Forever Home: Creating Horror Comedy Magic on a Shoestring 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 Latham, 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.

Transcript

Paul DeNigris: 0:01

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 Music. With me today are Sean Oliver and Drew Latham, 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 100 visual effects shots for. Welcome to the podcast, guys. Hi thanks for having us. So before we jump into Forever Home and there's a lot to talk about there let's give the audience just kind of a quick overview of who you guys are, what you've done and what led you to make Forever Home as a debut feature.

Sean Oliver: 1:28

Sure, so my name is Sean Oliver and I co-wrote the script with Drew and I directed it and also edited it. I'm an independent filmmaker. This is my very first 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 played at a special screening sponsored by the Red Cross over in Japan about a couple years ago. And yeah, I'll let Drew introduce himself a little bit.

Drew Leatham: 2:00

My name is Drew Leatham. 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. Been teaching piano for almost 10 years now and I've acted all around the Southwestern states Probably some of my favorite gigs with Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival here in Arizona and some of my just favorite memories. Basically, I've been really excited to kind of go through our little history here and I've been. What I want to share is kind of like almost five years back now, pre-quarantine, and it 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 callbacks 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 asked me for like what's the most important thing? I was like you know, it was just these really weird auditions in Chicago like before COVID, and I keep like coming back to that room and it's just important memories. So yeah, yeah, 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: 3:18

Yeah, so Forever Home, like Paul said, is a horror comedy and it's kind of that classic setup about a young couple who purchased a new home only to realize that it's haunted, but kind of switching up 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 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 kind of a community of us finally coming together to produce something a lot bigger than we had in the past.

Paul DeNigris: 4:22

So it sounds like kind of your little film, your film and acting tribe that you've put together for years and years and years.

Drew Leatham: 4:29

Yeah, it's almost a decade.

Paul DeNigris: 4:30

Yeah, that's a recurring theme. A lot of the guests that I've brought on they talk about. Well, you know, we were making our first feature and it was who are the people that we've been working with all this time and who are the people that we found along the way that were like, hey, you need to come into this project with us? And it's very much about finding your tribe and finding common vision to jump into the craziness of making independent films.

Sean Oliver: 4:56

It's always felt very similar to like playing like like a dragon age, but for filmmaking, 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 jumpstart straight into a feature and you don't have a party and it's like you want to go kill a dragon, like maybe you can, 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: 5:22

People you know you can count on Right on how long was the whole process of making Forever Home. So pre-production production posts kind of break that down into the sentence.

Sean Oliver: 5:33

So some of it really started to just stay kind of in the early COVID. It was an old idea that I had had written down, which was just this idea of you know, really it was roommates, so it was roommates who move into a new house and literally I lived with a friend of mine. We moved to like 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, well, 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, like oh well, like 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 sometime in COVID the lead, sammy Ladine 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 like if we write something we can work with Sammy, like at the tail end before she goes back to New York, and had that idea. And so we instantly thought of Drew, thought of Sammy, thought of our friend Cody, who plays kind of the third lead, max, in the movie, and that those, those few elements really came together to kind of crack the code and make the script that was going to be not only like something we really liked and very, very funny, but like very achievable and something that we could film locally with what we had Very early brought brought Drew in. I mean, 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 the Drew just kept bugging me about it and it was like, well, dude, you just need to just write this.

Drew Leatham: 7:18

Like you know, you're on it with me let's make it, let's make it, and that was probably, I think I want to say October of 2020,. Sean had put some stuff down on the paper.

Sean Oliver: 7:30

And I read it Probably had a first draft March.

Drew Leatham: 7:34

No, I went, yeah, I even I made a little list just up March 18, 2021, first draft done first draft, and then it changed quite a few times Just hit the.

Sean Oliver: 7:43

I mean we, you know I would slow things down if we did this again, but Sammy had to go back to New York date and we were trying to kind of meet that in the fall, so instantly just started raising money, started, you know, pre-planning while rewriting, because we kind of, you know, we know we needed a house. It's a haunted house, it's mostly one location we were filming by August 2021.

Drew Leatham: 8:05

And then basically took about a year in post for everything to come together.

Sean Oliver: 8:10

So 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 of half days. That would you know. 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 a couple of days, you know, 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 know. Oh, it's such an old haunted house. You know, 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: 9:02

Very neat, very neat, and that was an Airbnb that you used.

Drew Leatham: 9:06

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 at Sean had literally gone through a bunch of places on Airbnb, showed me pictures and I was like I know that place, like let's use that one, and so it was just super easy to book it through her. And then she was also kind of 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.

Paul DeNigris: 9:44

Gotcha, you know that didn't even compute for me. It's so seamless I just, I just thought it was all the lie.

Sean Oliver: 9:50

Yeah.

Drew Leatham: 9:51

No, you're in the weeds, you know, worried about the entrance If you've ever in the movie.

