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2. SAMURAI - Behind the Scenes

by Jerry O'Flaherty

1 year ago

1. SAMURAI

by Jerry O'Flaherty

1 year ago

Proof of concept trailer I created for the film / transmedia franchise SAMURAI. This was a no-budget piece shot in two days with a volunteer cast of five people against a white background and then me doing all the post work in a couple of weeks after that. The background plates were created in the Unreal video game engine with the intent of sharing all of the environment assets (rendered at higher res for the film) between the movie and the game. We only had access to more traditional costumes but the vision is to modernize and re-reinvent the look of the Samurai / Ninja genre for this 3D action epic.

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Praveen Leonard
4 weeks ago
Doni Major
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NOBIK
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Chris McQueen 1 year ago

Great stuff!
eric alba 1 year ago

very nice.
Daniel Steen 1 year ago

Nice work!
marc aussure 1 year ago

this is just so good. the gradual build up both in the film and in the music is perfect only to finally explode when the spear is in mid air! this is mere perfection :D
Plastic Tolstoy 1 year ago

Love the concept trailer. Great atmosphere. Great art-style. I hope this'll get you the job you want.
It's just that the zero budget claim is a bit BS. I see a lot of students make the same claim. And it's nice for them so many people on the internet believe it's true. But it's a myth. You use software in creating this stuff, which cost money. This software requires hardware, which cost money. Everybody working on this needs food, which costs money. People sleep in houses that cost money. And the assets you borrowed from other movies/trailers costs MONEY. Everything costs money. Nothing is zero budget. I mean if you could do this trailer 200 times, you could end up with an Avatar movie that costs literally nothing, right? Right?
Randy Perry 1 year ago

Wow, thanks for your comment Sir BUZZ KILL.

I'm pretty sure most people understand the statement "Zero Budget". The beauty of this is that this very polished and professional trailer was produced with no budget other than things in hand.

When a film is green lighted at a studio the budget they set doesn't include the price of cameras, computers and software either...
Randy Perry 1 year ago

Great job! Well done!
Plastic Tolstoy 1 year ago

@Youdiejoe. LOL. I hear zero budget all claim the time well it's getting a but old. I'm just saying nothing is zero budget. Zero budget is a myth. I mean you need food right? You need time?
Anders Goberg 1 year ago

Wouldn't he have to eat if he didn't make this trailer? It's not like you only eat when your making movies. It's a zero budget production because he used stuff he had available for free. He probably shot it on a camera he owns, probably edited on a computer and software he owns, and all the actors did the job for free. Time is money? that's very cliche and old as well.

Great work...
Jerry O'Flaherty 1 year ago

Being skeptical of the no-budget claim is valid but, as Anders speculates, I did use my own camera and machine and software to do the work.
It was a number of long nights in After FX and Unreal Engine to get everything put together but was a blast to do. Worth giving up a little sleep over.
Rob Ogden 1 year ago

Great look and use of CGI, how and where did you learn to use Unreal Engine to create such good looking environments?
Jerry O'Flaherty 1 year ago

I was the Studio Art Director at Epic Games during the building of the Unreal 3 Engine. I've spent ungodly numbers of hours working with UE3 at this point.
The version I used for this piece is a three year old build of the engine from the UT3 days.
The background plates in most of the shots are broken up into Foreground, middle-ground and background passes of the Environments so I could add atmosphere and other post elements.
Rob Ogden 1 year ago

Nice! A quick Google search didn't turn up anybody else using UE3 to produce this kind of quality for cinematic purposes. What is your turnaround - significantly less than more traditional 3D workflows?
Jerry O'Flaherty 1 year ago

Turnaround for creating the settings is massively faster than a more traditional CG pipeline. UE3 is built to allow a single user to very quickly flesh out an environment, light it and dump out the frames.
Once I had the proper angle and camera motion in place, inside the engine, I would add a Greenscreen panel to the scene and shoot the 3 different layers from back to front. Added the live-action then several layers of dust and smoke and other atmospherics, shot in my 2 car garage.
dwayne casey 1 year ago

Very nice. I didnt know one could utilize a game engine in this way. I am trying to decipher what was AE, alpha channeled video and the game engine. So its like the Unreal engine is the stage...
ciaran 1 year ago

stylish and well executed. I'm looking forward to seeing more soon. That Unreal engine seems promising for sure.
softdistortion 1 year ago

Cool mashup of tech for this. Indie Film making is ramping leaps and bounds in quality and methods. Major respects for your accomplishment!
Christiant D'alberto 1 year ago

good work -
james Marshall 1 year ago

Great job!!!
ZOMBIE STUDIOS 1 year ago

There's a great article with more detail about the project on Metacafe:

blog.metacafe.com/2010/06/metacafe-exclusive-the-genesis-of-samurai/
Million Dollar Extreme 1 year ago

WOW! Very original, I don't think I've ever seen anything like this. I have never in my life ever seen anything that looks like this samurai action thing. Literally! Awesome! Great Job! This is so sweet! Total sick killer!! Especially cool with the 3D and what not, truly innovative. Wow!
K C 1 year ago

Nice work. Music is...?
Umashin Yakubu 1 year ago

nine inch nails just how you imagined
MichaelTheGeek 1 year ago

Great!
Patrick Prejusa 1 year ago

Absolutely amazing work. That was a real pleasure to watch.
Alex Popov 10 months ago

hey man love the trailer, i used the same technique on few of my projects, so the main question is how do you render the video in UT3 engine? what i was mostly doing is gust capturing the video from my screen with "Fraps", but i would love to know how to actually render one in using the engine itself, Once again this video is a huge inspiration for me :) Thanx
Wrighto 6 months ago

Awesome. Inspirational.
Mico Gaerlan 5 months ago

Very nice compositing, can you put a tutorial if possible