Limitless Re-Make

Red, Amber, Green-Lit

After an evening at my house watching the film 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty', my team and I brainstormed three film sequences that we would put forward to re-create in our presentation the following Monday.

The three films we came up with were:

- Limitless - The Pill Scene

- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - The Opening Sequence

- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Following our team evening were the presentations, this is where my team and I pitched our three film sequence ideas to the staff & seminar group of our module. All three of our suggestions were successfully green-lit which meant our team had a choice of which sequence we wanted to go ahead with.

After some deliberating over location and equipment usability, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to re-make the pill sequence from the film Limitless.

Pre-Production

Our pre-production began by assigning job roles to each member of the crew:

Producer - Emily O'Brien (me)

Director - Joel Woodman

Gaffer - Billy Child

DIT - Ellie Ganley

2nd AC/Props - Misha Sillifant

Sam Lawrence - Camera Operator (Sam isn't on the 254 module but kindly helped us out in the shooting of our film)

Jack Arthur - Talent (2nd Year Acting student at Falmouth Uni)

Once roles were put in place we assigned ourselves each time codes within the sequence to analyse for the shot breakdown - this would help us to get familiar with the sequence itself and help us later on when it came to the shoot.

Every film needs actors and luckily Billy had a certain actor from the Acting Course in mind who happily accepted our request to play Bradley Cooper's part in the film. Unfortunately, we struggled to find a female actor to play the role of the landlady, so our crew member Misha bravely put herself forward to play the role.

My Role as Producer:

As producer, my role entailed sorting out the paperwork, this included completing risk assessments, location agreements, contributor release forms, location recces and sketching out floor plans. I created a Google Drive folder for the crew and started uploading my production documents to the folder.

Incredibly, the house I am currently living in had almost the exact layout of that of the block of flats hallway in which the Limitless scene plays out. Our only issue was the wall colouring, as in the sequence the shots are quite dark because of this, this caused some grading issues in post which I will go on to talk about later.

Once I'd completed the location recce, I emailed the estate agents to get permission to use the house as a set. They emailed back saying they'd see no issue and shortly after I went over to get the location agreement signed

After the location agreement was signed, it was time to get the Risk Assessment completed in order to be able to book out the equipment for our shoot. With the risk assessment completed, signed and approved by SoFT Stores we were able to book out our equipment and transport it over to my house to store the day before shoot.

Shoot Day One

5th March Shoot Day:

Shoot day came around and by 10:30 we had the crew on location, ready to set up the equipment for filming. We had our actor Jack scheduled to arrive at 1:30 so we used the first 3 hours for test shots, b-roll shooting and lunch (consisting of a sweet potato curry I'd cooked up for the crew at 9am that morning!).

Once Jack had arrived, we started shooting his scenes which were the bulk of the production. A shot list was checked and ticked off after every shot had been successfully filmed. Once we had all of Jack's shots, we checked them over on the laptop, ensured we had all required takes and finally talked through our green screen studio shoot. After Jack had left we proceeded to film the rest of the sequence including the shots of the Landlady, played by crew member Misha.

Once we had ensured all of the shots for that shoot day were ticked off and successfully uploaded to the laptop and hard drive, we wrapped on shoot day one, packed up equipment and transported it back to stores.

The shoot in total lasted 8 hours with two breaks, one for lunch and one for tea. My on-set role consisted of ensuring paperwork was together, that cast and crew were sufficiently provided with breaks, water and food, ensuring that we stuck to the shooting schedule, on-set photographer and finally a hand model for the ring shot.

Pictures from shoot day one can be found below:

How we intend to use VFX within our edit:

Visual effects are an integral part of our edit as our sequence uses them more than once. The first time we see vfx being used is during the shot where the pill starts to take action and we see a body double of Eddie walking up the stairs. We thought a lot about how to most effectively go about this shot and after some deliberation decided to go down the green screen route (which I'll talk about in the next section). In order to complete the shot we needed two shots to overlay, the first showing Eddie's body double walking up the stairs and the second showing Eddie's reaction in the foreground.

The Body Double Shot:

As you can see from the image below, we decided to film the shot of Eddie walking up the stairs on location using a C-stand, this was used to represent the foreground Eddie that we intended to shoot in the green screen room. The C-stand not only served as an eye-line for our actor but also as a marker for the VFX students we were collaborating with to use when it came to keying Eddie into the foreground.