Sean Oliver: 9:56

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: 10:11

Yeah, that's great, very ingenious. 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 it done.

Paul DeNigris: 10:24

That's actually really astounding. Uh, 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.

Sean Oliver: 10:39

It's maybe a little quicker now, but I would add some on to ours, if I could, especially just because you know we, we, we finished row 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. Um, I always like to say 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 like 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, um, and we're going to make that happen. And I think that was an important kickstart for us to just go and and maybe even, you know, 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: 11:28

Right, Well, you had put in your your work, your all your reps, your initial getting geared up uh, making shorts and doing them well, and you guys had sort of hit the ceiling for what you could achieve in the short form, you know. So this was the obvious next step for you to jump.

Drew Leatham: 11:49

No, it is a little bit that sensation of building the plane while it's in the air. But I forget that you're. You know, 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 Absolutely.

Paul DeNigris: 12:03

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, uh, to add to that, what was your experience like with VFX prior to this? Had you used VFX on shorts and you know?

Sean Oliver: 12:27

so you, you kind of were aware of that we had that factor Um, so we did a web series for a long time called a lucidity, which, uh, 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 low five visual effects, um, over the course of five years of making that show. Um, we never reached the likes of what you know Foxtrot does and other people create, but it gave us like a really good foundation of understanding masking keyframes, um, just like, even even if you're not able to execute the effect the perfect way, you still know what those steps are, um from having that experience in the past. So we were very conscious while writing Um. Then we'll talk more about some of the specific effects. But, like the red gloves, which are these floating red gloves, gloves that are in the movie Um, I always knew a couple of different ways that we might achieve it. Not even just like, oh, only I have to know exactly how we'll do it, but just knowing a rough estimate of like, if we say this is floating, yeah, we can make things flow, we know how to make things flow. Um, and that just comes from that aspect of really writing something that was achievable, doable. Um, 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. Um, so it was written at a level that worst case scenario. I can gut that out, you know, um, I can make that happen, I can. I can, I can frame by frame, mask that person out. Uh, and then, as we were able, we genuinely it was, we overraised 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 individual 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, we're very, very much planned to be in it.

Drew Leatham: 14:25

And there's uh, there's good examples, though, of just going from draft to draft, like originally we had a headless cello playing ghost and 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 play on that. And then we were like, oh, this isn't going to work. What's something simpler we could do, when ending 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, you know, but that that that relationship varied as we got closer to shooting.

Paul DeNigris: 14:59

Yeah, I could tell right from our initial conversations that you guys had put a lot of thought into how the effects were going to be deployed, that we were not able to do that. There was an awareness of what you were going to need to provide to my team. We weren't starting from scratch sometimes and part, you know, part of the reason for this podcast is to help the indie filmmaker who is starting from scratch, who doesn't know. You know, how do I even start with VFX? How do we start the conversation before they even think about coming to an outside vendor? You know, how do I? How do I write it, how do I plan for it, how do I shoot it? How do I get on the same page so we can even just talk the same language? And right out of the gate you were. You were on that level right. You were coming to us and I was like have you thought about this, yep, have you thought about this? Yep? You kind of had the checklist down.

Sean Oliver: 15:55

I think that that comes from. What my advice would be to someone who hasn't had any of that foundation is is, even you don't have to do visual effects in a short film, but you could just just to do, test and experiment and even if you're not going to do them, watch the tutorials, because it's it's what 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 I mean to their visual effects people like and then you'll just fix. You know 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. You know like these are even some of these are some of the lessons I learned that we can go through about forever home, um, 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 like I always want to serve the best footage I can to, like, you know, my colorists, 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, you know, it's just. Like. You know, 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. I think that's. I think that's important to filmmaker. 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: 17:23

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.

Sean Oliver: 17:44

It's all usually fun. Yeah, like it's not. It's not tedious stuff, it's cool Right, understand the terminology.

Paul DeNigris: 17:50

Understand the terminology you know. Learn the difference between a boom mic and a laugh so you can communicate with your sound mixer. You know those sorts of things Doesn't mean you need to be an expert at visual effects. It's just having a little bit of forethought and a little bit of foreknowledge and doing some research. I mean, the internet is a treasure trove of stuff out there for you to learn, you know. 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 Every.

Sean Oliver: 18:23

Marvel effects right, Either the people who did it.

Paul DeNigris: 18:27

Yeah, either the people who did it have published a tutorial for it or a channel that's, you know, targeting independent filmmakers, like Film Riot, or something they have gone and figured out. Like, 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. Yeah, I am. Yeah, 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: 19:31

Totally no. Thank you, I'm glad that shows through. Yeah, absolutely.

