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post shoot imovie vfx frolLicks

I thought I'd share something special with you today and it's definitely something you're not going to be seeing anywhere else, the "first" VFX shot from Moon. We'd wrapped our shooting at Shepperton and Duncan had just gotten a new Mac Book Pro (these lovely little metal machines were used extensively on Moon). We were at home having some sleep and generally trying to get our heads together as we entered post and my life was about to become overtaken by Excel spreadsheets for a week or so as we rooted through all the footage and got underway with the edit. It was exciting being at home and getting footage through on hard-drives and we'd spend a lot of time just looking at what we'd just shot and generally getting familiar with it all.

Duncan decided he couldn't wait for the next few months of postproduction work to be carried out and so we decided to load a random shot into iMovie. At the time neither of us had used this excellent bit of software before and so we thought we'd take it for a spin and see what we could make it do. If you've seen Moon you'll likely be familiar with the shot of Sam driving his Rover. In case you're not, the footage shot in the studio looks similar to the image below.

I'm not sure exactly how funny this is going to come across as but by the time we were adding the sound effects we were both crying and pissing ourselves with laughter. Our first step was to enhance mood, so it had to be noir. He's driving a car so we'll have the car noise in there a few times. The car sound effect sounds a bit exciting so we knew we needed to amp up the motion so we put the earthquake thing on there just to get a bit more of a kinetic feel. And everybody likes monkeys so lets bosh that in there as well. It's basically all you need to make a film like Moon and perhaps we should have done the whole film this way. We'd have been finished in a day and a half, it's very quick to use. The xylophone effect is something that I really don't think you can have enough of. It adds tension and drama. Apparently the new Robocop re-boot is going to be xylophone-heavy. So here it is, the first ever VFX shot completed for Moon by myself and Duncan on his new Mac in about twenty minutes. Piece of piss this post-production business.

I know that this stupid little video isn't a huge part of the making of Moon, but the ability to muck about a bit and have a laugh when the rest of your life and career seems to be hanging by a very thin thread cannot be underestimated. We were so exposed on this film both professionally and financially that I'm not going to try and describe the constant pressure and related weird-feelings that we all had as I'm not sure I'd be able to. But at least we could still find times now and again to have a bit of a laugh whilst we were doing it.