[CGnews]

Escamotage is a new live action short film created by flourishing Canadian director Patrick Kalyn. Inspired by the Bourne series of films, Escamotage is Kalyn’s directorial debut and tells the story of a violent man immersed in a world of organised crime, who discovers an unexpected love. Nominated for Best First Film at the 2008 South Africa International Film Festival, Escamotage is an impressive primary film venture, even more so for a production without a budget.

Kalyn recently spoke to VFXTalk about Escamotage, the making of the film and how his childhood love for story telling eventually lead him to live action film making ........

“Ever since I was a kid I have always loved to tell stories, whether doing skits for my relatives at family functions or drawing late at night whilst I should have been sound asleep. One thing always drove me, to create interesting characters in fantastic worlds.

Instead of paying attention in grade school classes, I'd be doodling away.... Ironman, The Hulk and Superman filled the pages of my binders, along with original creations I would conjure up.

As the years went on I found interest in computers, I dabbled in rudimentary 3D software trying to wrap my head around a whole new world and way of telling these stories. These passions collided in high school where I was fortunate to land an internship at a local games company.

A couple of years later I enrolled in the Vancouver Film Schools 3D Animation program where I learned the basis of animation production.
My career in film started in early 2003 at Image Engine in Vancouver, prevising action sequences for I, Robot. I worked there for a couple of years before joining the animation team on King Kong in New Zealand. Working on live action films, I found myself gravitating to this medium. It was then that I knew my path was to direct, so the inception of my first live action film started.

The original concept for Escamotage stemmed from an idea of a man, on a bench, on the beach. I thought, what would happen if another man joined him on that bench; and was told something horrible?

To push the story to another level, I dug up a VFX element of a car explosion and from there; the scenes seemed to just write themselves with the explosion as the climax in mind.

I love the Bourne series of films and they were a huge influence for me during the entire production of Escamotage, from the action to camera work. We rehearsed the fight scenes a few times a week during my working lunch breaks, at a studio where Phil Reed teaches his kung-fu class.

Having "no budget" for this first endeavour presented a lot of obstacles. I started writing the script around locations I knew I could use for free, and being in New Zealand at the time, I wanted to use as much of the lush country side as possible.

I didn't know anyone who could shoot the film, so I bought a consumer HD camera and taught myself the ropes of using a real camera. Most of the actors were work colleagues or friends, minus the leads which I found through a local drama school in Wellington.

Working full time at Weta Digital I could only shoot on weekends, so Saturdays and Sundays were very busy during the 7 weekend shoot. During mid-week between rolling the camera, I would be building props, mixing fake blood and shot listing in prep for our next shoot.

The script was about 8 pages; where logic says about one minute of screen time per page, the film quite deviated. While shot listing I'd play back the scene in my head with characters' idiosyncrasies and when we shot all of that, Escamotage grew to a 30 minute run time.

My help on set was Chris Moss, pitching in with actor wrangling, setting actors marks, bounce boards, and lens' changes for my 35mm lens adapter (which was chosen to allow shallow depth of field). His help was invaluable to keep things on track. It's quite windy in Wellington so any sound that was captured with the on-board mic was unusable.

When the shoot was done, I cut it all together in Avid Media Composer on my home PC. Once I had the cut, I had to color match the shots because we didn't really know how to white balance properly! Once color was set, I proceeded to make targa file sequences of all the visual effects shots, 15 in total.

The effects shots ranged from digital bullet casings, muzzle flashes/smoke, a transit bus nearly levelling the lead actor, bullet squibs hitting the car and finally the car explosion. The aim was to be subtle and support the story, not blarje them in your face.

For the car explosion I shot plates with and without the car. I used the beauty plate to project the car onto a 3d model I built based on blueprints of the Audi RS4 (which the local Audi dealer kindly loaned us their floor model for the shoot day). The 3d model allowed me to have the car react from the blast of the explosion. It was all assembled onto the clean plate along with digital debris that was animated and rendered in Maya.

Once VFX was finished, I graded the scenes with Media Composers Color Correct tools for the specific mood I wanted to convey.
Now I had a complete film... with no sound. Sound is at least 50% of what you "see" in film so it was definitely a place I didn't want to skimp out. I researched sound design packages and decided Pro Tools was the best choice, as it seems to be industry standard in audio post facilities. Dry foley was recorded in my bedroom along with the ADR. For location specific sounds, Chris and I went back to the locations and recreated the action. We got clean recordings of it all that I could mix in Pro Tools. For special sound effects such as gun fire and explosions etc I purchased sounds from various online sound databases.

Now that sound was complete, one last thing was missing, score. Back in the day, I used to jam with my brother in our parents basement. Since I already had Pro Tools up and running on my machine, I tapped back into my musical side and took a crack at scoring the film. The first scene worked pretty good so I kept rolling with it. Various orchestral samples were used along with drums and pads to create a dynamic rhythm throughout the film.

All in all, it took over a year to make Escamotage from concept to completion. I'm happy with how it all turned out and can't wait to get my next film off the ground. Thanks for having me......"

VFXTalk is pleased to announce that our sister site Sputnik7.com, will be screening the short film 'Escamotage' - Check in on VFXTalk soon for confirmation of screening date. Sputnik7.com is an independent film website dedicated to showcasing broadband content for today’s digital marketplace. Sputnik7.com, along with VFXTalk.com, is part of the CGNews Network.

CAST
Hero - Logan Pithyou
Henchmano - Lance Louez
Ashman - Ashour David
Abram (Tank) - Phillip Reed
Mafioso - Richard Dexter

CREDITS
Writer and Director - Patrick Kalyn
Assistant - Chris Moss
Fight Choreographer - Phil Reed
Auditions Coordinator - Nicky Muir
Original Score - Patrick Kalyn