, especially in our budget, had we been handheld, right? That's another one we locked down. We did that on tripod. That gives a, it just gives a lot more latitude, I think, in, in the effect.

And I've known people that'll do their effects on sticks. And then they'll add a little bit of handheld if they want to get that motion back. But I think, Especially if you're newer and you're getting started out on effects, like train up on sticks, doing your effects. Cause you could do a lot more.

You have a lot more control and power

Paul DeNigris: and a lot more leeway. Yeah. Just be smart about it. A lot of people, they do, like you said, everything's handheld. And then this is an effect shot because we're locked off. Yeah. Pay attention, there's definitely things you can do if you wanted to do that as a handheld shot, you could shoot it twice once locked off.

Once handheld and then you build the effect on the lock off and then take it and track it into the handheld.

Sean Oliver: I didn't know that. But you have to be smart about it you to be smart about it. Genius it. Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. So if the camera's, that's what

Sean Oliver: you're gonna get. A lot of my next movie,

Paul DeNigris: camera's doing a lot of, this movement up here.

Your stick shot isn't down here. it's got to be, you basically find the average, the midpoint of where that is. And that's where you plant it and shoot your lock off. Yeah. Another trick is to shoot, let's say you're mastering in 4k, but your camera can shoot in 6k. You shoot 6k.

So then you have a lock off in 6k and then The work that's done on that. And then you also shoot, a handheld version that now we can track. So we have this 6k overscan version. We do the effect on it and then we add the camera movement and then just chop off the edges. So now we have a 4k.

handheld camera with a an effect that was done on a locked off plate inside it.

Sean Oliver: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. And it's just being smart about these sorts of things. And again, it's trial and error. It's experimenting, it's planning, it's talking to somebody who knows what they're doing.

It's watching tutorials so that you're not going into it blind. You're going into it smartly. I, like I said I never want to be the person who tells the director, no, you can't move the camera, right? And I'm always going to, if you say I have to move the camera, okay, then we have to figure it out.

We have to, we just have to figure it out. That's VFX's job. VFX's job is never to say, no, VFX's job is to say, here's what I can do with the money and time we have.

Sean Oliver: Which you guys were awesome with. Yeah,

Paul DeNigris: thanks.

Sean Oliver: What other effects? A couple

Paul DeNigris: other effects. We had the doorknob gag. The energy

Sean Oliver: barrier, I think is a good one.

Paul DeNigris: Oh, we can talk about the energy barrier. That one was really straightforward. Was it? Yeah, it really was. Force fields and things like that are not not terribly difficult. That was a, An effect that really developed the look in post. That was a, that was an entirely digital effect.

The only practical elements that you did were, so one of the characters, one of the ghost characters gets, I don't want to spoil anything, but he gets yanked through the energy barrier at the end of the movie. The energy barrier is what keeps all these dead spirits from leaving the house, right? That's why they're, it's a haunted house because they're trapped.

And he gets pulled through and then he burns up, right? Because now he's not being arms on fire. Yeah, so

Drew Leatham: it's a flame.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. So we ended up having to track all these little chunks of fire onto the actor and all of that. But what sold that effect was you guys Basically shoved a smoke tube up his shirt.

Yeah. Yeah. So we had a

Sean Oliver: smoke machine off to the side and it was, I thought we were gonna have to make something and build this whole thing. And then I went to spirit and it's like smoke machine tube for smoke machine to send smoke. I was like, perfect. Buy that poke some holes in it. Running up his pants.

But again, marrying the visual and the practical. So Just knowing that if there's such a difference when smoke gets in someone's eye, and it's, it's actually bothering them. Versus a layer of digital smoke. And it's casting a shadow

Paul DeNigris: on the other actor. And it's, yeah, there's texture to it.

Sean Oliver: Helps the actual light, the way that it hits it. It's wonderful when you can have it.

Paul DeNigris: And then the other thing you did as he burns up, you tattered his clothes and added burn makeup to him and burn marks on his shirt. And so that, that motivated. For us, where the fire happened to go and as he disintegrates every one of those little practical pockmarks and burn marks that you guys made on his shirt became a spot where we centered fire wave that would spread out and erode him.

And again, it's a marriage of practical and digital. It's. You're not expecting digital to do all the heavy lifting, right? You're capturing in camera. What is best captured in camera? You weren't going to light the guy on fire, but you can do everything that you can. Yeah.

Sean Oliver: So if if it's just the smoke, then just do the smoke.

