Working on the Ray Bradbury Odyssey: Part 3 (Of Groons and Ghosts)

Of Groons and Ghosts from Christopher (Moonlight) Cooksey on Vimeo.

This video is of some moments from the effects shoots for Live Forever: The Ray Bradbury Odyssey. It demonstrates how I created the underwater puppet effects (with green screen) for such Ray Bradbury creatures as "The Groon" and "The Monster on the Stairs." Family members from Ray's past were also a big part of the story, so we had to come up with a way to make them look ghost like (ghosts from his past) using only some green felt, and a 7D camera. 7D is a great camera for shooting actors, but is hard to deal with when it comes to keying out green, because of the way that it compresses files. In the end, we ended up using some of the noise that compression caused as part of the look, instead of spending time outside the budget, trying to clean it all up. The results turned out very nice, if I do say so myself. As always, I had my loyal team of visual effects supervisor Rich Goddard, co-director and DP Jeremy Hanes, and model builder, grip, and actor Dave Grave, to aid me in making the magic happen. Written and produced by Michael O'Kelly.







These photos are of my creature design for "The Groon" and the staircase I photographed at Dave Grave's home. I then broke the staircase down into layers, so that Rich Goddard could more easily blend the puppets into the scene.