The Impact of VFX on Indie Film with Peter Paul Basler
Get ready for a deep-dive into the world of independent filmmaking with Peter Paul Basler, a talented director and filmmaker whose craft is steeped in the magical realm of visual effects. Peter shares stories of the challenges he faced creating crowd replication on a sports movie and the complexities of filming dynamic scenes on ice. Join us as we get a peek behind the lens, revealing how VFX is shaping the way directors create gripping cinematic realities that captivate audiences.
Peter doesn't stop at VFX. With an enthusiasm matched only by his knowledge, he recounts his innovative use of practical effects in a desert-set movie. From creating a mold of a lead actor's head for a memorable zombie scene to perfecting the art of blood shots, Peter's stories are a masterclass in using effects both practical and digital to tell a story. We also explore how having a tangible reference can bring a certain delight and texture to the filmmaking process.
In the final segment, we talk about the significant and ever-growing impact of VFX on independent filmmaking. With advancements in technology, filmmakers are now able to see results in near real-time, revolutionizing the way movies are made. Peter offers valuable tips for filmmakers on making the most of their VFX budget and finding the right VFX company for their projects. As we wrap up, Peter offers a sneak peek into his upcoming projects - a time travel thriller and a sitcom-style series. This episode is a treasure trove of insight, inspiration, and indispensable advice for all who are passionate about the blend of VFX and independent filmmaking.
Peter's website: https://www.peterpaulbasler.com/
Behind the Lens: The Impact of VFX on Indie Film Narratives with Peter Paul Basler
[Paul DeNigris]: 0:00
When it comes to working with visual effects, director and lifelong boy scout, Peter Paul Basler has learned the hard way to always be prepared... on this episode of VFX for Indies Welcome to this episode of VFX for Indies, the podcast about the intersection of visual effects and independent filmmaking. I'm your host, Paul DeNigris, visual effects artist, filmmaker, and CEO of boutique VFX shop, Foxtrot X-Ray. With me today is a director, filmmaker, title designer, all around Renaissance man, who has collaborated with me and my team over the years, a number of times, and in fact, directed the very first official Foxtrot X-Ray project. So, He holds a special place in our heart here. I would like to welcome to the podcast, Peter Paul Basler.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 1:06
Hello, thanks for having me, Paul. It's great to be here.
[Paul DeNigris]: 1:09
Thanks for being here. Why don't you fill the audience in a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you've done, what your career has kind of looked like.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 1:17
Sure, I like to consider myself an independent filmmaker. If I put a title to it, I'm a writer, director and producer. I think I've held every job in the industry, aside from lead actress, I guess. But I've even, because I've been an assistant director, I've even been pressed into putting on a suit and hopping into a scene. So I've done it for a while, and I was thinking about coming on this podcast with you today, Paul. And the first project I ever did, VFX was the furthest thing from my mind. It wasn't even something that was sort of within my reach. It wasn't a tangible thing that I thought that I could do. That was 20 years ago. And has certainly working with folks like you and then working in different movies with different types of VFX and understanding what they can achieve has changed my perspective on how I operate on set as a director, and then when I wear my producer cap, and as a producer as well, making a movie happen quickly, but looking the best it can be.
[Paul DeNigris]: 2:28
Right. And I could tell, you know, from our very first collaboration that you had a good sense of the VFX process and kind of what you needed to provide to VFX artists to be able to accomplish what you were asking. Right. So the first project that Peter and I collaborated on was a sports movie and it required a lot of crowd replication. Right. They were in an enclosed arena and there weren't a number, there just wasn't enough people, enough extras on set to fill the stands. And so. What I was provided with was the principal photography of the actors doing their thing. And then the, it was mostly empty stands. You usually, almost every shot, the stands were completely empty. But then Peter and his team shot, uh, you know, plates, right? So they, they fill a section of the stadium and shoot a plate and then move everybody to another section. So we, you know, we sort of had a straight on section. We had a corner curve section. We had another angle section. And so we had these different pieces and they'd move people around. Uh, and so we had all of these, uh, these plates to, to put it together. And it was, um, it was really refreshing because I've been in situations where people come to me and say, I need to put crowd here and I say, well, what did you, what have you shot? And they say, nothing. Can't you just make people in the computer? And I say, sure. It's... That's way outside your budget. Right. But. Peter and his team, they gave us what we needed. And so we were able to pull those shots off in a reasonable amount of time with a very modest budget. So Peter, talk about like going into that project, obviously you were prepared. So what got you to that point where you and I hadn't even had a conversation yet. We didn't even know each other when you filmed this, right? So it wasn't a case of you, you talked to me. Maybe you talked to another VFX supervisor? I don't know kind of what went into the preparation that got us to that.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 4:26
Well, I think I'll back up a little bit and say that project was all shot on location in Colorado. We did some pick up work in interior shots in some arenas here in Southern California, but that gives you a very different look than Colorado, obviously, in the winter. And one of the things that we couldn't get on our schedule was how we're going to shoot this finale. And if you've done your work on the setup to your third act, you really want it to look as good as possible. And I had luckily done a few projects and had, and they were VFX heavy. So I had a bit of an understanding about what we would need as a filmmaker to provide to you and your team to make it look good. One of the things that was the most challenging and I believe you talked to me, Paul, and sort of baby stepped me through, which sometimes director needs that, is we were shooting actors on the ice. with a camera operator on the ice who was moving left to right, but also forwards and back. And sometimes left, right, forwards, back, all in the same sequence. So the parallax, the way that you see the crowd and the audience was changing, which made it very difficult. And to your question, yes, we did go to a few other houses and they were either flummoxed on how they would actually do it or... or there's just no way for a low budget movie. And to your credit, your team took it on and said, we know how to do this. And I think the end results on that is something that you don't think about it. It's not a VFX that is showy, like an explosion or a monster where your brain goes, we know that this is pretend. That didn't happen. They didn't blow up Tom Cruise or whoever's in your movie. And you, as an audience, engage it in a certain way. This is, and it's really funny, because a lot of the work, and I'm sure you can attest to this and other filmmakers have talked about it, is doing stuff that if you do your job right, no one knows you even did anything. And it's hours and hours and hours of work. And this is definitely one of those. The crowd is responding to the nationals of a figure skating competition, and they needed to look as natural and real as