THERE AREN’T ANY GHOSTS IN HERE
November 3th 2020
There aren't any ghosts in here is a short horror Pokemon fan film. It showcases the terror of sharing your everyday world with corporeal entities that can shape your understanding of reality as you know it.
This film was under production for 1 year and 1 month due to countless difficulties. I can’t stress enough how light I felt after it released.
At the beginning, there were light, then everything else stared with Sara Jeanne, as always. This were the second time were came together in order to work on a project, (sadly the first one was a no go).
I always found bizarre the interaction characters has ‘in the world of Pokemon’ with such creatures. There are fire Pokemon that breathe fire, and water Pokemon that shoot water. But there are also ghosts and dark Pokemon. Ghosts, like in dead itself. It simply confirms life after dead, the holy grail. Oddly enough, I saw a good opportunity in order to showcase how terrifying this notion is. There are Pokemon that will stalk you in the dark in order to paralyze you and eat your dreams, they hypnotize in order to kidnap children, suck your life force though nightmares, there is a doll that is said to be just filled with hate floating around. Hell, if there is something I’m not lacking is a good source for a good story.
Once the screen play was done, Sarah got in contact with David O. Anderson, and Heather Casseri. Meanwhile, I asked for special effects assistance from my fellow marathon runner, (yes, we meet on a marathon the prior year) Ashley Pfalzer. And just like that, the foundation was ready to go.
We shoot the entire movie in 5 days, (expected 3) and the last few missing shots which were just me walking in the basement, were shoot an entire year later. That is 4 days last year 2019, one day this year 2020. One of the reasons for the delay was my computer, it exploded (internally). 2009 iMac (R.I.P). Yes, I was using 3d animation and compositing software with a 256MB graphic card in the year 2019. Get off my shoulders, life isn’t fair.
Now, what can I say about the editing process? I had the responsibility of oversee the entire postproduction process by myself. It’s wasn’t pretty due to the way it was shoot, (meant to save time during production, fix it in post issues). The smoke simulations in Blender are broken, although the Optix functionality in combination with RTX graphic cards and the new AI denoising are a fantastic mix. I was reality happy about it. Oh, yeah, and I dislike animating 3d character. That is something I’ll never missed.
The sound design is something I’m really happy with, there were more than 342 sound clips in the entire 20 minutes short film. How do I know that? I had to render all the sound at one point in order to continue editing. In case you aren’t familiar with sound design, you have to go into each individual sound clips and adjust it’s frequencies in order to avoid it to get to loud and destroy the entire sound track or voices.
I’d like make a more in-depth details of how this thing was made, but this will do for now. My favorite part were when I had to ask Sarah to stab Heather in the stomach with a broken piece of (non glass).
I’d like to know your thoughts, I haven’t received much feedback due to the ridiculous small size of the Youtube channel, so I’m curious to see what the general sentiment is towards this piece,
Equipment
Camera3: Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 6k
Lens: Canon EFS 18-135mm Nano USM
LED panel.
Fluid head tripod.
Microphones: Rode Mic, Comica wireless system lavaliers.
Variable ND filter
Camera 2: T3i (+Magic Lantern)
Lens: Canon 28-135mm Ultrasonic.
Tripod
Spider rig
Camera 1: Panasonic GH4
Lenses; Rokinon primes 14mm and 35mm
LED Panels:
Tascam Dr-60MKII
Microphone: Don’t remember :)
Software: Davinci Resolve 16, Blender. premier, photoshop, after effects.