Paul DeNigris: 19:36

So let's dive into the visual effects, because 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, you know all of 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 turned black and the doorknob gags. You guys had two conceits in the movie that sort of lampshaded the idea of when characters are in a haunted house, why do they stay? Why don't they just get the hell out of there, right? So you had two things. You had the we can't afford to move and then at one point the house is like you can't leave anyway.

Sean Oliver: 20:29

Once the characters finally decide we should leave, the house locks down.

Paul DeNigris: 20:34

We got a brand new problem now, and so we achieved that by some various things that we did to the doorknobs.

Sean Oliver: 20:41

Did I forget any? The exploding and recreating bottles?

Paul DeNigris: 20:48

That's right, that's right your matrix animatrix. For those of you who have seen the animatrix, we've got a wonderful animatrix.

Sean Oliver: 20:57

Nod for all thousand of you that still remember it. I say it all the time and people are like no, I didn't see it. Why are we all sleeping on?

Paul DeNigris: 21:05

the animatrix. Still, I love the animatrix, it's still good. The second renaissance. Those two faulded my dreams.

Drew Leatham: 21:16

I don't know why sci-fi?

Paul DeNigris: 21:17

filmmakers aren't just still ripping off the animatrix. 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, well, you go ahead, you describe it.

Sean Oliver: 21:33

Judy, do you want to describe the scene?

Drew Leatham: 21:35

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 brought these leftover bottles because dad had a bad day and they go ahead, they throw them down onto the rug and they start breaking and what you see is that they kind of like fizz in and out, basically they shatter, and then they kind of hang their suspended frozen and then zip back up, almost like they get stitched back together and just fling back with their original momentum right where they threw them from, and the kids just catch them.

Sean Oliver: 22:11

So, yeah, 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 like Should it have? Like I don't remember, like you know, should it like hold and freeze, or does it need to kind of like re-explode, then come back down and re-explode? And it did go through some iterations on the visual effect to kind of get it to that place where it felt Warbly enough, I guess. And then I know that that was one where Lessons learned on that effect. I think we really should have shot it at a 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 had been shot it at. But that was one of my lessons about Visual effects and how, like you know, normally I'm locking that shutter in and leaving it. You know, in real just in relation to my frame rate Right. But there are these moments where you know this shot isn't about getting a cinematic quality out of the picture. This shot is about obtaining data that is going to be manipulated in the visual effects later, and that means different considerations in the settings that we lock in.

Paul DeNigris: 23:44

Yeah, you know for me that the thing that I kept bumping on as we were working on it, you know and we figured out pretty early on that that you were gonna want to have that control of how, how much and how far and how many times it sort of like warped in and out, and so I was able to essentially take all those attributes and put them on one slider that I could keyframe, so so that that worked really well and I could even like 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 gonna sort of fluctuate and do it, do its thing, nice. But what I was bumping on was when the shards, when the, the bottle hits and breaks apart, in order to convincingly sort of 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 is like they were. They were flying outwards, so they had this motion blur trail behind them. I wanted to be able to sort of freeze it. Yeah, turn off the motion blur and then have motion blur go the opposite direction. As it came back together and I was, I was sort of limited in terms of what I could do and and how a hundred yeah, 100% yeah, and and that that was like.

Sean Oliver: 24:59

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 punching and break another bottle for a close-up. I just think that would have been cool to have gone into a close-up of the warble, but it's all it's all done in a master, in a wide shot, right, which is good because you get that, you get the kids reactions and that's nice right, and it's that's my other regret. It's nice punching.

Paul DeNigris: 25:22

I get it. It would have been a really cool thing to show off that. You know the effect, but. But what works really well in the master is that the two kids, their frame rate and their reaction stays normal. Yeah right, so they're still doing their 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 them, where the kids are. Yeah, seeing that relationship does help. Yeah, I think it. I think it helps to sell it, as Did this quote-unquote happened in camera.

Sean Oliver: 25:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul DeNigris: 25:58

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, he throws it and then he gets distracted. So when it comes back, it just yeah, don't beans him right in the head, yeah, and so that that works really well too.

Sean Oliver: 26:19

And that, the sound. That was what I was a sound, sound design element. We had to wait till we had the effect right because we needed to score it basically to the movements and yeah, it's like 10 layers of different kinds of glass noises, yeah, yeah it works really really well.

Paul DeNigris: 26:36

Let's um, let's dive into the ghosts, because that's another, another big thing. And you, 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 so what? What did you mean by a clean plate so?

Sean Oliver: 26:56

this would be a clean plate when to go. So if we were doing a visual effect 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 background, do 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. 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 that's 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: 27:58

No, that's. I think that's the easiest explanation, as 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, 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 have used clean plates. You guys shot a ton of clean plates.

Sean Oliver: 28:25

It seems like you shot yeah, almost every effect was kind of paired with a plate.

Paul DeNigris: 28:29

Yeah, honestly, probably 60% of the movie you guys shot every shot twice.

