About a year ago, Nick Denney, a low-budget filmmaker from here in Kentucky, touched base with us about helping him bring his vision to life for The Guardian—a stylistic, mystical short film about a vision-harried paladin who can see into people’s life via touch. Dedicated to protecting those who will change things for the better, the film’s protagonist is psychologically damaged when he’s unable to save someone capable of bringing peace to the world.
Because the film had to compress a lot of concepts into a short space of time, numerous special effects were needed to showcase some of these concepts in the film. (Plus, there were some things that had slipped through the cracks in production that needed to be corrected in post.) Additionally, the film travels through time from the ‘50’s to the present, so cover up effects were required to make the world believable. While some of the motion skewing and Colorista effects were performed in Premiere Pro CS4, most of the heavier effects were done in After Effects CS4, since it’s just designed to perform better for effects work.
Fortunately, the Dynamic Link options in CS4 made going back and forth a breeze. Because I and the director were in two different locations, we had intended to make a lot of use of Adobe’s Clip Notes, as it has a really great meta data export that can let you send out comments and corrections from preview videos that can be imported into Premiere Pro as markers on the timeline. While the actual importing of the meta datea worked like a dream, the actual previewing of the Acrobat-based Clip Notes’ videos we emailed back and forth were much more limited due to issues with both Windows 7 (which I was using) and the newer versions of Mac’s OS he was using in conjunction with this. As such, after a few barely working attempts, we just started exporting out high quality .F4Vs of the footage and emailing them back and forth. While not as convenient as Clip Notes, the CS4 Media Encoder made this process pretty pain-free.
As an FX artist, it’s always interesting when your goal is to have your effects completely unnoticed, but, truthfully, that’s often the case. In this situation, at least half of the effects in The Guardian were done for just this reason.
