Over the summer one of the projects I was excited to work on was putting together some set pieces for David-James Fernandes‘ first short film, Re-Wire. The film’s been cut and sent to Sundance and the trailer is on its way, but for now David’s posted some stills over at his aforelinked blog.
One of the set pieces was a cryptic-looking terminal interface for Dr. Vanuz, which is pictured above (it’s on the left screen). It’s hacked together using entirely open-source tools: Ubuntu, zsh scripts, the xmonad window manager, and dzen. All the parts are triggered from a single command so the actor can interact with the interface directly, allowing the visuals to be integrated into the film in-camera. The result? Reduced post-production work, allowing David to focus on editing, sound, and colour correction in the short time frame between the end of production and festival submission deadlines. And when you’re shooting 4K video, post-production timelines are tight!
The PC running the interface was rented from Reboot. They’re a great charity that collects, distributes, and recycles used computer equipment – they also rented us an aging rack of Compaq servers that looked great on the set!
Prep work, as with all reasonably complicated projects, was key for this, and it was great to gain experience on working on prep work for a film shoot. I’ll be adding some sketches and reference material to this post soon.
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