Making Extinction Event: Alan Atkinson explains how he made the movie which won an IAC International Award and a UNICA Gold Medal.

Other Effects

Now for the cat's rolling eyes. In case you hadn't realised, cats' eyes do not move much in their sockets - they turn their whole heads - so having Walter's cat react in this way should get a laugh. It started with a straightforward shot of the cat (one with relatively little movement) and a single frame was exported into Photoshop. Extra white was next added around the pupil by cloning (OK, as it was a cat, it was extra 'green'.) Adobe Premiere's, 'motion' controls allowed this image to be moved up and down like a rolling eye. This shot was used as a background layer, with the original scene placed in front. A mask was now made (in Photoshop) to cover just the area of the eyeballs. This was used as a 'Track matte' to let the new, 'rolling eyes' layer show through the eye-holes in the original shot. Along with some morphing, to slightly raise his eyebrows, our cat now responded to Walter's delight at having a World-threatening comet named after him.

The cat also liked reading books, which, I confess, sounds a bit like Grommet the dog, but a good gag is always worth stealing. This effect was done simply by cutting out the paws from a photograph of the cat, sticking them onto the book and filming it in front of a blue screen. (Fig 10) Premiere was then used to put the paws and book onto a scene of the cat, who had been encouraged to 'read' by waving a toy back and forth out of shot. (Fig 11)

Early in the film, hot meteorites start to fall and one pile lands on a poor chap's head. The falling rocks were made from grey-painted lumps of furniture foam - some dropped directly onto the actor's head with others 'blue-screened' in afterwards. We then see the victim lying under a smoking pile of rocks. These were stones filmed on a blue cloth and superimposed over a shot of the actor lying on the ground. A few whiffs of smoke, from smouldering rags, were finally added to complete the effect.

Gordon Bullock, who played Walter, is a good juggler and, with hot rocks falling, this was too good an opportunity to miss. He started by juggling with some false rocks, made out of sawn-off beer cans covered in cement and filled with smoking rags. In order to make them 'hot', fuzzy orange discs were drawn in Photoshop and then superimposed, with matching movement, onto the rocks using Premiere.

One of the stars of the film was the comet itself, which was made from pieces of polystyrene foam, coated with cement, and roughly glued together. It was allowed to spin, suspended on blue thread, over a blue screen whilst lit with very harsh, one-sided light. When composited with a cut-out photograph of the Earth and a starry background (made from pinholes in a sheet of black plastic over a light-box) it looked reasonably authentic. (I must, in fact, admit to never having seen an actual comet heading towards the Earth - but you know what I mean.) It needed a little more, however, and was given rotating gas jets (as in the comet film Armageddon) using some steam from a kettle and a tail drawn in Photoshop.

One scene that always seems to get a laugh is the meteorite hitting the London Eye Ferris wheel. The wheel was filmed for about half an hour and then speeded up a few hundred times on the computer. This, of course, also speeded up the foreground river traffic and made the effect totally unconvincing. The answer was to combine two shots - one going fast and the other at normal speed. It was quite easy to do this by making a mask (in Photoshop) that divided the scene along the line between the wheel and the river. The 'Track matte' key in Premiere then allowed the two to be combined seamlessly. Adding the flaming meteorites, made from small fireworks, completed the scene. A similar technique was used to make the Underground train move at ten times its normal speed while leaving the passengers on the platform moving naturally.

Another problem, solved by special effects, arose when the actor playing the vicar turned up with a huge plaster on his nose; this needed to be explained away. The problem was turned into a gag by adding a scene where the poor man was hit on the nose by a meteorite. But, we still needed a few seconds of him before being struck and without the plaster. A reasonable result was achieved by exporting the scene as a 'Filmstrip'. This was 'cleaned-up' by removing the plaster, one frame at a time, using Photoshop's 'clone' tool. If you look closely, there is still a slight shimmer where the plaster used to be, but no one has yet commented on it.

The film ended with millions of people jumping in unison and, although this could have simply been represented by sound effects and an actor's description of the scene, I wanted some high-impact visuals at this climactic moment. It soon became apparent, though, that getting half a dozen people together would be difficult, let alone making them all jump. Today, I would perhaps think of creating the leaping masses using computer generated imagery but, at the time, this was not available. Some kind of model was clearly going to be needed. Fortunately, the indifferent resolution of today's TVs meant that, with so many 'people' in the scenes, each one would be no more than a couple of pixels across. Consequently, they would not have to be created in any great detail - just in huge numbers.