possible and not be showy and not call attention to themselves and fill what was a 10,000 seat arena. And we had like 300 actual background. And I used as many tricks as I could to reuse those 300 extras again and again and again and move them around and pick shots where I wasn't showcasing the crowd. But one of the things that I did also in my homework is I watched some of the movies that have been done before with either ice hockey or figure skating. And one of the ones that is the most popular is a movie called The Cutting Edge. Early 90s, it is the breakthrough figure skating movie at the time. And what they ended up doing was the sequence, which was the finale of watching these two skaters compete, was it was a single spotlight in a... darkened arena that followed them around and you go wow, that's dramatic. That's over-the-top. Why are they doing that? From a practical sense, this is early 90s, they're either gonna fill up the arena with extras and they're gonna pay to feed them and clothe them and all this stuff or they chose that so you don't see them. And I didn't want to go that route I wanted it to feel like there was a crowd and so I think anytime as an independent filmmaker, you start to do a project, there's a little bit of a leap of faith. And I said, I'm gonna do my best to get good clean images. I'm gonna do these plates and give them material and then hope I find the right VFX team. And luckily we did.
[Paul DeNigris]: 8:30
Well, thanks. It was a definite learning curve for us. It was one of those classic scenarios where somebody says, can you do this? And you say yes. And then you scramble with your team to figure out how to do it. You know, and some of the shots were super straightforward. And some of them where the camera is moving in, you know, six degrees of freedom, panning, tilting, you know, moving on X, Y and Z all at the same time, because you had a great skater as your camera op. Yeah, some of those were a challenge. And it required, you know, breaking those plates up into multiple little layers, you know, one, one row of seats at a time and putting them on 3d cards and all of that sort of stuff. Let me tell you though, great training for the post-COVID era. We do that a lot now we do a lot of crowd replication now because of because of COVID because you know, because there aren't big crowds anymore. Even you know, we did a Christmas movie last year, where it was like you know, a 400 seat little community theater and they brought in 20 extras and we replicated them 20 times, right? Because of COVID, because they don't wanna deal with the health implications or the cost of screening everybody and all of that. And so they, you know, they had a bunch of people that were friends and family of the crew and cast that were in the bubble and they brought them in and we just replicated them all around and changed red sweaters to green and you know, things like that. And it's all... Like we're really good at that now because we kind of went to film school on that, on your movie to figure out how to do that.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 10:05
I'm happy to help, I'm happy to help, Paul.
[Paul DeNigris]: 10:07
I haven't thanked you before, thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you for the faith that we could pull it off. So like I said, Peter and I have then collaborated on a number of projects and Peter's a close collaborator with my VFX producer, Jai Sathyan, who I met on this film and who has continued to work with me since then. So again, that movie, you know, just kind of like set the tone for my company and the team. And so it's a situation where, you know, now when Peter has VFX, he's bringing Jai and I on when we have projects like there was a title sequence on a horror movie that we did a couple of years ago, where we needed somebody with a vision to direct the opening title sequence and really shoot some interesting creepy stuff, you know, Peter, we brought Peter in. So it's kind of like a nice little family unit that we've got here that we continue to work together. So one of the things that we did was a zombie horror movie called DJZ that Peter directed and was a fun combo of practical on-set gore and some stuff that we did in post. Peter, why don't you talk about DJZ and kind of how that project came about.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 11:21
Yeah, so right as we were finishing up the sports film about 2016, 17, a good friend of mine who had shot a creature feature, a mega creature feature that I had done, which was very VFX heavy, he had gone on to be the DP of note on a TV show called Z Nation, which was a SyFy Channel, sort of low budget version of The Walking Dead. I was able to in 2017 fly out to Spokane, Washington and I shadowed on two episodes of the show, not episodes that my friend was directing, which was weird, but he and I had such a good rapport that he pitched me to some other directors on the show because I was friends with him. They said, yeah, sure, come on and check me out. I don't know you, but Alex vouches for you. You're a good guy. So I came off of that shadowing and I had I had dipped my toe into the mythology of Z Nation it was in its fourth season so there were a lot of episodes and what I wanted to do was my own version of Z Nation my interpretation of Z Nation, and show off my directing skills because I wanted to be in the mix on the next season, if I could, to direct. Directing television is something that I've aspired to do for a long time and with my indie background I felt. So we shot that movie up in the Mojave Desert. We used my garage as the bunker for the mysterious DJ who is broadcasting during the zombie apocalypse. And we really wanted to go practical, frankly. I, we created a mold of one of my lead actor's heads. We matched his hair perfectly. The switch from the real actor to the dummy, you cannot tell. And we filled the rubber head with all sorts of goo and grossness and bits of brain as you do. I'm sure just a typical Tuesday for any filmmaker. And on the day, of course, because we're working with practical effects and liquid and so on, we tried it and it looked very unimpressive. Instead of a large squirt and something that would make you react, emotionally, viscerally, gutturaly and go gross, you just went, that's it. And I was a little bit defeated. We had already started a collaboration on the sports film and I brought that to you through Jai and got really what I was looking for. One of the things I had to overcome as a filmmaker was having done some VFX stuff in the early 2010s. In my mind, VFX hadn't got to the point where liquids look like liquids. I'm also a big James Bond fan. Die Another Day has a terrible, terrible CG sequence. It's one of the worst in Bond history. Because they did that sequence, they rebooted with Casino Royale, which is a great, great film. So I'm thankful that it exists, terrible. And so I had this negativeness about it. And Jai said, let me bring it to Paul, let's see what we can do on this. And one of the things that you did Paul and your team, which I really loved is we had this little shot after, so you made the blood and we were now, now we're getting into as a director where I have the ability, you know, you showed me it, I went, no, I need bigger spurt. And then, you know, you're giving me the options, you're giving me those tools so that I can react creatively, which is always the dream of a director. Give me options. Let me make choices. That's your job as a director. Um, right after, so this head gets squashed, the brains and guts fly out of this zombie head. We cut back to it. Um, and you had the, the actual head brain matter, like sliding, which was just that little like cherry on top of like, if you watch it, and I've seen it with a crowd where people go like this, they turn away, then they look back and we get them again. So we go right to that. And they get that little bit of. So I always loved that. And it changed my confidence in what could be done with VFX as an indie filmmaker.
