We’re always interested in stories of up-and-coming indie movie projects.  One such project that caught our eye was  Sledgehammer, an Aliens-inspired science fiction film about a group of space marines marooned on a distant planet full of hostile monsters. The design of the monster was what really did it for me. The concept art, by 3D artist Wesley Griffith (who also worked on Dan Trachtenberg’s Portal: No Escape) shows a nasty spiny insectoid, something like a giant sand flea, sure to inspire the heebie jeebies in any arachnophobe.  Science fiction is one of the most difficult genres in independent film, for obvious reasons:  Science fiction means special effects and special effects cost money! So we had to know, how do you make a critter like that on a budget?

The man behind Sledgehammer is 15 year veteran 3D video game artist Frank Silas, who has worked with  Rockstar Games and Activision Blizzard; he previously directed the award-winning short film Box on a shoestring budget of $2000, but Sledgehammer promises to be a more ambitious special effects extravaganza.  He’s using Kickstarter to raise the money to make this film a reality.

Frank spoke to Videomaker about the challenges of putting together an independent science fiction movie, sharing some tips about finding funding, recruiting actors and creating special effects on a tight budget. Aspiring sci fi directors, take note!

VM: What have you learned from working on Sledgehammer?

FS: I learned about being an Executive Producer. If you are able to bring in active investors at the target amounts you need per film then you can make any film you want. That’s the rub, because those two things are directly proportional. So in most cases you will not be able to make exactly the film you want. I’ve learned to be detached from the details just as long as I like the outcome. I write the script that I want to write, then we shoot what we are able to shoot based on locations, crew, cast etc. Then we edit what we have to turn that into the best possible film it can be. Even in post production it depends on how many people or how much time we can put on to it, but that keeps each stage of the process an adventure, somewhat experimental which frees me to not only shoot more films, but to enjoy the work more. I could see the struggles of other directors who have a crystal clear vision that they want reproduced from their mind’s eye with complete fidelity. I don’t want to struggle against the film making process. I want to enjoy it and I want my crew to enjoy it.

VM: Besides Kickstarter, what other alternative funding options have you explored?

FS: I brought on a couple of friends to help me pay for the live action shoot. That’s what allowed us to shoot the film in the first place. It’s tough to be an Executive Producer on your own film as a Director. Our purpose on Kickstarter.com is to raise funding to create the visual effects for the film. Our studio normally shoots DSLR on Cannon 5D Mark ii and Cannon 7D. With this film we were able to get our hands on a RED Epic from one of the same companies that supplied RED Epics for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. So now we need to do vfx at a very high resolution, which means insurmountable render times unless we acquire the proper software and hardware tools to deal with that.

VM: What advice would you give to other aspiring filmmakers?

FS: The advice I would give to other film makers working on low and micro-budget films is to be a bit more Depak Chopra about it. Your careers will last longer and so will your crews. As for the Sci Fi Film aspect, you’re really going to need to love it. It is the most difficult kind of film to do. It also takes the longest amount of time to make. It cost more than any other type of film to produce, but if you can hit a home run there…those fans are forever. I know, I am a sci fi fan thanks to George Lucas, Ridley Scott, and James Cameron.  Sci Fi raised me.

VM: How did you find the right actors for Sledgehammer?

FS: We screened over 30 actors to discover the cast we have on Sledgehammer! We were very selective about those 30. I promised all of the backers of our Kickstarter to tell them first exactly how we found the actors and what we were looking for. We’ll even show you the process we went through to get them ready in the feature length documentary we are shooting on the making of Sledgehammer, provided our Kickstarter is successful!

VM: What was your idea for how the alien should look? How do you build a good alien when you’re on a budget?

FS: Building an alien on a budget really comes down to what you are trying to accomplish with that character in your film. For us, we knew that there wasn’t just going to be one alien and since I’m a 3D Artist with 3D Artist friends creating our aliens in 3D just made sense. Not everyone can do that on a budget, but we already had that background coming into this production.