	The simulated people needed to jump roughly together, but not too well. This is not how real crowds behave - they are always slightly out-of-step. About nine or ten methods of simulating the crowds were attempted, each time starting full of confidence in a breathtaking result and each time being bitterly disappointed. Eventually, the larder provided the answer, in the form of dried peas. Several hundred were roughly daubed with paint, of various colours, and each was then impaled on a pin. A sheet of hardboard was painted blue and hundreds of small holes were drilled into which the pin-mounted peas were placed. Manually pushing the pin-heads from underneath, using a flexible rubber sheet, made the peas rise and fall in a semi-orderly way - rather like a genuine crowd.
	This was filmed, in time with the pre-recorded sound of millions of people jumping (alright, with the sound of a few hundred pebbles bouncing on a polystyrene tray.) Several shots were made, each using a different perspective. By adjusting the size and position of each shot, and using many hundred layers overall in Premiere, it was possible to fill up Trafalgar Square and Whitehall with millions of tolerably convincing jumping people. In some scenes, a few genuine people were added to the front of the crowd but it proved very hard to get anyone to jump in a coordinated way. The ragged edges were disguised by distracting the eye with an overlaid a flock of pigeons made from flapping-wing models filmed against a black background and inserted using a luminance key.

Actors

Actors are never easy to find but my club, Nuneaton Moviemakers, is blessed with several talented thespians who willingly stepped forward. I even ended up performing myself, but not as part of the plan. We had booked the Coventry location and the promised actor, who was supposed to come in the uniform of a senior military officer, failed to materialise at the last minute. A quick re-write, and the words were spoken instead by a scientific advisor (i.e. me!) In some ways this turned out for the best, as a number of re-takes were necessary and we would have been in deep trouble if the original actor had no longer been available. In future, I plan to use more experienced actors when suitable club members cannot be found. Members of local semi-pro theatres or 'amateur-dramatic' groups played some of the smaller roles in Extinction Event. Their greater acting confidence was readily apparent and, provided that shoots are well organised, these people are usually very willing to help.

One thing that I am always asked is how we got Sir Patrick Moore to appear. I thought that it would be great to have a high-profile personality in the film and who better than Britain's most famous astronomer. Fortune favours the bold so I simply wrote to him, at both his home address and at the BBC department responsible for producing The Sky at Night. Less than 24 hours after posting the letters, the phone rang and a voice said "Patrick Moore here. How can I help?" Could it really be him or was it a club member winding me up? I could hardly challenge the caller and, luckily, it proved to be the man himself. He immediately invited us to his home in Selsey and, a few days later, Gordon and I were in his house with a couple of cameras. I had prepared large-print prompting boards with his speech, to hold by the camera, but these were soon dismissed. One quick glance through the script and our famous performer was word perfect. We did three takes (his kitten kept pulling the microphone leads out) and had all we needed in a very short time. Two months later, the BBC replied, advising me that "Sir Patrick never takes part in this sort of thing."

After it doing rather well in the 2006 BIAFF Competition, I was very pleased to have Extinction Event selected for inclusion in the UK's programme for UNICA in Korea. Thanks to the efforts of Reg Lancaster and Dave Watterson, the film was given sub-titles in both French and German. I was still concerned however that, with so many of the gags referring to exclusively British topics, foreign audiences would often be left cold. I needn't have worried, they seemed to get enough to enjoy the film.

Another very satisfying accolade gained by Extinction Event arose from many of the characters uttering the word "B*gg*r" at times of stress. Following the film's entry into the Guernsey Lily Competition, a special award was created by organiser Richard Rouillard. In addition to being voted 'Best Comedy' and 'Best Script', the film was also awarded a certificate for the 'Best Use of B*gg*r'. Now, that is something unique!

What now for our intrepid farmer Walter Ruddles? Well, perhaps just one more outing?

- Alan Atkinson

(Note from Webmaster: Alan's picture on Page 1 is my own work. Alan would have done much better than I did))

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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