Doombeard:
Its certainly possible it would just take a long time to pull off. The thing with short film-making is to not be over ambitious, do something simple and do it well. Then if you decide to you can do something more ambitious once you’ve learned from your mistakes and go forward from there.
If I list some of the things that are viable and the pros and cons then you can get more of an idea of feasibility and voice your thoughts
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Live action
The easiest and most tradtional way to achieve this is 300 style, just shooting a bunch of stuff against a green screen. Light it correctly and throw it into a digital environment ala Star Wars prequels or 300 or LOTR. You’d need a large area with controlled light ie no windows, and some good lighting kits, tons of green screen and lighting, sound, and camera equipment (all of which you can borrow these days from fellow collaborators).
The Dwarfs could be done with forced perspective. Early tests for Gandalf and LOTR exist on youtube and stuff if anyone’s in doubt, there’s a lot of reading material and guides out there on how to do this in cinematography and its one of the oldest tricks in the books going bck to the days of George Melies. Something worth mentioning about scale though is, if there weren’t any other types of races involved then you wouldn’t need to cheat scale because they would have nothing to compare against.
Environments, Zharr Naggrund etc, you would just paint digital mate paintings for large Environments in Photoshop, huge digital matte paintings like 20k resolution which depict landscapes or skies or huge interiors, and then re- project them in compositing or 3d software and drop them into the green screen behind the actors where appropriate. (Each shot has to be pre-designed) Also , and this is where the really fun bits come in, making Lava flows and miniature scale environments & buildings, castles, and shooting them on camera.
The costumes and stuff could be easily enough made. you can make huge beards our of crepe hair and use FX denture style sets for large teeth. If you wanted to go huge with the tusks you could make CG ones and add them in or just make practical latex ones. Make contact with all the Cosplay & LARP clubs, find extras, find actors, find costumes, go out and shoot in some cool places, garner support on warseer and other forums. Get the rpf guys involved : http://www.therpf.com/ … Make a kickstarter project to fund it.
Pros
- Photo realism, believability, jaw dropping backdrops and scenery, performance led acting (if you get good actors!), extremely fun making everything practically such as costume, makeup and miniature castles etc
Cons
- Mainly logistics, which is why you’d need a good producer to work through them. Need good actors, working with actors is tough trying to organise dates when they are available, and finding committed people to work with who don’t totally suck, would have to do casting sessions. Need a lot of Green Screen and space to shoot in, or awesome outdoor locations, mines, quarries, caves, but that opens up more logistic problems, need a large space if any model making is being done its logistically hard to have workshop space and space to shoot in, space and resources are really the main issue here. A workshop or barn or warehouse is really needed to house it all under one roof but that kind of thing is very rare to get especially for now money. And last of all and most importantly time, would take time to make inexpensive but high quality costumes, miniatures, makeup etc . A kickstarter project could help hire a warehouse for a month or something to build and shoot (and live and sleep in probably!)
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Stop Motion
Agree on a scale, build some chaos dwarf armatures, and hobgoblin ones, someone sculpt some characters, build some miniature sets with MDF and you’re in business just animate the characters , possibly enhance with some CG for things like fire, smoke, large environments etc. Shoot very controlled lighting with very large depth of field and good lights. With 3d printing now you could possibly rapid prototype some face designs but they’d need to be sculpted by a digital sculptor first then finished off with hand painting. Laika’s work serves as a great example of whats achievable. Make a kickstarter project to fund it.
Pros
- Unique, beautiful aesthetically, never been done before, medium lends itself well to fantasy. Easy to work on continually over a long period of time as the logistics are more manageable than a live action shoot. easy to re-shoot scenes, not at the mercy of time or actors performances or actors reliability etc. Utilises model-making skills & creativity. Once stuff is made if it can be stored can be used over and over again. Use two cameras and could be shot in stereo easily.
Cons
- Long winded process, a lot of workshop/model-making time, requires technical ability if you want to have any exciting camera moves you’d need a motion capture rig (like they built on the original star wars, or Alien, built with small motors and electronics) otherwise just shoot from a static camera which can look boring because every shot is a lock off.
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Full CG characters or CG enhancements / Live action
Mix model sets shot in miniature, digital environments & live action parts with full CG characters or CG character enhancements combining various techniques. Make a kickstarter project again to help fund it.
Pros
- If done right could be very photorealistic and gives more freedom to the director to do whatever he wants storywise, and not have to worry about the realms of whats achievable in the practical world so much, creature design, vfx all looks very impressive if done right and incorporated into the real world believably
Cons
- Extremely hard to do certain parts of cg characters, logistically without them looking like some kind of low quality computer game cinematic or 90’s pc game. Organic stuff like skin, faces, eyes, hair, teeth is incredibly complex and would take a huge amount of rendering time logistically. It is possible to do stuff , but things like close ups and realistic lip sync’ing would be almost impossible to achieve without a budget and large resources. Smaller things work better like enhancements, some digital teeth or cg eyes, or some form of lower body replacement etc
Rigid body stuff is easier too, its much easier to make a realistic Dawi Zharr helmet digitally that would hold up close up to camera than it would be to make a convincing face for example. Rigging the chainmail to move with the character would be a bit more involved (you’d have to make a cloth sim) but still easier than a full cg face with hundreds of muscles controlling it.
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Full CGi or hand drawn animation
Could get a bunch of artists to work on building a Dawi Zharr full animated short film, make something beautiful, maybe incorporate different forms of animation, shadow puppetry, hand drawn, cg anim, stop mo.
Pros
- Skies the limit anything can be done, full control to the storyteller, no time limitations, no logistical problems, just takes time, talent and a good story.
Cons
- Takes a long long time and specialist animators to work on character animation, hard to find any good experienced animators who will work for free or low cost.