With the alien design, I wanted to create something that people have not seen before. It needed to look believable, but not quite like anything else. I call it a cross between JJ Abrams, Starship Troopers, and Avatar. I want the audience to feel scared, intimidated, grossed out when they see it. The thing is the size of a mini-van. Here’s a spoiler, that’s not the only monster in our movie.

To learn more or support Sledgehammer, check out the Sledgehammer Kickstarter page.

Video may well have killed the radio star, but until recently the internet had yet to kill the video star. Though  plenty of music videos have been sold and watched through online portals such as Apple’s iTunes and YouTube, they have in reality, stayed the same. The only difference was that instead of plopping down on a couch and watching your favorite band’s music video on TV, you could sit in front of your computer watching the videos you wanted to see when you wanted to see them. That was until now. Harnessing the power of HTML5, several innovative bands have now created online music videos that have upped the ante in how fans can interact with their music. Instead of the tried and true method of piecing together multiple clips and letting the viewer sit back and watch, these bands are allowing fans to not only choose what they want to see in the music video but are making the place you grew up part of the story as well.

In the latest iteration, OK GO, a longtime internet star going all the way back to their famous treadmill video for their song “Here it Goes Again“, used HTML5 to spell out a user-supplied message with the band member’s feet in their video “All is Not Lost“. Quite an accomplishment considering that the designers not only had to spell out all 26 letters of the alphabet with people’s feet –  but synchronize them as well.  Arcade Fire does something similar toward the end of their masterpiece, the “Wilderness Downtown” but also incorporated a Google Maps version of a user-supplied childhood home as part of the story in their music video. Amazingly, they were even able to use some 3D effects of HTML5 in order to make trees look like they were growing right over the satellite and street views of your own home. Danger Mouse went a slightly different but equally innovative direction with their music video “3 Dreams of Black”. Their video allows users to not only change their point of view, but to create some of the 3D elements at the end of the video as well making for a truly interactive experience.

Though these are new and interesting experiences for music video fans everywhere, the real question is if this trend will last. If so, it will be a redefinition of what can be done with  music videos and will require that video editors not only know how to helm programs such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects, but HTML5 code as well.

The 2010 Videomaker Best Product of the Year award for Best Graphics Card goes to the NVIDIA Quadro Graphics Solutions.

Leveraging CUDA technology on NVIDIA GPU’s can drastically speed up any work flow and the technology has been widely adopted among many video editing applications. We used NVIDIA’s cards paired with several of our software reviews and we had nothing but extremely quick rendering times and jaw dropping benchmarks. If you’re serious about cutting rendering times down look no further than one of NVIDIA’s Quadro graphic cards.

Read Videomaker‘s review of the NVIDIA Quadro Graphic Solutions.

When Videomaker first took a look at Beauty Box back in September we came to the conclusion that it was a useful and time saving plugin that made it possible to make even the most self-conscious talent feel happy about what they’ve shot. We still hold to that conclusion and now with a new GPU-utilizing upgrade that gets rid of our only real complaint with the plugin, we can confidently stand behind our conclusion again. To be clear, Digital Anarchy, the makers of Beauty Box, a plug-in for fixing blemishes, wrinkles, and small defects in skin, recently released a new version of their plugin that can now utilize the power of a computer’s GPU instead of relying on the CPU only. As a result, in our tests we found that to render 10 seconds of footage from our new Documentary Storytelling series in After Effects, took only half as long as the previous version of Beauty Box.  Of course we tested this on an Intel Xeon 3.33 Ghz Quad Core computer with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 graphics card so we did have some definite power to start with but that doesn’t change the fact that time is money, and so saving this kind of time is significant. In the past, an editor would have to mask the area of the face, apply a blur, and rotoscope the movement of the talent frame by frame in order to achieve the same face-detecting results of Beauty Box. Oh, I can’t forget to say that Beauty Box 1.2 works best with NVIDIA’s CUDA technology on a 64 bit system. So for those who have been blessed with that kind of computer power, expect a big boost in speed and for 200 dollars, a good price to match.