[Paul DeNigris]: 15:49
Great, yeah, that was a lot of fun because, you know, blood is a tricky thing. I always say that, you know, among the hardest things that we ever do is, are shots that have blood. Because everybody has an opinion on what looks right. We all think we know what blood looks like, right? And how it behaves and how it sprays and how it moves. Most of which is informed by horror movies. Some of it informed by reality. And the truth is, no two instances of blood ever look alike in the real world, in movies, you know, no matter what, right? Depends on a whole bunch of things like where it comes from, if it's oxygenated, you know, is it under pressure? Is the person dead already? Not dead, you know, there's all sorts of things they have to take into effect and into account. And everybody is like, it's not red enough. It's too red. It's not, it's not shiny enough. It's too shiny. It's too transparent. It's too this, it's too that. And so we end up going. Lots and lots of revisions on most blood shots, specifically because of that. But what was fun here was you had that practical reference. You did have practical blood, some that came out. So we had viscosity, we had color, we had gloss. So all we were doing was matching. In other words, we weren't creating it from our imaginations or from what we thought it should look like. And you weren't responding to it from what you thought it should look like. It was always... does it match what we got on camera? Does it look like it's in the frame with the other practical blood that didn't work as well but is still there and is setting the tone? So that was great because that's kind of the ideal scenario. Anytime a filmmaker comes to me with a shot where it's, we didn't do anything and I need you to add blood, that's when we're like, okay, we're off in fantasy land and it's gonna be 10 revisions before we get this shot dialed in. But a filmmaker comes in and says, I have some practical blood in here. I want more of that. That's, you know, we're not, we're knocking that out and you know, three or four revisions and everybody's happy. And it, and that was great. And then, yeah, then to add those little, those little extra textural elements like the, the head, you know, the, the practical head sort of collapsed a little bit kind of as it sort of, you know, ran out of stuff inside it after the stomp. And so adding that extra little, you know, squish of brain matter inside it. And then, and then to me, my favorite shot of the sequence is the guy who's stomped looks at the bottom of his shoe and we put a piece of bloody scalp on there and had it slide off.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 18:25
Yeah, it drops it drops off right before you cut away, which is awesome
[Paul DeNigris]: 18:29
Yeah, yeah. So that was that was a lot of fun. And again, it's you know, your practical effects people were setting the tone and then we were we were just playing in the sandbox that they had they had set up for us, right. As opposed to coming up with something from whole cloth, which is always a challenge. So you reference this earlier movie that you worked on that was very VFX heavy. And you've mentioned it to me before that you learned a lot of lessons on that. And that's Big Bad Bugs, correct?
[Peter Paul Basler]: 18:56
Yeah, it was released as The Vortex. This is before streaming was as popular as it is, but it still was a V word at the end of any list that you had alphabetized. And we had done this movie before Big Ass Spider, before Sharknado, and before the sort of tongue-in-cheek low-budge action thing was celebrated as much as it was. So it was originally called Big Bad Bugs, and like any great, good, low budget, we leaned into the comedy because I had, I was like every five pages I can do something VFX-wise, but I just don't have the budget for every two pages, right? That kind of math was going into it. And the distributor at the time said, no, The Vortex, that's what it's gotta be. We said, hey, you're the expert. And we had a five-year deal. So after five years, we got it back, and we've released it as Big Bad Bugs. It was a mega creature film. So these crystals are coming through a wormhole. When they hit these little creatures, they become mega creatures. So we have a mega scorpion. We have a mega hornet, mega snakes at the end, as you do, as you see in these type of films. I was shooting the end of the movie on a location that was a rental I was shooting the end of the movie on a location that was a rental in Santa Clarita. The Blue Cloud movie ranch has a full Iraqi village set that they built for the opening of the original Iron Man. So that whole Iraq sequence is still standing and it's been redressed to all sorts of Middle Eastern. It's not inexpensive for what it is because it's a massive facility. And as you do on low budget films, and I'd like to talk about this a little bit more too, is you do sort of a backend page count. You say, well, this is the money I've got. Every day that I add, I gotta feed all these folks and pay these folks and pay for blah blah blah. So the easy math was we're gonna shoot 10 to 12 pages a day, which is very ambitious,
[Paul DeNigris]: 21:19
Mm-hmm.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 21:19
which means you're doing very few takes. You're doing limited coverage. And you just got to rock and roll because you just got to get it done. And so we had this location for a day and a half. That's as much as we could. And I really felt as a filmmaker that I was just, I hope there's a VFX team that can, because at the end it was going to be snakes fighting. There were these crystals that were flying out. We had our lead actors ducking crystals that weren't there. There was so much in my head of what this end visual was going to be. And it's pretty good. You know, again, it's dated, it's 2011. Luckily, again, my tone was comedic. So we could lean into some of the flaws as if we meant to do that if that makes sense. And it was a crash course, it was it was my learning curve on what how much you could get away with VFX and how costly they were going to be and what the expectation from the industry was on how they were going to look. And I think that helped me to be more confident when I'm doing an end sequence like I was doing in Nebraska for the figure skating competition because I already kind of been through the fire before I knew what I needed if that makes sense.