Sean Oliver: 28:35

That's one of the the funny, tells sometimes where you know and, and it changes how we shoot the shots around it, cuz I don't want to be handheld, handheld, handheld, handheld. And then suddenly we're like on a tripod, clean plate, but we shot all of our plates on you know, a tripod to make sure that it could get the cleanest cut out. I remember talking to you early on. You were even like, well, if there's some shots you want camera movement, like don't be afraid of it. And I was like no, it's gonna be locked down and to make it. I knew how many red glove shots there were gonna be, which I 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 like a stable, lockdown clean plate, it was gonna make it a lot easier on on your guys's end.

Paul DeNigris: 29:18

Yeah, I mean that's not to say it was. They were without their challenges.

Sean Oliver: 29:22

Yes, yeah, no, no, right even when you're shooting a clean plate.

Paul DeNigris: 29:26

There were Inconsistencies and lighting and it was mainly because you had a, you know, 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, 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 out here. Yeah, you're cutting shadows and all 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, you know. 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 whole verse. Yeah, it was kind of the reverse. So we were still keying the green Suit but we weren't as concerned with, like, the edges of the green suit, we were mostly concerned with where the the gloves met the green suit and, you know, keeping that clean. And then we ended up having to, you know, rotoscope, hand trace the fingers and stuff on the red glove. We could like pull a key on the red because it was unique enough that we could get like the beginning of a mat.

Sean Oliver: 30:47

But there was a lot of manual, you know, frame by frame and your, your Red glove guy can't talk, and so he's gesturing wildly and you can see yeah, it's probably another one that a higher shutter would have been would have been really nice again.

Paul DeNigris: 31:05

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

Sean Oliver: 31:28

Oh, 100%. And even when we filmed in my new we you know we have a green suit, but it was it wasn't lit in a way that that was ever gonna be what it was. It would just give a hard cutoff line. You know 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. Yeah, it was always kind of the way and then you got, but you guys really took it a Step much further than we ever would, and it's kind of that. That level up that you guys were able to add to us is that the shadows of the hands are, yes, just the, the extra depth of an effect that make it go from this 2d paste it on effect to something that's in that world, because obviously there's this six foot man Attached to every shadow with the gloves. There is no floating Gloves shadow. 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 put so much presence on the gloves and so much Immersion from the effect.

Paul DeNigris: 32:39

Thanks, yeah, but the trick with that is, you know, now we have the, the mat, the outline of the gloves right, and so then it's just a matter of taking that, duplicating it and using it as a, a Mask for a color effect to darken and create the shadow on the, the plate behind, and we always had the reference. We, you know your original plate with the green suit gave us the reference of where the shadow, of where they would fell. We will be building those Shot by shot, and when he was against them, just a blank wall, it was no problem. Like those are, those are relatively easy. There's a couple of places where the shadows sort of like Crawl, you know, hit the counter, and kind of like travel wall side of side of cabinet front of cabinet top of counter and it does this sort of like three-dimensional thing and we're it's cheating. You know we had to cheat. We didn't like build a bunch of geometry for those things. It was like simple 2d manipulations to kind of make it follow the contours. But thankfully those are few and far between you know the other. The other thing we discovered pretty early on was when you've got the back of the glove and Now the hand inside, it is supposed to be invisible. We were, we'd get this line Fill that hole. Yeah, we got a line for the edge of the glove, but nothing on the interior. So we ended up building what did you guys call it?

Sean Oliver: 33:58

the glove Like oh no, like it would ever. Another one came up because we, we it's one of we're we were trying to avoid that on set and it's one of those ones where you had asked me I'd 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 glove anus we have to send to Paul and it, you know it, it was a. It's one of those ones. It could have been a lot worse if we, you know, without our background. The In the green suit was Cody and he's the guy that I did almost all those visual effects with and all of our short films and our web series. So he kind of you know him and I have like 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 covering dog, for now, um, 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 just in terms of like learning and lessons, some of this. If we had just done some more test and and with and every, 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. So I always, I think I always stopped myself thinking it needs to be a big production. When you 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 Potential pitfalls that I could have hit. Yeah that's absolutely right.

Paul DeNigris: 35:51

You know, I definitely recommend, when there are complex effects, that there's testing. You know that's. That's something that I Will often do with clients on bigger projects is we will. We will do proof of concept shots. You know, here's, here's what we've written in the script. Is this doable before we go commit? Yeah, you know 50 scenes of this thing let's figure out if we can actually do it.

Sean Oliver: 36:15

Okay, it's doable, but never from this angle, in that angle right. As long as we never do that, we're okay.

Paul DeNigris: 36:20

There was one shot of the red gloves where he puts his hands on his hips and and he his hand is the finger disappears.

Sean Oliver: 36:28

Yeah, his hand goes behind.

