Production Part 1

We officially began production of Future Tense around April 2007 after about nine months of late-night storyboarding, scheduling and other preproduction. We then began searching for crew. Fortunately, Vancouver is filmmaker's heaven, so finding an excellent, professional and enthusiastic crew was not too hard. The screenplay played a major part in getting top talent interested!

Some storyboard samples (after scanning the scraps of paper), from the hundreds we've been making!

We rented an amazing camera, a Sony XD Cam HD, from our local TV friends, and borrowed some awesome lighting gear from our friends' friends at William. F. White.

We began shooting all the parts of the movie that took place in the present time, since they required fewer CGI elements. All the scenes with Neil and Kelly in their Manhattan flat were shot at The Lions condominiums in Coal Harbor, downtown Vancouver.













A frame grab from the actual footage. The pink one is straight from the camera, the blue one was toyed around a bit by the postproduction team, to get a feel for what can be done.

After finally shooting all the present scenes (not without problems, but I'll leave that to another day) we began prepping up for the future scenes. Since we needed to use green screen extensively, we became members of the local filmmakers' society, Cineworks, and rented their studio room.

Two pictures of the apartment after we finished shooting the present scenes and moved to the studio.

Two more pictures of us on set at the studio shooting the beginning of the flying car sequence.

Left: Jon Affolter, our top-notch 1st AD, prepares a scene for our Director of Photography extraordinaire, Brendan Mk Uegama. Tom Affolter rigs the set. Right: Greg takes five as the VFX team jump into action. The smiling big guy setting up the tennis balls is our awesome Visual Effects Supervisor, Jason Hancox.

Co-Writer/Co-Director Brant Hughes wonders how we got into this mess, while Greg makes sure his belongings havent been stolen. 1st AD Jon Affolter and partner-in-crime Steph Faye (our ubercool documentary filmmaker) discuss where to hide Greg's sox.


Left: Ninja D.P. Brendan Mk Uegama and 1st AD Jon Affolter stare happily and unsuspectingly at my camera. Documentarian Steph Faye knows better and looks away.

Right: Our crack team of HD-savvy, airbrush wielding, makeup artists work on our two holographic newscasters. The boy playing with tennis balls is Ben Miller, one of our wizards in post-production artistry.

Its been a test of skills and patience to everyone involved. But we have savoured every moment of it through and through, and there's no turning back now!

As I write, the new storyboards and tight animatic for the flying car sequence are nearing completion. In the next few days we'll get together with Jason and finish off any pending details, and we'll be ready to get the Visual Effects team to start working on the 3D Animated elements of the future and the actors ready for their parts. We still have a long way to go. But every thousand mile journey begins with a step, someone clever once said!