A blend of fantasy, horror and action genres, Mutant Chronicles is about a mission to rid the world of the terrifying mutants who are disturbed from their slumber under the earth by a deady world war. Directed by Simon Hunter, the film uses a large amount of greenscreen photography to create a wartorn world on a low budget. Dinamo were brought the project by Llyr Williams, who had previously worked with Simon on a seven minute promo reel in order to sell his vision to the producers. Llyr did most of the work on the project and I helped him with a lot of the keying and compositing late in production.
My main contribution on Mutant Chronicles was sharing compositing duties with Llyr who had set up the projects for and needed some help doing the final balancing and keying of the greenscreen elements. Because the film had been mainly shot on the Thompson Viper, all the footage had a green cast to it that had to be removed before the footage could be used and then readded when delivering back to the edit. This caused all sorts of problems and was a gigantic pain in the neck because Thompson wasn't particularly open about how to deal with the green footage and make it usable. I'm sure that high end post houses in London can hire technicians to sort it out but smaller houses like Dinamo don't really have that luxury. I've sworn off ever using Viper footage again. The upshot was that I had to key green characters against a greenscreen background with the whole image tinted... green. Not great. Still, it required a bit of rotoscoping here and there but the various elements emerged eventually. The other problem was that all the image files had to be delivered to us and had been stored as dpx files. In order to do this, they had to pay to have all the footage downloaded off data tape before putting it on a hard drive and have it biked to Cardiff. When the wrong footage eventually turned up at the offices, we had to ask them (at great expense) to send us the right stuff. This cumbersome system was the main reason I specced the Grandpa in my Pocket workflow to use the Codex Digital box to output Avid DNxHD footage directly into the editing workstations and our storage so that everyone had access to the online-ready footage at all times. Much easier.
I also composited the maps and titles for the opening sequence, a task we were given late in the day after the original company had let the production team down. The three of us, Llyr, Romano and I, worked together to create a 3D map that followed the direction of Simon Hunter and was timed to John Malkovich's voiceover. It was great finally seeing that sequence at the cinema! In fact, all of our work eventually made it into the trailer, even the shorter shots of the approaching mutants. The first trailer hadn't featured anything of ours but then the Russian trailer had appeared that not only featured all our shots but they'd even reworked our titles in Russian to match the original English.
This is my first (and at time of writing, only) cinema credit so we all descended on the local cinema intending to beat back the crowds to get our seat and cheer our names. Sadly, we were the only ones in the auditorium that evening so no-one got to stare in wonder at our achievements. Nevertheless, we still cheered.
A blend of fantasy, horror and action genres, Mutant Chronicles is about a mission to rid the world of the terrifying mutants who are disturbed from their slumber under the earth by a deady world war. Directed by Simon Hunter, the film uses a large amount of greenscreen photography to create a wartorn world on a low budget. Dinamo were brought the project by Llyr Williams, who had previously worked with Simon on a seven minute promo reel in order to sell his vision to the producers. Llyr did most of the work on the project and I helped him with a lot of the keying and compositing late in production.