[Paul DeNigris]: 22:36
Yeah, yeah, that does make sense. And that's something that I try to cover with a lot of my guests is that learning curve. It's the point of this podcast is really for filmmakers like you were in 2011 who are new to this, right? They're new to using VFX as a tool because most of us, we come through film school. And we learned how to use sound as a tool and lighting as a tool. And the camera as a tool to tell our stories. And VFX is something that's that wasn't really attainable. You know, when, when we were coming up, it wasn't something that, that independent filmmakers or student filmmakers could even touch. So there was no way to learn about it. And it's only been in the last, you know, 20 years, 20 plus years that desktop VFX software, like After Effects, uh, made it possible for us to even consider visual effects as a tool for independent filmmaking. And your comparison to television, you talk about Z Nation and wanting to direct TV. In my mind, TV and independent film are very similar in terms of short schedules, not as much money as a big budget feature. You have to do more with less. And you're... A lot of times you're compromising the vision in order to get it on air in seven days. It's very, very similar. How has that experience with Big Bad Bugs or The Vortex, how has that experience, if you could put a fine point on it, how now you use VFX to help you tell your stories? Knowing that you've got that arrow in your quiver. How are you using it when you're facing that blank page writing a new story?
[Peter Paul Basler]: 24:32
So there's two ways, I think. If we're talking about facing the blank page, understanding where VFX is at and what you can do on a budget and what you can accomplish does inform me when I'm writing. Because originally it would be the edict was just write it and then you figure it out later. And so there's a studio version of your space thriller and then there's a low-budget version of the space thriller. Doesn't change a word, but the VFX and the time you're on set does change quite a lot. I was, as you were chatting just now, Paul, I had a thought, you know, I've been doing it for a while and I was joking as we started it, you know, started in the early 2000s. But when I started, my first film was a feature on film. And coming out of the film school, it was what you captured in the frame is what you got. That's the way your mindset was. So you would be, as a director, you would be scanning the background. I don't want that license plate in the shot. It's not of the state we're supposed to be in or whatever. The image that you captured was what you lived with forever, and that was the thing. And so that really informed how you'd made your choices. I noticed as we got into the 2010s that there was a shift also with my crew. So for example, when we were doing Big Bad Bugs, we shot at the Griffith Caves, which are the famous Batman Caves in Los Angeles. And one day a hiker was stuck at the top of the, like way up in the mountains. And so the LAPD sent a helicopter to get the hiker off the ledge, which is very, very noisy if you're trying to shoot an independent film. But again, we only had that for two days because it was a low budget movie and I had to keep shooting. So I said to the sound guy, get me the best scratch track you could. Everybody kind of understood that. They understood what was gonna happen. We can do ADR later. We'll pick that up and we move forward. However, you know, when I was doing a film in the mid 2010s, 2015 or so, there was a time when the mic kind of dipped into the frame, right? Here's my mic dipping into the frame. And one of my sound or one of the crew people yelled boom and killed the take that I loved. So I turned and I said, look, guys, I have eyes. I know that the boom was in the shot. Let's not. If I like the take, we can cut that out, we can paint that out. There was some understanding, and obviously a younger generation is quicker on the computer, but it wasn't as commonplace as now. I think if I had that same conversation on a feature, they would easily get it, if that makes sense. So because of that too, you're always making choices. That's your job as a director. And you go, all right, I've got a beautiful two shot. I really want to punch in on Paul's face for this next sequence. I got to see the emotion. And there are times when I will, as a director, go back and say, wait a minute, we were shooting this 4K, 5K, whatever K we're at these days. And I've got a great performance here. I can, in post, I can take that two shot and make it a single, jump back. And it feels like to the audience that I did a new setup. I swapped a lens.