Paul DeNigris: 36:31

Behind, and so, yeah, we had to rebuild his hand and it's. You know, you end up taking pixels from Before and after it disappears and kind of building a new building a bunch of faux fingers and putting them on there trying to keep the Texture and all of that stuff. You know it's, it's painstaking but but doable but it's. Yeah, that's kind of thing we did it once. To have done it, you know, multiple times would have been, would have been really problematic. Yeah.

Sean Oliver: 36:58

And you know, like the red gloves, I think, are always an interesting effect. That that I do reflect on, because you could have done them, or we could have done them, in several different ways. You know, you could full CG those gloves and have 100% 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 and had really nice, clean, you know, and actually used a keen for a lot of it. The one benefit that we got and I think it really is just kind of a question of your budget we knew that we could always gut it out ourselves and I think that was why we chose it. But the 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 the 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't. Even then. You know they get a lot of flak 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. You know, anytime you watch a major movie we know how they did it. It's a full green screen, so full like 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: 38:35

Yeah, when he picks up the the the duffel bag and dumps it out, or when he's he's filling the the water guns yeah, shakes the hands with Sammy and they do their, they do their secret handshake and she realizes who it is. And when he gets thrown to the floor and yeah, yeah, and he kind of like get you know, skitters across the floor and and, and all that's left are his gloves. Like you feel the weight of the body that you can't? yeah all the way that it would and you'd have to fake that all the other ways and 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, right, and a lot of times, though, it's the lighting mismatch that gives the effect away. Tell yeah it's the tell and 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 on the the glove plate same lighting on whatever.

Sean Oliver: 39:37

To your point, yeah, almost to a fault, we didn't change the lighting because you know, really it, you know movie moving a few things here and there. It would have helped those clean plates stay, you know, without the shadows. Yeah, yeah.

Paul DeNigris: 39:49

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 kind of stomp past camera.

Sean Oliver: 40:02

Yes, yes, I know, okay, I know, you know what?

Paul DeNigris: 40:03

I'm talking about and.

Sean Oliver: 40:05

This and this, yeah, and go ahead. So you have.

Paul DeNigris: 40:07

You have your two human characters and they close the door behind them and then the two ghost characters you know, phase through the door and as they all sort of stomp past because now they're, you know they're, they're moving fast, the camera just really suddenly does, does this little little jitter, and so, getting it like Stabilizing all of that sort of stuff, it's not as easy as it as it sounds, or you would think. You just drop a stabilizer on there and, and, you know, just pick a few points, because it was the kitchen. There's all kinds of countertops and stuff you could, 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 like sensor wobble, yeah, 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 like looking at it for everything, it's just kind of like, just kind of like, got jello-y there when, when they they walk past.

Sean Oliver: 41:10

That that was definitely one of the drawbacks of being in a house that was built in 19 or five, because we had that all the time the tribe anyone anytime. We had anyone walk by that tripod, like you know. You just saw that heavy, heavy movement.

Paul DeNigris: 41:23

Yeah, but by and large, you, the clean plates you guys provided for us, made all of those effects possible because we weren't as particularly on the time that we the 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, which you can do like we, we do it all the time. There's always instances where you know somebody moves and so you, 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, you do a little paint work in the spot that you 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 know you have to. You have to do it. It's not a visual effect shot that was planned, but a an after the fact fixed fix, you know. So if we had to clean plate every single shot, I mean we'd still be working on it.

Sean Oliver: 42:24

Yeah right.

Paul DeNigris: 42:25

So. So the fact that you shot clean plates, even though it I Know it had to have slowed you, slowed you guys down.

Sean Oliver: 42:33

Oh yeah right, I mean you do the shot and then you got to make sure, and then, if you change anything, get that plate again. You know, at the tail end uh-huh, I'm just extra shots at the end of the day. But.

Drew Leatham: 42:44

I think that was always the thing that like indicated people who, uh, who, had done effect Effects work in the past be like oh, we're getting the plate. Like, whereas people other, like us and like some actors, would be like what are we like? Why haven't we moved on? Yeah, they just see this like you know there's.

Sean Oliver: 43:00

Why are we doing the next setup?

Drew Leatham: 43:02

right Like why are we taking so? And it's just not like this is this is saving us hours of work. That's 45 seconds is literally saving us hundreds of dollars.

Sean Oliver: 43:11

I think a lot of that thought process too, and in trying to Save you know, your guys's time or whoever was gonna end up doing our visual effects, I mean, we knew before filming that it was you guys, that 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. Right? Cuz it's like, yeah, you like you can rebuild a plate, but I would rather you be working on like our really cool flower wilting effect, which we can like 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 and that I'll continue to try and do more moving forward and forward. Instead of that fix it in post, kind of mentality, more of the like no, this is our like, we're saving this creativity to be in post for this moment. Yeah, instead of just like, but we'll fix it spending the VFX budget where it matters. Yeah, not just on everything with an indie film, right, you want to pace your dollars in the right spot and you want it. You want it to end up on screen right and not, you know, in the catering budget. But we had really good catering, so, actually, delicious delicious.

