I am Vader...
Darth Vader
I sense the force is strong with you, so let's get right into this epic episode
Good evening and welcome to the Media Division. Today is a very special edition at least for me because...
I dressed to the occasion because we are doing one of my all-time dreams,
we're gonna recreate the Goldfinger intro which is one of my
Favorite iconic pieces of cinema history and because just copying is to boring,
we're gonna do it with little gist, we're gonna include another iconic franchise and that it's gonna be Star Wars.
Who, doesn't love the iconic visuals of Goldfinger's title sequence and we are going to take these Bond visuals and turn them into a versus
them into a Versus-Mix with one of the greatest villains of film history Darth Vader.
Goldvader is a homage to two giants of cinema and to those who gave them to us.
We explore how projectors are used for visual effects
analyse the original production and show you step by step how we executed the production with minimal equipment
After that we will go into the details of the post production
including grading and how to avoid the mistakes that we made.
That is one hell of a ride ahead, so buckle up and beware of a Ninja-Attack at halftime.... so
So, what's not to like about that... so, let's do it.
Let me loosen up a bit because it's hotter than I expected it to be
When we plan a project like this the best thing to do is to look into
how they did it in the original and thank god there's very good documentation on how
they set up the scene how they did the Make-Up and we're going to go into that in a second but I would like to
start with the projector itself
The projector is a very nice and versatile tool
for filmmakers in the past and it's still today
projectors are very interesting lights because they can be any light you really want they can change color so they are RGB lights and
they can transmit shape and movement and they have a built-in Frenzel
they're relatively cheap for the
light that they actually
Will give you
So it's interesting
They are so bright and as you usually shoot in a dim environment and you're close to your subject
it makes sense to have a little cheap
plastic ND and that you can just drop it front ...
...and then you have something which is a bit more friendly to exposure
because
these little f.................. can be bright
The most classic application of projections was to merge scenes that, were shot in different locations... like here in 2001
the projectors were so powerful and the costume so warm, that Kubrick could only shoot for short periods
Doctors had to be on set all the time in case of heat strokes
Projections were used to blend miniatures with pre shot real-life action... like here in the legendary ED 209 sequence in the original "Robo Cop"
this gives the advantage that reflective surfaces blend with their surroundings
Of course this works very well the other way around like here,
where a pre shot Terminator miniature is projected on a screen in front of real-life action giving the actor cues to act to... ouch
"2001" has way more projection action like when flat screens are in the screen
sometimes all says had to be cut apart to give the illusion of a handheld flat-screen device and here is where Kubrick invented the iPad....
iPad Pro that is.
"2001" used the same projections on the actors themselves for a more artsy look and that is what we are going for today
Kubrick was by no means the first to use this technique six years earlier "From Russia With Love"
Projected its titles onto the body of a dancer and thereby setting the stage for the most iconic use of projectors
in the title sequence of Goldfinger
Developed by Robert Brownhjohn it had his own storyline and became a seductive and exciting miniature Bond movie just by itself
it won the British Design Award and Art Director Gold Award in 1965... just lovely
Looking at the Goldfinger intro in the original we can make a couple of assumptions
first for example we're gonna need a darkroom just like in a cinema it's just the nature of projections that the
The lowest illumination of the room is equivalent to the darkest part in your projection so a dark room
has to be there
secondly we're gonna need
some form of backlighting and for once we don't want to have
a soft light that spreads nice and evenly but
We want to have a harsh light to cast the sharp silhouette on the back so a single-source light
with a Frenzel might be the best for that
We're definitely gonna need a tripod and I think for some shots a
slider would be very nice
Let's look into the studio where the original was shot and we have some photos here and maybe we can
learn something from those
As we can see it's everything is pretty
Straightforward as to be expected
I'm a bit surprised about there the size of the room that's a small room and
that they're closer to the subject
than I thought they would be… and I wonder how little the crew did to really darken the room. It's really just right behind
the backlight and
right behind the camera where the room is really darkened
I don't know maybe they have some curtains they put in and out of the screen which you just don't see
on this photograph. Maybe other photos reveal a bit more once the room is dark, we see there
we have a nice contrast and everything works out we see the silhouette of
the backlight and we see a nice projection
This is exactly how we're going to do it and we're not going to really need a big room, so, I think
our dining room would be great because she's on a table and so we are gonna
use a table, our just our dining table to do the same job
one of the key ingredients of the whole image of course is the gold color and it's gonna be a
combination of
body paint, of lighting, and of the white balance in the camera. In the film itself you have a couple of scenes with a
dead woman being covered in gold color and in the film it is a very very rich color and it looks almost as if
she is Gold-plated. I knew to start with that that's gonna be difficult to achieve a look that is that strong but
when we look again at a set photo, like this one, we see that it actually looks pretty normal to begin with and
This is just a body paint you can easily buy on Amazon or equal and
that's exactly what we did and I'm quite happy with the result of that paint.
So, we're going to need a dark room, we're gonna need a table, we're going to need a tripod,
we're going to need a slider, we're gonna need a backlight,
we are going to need some color, and we're gonna need the most precious ingredient of them all... which is a woman
Women are strange and dangerous creatures, so be careful
Luckily we have a domesticated
specimen of these creatures and I am married to her… her name is Kristina and as she is a brunette
we're gonna have to make her wear this
she's not gonna be happy about that.
Kristina has the "odd job" (pun intended) to paint herself golden... that will take a while
enough time for me to turn our dining room into our studio
I black out the background and brighter walls with muslin.