[Paul DeNigris]: 27:57
Mm-hmm.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 27:57
I swung the lights a different place. And I haven't done it. I've taken that to post. Now that's not traditional VFX in a way, but it is. You're altering the frame in some way that's different than it was presented. So that is one of the tools that I always keep in the back of my mind about how much can we play with this frame? What do I need to get? Because it's always a matter, especially on the low budget world, which is where I live, a matter of math. I've got this many pages. And sometimes, you even do the math where you say, I need to get this information out. It wasn't the best performance. It wouldn't give me my top 10 of the day, but it gets the information, it gets me from A to B. This is a transitional scene, et cetera, et cetera. I can live with that. So I say all that to say that it gives you a confidence. It gives you a feeling like you can get things done. It changes the way you approach and then the more that you see what a VFX team can deliver for you and the closer they get to an image that you've lived with in your head and when you were writing it when you're on set and you're shooting it again it informs you. One of the things I used to always say about the post process is man you write it you shoot it and then you know where you learn how to do it? When you're editing because when you're editing you're going who shot this crap? Oh wait, that was me. Who wrote this darn scene that's too long and needs too many extras? That was me. And it informs your process when you start over, right? Nothing stands by itself. It's all part of this process. And it is incredible how VFX has changed so much. When we did Big Bad Bugs, we actually went to a company in LA that had done Robert Zemeckis' latest film. I forget what it was at the time. And whatever choices we made, they would say, guys, we are so fast. Give us two and a half hours and we'll render this and you get to see what it looks like. We're like, whoa, in two and a half hours, we can see what this is gonna look like? That's so great. And we would wait, you know, and then they would turn it and you're like, no, I need to change this. All right, well, in two and a half hours, we'll show you the change, you know? And how much, again, this is 2011, 12, how much, you know. that has changed where now you can see it almost in real time and the options presented to you on a level that's equal or better to what we were doing in the early 2010s.
[Paul DeNigris]: 30:31
Yeah. Yeah, you and I haven’t had a chance to collaborate on a on a film where we use Unreal Engine, which is real time. It's when we do get this opportunity, you're going to love it. We did a Western recently where we had to create a cave interior for the filmmaker and we were able to just over Zoom. Basically, a conversation like this, just share screen of Unreal Engine. And he was able to say, let's move the camera here. Let's put it. Let's put a little more light there as if he was on set working with his cinematographer. So yeah, it's a completely new world,
[Peter Paul Basler]: 31:04
That's amazing.
[Paul DeNigris]: 31:06
So you were talking about, you know, the punch in to create a separate close up. Another thing that we've been doing a lot of recently is the split screen comp, where you have two actors whose rhythm is slightly different. And your take one, you know, actor A is giving you gold in take one, take two, take three, and then they start to their energy starts to wane. And actor B doesn't warm up until take you know, five, six, seven, and now you've got, so you've got two different performances. And then the filmmakers would just go, give me actor A from take one on the left side of the frame and give me actor B from take seven on the right side of the frame, stitch em together, preserving the camera movement and all of that sort of stuff. And it adds that extra dimension to your editing. It's not just, you know, individual shots that you're able to use to craft a performance. It's within the frame. You can... craft the performances and create a better ensemble.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 32:04
Yeah, I did that in my very first film, the one we shot on film. We had recorded the, we had the audio of the first guy's part of being on the phone, and we were able to play that on set so the second guy knew the timing. But it was because of the, when we did it, and because we're shooting on film, there was no choice. It was either this lines up, This one doesn't line up. We can't use it. You know, if you choose A, then it forces you on your choice of B. And it is funny for me as a filmmaker because there is a moment toward the end where they fall out and the guy, our lead says something and then his sidekick is supposed to respond and there's like a three second pause which feels like an eternity. Where he finally goes, oh, okay. Luckily it's something where he's getting his nerves so it almost creatively works. Yeah, but back in the day you were locked in. And again, the more you can provide a director the opportunity to make choices, the closer you can get to their vision because without choices, then you're just forced into, you're forced into stuff that just, you know, it works. As I said, sometimes you go, well, this isn't the perfect sequence, but you know, I need this information for exposition. I'll leave it, cut it down, or figure it out in post, that type of thing. But yeah, what VFX now has done, because it is available and affordable to the indie filmmaker, it has allowed you more opportunities to make creative choices, which can only mean a better end product for the viewer. And that's what you're all chasing.
[Paul DeNigris]: 33:54
You know, I wanted to speak to another point that you made where you said when you were shooting on film, you were really inspecting the frame and going, oh, that license plate is out of place. We need to we need to get that out of frame. I really wish that would come back. I really do. I mean, as much as I appreciate being paid to paint out boom poles and paint out license plates and paint out crew reflections. I really would much rather see filmmakers spend their VFX budget on fun stuff, fun, creative stuff that actually helps them tell their story. We get a lot of work where it's, you know, if the filmmakers had just moved the camera three inches to the left and panned, it would eliminate the reflection of the crew. The shot would be more or less the same. It would serve the same purpose in the story, but they're not burning hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars for us to... paint them and their camera out of the reflection of the bus window or whatever. In some ways, the ubiquity and the ease of visual effects has created some laziness in that regard, right? The, ah, we'll just, yeah, we'll just paint it out. We're moving too fast, we have so many pages to shoot today. Don't worry about it, we'll deal with it in post. And then they're trying to scramble to pull coins out of the couch cushions to pay us to do it instead of paying us to do something fun that really helps them tell their story.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 35:28
Yeah, I mean, to your point, I mean, I think, and I've been there, I was a first AD for a good long period in, and I felt I was getting older and the directors kept staying in their early 20s and it was, and you were seeing that a lot. That was the, you know, sort of everything's rolling and then they have one more comment, they step in frame and they're like talking to their actor, you know, the kind of stuff that we were taught when that camera's rolling, think of it as dollar bills rolling through the camera. So, you know. Once you, that's the sacred, that is the sacred time. And once you hit record, it's gotta be what you want. So somewhere in between is probably what's the ideal for that because again, for me, when I need to make my 10 and a half pages, it's a blessing that I can do that. I can fix it in post. But yeah, to your point, it also makes for sloppier filmmaking in that, well, we'll figure it, we'll fix it, we'll fix it, we'll fix it, until your list of fix-its are more than the list of stuff that you got right. So I feel you on that. I try to keep a happy medium, I hope, but again, the world I live in is a lot of times it's move, make it happen. And I think that's the... the give and take that every filmmaker has to think about when they're on set.