If it's just. Fire light so that there's at least real natural light on their face. That's one thing I would've maybe gone back and added. Yeah, if I could reshoot this again, I would've had my little LED fireplace light just to get that little bit on them. It was daytime. It wasn't like a huge scene where it'd be a major problem.

Paul DeNigris: If it was nighttime, it would be a totally different story. Daytime, it works. I actually added some glow on the other end. I thought you did right to tie it all together, but it was. Because it was a daylight scene.

And that's the thing

Sean Oliver: Visuals can do every piece of that layer, like you're saying, but if you can just get one layer in camera, it's huge. Like I remember Favreau, when he did Iron Man 2, did like the eye tracking thing, where we look in a screen and the eyes go to what's real first.

We, we intake CG last. So if you can soak the image in enough real things, We're not going to start analyzing, Jar Binks or whatever until the last thing in the shot. And I think that's important to remember when you're like, If this shot has, is 90 percent visual effects, my audience is going to start analyzing those pixels pretty quickly all of a sudden, and our brain's very harsh about that.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, for sure. And I've never actually heard that about about Favreau's experiment on Iron Man 2. That's great. The one I always go back to is Peter Jackson on the original War of the Rings trilogy. The fact that In this shot, it would be a digital double, and in this shot, it's a stunt person, and in this shot, it's a person a a little person wearing an Elijah Wood mask, and in this shot, it's a, it's Elijah Wood with a giant performer wearing Aragorn's coat, and he's mixing and matching all of these different things, so your brain is always dancing around, how they do that.

Oh, that's fake. And I know it's big. I've seen it's

Sean Oliver: fake. It's going to be fake next time. Exactly. You're just keeping on their toes. Exactly. The first shot in the CG lion King is real. The very first shot is a live action shot. And the idea was to be like, Show you something real to take you in beyond whatever else

Paul DeNigris: No,

Drew Leatham: I even remember with the energy wall just like artistic direction I watched the original Independence Day The other day and that, like just that scene where they shoot the coke, right?

And that first early energy field. And I was I remember just not being sure how to articulate. So I think that's one thing that like, I liked having just a list of Oh yeah. I saw it like this here. And I just really enjoyed the. Flame, almost like energy. It doesn't look like a hell wall, but it's just

Sean Oliver: It could be like alien tech, right?

Or like a exactly right. Yeah. I've been in the woods.

Drew Leatham: Shields force man made

Sean Oliver: coming from an, if we just hit the energy source, it would go down. So I think that's where you guys. Cause I don't even remember how much direction we gave you on that, but the flame barrier that, stops them but it's one that it's, I think there's an important effect because it has, it carries a narrative weight.

I, we try not to over explain things via dialogue. I don't think anyone actually ever, one character at some point says like in the backyard and they're like, I didn't know you could come out here. And she says all the way from the back gate to the front gate. And that's really. Most that we talk about it and the rest is when you see a ghost hit it and bounce into it and you see the ripples go through.

So I think that's why I go back to that fact that it's one of our effects that carries, narrative significance. So it's very important that it transcribed what was happening. The audience was able to and also

Drew Leatham: had its own look, looked unique in its own way and was still very clear.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. Thanks. I the jumping off point was knowing that character was going to burst into flames as he pulled through it. So that sort of motivated the fiery kind of look, but we didn't want it to be fire. We wanted it to have that energy field to it. And you had described it being like a membrane.

That has it's like elastic. So as the guy is being pulled, it stretches and snaps back a little bit, let's him go. So that, so it's a lot of manual warping to create those sort of, stretchy tendrils like tension and masking so that, as his arm pushes through, I'm masking his arm, where the barrier is.

And so his arm is being placed in front of it and the rest of them is being placed behind it.

Sean Oliver: It added a ton of depth with those moments.

Paul DeNigris: Thanks. The other thing I wanted to do was, again, I'm always trying to make it feel like it was captured in camera. Was, I wanted to give it the sense of in the summer here, when it's really hot and we see those heat waves coming off the asphalt.

I wanted it to feel like that. It's a little out of focus behind there. The color is shifting like the wavelengths of light. There's this color fringing on the edges. And it's very alive and it's there, but invisible. And so you get the sense that it's always there until something disturbs it.

And then it like crackles and it distorts. And that's when we can actually, you can point a camera at it and perceive it. Otherwise you point a camera at it and it's not there, it's not visible. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Those are the sorts of challenges that I love because.

Like you said it's a story point. It, your movie needs it to tell the story, right? Your movie needs it to be convincing, to be real. There's a big emotional scene around that.