Paul DeNigris: 44:21

Very cool, very cool. So yeah, let's, let's talk about the wilting flowers and the doorknob, and I think that probably co. Oh, and the energy barrier. That's the other thing we haven't covered.

Sean Oliver: 44:32

Yeah, the wilting flowers are a good one, because that was an effect that even I, you know. I knew what it was in words. I don't know if I knew what it was actually in visual visual like until I could like volcanine meld with you and I don't know if we would see it the same way and I was. It's basically there, it's. It is actually like a quote-unquote real thing. Not the name. We call it a rose of sacriest, 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, they will turn black. So we use this as kind of our you know our little like beep, beep, beep, beep to find out where the bad ghosts are, and so they start White and it's a visual effect shot where they needed to turn black and how exactly they turned black like and it wasn't really in the script exactly whether we ended up At like a wilting, which is very, very awesome. But I remember one of our earliest Meetings. On that one you were. You were kind of like we're working on this shot, but like we don't have it yet, so I don't know. And then you were like, well, if you want to see what we've done, like these are all, these are all what it's not Going to look like. And you showed me like an ink drop, where it was kind of like ink had dropped on the, on the flowers, and it was spreading, but it just had this I Know to deish 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 remember another one. You showed me another version and then you were like what I'm really gonna end up doing is I'm gonna hand wilt these flowers, so it looks like a time lapse, so, like you know, manually adding this work onto each pedal, and then it's like this, this burn of a flight of blackness coming into the shot, which was really awesome. Yeah but you know, you told us not to toot your horn, but I'm gonna teach her 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 seen, 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 right, but to have to have that level of you caring about it as well meant, meant a Very great deal to us as creators. To know that there was stuff that you were like no, like my name's going on, that Like, and that that's not where.

Paul DeNigris: 46:51

I want it to be, yet.

Sean Oliver: 46:52

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, really does that's a.

Paul DeNigris: 47:09

That's a really good example of Manual clean plating, right, because I wanted to separate. So you have all these petals sort of stacked on each other. As the you know, the roses are kind of like sitting and every rose is Multiple layers of petals sort of coiled around each other, and then you have multiple, multiple roses kind of packed in this box. Well, if I want to take the, the petals that are in the foreground and have the their edge turn black and have them get sort of shrink and wilt and kind of dry out, well I have to reveal what's behind, and so it's pull this part out, okay now paint it out of the back layer, then take the next, yeah, and you just are building, you know, multiple levels of clean plates and kind of like straplating what. What does when I have two petals? 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, you know, through this area? So that is, this one Strengths and reveals pixels that were never filmed. What does that look like? Don't exist, yeah, they don't exist. So you end up having a bill, all these clean plates, and then there's a bunch of cheating. You know like the deep background stuff is is just changing color while the foreground stuff is doing that. Yet you know individual little.

Sean Oliver: 48:32

You know manual, animated shrinking and warping and discoloring, and you know it's a lot of smoke and mirrors 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 not when we locked down. We did that on tripod that gives a. It just gives a lot more latitude, I think, in the effect and I've known people that will do their effects on 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, because you could do a lot more, you have a lot more control and power, a lot more leave yeah, just be smart about it, right, a lot, of, a lot of people.

Paul DeNigris: 49:15

They do. Like you said, everything's handheld. And then this is an effect shot, because we're locked off and then it goes back to born identity. Yeah, like pay attention. You know 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 it wants handheld and then you build the effect on the lock off and then take it and track it into the handheld Right. I didn't know that.

Sean Oliver: 49:41

But you have to be smart about it. You have to be smart about it and you shoot it yeah yeah, yeah.

Paul DeNigris: 49:45

So if the camera.

Sean Oliver: 49:45

Guess what You're going to get a lot of my next movie.

Paul DeNigris: 49:50

Camera's doing a lot of, you know, sort of this movement up here. Your stick shot isn't down here or up right, it's got to beyou basically find the average, you know the midpoint of where that is and that's where you plant it and shoot your lock off. That's cool, yeah. Another trick is to shoot let's say you're mastering in 4K but your camera can shoot in 6K. You shoot 6K, then you have a lock off in 6K and then the work gets done on that, and then you also shoot. you know a handheld version that now we can track. So we have this 6K over scan 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 an effect that was done on a locked off plate inside it. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome, 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, I'm always going to if you say I have to move the camera, okay, then we have to figure it out. Yeah, 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: 51:19

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you guys were awesome with it, thanks. What other effects?

Paul DeNigris: 51:26

A couple other effects. We had the doorknob gag.