[Paul DeNigris]: 37:01
Yeah, absolutely. We just did a Christmas movie. We do a lot of Christmas movies. And we just did a Christmas movie where the filmmakers had to decide between a bunch of stock footage of the city that they wanted to add Christmas decorations to help set the tone for the film. They had to decide between spending money on that or spending money on the crew reflections and boom reflections and things like that. And they ended up having to, because the network is not going to air the movie with crew reflected prominently in the, in, you know, windows and stuff. They had to prioritize the QC fixes, right? The things that, that QC is going to flag instead of spending the money on the story stuff that they really wanted to. And it's, it's a shame because again, things, money's finite, right? Money is always finite on, on every production. It doesn't matter how big it is. And it's, there's almost no excuse for it. Right. With, with how good our monitoring technology is, right. There's no reason to, to not have a big monitor at video village. There's no reason for a director to not have a, a handheld display in his hand, his or her hand all the time, you know, where you can just, all right, let's, let's just pause for five seconds. Just move the camera. Okay. Now we can roll. I just eliminated a VFX shot.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 38:26
Yeah.
[Paul DeNigris]: 38:28
And I'm, I'm all for it. I'm all for it. Please eliminate all those VFX shots. Let's do fun stuff.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 38:35
Good. I totally agree. I was thinking too, I did a film that I AD'd where it was a famous DP and she had, she'd been working for a long time, obviously started in film. And we were doing an insert shot, and she lit that insert shot like, you know, this is going for Oscar gold. And you're like, man, it's just an insert, you know, there's always that fine line. And again, I felt like for me, I was the young guy in that situation and I was doing the math in my head saying, um, we can, we can stabilize this in post. It's literally a static insert shot. We can give it a look, you know what I mean? Get a clean shot, move on. Let's not make it perfect on set because the amount of work that we can do in post is not a lot, it's just, you know, tweaking the color, correct. It'll match it. And you, you know, um, and where we were spending all the time on, you know, blah blah blah. So it's, it's always about kind of knowing where you're at in the process. And I feel like, again, for me, having been doing it for a long time, the technology is changing rapidly and it changes quicker every time. Which is one of the things I like about the fact I do a lot of short films. People always ask me, why do you do short films? Because it allows me to flex a muscle in a creative way that's different than what I've done before. You know, if I get inspired by a zombie thing or a sports film or whatever. And then I'm... kind of staying up to date. I'm in the game and like any other muscle that you, you know, it can atrophy. And so keeping yourself engaged and keeping thinking about stuff and that way you're forced into new decisions and the technology, like I said, is changing. And so you're always sort of trying to stay up to the moment, right? I mean, if you dropped out and you came back into the industry in five years, five years from now, think how much change is happening at this moment with AI and all these things. you would be a little bit lost, right? So it's something that keeps me fresh and allows me to, like I said, flex the creative muscle, but also stay kind of as current as I can be with technology.
[Paul DeNigris]: 40:45
So yeah, we've collaborated on a couple of shorts recently, The Pragmatist, which I guess you've got bigger plans for, maybe turning into a TV series, at least according to IMDB.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 40:57
We shot that as a sort of a backdoor pilot. And we wanted it to feel very much like something you'd see on network TV, like an NCIS or a procedural. And the writer on that has a whole bible and episodes that he's written for the first season. And we've been playing the festival circuit with that and getting some noise and excited about that one.
[Paul DeNigris]: 41:22
You want to talk about some of the challenges or problems that we helped solve with VFX on Drop of Blood?
[Peter Paul Basler]: 41:31
Yeah, so that was definitely a case of the budget informing how fast we moved. I'll be real frank with you guys and your viewers. We shot very quickly and there was footage even that was out of focus and you're all you're all you're faced with all these issues in post and I was kind of defeated on the project for a little bit. And then we realized because it's a horror film and one of the things I wanted to do was scratch it up, scuff it up and mess with it and stuff, I could sort of lean into the flaws. And we had shot everything we had put a GoPro mounted, our lead actor is coming up to a sink, so the frame is sort of like this, and you're seeing his face as he's going through these emotions and he's going through this transformation, the drop of blood causes things to happen in a horrific, chaotic way. And the practical kitchen had a window that sort of looked through the kitchen into the dining room. And again, so back in the day, if we were gonna, we would live with that and then we would dress through that, right? And there would be a PA with a walkie sitting right there that like, you can't walk through here or you will die and all sorts of, it would be very serious on set. And then someone would inevitably walk in and ruin a take or something would happen and through story. And we'd be sort of worrying about that all on set. I actually set up this little GoPro as almost an afterthought thinking it might be cool. Because we had footage issues and so on, we really went to that shot a lot and leaned on it. And there were several shots where you had a crew and other actors sticking their head into the window looking at what's going on, just having a great time enjoying craft services, whatever. There was a whole other movie happening in that little window.