VFX on the brain...

The next shot to include visual effects was a type of surrealism vfx shot as it reflected Eddie's internal, the visuals of moving through Eddie's brain as the drug takes action. This shot is entirely vfx and we left this to the hands of our vfx team to get creative with. We were extremely happy with how the vfx brain shot turned out, the team did a really good job with it. Below is a screenshot of what they achieved:

Shoot Day 2 Green Screen Studio Shoot:

Next on our shooting schedule was the green screen shoot. As previously mentioned, there is a particular shot within our sequence which involves seeing double of the protagonist. In order to re-create this we filmed two shots, one on location (as previously spoken about) and one in the green screen studio. For this shoot we filmed our close up foreground shot of Eddie where he reacts to the body double behind him. As we only needed to get one shot with actor jack, this shoot day only lasted around an hour. Once again my job role was to ensure the shoot ran smoothly and to be the on-set photographer. After a quick set up and rehearsal with our actor, we did a few takes and managed to get the shot done relatively quickly. The SD was then backed up onto our computer and this concluded our shoot. At this point in the process we now had all of our rushes complete and uploaded to the Nexis, ready for the edit.

Pictures from Shoot Day Two:

Re-shoot

After looking through and logging our shots from production we realised a few of the timings weren't accurate within Misha's part, we decided to re-shoot and use this time to get a few final shots we hadn't yet taken (the lightbulb shot). This shoot was relatively time efficient, once I'd completed the studio risk assessment and the equipment was booked we headed to the studio to start filming.

A few shots required some imaginative thinking, for instance we needed a shot of a lightbulb on a wall, we didn't have this setting available to us so Billy decided to get crafty and created a makeshift light fixture out of a lamp bulb, a piece of A3 card and some masking tape:

Once we'd successfully shot the lightbulb shot we decided to move onto re-shooting Misha's shots. As we'd previously shot her parts with a black flag behind her we needed to replicate this within the re-shoot for the purpose of continuity. This entailed myself and Joel standing behind Misha, holding two ends of a black floor mat (yet another crafty on-set decision), whilst Billy filmed the take. When we'd finished shooting, we uploaded the files to Billy's laptop and he copied them across to a hard-drive. We looked over the shots to ensure we had good continuity and that they had the right timings. With the all clear from the director we were now ready to start Post-Production!

Moving on to Post-Production

Rough-Cut:

After successfully wrapping our shoots and uploading all of our rushes to the Nexis drive, it was time to compile a rough cut/offline edit. I've not much experience with editing softwares, other than Final Cut Pro, so I decided to use Premiere Pro to construct my edit as it's a software I want to gain experience with in order to gradually work my way up to using Avid.

Creating the Offline Edit:

The first step for me during the offline edit was adding the original audio to the timeline. Once I'd done this I then started to compile together the sequence, adding shot by shot, matching the audio, whilst continuously referring back to the original sequence and watching it very closely to ensure I was making the correct adjustments. Due to the fact one of our longest shots was being edited by the VFX team, a filler was added in order to show where the shot would slot in within the timeline once finished.

I also added a letterbox template to the timeline in order to create the same letterboxing effect used in the original sequence. A lot of the shots required a bit of punching in and rotation in order to ensure the re-make shots reflected the originals accurately.

After watching my sequence in close comparison to the original, I was happy with the offline edit and it was now down to VFX to send us their work in order to replace the filler.

The filler is represented by the pink within the timeline below:

Grading

Just before my export, I realised that if I were to directly export my rough cut into DaVinci Resolve with the letter-boxing, I would end up grading the black of the letter boxing effect which would hinder the overall look. I removed the template and decided that it would be best to add the effect back in once all of the shots had been graded.

After removing the template, I exported my rough cut to a pro-res file and imported it to DaVinci Resolve ready for my grade.