Sean Oliver: 51:28

Energy barrier, I think is a good one.

Paul DeNigris: 51:31

We can talk about the energy barrier. That one was really straightforward, you know, was it? Yeah, it really, it really was. I mean, force fields and things like that are not terribly difficult. That was a. That was a. An effect really 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.

Drew Leatham: 52:20

Because now he's not being yeah, so, yeah.

Paul DeNigris: 52:23

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.

Sean Oliver: 52:36

So we had a smoke machine off to the side and like I thought we were going to have to like, make something and build this whole thing and 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, run it up his pants. But again marrying the visual and the practical right. So just knowing that, like, if there's such a difference when smoke gets at someone's eye and it's, you know it's actually bothering them versus a layer of digital smoke.

Paul DeNigris: 53:04

Right and casting a shadow on the other actor, and it's yeah, there's texture to it, it's the actual light the way that it hits it.

Sean Oliver: 53:13

I mean it's wonderful when you can have it Right.

Paul DeNigris: 53:16

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 had to go and kind of like, as he disintegrates, every one of those little practical pock marks and, you know, burn marks that you guys made on his shirt became a spot where we centered a sort of fire wave that would spread out and you rode 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.

Sean Oliver: 54:03

So if it's just the smoke, then just do the smoke right. If it's just fire light, so there's at least real natural light on there, that's one. That, that's one thing. I would have maybe gone back and added Like if I, if I could reshoot this again, I would have had my little LED fireplace light just to get that little bit on him. It was daytime, it wasn't. It wasn't like a huge scene where it'd be a major problem.

Paul DeNigris: 54:25

Right, it was nighttime. It'd be a totally different story Daytime.

Sean Oliver: 54:28

It works.

Paul DeNigris: 54:30

I actually added some glow on the other.

Sean Oliver: 54:33

I thought you did.

Paul DeNigris: 54:34

I like to tie it all together, but it was because it was a daylight scene, and that's the thing.

Sean Oliver: 54:39

Like you know, visuals can do every piece of that layer, like you're saying. But if, if you can just get one layer in camera, it's huge. I remember Favaro when he did Iron man 2, did like the eye tracking thing where every where we, where we look in a screen and the eyes go to what's real first, we intake CG last. So if you can soak the image in enough real things, we're not going to start analyzing you know Jar Jar Binks or whatever until until the last thing in the shot. And I think it's important to remember when you're, when you're like, if this shot has is 90% visual effects, my audience is going to start analyzing those pixels pretty quickly all of a sudden and our brains very harsh about that.

Paul DeNigris: 55:23

Yeah, for sure, and I've never actually heard that about, about Favaro's Iron man 2. That's, that's great. The one I always go back to is Peter Jackson on the original War to 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, you know, a little person, wearing an Elijah Wood mask, and in this shot it's a you know it's Elijah Wood with a giant performer wearing Aragorn's coat, you know, and and he's mixing and matching all of these different things. So your, your brain is always sort of dancing around, you know how do you do that?

Sean Oliver: 55:59

Oh, that's fake and I know it's fake. I've seen it's fake. It's going to be fake next time, exactly you can get on their toes.

Drew Leatham: 56:05

Keep them warm on their toes.

Paul DeNigris: 56:06

Exactly.

Sean Oliver: 56:06

The first shot in the CG Lion King is real. The very, very first shot is a live action shot and the idea was to be like show you something real to like you know, take you in beyond whatever else, hold on, hold on.

Drew Leatham: 56:22

No, I even remember with the energy wall, just the 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, I was like like 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 like. 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 but it's just like that.

Sean Oliver: 56:52

It could be like alien tech right or like a hot like exactly right.

Drew Leatham: 56:56

Yeah, like a shield force field kind of thing.

Sean Oliver: 57:00

Like manmade coming from an energy you know, if we just hit the energy source, it would go down. So, I think that's where you guys because I don't even remember how much direction we gave you on that the flame barrier that you know stops them Right, but it's one that I think it does an important effect because it carries narrative weight. You know, we try not to over explain things via dialogue. I don't think anyone actually ever one character at some point says you're like in the back yard, 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 a lot 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 it's one of our effects that carries narrative significance. So it was very important that it it transcribed what was happening. You know the audience was able to.

Drew Leatham: 57:52

And also had its own look. Looked unique in its own way and was still very clear.

Paul DeNigris: 57:57

Yeah, thanks, I. I the. The jumping off point was knowing that that character was going to burst into flames as he pulled through it, so so 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, like it's like elastic, so as as the guy has been pulled, it stretches and then snaps back a little bit. Let's him go, so that. So it's a lot of you know manual warping to create those sort of you know stretchy tend to look like tension. Uh-huh, yeah, and, and masking, so that you know as his arm pushes through. You know I'm, I'm, I'm masking his arm. You know where, the, where, the, 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: 58:52

It added a ton of the depth with it, with those moments.