[Paul DeNigris]: 43:20
Plus equipment, equipment on the table in the back. Yeah.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 43:23
Yeah, it was all gear and goop and the wardrobe was hanging. It was a mess. And again, I said, you know, one of the things you guys do a lot of is a ton of work to make it feel like you haven't done a thing. And that was definitely a case in point because that window then all it became was just a solid wall. I believe there were maybe one or two handheld shots in there as well that you had to,
[Paul DeNigris]: 43:45
Mm-hmm.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 43:46
you know, a little bit more difficult. And, and yeah, and me kind of in the back of my head doing that math as a director saying yeah, we'll throw this shot up there I know that it's gonna be wide fish-eyed, but I can punch maybe it's gonna be something like that maybe I can use it, you know, and like I said because of the problems we had on set with the footage from that we went to that a lot more than I intended It was kind of a save my butt if you will but it worked and you guys cleaned up all the window stuff and no one was the wiser.
[Paul DeNigris]: 44:21
Right. I love stuff like that. I mean, you know, I do get filmmakers who are like, I'm sorry. We're making you put on all this work and no one's going to even know you were there. And I'm like, I kind of like that. I kind of like, you know, if somebody saw Drop of Blood and saw Visual Effects by Foxtrot X-Ray, if they went to you, Peter, where were the VFX? I didn't see any.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 44:39
Right.
[Paul DeNigris]: 44:39
That's when yes, we did our job. Love that. OK, so if you met a young filmmaker or not so young filmmaker who's new to using VFX and they said, uh, you know, I'm, I'm about to make a feature or a short, and I know I'm going to need VFX and I'm really nervous about it, Peter, you know, give me one piece of advice that, that will help smooth this process for me, give me the guide me so that I don't have to learn from all the mistakes that you've learned from him in the past.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 45:11
Sure. I guess I would coach them in saying, look, don't think of VFX as this big hurdle to overcome. Don't be worried about it being so costly that the only people that can do it are studios. I would also have that filmmaker find a VFX company that has something on their reel that they respond to and do a meeting and set that up from the beginning. I think it's much easier if it's a collaboration on a shot than, Paul, we've shot this, we messed this all up, can you fix it? Or this is what the vision is and you're like, I understand what your vision is, let's be very clear, I can see this huge monster, you don't have a plate, where am I putting that, you know, on this footage it doesn't match your vision, right? So I would do that. I would say also for them to look at projects that are out there as well. So if it's a sci-fi thing, if it's a horror thing, look at stuff that's been done recent that your contemporaries have done in a similar budget range, and you can kind of get a sense of what can be done. You can use that as a rule of thumb. And. It's pretty it's pretty incredible again how much VFX have changed and become accessible. So if it's a sci-fi movie, you're playing with tone and you're playing with stuff that we've created in our mind, but it's not real. I mean, space shuttles are real. Astronaut suits are real, but the rest of it, an alien is pretend far away planets are pretend. We have references from other big features, plus Blade Runner, Star Wars, those type of things. So there is a sort of milieu that we're used to, but it's not, you can get fantastic, you can get it to look pretend because we want to believe we're in that mindset. If you're doing something that's a fight sequence and then people strip down and muscles and so on, fake blood might not work, it might take you out of the moment. It could be something like Quentin Tarantino, like when the necks get sliced and it's like a spray of blood, but it's hyper-realistic. and you've gone into that hyper-realism. So you need to make choices and understand what the VFX are telling your audience. You can get away with a lot. You can get it to look very realistic with what you're doing with your timeframe and your budget. If you want it to be very realistic and it's not something that can be done with VFX, then you might have to think about how do I do this practical? How do I remove wires? How do I... remove the things that will make it feel real. And liquid has gotten to a point where it can feel, and as we were talking about, you know, with the goo coming out of the head explosion, I've done some blood stuff that looks very real, where you've added blood into a sequence. And again, on that type of a project, if it looked pretend, if it looked stylized, I couldn't use it because what I needed was it to feel visceral, to feel like the lead actor got the crap beat out of him and that there was danger and I needed you to believe it. And luckily we've gotten to a point where the VFX is so good and you can get something that's gonna be believable.
[Paul DeNigris]: 48:52
Right. So understanding the limitations and also understanding what the audience will accept and, uh, kind of understanding that the audience is our partner. Right. In a lot of ways you can pull off a lot with sound, right? You can pull off a lot with shadows that the audience can fill in the blanks with, um, uh, you know, sort of the barest sketch of an idea on the, in the frame. and focusing your attention on what that sketch is and how it conveys that feeling in the audience. That's good advice. I mean, so many times it is, people think that VFX is this catch-all, right? It's gonna solve all my problems and I'm just gonna shoot on green screen and we're gonna build the set in post or whatever. And in reality, it's like less is more. If you think back to the movies of our youth, right? Alien, like you don't see the alien hardly at all.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 49:54
Mm-hmm.
[Paul DeNigris]: 49:55
Jaws, you don't see the shark hardly at all, right? But they're no less threatening. In fact, they're more threatening than the last Sharknado movie where it's just shark after shark after shark after shark. Right? And some of that is because again, visual effects is ubiquitous and quote unquote easy. And they're focused more on the spectacle than on evoking the response in the audience. Yeah. So it's good advice. It's good advice for sure. You know, I always say people when they criticize movies that are heavy on VFX are like, oh, there's too much CGI. And my response is you wouldn't say they shot this movie with too many lights. Right? It's not a matter of. too much CGI. It's a matter of CGI that's not well executed
[Peter Paul Basler]: 50:51
Right.