Our rushes as a whole had a very prominent yellow hue, this was because during production we over-lit our shots in order to ensure there was enough light to counteract any noise that could come from the grade being darkened. However, this look was a very different tone to that of the very muted grade in the original film. Below I will deconstruct my first attempted grade:

Original Shot (Limitless, 2011)

Original Shot From Rushes First Attempted Grade

As you can see there is a significant difference between the rushes and the first attempted grade. The first step was to bring the rushes to a normal level, this consisted of making sure the parades and waveforms of the video scopes weren't off balance. Once the image was of a normal appearance, it needed to match the tone of the film, a dull de-saturated monotone feel with a slight green hue. I used a series of vignettes to create a darker background surrounding him, some with a higher tint in order to create a green hue, meanwhile keeping the saturation to a minimum. I then masked his face, as I didn't want to lose the skin tone completely, and lowered the saturation to somewhat match that of the surroundings. In the film shot Eddie's cheeks and lips remain relatively pink, for this I masked out 4 sections, his cheeks, his nose and his lips and gave them a slightly red hue in order to ensure his complexion wasn't completely lost in the de-saturation.

After debating over it for a while, I decided I wasn't happy with my first grade attempt of this particular shot and started over. Here is my second attempted grade:

Rushes Second Grade Attempt

My second attempt is a much smoother grade, the skin is less patchy and the green vignette creates a really nice overall look on the shot.

Next it was time to move onto Valerie's shot, I struggled a bit more with this grade due to the fact we filmed the two shots in different locations. We tried hard to replicate the lighting on set but this still caused a bit of a continuity error within my grade.

Evidently, as shown, my final grade isn't quite as dark and desaturated as the original shot, however after grading the shot in conjunction with the original, I wasn't as happy with it and decided to change it. Our rushes of this shot had a very yellow hue so I brought this right down and added green tints within the shadows to keep to the aesthetic of the film. I struggled to match this grade to the other shot of Valerie due to the change of location but I am happy with the final grade I achieved.

Another example from my grade is this shot of Eddie after he takes the pill. The saturation increases during this part of the sequence to represent the effects of the drug so it was important for this to be made evident within my own grade. Unfortunately, this was a lot harder than expected because the background of my shot matches our actors skin tone, making it harder to emphasise the saturation without running the risk of over doing it. The background in the Bradley Cooper shot is darker due to the dark green walls, it wasn't possible to get the same desired effect in my grade without having to alter the background in every singe shot, instead I created a lighter green vignette to keep to the green aesthetic without altering the shot too harshly. I then sharpened the eyes and tried to bring out his face as much as I could.

After several more hours of grading, I was finally finished with my first grading draft. Not quite a finished however, as we hadn't been sent the final vfx shots yet so I began working on my shot deconstructions for the showreel whilst I waited on the shots.

Editing The Showreel

I edited in DaVinci in order to avoid losing my grade during the export, this worked really well too as it allowed me to easily copy over graded shots to remove nodes and deconstruct for my edit. I used the track 'Happy Pills' from the film Limitless soundtrack in my edit in order to keep in line with the film. I also included screen recordings of me tracking and grading a few of the shots as I thought this would add to my showreel, as well as allowing some creativity within my edit.

VFX Shot Grading

After we were sent both of the final vfx shots I added them to my re-creation sequence timeline. Despite how brilliant the vfx shots were, I unfortunately experienced issues with them. Firstly, there were issues with rendering the body double shot which caused a change in grade halfway through, I tried to combat this by re-grading but unfortunately it still does change slightly mid-way through the shot. The second problem experienced was down to the grading on the final few seconds of the brain shot, where the shot pulls out of Eddie's head. We needed to send off a graded version of the rushes to VFX in order to avoid the brain being affected by a secondary grade. I had already graded my shots of Eddie after he takes the pill and was happy with what I had achieved, this meant I had a different grade on Eddie after it pulls out of his head to what my graded shots of Eddie were after this. I tried my best to make them as similar as possible but due to the fact I couldn't edit the nodes on the head shot, because it was from an export, I found it difficult.

Final Edit

Once I was happy with the grade on my re-creation timeline, I added my final sequence into the showreel, made sure all the wipes were accurate on my shot deconstructions, added in the letter boxing effect and a few rushes to end.

Lastly I rendered and exported my showreel to MP4 and 720p, ready for assessment upload, concluding my production work for the module.

My Overall Experience...

My experience with this re-creation was very pleasant due to having such a supportive and well communicated group, we worked together well and helped each other out when needed. I learnt a lot about grading and am happy with what I've achieved, considering it was only my second attempted grade with DaVinci. I learnt a few tricks along the way such as how to successfully key frame and the importance of having good lighting on set. I also had never collaborated quite so closely with vfx, which definitely taught me a lot. Overall I'm very happy with the outcome, our team chose a very complex shot and faced some challenges along the way but I believe we did our best to overcome these.