Paul DeNigris: 58:56

The other thing I wanted to do was again, I'm always trying to trying to make it feel like it was captured in camera was I wanted to give it the sense of like in the summer here, when it's really really hot and we see those heat waves coming off yeah. Like I wanted it to feel like that, like it's, it's a little out of focus. Behind there, the color is shifting like the wavelengths of light. There's like this color fringing on the edges, um, and, and it's, 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 and it distorts, and that's when, that's when we can actually, you know, you could point a camera at it and perceive it. Otherwise, you point a camera at it and it's not there. You know it's not there. Yeah, so yeah, it was a lot of fun. Those are the sorts of uh challenges that I love because, like you said, it's, it's a story. Point it, your movie needs it to tell the story, right, mm? Hmm, your, your, your movie needs it to be convincing and to be real. There's a big emotional scene around that.

Sean Oliver: 1:00:03

Yeah, our climax happens around this effect in many ways.

Paul DeNigris: 1:00:09

And that's the thing I love about working with independent filmmakers is, uh, I get to as a visual effects artist, I get to partner with you guys, you know, and help you tell your story. It's not just. It's not just being a hired gun. You know, I do plenty of that where I'm a hired gun.

Sean Oliver: 1:00:24

A race just glare, yeah, a race, a race, the boom pole.

Paul DeNigris: 1:00:29

Uh, you know, we see the the crew in this. In the side of the issue, we had one boom removal.

Sean Oliver: 1:00:34

Yeah, yeah, you had one boom we had one. So, kudos to our sound guy, nick. Only like that's a pretty good job.

Paul DeNigris: 1:00:41

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

Drew Leatham: 1:00:58

Yeah, You're like, here's the note I need to hit, Get me there and uh no, I didn't get a comment with the Rosa Sacris, it was just um, going through those iterations with you, cause I, I remembered, like you know, 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 the literally the work that you are doing, not just like hard keyframes and rotoscoping, but creatively as well, and being like man, oh whoa, we've.

Sean Oliver: 1:01:38

We went to some of the same places throughout that process and thinking about it, the effect, and figure out what works about it. Yeah, and a lot of that.

Paul DeNigris: 1:01:47

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. 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. We were very much on the same page right right from the get go, because you were very, 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. You know, it's like this but this color, this is what inspired it, right, right, kind of at least see yeah, Right, that that ability, not only the preparation that you guys did on on your shorts, but then the ability to clearly communicate. And that's that, if, if filmmakers take one thing away from this podcast, on this episode, every episode, it's plan well, communicate well, yeah, right. Your team can't read your mind, okay, and we, we, we burn 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. Yeah, yeah you guys would never do that yeah. You guys would never edit that.

Sean Oliver: 1:03:01

And sometimes people, especially like directors. They think the job is having cool ideas and the job is actually is being able to uh shit, being able to share those cool ideas and to to share the vision that's not having. I think most people have really awesome ideas. 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 like I mean we, we, we come from like a heavy theater speech and debate background, and like I always tell all directors, my encouragement to them is to take a public speaking class, um, to take things that that force you to put your thoughts down in a coherent way other than just screenplays, right, um, and always trying to be the like auteur who has this perfect vision, and instead like how can I just be a better communicator? Um, cause, that's ultimately what really. What the job is is is being a communicator.

Paul DeNigris: 1:03:56

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? Uh, forever home as far as festivals and possible distribution, what happened in there?

Sean Oliver: 1:04:09

We, uh, we were still at the very front end of our film festival circuit. So we did the Phoenix film festivals a couple of months ago. Um, we did a horror hotel over out in Hawaii, Hawaii, just this past weekend. So shout out to all of those folks Uh, 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. Uh, and then really a lot of the festivals will start hearing back when it gets closer to Halloween, because we are a horror comedy. And that's where uh that's where our audiences are and are hopefully waiting for us. Uh, and distribution uh, 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 to very as many people as we can. So follow forever home movie Um, that's what we are on Instagram. That's what we are on Facebook uh, forever home moviecom, and you can keep up with with all the good news that comes out with it. Awesome, Awesome.

Paul DeNigris: 1:05:05

Thanks for making magic. Thank you for letting me play in your sandbox. Oh yeah.

Sean Oliver: 1:05:10

You're invited back Again.

Paul DeNigris: 1:05:12

Looking forward to doing it again. All right, well, thanks to Sean Oliver and Drew Latham for uh, for being part of today's show. Hopefully you enjoyed it and learned something. I know I did. It's always blast talking to these guys and uh talking VFX. So, uh, 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, uh, if, if you, if you have questions you want us to answer in uh future episodes, I'd love to hear about it. So uh, so, please, uh, hit those comments and uh, we'll see you next time. Thanks so much.