[Paul DeNigris]: 50:51
and isn't helping tell the story and it's taking you out of the story. Right? You wouldn't say they use too many cameras on this shot. Well, maybe you, maybe you would if it's over edited, right? You know, CGI is a tool. VFX is a tool. Nobody's going to go, there were too many grips on that movie. That's why I didn't like it. Right. So what's next for you, Peter? What do you have in the hopper? I know you always have some cool stuff on the horizon.
[Peter Paul Basler]: 51:19
I have a time travel thriller that is very cool. It's like a five to six million dollar budget. Stephen Baldwin, the youngest of the brothers, is one of the producers on that project. And he's very well known in the Christian market. And one of my actor friends who's been in a lot of movies, 12 different projects that I've worked on, Michael Monks knows Stephen quite well. So that project is hopefully post-strike, one of the ones that we get to play with pretty soon. According to Stephen's team, it's a matter of when, not if that was our latest that we've heard from them. So we're super excited, super excited. I won't give the name of the title away, but and that is a time travel sequence and there's a time travel thriller. So there's gonna be some gun work. There's gonna be, there's a sequence at the end where our hero is on a... an active test ground for a machine that can diffuse bombs and so on. So he's in sort of a battle sequence. How do we do that? It should look realistic, but be safe for our actor. There's also a zapping sequence. So when the person travels through time, they're going through sort of a wormhole. And we've seen a lot of that with Star Trek and stuff. So there's that type of a thing. So that one's coming up. Again, you know, the strike being what it is, right? There's some things that have slowed us down. I do have another project that I'm super excited about. A friend of mine is a multi-arm amputee and an actor. And he is a bit of an older cat than me, and very funny, kind of lovable grouch in some ways in real life. And so it's gonna be like a Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, sort of he's playing like a heightened version of himself. And as somebody who now he was disabled in his late 20s, he's in his 60s, so he's lived more of his life with a disability than he did with arms. He's heard everything and had every kind of weird encounter, you know, just walking by and people are like, thank you for your service, he's never been in the military. People who are super religious wanna pray with him, randomly, you know, all this kind of stuff. And he's just trying to go to Home Depot and you know what I mean, like trying to go to the grocery store and get a gallon of milk and all this stuff happens. Or the checkout girl who's giving him change and is so flustered because he's got hooks. She doesn't know what to do and she shoves it all into his pocket and his pockets now. Like, you know, like it's just, it kind of writes itself from what his life has been. And so we're doing that as 30 minute episodes. And we want to, we possibly will raise the money ourselves and do six episodes, put it up on YouTube or kind of find an avenue for it. And using kind of what The Pragmatist model we did. So have the end product look almost like it could be on network today. So those are the things I'm working on, I do have another horror/thriller that we're rewriting and it's a young African-American kid growing up in suburban New England and adopted. He's in this all white world. He's the only kid of color with these fancy houses where the perfect lawns but then behind everything is the facade and everything's all messed up and he's living this terrible life and it's very bleak. But it's ending on a moment of hope. It's very much a festival piece. We might get down and dirty and do that one, super low budget. Even during the strike, we might be able to get the interim agreement to start shooting. So, yeah, so, you know, always looking at that next thing, always juggling. If you're an indie, that's what you gotta do to keep the, like I said, keep the muscle from atrophying and getting something out there.
[Paul DeNigris]: 55:17
Yeah, for sure. Well, looking forward to our next opportunity to collaborate and also looking forward to just watching whatever you make next. It's because it's always, it's always different. You, every, you, you haven't made the same movie twice in, uh, in our, our time that we've worked together every, every time. I think I've kind of got the sense of what a Peter Basler movie is, you surprise me with the, with the next one. So, uh,
[Peter Paul Basler]: 55:39
Thanks, man, I try not to be pigeonholed. That's one of the things, and to my detriment, I don't know, maybe I should be the rom-com guy, but I just love it all, so I like to play.
[Paul DeNigris]: 55:54
Yeah, keep flexing those muscles. That's all you can do, right? So if people wanna follow you on social media, where can they find you?
[Peter Paul Basler]: 56:02
So I do have a website, I know that's old fashioned, but it's peterpaulbasler my last name is B as in boy, A, S as in Sam, L, E, R, PeterPaulBasler.com. And yeah, I'm sort of on the Insta, but I don't really do it, I don't TwitterX. But I'm with Bohemia Group Management and Global Talent as my agency. Hit me up on IMDB and IMDB Pro and you can see all my credits. And yeah, if you're down to, if you need some advice, if you're in that, if you're in, if you're one of those filmmakers who's thinking about doing a project and you have creative questions about VFX and how it can help and enhance and how do you do it, I'd love to talk as you can tell. My wife likes to say this. There's one thing I like to talk about is filmmaking. So thank you, Paul, for bringing me on. I appreciate it.
[Paul DeNigris]: 56:53
Yeah, thank you so much for being part of the show and listeners, take Peter up on that, right? That's a really gracious offer of his time and expertise. So please take him up on that. And thank you to all my viewers and listeners for tuning into this episode of VFX for Indies. If you're watching on YouTube, please like, subscribe, leave us a comment, let us know what you liked and what you'd like to hear more of. And if you have questions for me or Peter or any of my guests, please leave a comment. If you're listening on any of the multitude of podcast aggregator services out there, like iTunes, Spotify, a follow, a star rating, and a review goes a long way to help, help us reach more filmmakers. And, and if you know any filmmakers, the filmmaker in your life who needs to hear this stuff, please send them the episode. Thanks so much. And for everyone at Foxtrot X-Ray, thanks for tuning in. See you next time.