Sean Oliver: Yeah, our climax happens around this effect and in many ways.

Paul DeNigris: And that's the thing I love about working with independent filmmakers is I get to, as a visual effects artist, I get to partner with you guys, and help you tell your story.

It's not just, it's not just being a hired gun. I do plenty of that where I'm a hired gun. Yeah. Erase this layer, erase the boom pole. We see the crew in the side of the issue. We had one

Sean Oliver: boom removal.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. Yeah, you had one boom. We

Sean Oliver: had one. So kudos, kudos to our sound guy, Nick.

Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: I mean that, that sort of work, that's bread and butter work. We love that. We'll do that all day long. We don't love it. We like having the work. We don't necessarily love the work that we do. But it's stuff like this where it's, we get to play jazz in a way.

You're like, here's the note I need to hit. Get me there. And

Drew Leatham: no, I didn't get a comment with the Rosa Saccharis. It was just going through those iterations with you. Cause I, I remembered like, like I'm thinking like, okay, so I'll get this syringe. I'll just fill it up with black ink and we'll like green duct tape it into the roses or whatever.

And we'll make, and then seeing it come back with like ink, I was like, Oh, whoa, that's like the digital. And then it was just, I really, it was such a moment of relief. Of just like seeing literally the work that you are doing, not just like hard key frames and rotoscoping, but creatively as well. And being like, man, Oh, whoa, we've, we went to some of the same places throughout that process and thinking about

Sean Oliver: the effect and figure out what works about it.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah.

Sean Oliver: And a lot of that,

Paul DeNigris: it comes back to you guys. It comes back to how you communicated your intent, what you wanted, the style you were going for. There were never other than a couple of things where we were like trying to figure out what it looks like when the, when ghosts pass through solid matter, we really didn't hunt for looks on this show.

We were very much on the same page right from the get go. Cause you were very clear. And concise and had references and showed me footage and showed me pictures and said, it's like this movie, but different. It's, it's like this, but this is

Sean Oliver: what inspired it. So you can at least see

Paul DeNigris: that, that ability, not only the preparation that you guys did on your shorts, but then the ability to clearly communicate. And that's. If filmmakers take one thing away from this podcast on this episode and every episode, it's plan well, communicate well. Yeah. Your team can't read your mind. Okay. And we've burned a lot of time working for clients who are like, I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it.

Sean Oliver: Yeah. You guys would never know that.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. You guys would never ever know. I think

Sean Oliver: sometimes pe people, especially like directors, they think the job is having cool ideas and the job is actually, hello.

Chris is being able to share, being able to share those cool ideas and to share the vision. It's not having, I think most people have really awesome ideas and if they were empowered and could, they could make really awesome stuff, but that hard part. Is getting it from here to there and that comes we come from a heavy theater speech and debate background.

And I always tell all directors, I, my encouragement to them is to take a public speaking class to take things that, that force you to put your thoughts down in a coherent way, other than just screenplays. And always trying to be the like auteur who has this perfect vision. And instead, like, how can I just be a better communicator?

Cause that's ultimately what really what the job is being a communicator,

Paul DeNigris: man. That is a great place to put the button on this show and wrap up. So real quick, what's the, what's going on with forever home as far as festivals and possible distribution, what's happening there?

Sean Oliver: We we're still there.

The very. front end of our film festival circuit. So we did the Phoenix film festival just a couple of months ago. We did a horror hotel over out in Hawaii, just this past weekend. So shout out to all of those folks. We have days of the dead coming up in Indianapolis in two weeks. And that has a, another component in August where we're screening in LA.

And then really a lot of the festivals we'll start hearing back when it gets closer to Halloween, cause we are a horror comedy and that's where that's where our audiences are and are hopefully waiting for us. And distribution sometime in the next year there, there's going to be news for sure about that.

And we're going to get it out and as many people as we can. So follow forever home movie. That's what we are on Instagram. That's what we are on Facebook forever home movie. com. And you can keep up with all the good news that comes out with it.

Paul DeNigris: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for making magic. Thank you for letting me play in your sandbox.

Oh, yeah

All right, thanks to Sean Oliver and Drew Leatham for for being part of today's show Hopefully you enjoyed it and learned something. I know I did. It's always a blast talking to these guys and Talking VFX. Tune in again next time for the VFX for Indies podcast. Meantime, if you learned anything, if you enjoyed yourself, please click, like click subscribe.

Post a comment. If if you have questions you want us to answer in future episodes, I'd love to hear about it. So please hit those comments and we'll see you next time. Thanks so much.