Big Scene development post 12 - The Penthouse scenes

Since my last post, I've been hard at work with a number of scenes; the biggest of which is the modified version of the confrontation between Bond and Blofeld in Willard Whyte's Penthouse.

It is a pivotal scene in both the original film and Diamonds Reimagined, as it is where Blofeld re-enters the narrative and we get a slice of what he's been up to.

But the key to this new version was to replace all shots with Charles Gray with animated ones featuring a Blofeld with the likeness of Telly Savalas, but has Donald Pleasence's scar and hopefully also a voice like his which I will add in post-production.

I had done multiple tests in the past for this scene, but until December 2024 I had yet to actually produce any final footage. The reason for this is that I hadn't yet finished the re-creation of the Penthouse set.

An early version of Blofeld's desk. Note the different chair - I had yet to choose one that could convincingly turn around.

Most of it I built around 2019 - 2021, so much earlier in the project. The layout was pretty much there, but the setting dressing was incomplete. I needed to render a variety of props, particularly to decorate the tables where Whyte's inventions were placed.

Objects like the safe as seen in this 2020 test for the Penthouse set were later removed. Bond's dinner jacket was also later altered to include the burgundy coloured lapels seen in the original film.

Only once that was done, did I start animating the scene's new shots. By then I had revised the dialogue in the script so as to ensure that whilst much of the scene's structure from the original film is retained, there is a more charged atmosphere. After all, Bond is determined to avenge Tracy by killing Blofeld with his bare hands if possible; but he is stymied by there being two Blofelds in the room.   

Notice how Bond doesn't have many lines in this extract. Blofeld is doing most of the talking, so much of Bond's emotions have to be portrayed with thinly veiled expressions of hatred towards his nemesis.

"Bond is about to leap for him", says Tom Mankiewicz's original script for the scene. This is not apparent in the original film, where the scene is edited as if to suggest Bond just stares in surprise at seeing Blofeld in Whyte's chair before he hears the second Blofeld from above.

None of this, though, stops Bond from being genuinely impressed by Blofeld's voice-changing machine. I had originally written a more dismissive line: "So that's how you've been impersonating Whyte." But then I changed it back to the original film's "Well, that's a neat trick." 

My reasoning for this is that Bond still considers Blofeld to be a clever opponent, plus he's willing to compliment him so as to make him lower his guard. Both Blofelds, as you can see in the script extract from earlier, are more content to taunt Bond.

Speaking of the voice-changing machine, one of the trickier parts of the scene was animating shots of Blofeld on the phone.

Unfortunately, the only phone holding animation available in Moviestorm is one in which the character grabs the phone by the right hand, not the left as Charles Gray does in the original film.

There is no interactive rotary phone prop in Moviestorm, so I had to rely on a trick I have developed for all uses of the phone in Diamonds Reimagined. There is a phone booth prop where a character can hold a reciever, so I set up a shot with a camera inside the phone booth prop, which is then hidden so I can replace it with a Sketchup model of a rotary phone reciever and cord.

The effect is not perfect. To animate the character picking up the phone, I basically have to painstakingly place a reciever & cord prop on the set multiple times. Each one is positioned to fit into the character's hand for a separate key frame, and I need to hide and unhide them depending on which position the hand is currently in.

Here is the raw footage for that particular shot, just to demonstrate how the phone animation looks. It doesn't move once Blofeld is holding the reciever to his ear, except for when he replaces it:

To save memory, all of this was done on a separate set. I placed a wall with the exact same texture as the one on the full Penthouse set behind Blofeld, as well as the chair and the golden armillary sphere prop (though the latter does not appear in this shot).

The reciever cord does not extend to the phone as I only created as much of it as needed to be seen in shot.

The same set was used for a later scene, replacing the shots showing Blofeld on the phone to Bond, who is using Q's invention to pretend to be Bert Saxby.

Blofeld was very much animated with Donald Pleasence's portrayal in mind. Though the scar does not extend onto his eye, I still tried often to replicate the creepy wide-eyed gaze that Pleasence gave off, with the occasional movement of the cigarette that Savalas gave the character.

Blofeld's character model is one of my favourites I've created for Diamonds Reimagined, because of how scary the face looks up close.

 I've already mentioned how the scenes went through a lot of changes both in scripting and direction, but its ending is one of the more significant.

For most of the scene, the main prop for the cat (though having an idle animation) is never seen from the front. This is because I couldn't find a texture with a face to map onto it!

Like in the original film, Bond was always meant to kill the fake Blofeld by kicking the cat so that it ran towards him. I wasn't sure how to animate the cat in one of the shots, but in the end I settled for a bit of stop motion with a specially rendered Sketchup model. This secondary cat prop was programmed to navigate as if making a leap, and I would move the legs & tail to a new position as the cat landed.

This shot with the cat going between the fake Blofeld's legs is very short, as I didn't want the cat prop to be seen for long. The remaining shots of it come from the original film.

