Roman Times

I’ve been working on a long term project over the last year and a half, and it’s finally in an almost finished state.  Roman Times.

The project is (hopefully one of many) 25 minute doco, aimed at year seven and eight students, studying ancient rome.  The doco takes the students back to ancient rome, and shows them what their lives would have been like, 2000 years ago.  It’s lighthearted and fun, and uses a lot of VFX to keep the target audience interested.  Shot on location in Italy, Turkey and France, the locations look amazing.  My boss is both director (with a 1/3 stake in the project) and the camera operator.

The challenge came when it came time to do the post production.  There was no solid deadline, no budget specified (the cheaper the better obviously) and no sure idea of the quality level required.  Having done a fair whack of training at fxphd, I was semi-confident that I could do all the 2D compositing, and a fair whack of the 3D work, though not all of it, given plenty of time. Seeing as this project had no real deadline, the option of really cheap but really long was taken, and I was landed with the job of now doing VFX 1-2 days a week, until I completed it.  Having never done a job like this before, I was asked how long it would take.  I couldn’t really give any estimate, so the decision was made to allow 40 hours per shot, with an additional 10 hours per shot for me to ‘learn what I needed’.  With the idea that some shots would take significantly longer than others.  This, based on 13 VFX shots, meant in a grand total of 650 hours, which, at 16 hours a week, was about ‘a year’.  There was also a down deposit of $10k, to allow us to purchase Cinema4D, Nuke, Syntheyes and Mocha, and another 8GB of Ram and a second display to beef up our Mac Pro.

Well.  13 VFX shots should more accurately have been described as 13 VFX sequences, and in actual fact it turned out that there were a couple more sequences added on as the project was edited, and so it ended up with around about 50 VFX shots.  Some ranged in time from 2 hours up to 80 hours.  End result?  I learn’t a lot.  There’s nothing like actually doing the work in order to learn!  I got the shots done to an ‘acceptable’ level of quality in around about 300 hours.  We had to bring in another person to do some character modelling (Ben Weatherall – now working for Firemint who do FlightControl, one of the best selling iPhone games), and we purchased all other 3D models through TurboSquid.  As you might have guessed, modelling is not my strong point.

It’s selling to schools, and some distributors have expressed a little interest, so fingers crossed, we can do the next few in the series.  Check out the trailer here.