The stands allow you to do that without ruining the walls
The heavy dinner table is perfect as a stage so I cover the table and the floor with muslin as well
tripods and a motorised ladder will give us a perfect placement for camera and the projector
I place my life in a small tripod that it will change later to be more, flexible with the height
We will shoot with the Panasonic EVA1, it records ProRes RAW to a Shogun Inferno
I have a 42 inch Rhino slider with motion arc that allows us to program repeatable movements
I surely wish it had an app as the cables tend to get in the way
And here is our golden girl ready for a golden hour
The better you plan and picture what you want the less time you have to torture your model
I edited together my favorite sequences and graded them a bit to a golden look
so we can have the colors where we want them even before the grade?
if you can, you should always do as much as possible in camera
Make, sure you have the room heated a lot remember that she's almost naked while you're not
Only the slides are shot on a wide lens, here we use the Sigma 18–35 as it will emphasise the change in perspective
It's a bit hard to avoid the camera or shadow on the projection so I recommend to shoot everything else with longer lenses
that will, also make it easier to avoid firming projection spill on the background
I used an 80 millimeter f1.9 Mamiya and a Mamiya 80mm macro...
...both are medium format lenses with an adapter of course
For a good spirit keep crew and tellent well-fed
Wait that reminds me of something
oh dear...
here I go again
Finally we know what the baby in 2001 wanted from us
Pizza
Now that we have all the shots that
we can possibly need it's time to go into post but as this is a bit technical I would like to show you
the end result first
So this is Goldvader
Goldvader
He's a man, the man with the mighty touch
A Sith Lords touch
Such a cold Vader
Beckons you, to enter his web of sin
But don't go in
Words of force he will pour in your ear
But his lies can't disguise what you fear
For a Jedi knight knows when he's touched him
it's the dark sides touch
from Mister Goldvader
Padawan beware who’s side you endorse
he’s with the dark side of the force
the dark side of force
only force
the dark side of force
only force
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Let's go into post-production and here we are in Final Cut Pro
that is the only NLE to support the ProRes RAW that we shot with the Panasonic EVA1 and the
Shogun Inferno... the image is great and we are close to 6k in terms of resolution
I will only do the primary grade in Final Cut and then export for editing in Premiere, I don't like Final Cut and Apple will not
make me use it ...... sorry
After the import you will see that the high dynamic range is converted into shrill colors and we are going to change that as
I like to start grading from a LOG image
So you just select all clips and turn the rec.709 conversion off giving us LOG V-LOG in this case...
now we start with applying a LUT?
for this I exported an EVA1 to Kodak film emulation LUT from the Filmconvert app that I can recommend... and that gives us the
Rec.709 starting point that doesn't cause eye cancer, we are going to do some tweaking with the color wheels I want the image
generated to be darker and I'm going to lift the mid-tones and
I will also drag those into the yellow so we get more of a golden color that I'm looking for
in the curves I also apply contrast
high contrast will give you a look that is more metallic
As you can see most unwanted details there were visible in the background
are already gone just by applying the primary grade and
believe it or not this is it for the primary grade so,
we export this to ProRes 444 to keep all the juicy color information for now
So we switch to premiere so you can see I already have the final edit open from here it's very straightforward
I did little to nothing in Lumetri, I just applied
a bit of a curve to each cube to make them fit each other
sometimes minor color tweaking was applied for a better match between bright and dark scenes
did some titles that resembled the original form and as a graphic designer
that is where I have to brag a bit here. I've got the right font with my first guess
Trade Gothic in a rounded version it is. Some scenes have still
some faint fragments of the projections or the muslin in them. To get rid of them we just apply a mask that we feather a bit
it's so simple, as Kristina is usually not moving herself
The scenes that did move have been shot in a wide angle lens
to emphasise the movement. The downside of that is that you cannot avoid filming the projection on the muslin
Premiere makes it easy for you, and a right click lets you send the sequence with all the right settings to After Effects
as a full step by step would be just too long and boring I will just say that there different techniques to do travelling masks in
After Effects including automatic tracking in Mocca. As we used a motorised slider the movement is predictable
simply drawing masks at starts and end points and applying some keyframes and bezier curves for acceleration and deceleration will do the job
the render shows a clean sequence without irritating background projection
Now that we have the edit, grades, effects entirely in we can take care of the music
as this is a parody it needs its own lyrics. For playback I used an old live recording of the original Orchestra that has no . Vocals
I just used the same mic setup that I used to record my voice now and sang a track
right into Premiere
I think we can all agree that I should stop doing that!
Friend of mine is a professional audio engineer and he was so kind to polish the mix a bit so I don't sound quite as horrible
Thank you Christoph, your are magic
In the end, this is a segment I call "We do mistakes so you don't have to"
this project went really smoothly and I didn't even get in a fight
When I asked my wife to wear the wig, she she actually liked it so don't worry, we're cool
But there was one thing that really really
Pestered me a lot and that is this projector
Because, many of you would say: oh you should know that, but I didn't ...  I had no idea.
This is a DLP Projector, and when I bought this I bought it actually not only with watching movies in mind, but to use it for special effects primarily
Nobody told me that it's a bad idea to use a DLP projector for that, and you should use other technologies but basically LCD or
whatever is out there... and in here is why
the DLP projector technology is based on a spinning colour wheel that is right in front of the light source and
that will not go well with a the shutter of your camera I tried
everything I tried every kind of
shutter angle that you can possibly think of to to make the lines disappear and
finally, in the end I got the right idea. The only way to actually get it right, is to actually
switch off the shutter totally
but even without an electronic shutter you will see artifacts like color ghosting on fast movements like here on the TIE fighter and
here in the lightsaber fight, camera projection and this upload are all exactly at 24 frames per second and still,
we have ghosting that is not visible in the footage that has been used for the projection
The effect is less apparent in brighter scenes
As always, I will put all the gear that we have used
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Hope to see you soon here and in the meantime, be the filmmaker that you always wanted to be... punch a hole in the sky
bye