The fake Blofeld's death is similar to the original film, only he does not make an exaggerated cry of pain like Charles Gray did. Instead, his eyes just widen with shock and he falls right down onto the floor.

The piton embedded in fake Blofeld's skull is a post-production effect, added frame by frame in the editing software. This saved time as it would've been time-consuming to do in Moviestorm. The blood however, is a texture on the character model.

 The real Blofeld still pulls a revolver on Bond, but in earlier versions of Diamonds Reimagined's script, Irma Bunt would've entered the room at this stage.

She was supposed to dispatch of Bond using a spike-tipped shoe, similar to the one used by Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love (1963), only not one laced with poison, but just a sleeping draught. 

In the end, I cut this and replaced it with the shots of Bond being forced into the lift and being knocked out with smoke from the original film. This meant I had less to animate, and in any event Bunt complicated and padded the scene too much. I needed to wrap things up and ensure the scene still synced with John Barry's Death at the Whyte House track.

The point of this moment is that Bond is rather glum and feels beaten. He has just exhausted his last opportunity to kill the real Blofeld, and he's lucky that Blofeld hasn't killed him yet.

So when Blofeld seemingly lets him go free, especially after all that, his baffled yet suspicious expression makes even more sense considering their history together.

That's all there is for the confrontation with Blofeld scene, but I did actually plan a few other shots on the Penthouse set.

A few were scrapped due to changes in the script, but the one that stayed does actually feature Irma Bunt in one shot. This is when Blofeld is calling Metz to inform him to move the operation forwards by 24 hours.

This is Bunt's one and only appearance in this costume, and she would've appeared like this in the Penthouse confrontation had I not removed her from it.

Another shot I animated is a moment that was in Tom Mankiewicz's script for the original film, but is never seen in the final print. This is Bert Saxby emerging from the lift; thereby alerting Blofeld that whoever had called him was an impersonator.
 

The doors and walls of the lift are separate objects which have been added to the lift prop.

I'm torn on whether to include this shot in the final version of Diamonds Reimagined. There was good reason for cutting it from the original film, as it means there's more suspense as to whether Bond has properly fooled Blofeld. Plus, when Saxby does show up at Whyte's summer home, it comes as a surprise. Keeping this would spoil it, so maybe I should save it for a director's cut?

Either way, I'm very glad to have the Penthouse scenes in the can. They're essential to the plot, and it takes me one step closer to finish working on the middle of Diamonds Reimagined. Once a few other scenes are done, I can move on to the pre-credits sequence set in Cairo...

Till then,

- The Retro Captain

Bloopers Are Forever - The light-hearted side of making Diamonds Reimagined

One thing readers will have likely noticed on this blog is my tendency to include plenty of production stills whenever I am discussing the scenes I am working on. On-set photographs are standard for films, being useful among many things for promotion.

 But on another level they also can be interesting for looking behind the scenes. Who doesn't enjoy seeing how these productions are made and how the actors spent their time between takes?

While we're at it, Bond fans should absolutely check out thunderballs.org, a fantastic non-profit site with the largest collection of archive stills for each of the Bond films. Their collection has been very useful to look through, not only for inspiration for my own production stills but also as reference for sets or locations used in the project's animated scenes.

Animated films do often have stills of sorts, but since they're not live action you can't have the same kind of behind the scenes ones. You may just get ones showing the animators at work.

With 3D animation though, you've got more opportunity for stills because you can just take them from a different camera angle in a scene. This is exactly what I've done with Diamonds Reimagined, and I've even made the effort to stage 'behind the scenes' photos!

During the course of production, I have also been considering the need to add something worthwhile during to the credits. I don't know how long they're going to be, seeing as I don't yet have many voice actors to credit, and I'm essentially a one-man show with the animation and editing.

But then I was reminded of how some productions might include outtakes at the end, just for a bit of light-hearted fun. Even Pixar did this for some of their early feature-length animated films, staging fake bloopers as if the characters were actually actors.

A fair few James Bond films have had their outtakes released, notably at the end of behind the scenes documentaries. So I've decided I would animate my own fake bloopers reel for Diamonds Reimagined, which I will include in the credits and also release separately.

So without further ado, here is a thirty seconds preview of the bloopers reel, featuring the first ones to have been animated:     

Adieu for now,

- The Retro Captain

Mini update #2 - Re-setting a dinner sequence

Sometimes in the development of a film, you'll find changes being made on set to the script. Naturally, such a situation has occurred repeatedly during the production of Diamonds Reimagined with its animated scenes.

In my post on the deleted scenes of the original Diamonds Are Forever, I said that I would not include the scene of Bond's dinner with Plenty O'Toole at the Dome of the Sea as it would not fit into the story of Diamonds Reimagined.

But I have since changed my mind - I feel bad about not giving Lana Wood more screentime as Plenty in the script, so it will be slotted back in its original intended placement.

Here's the problem with making that change though - I already have an animated scene where Bond converses with the other Bond girl Tiffany Case over a meal, which takes place later in the story.

And this animated scene has a setting which was deliberately made to look similar to the Dome of the Sea. I called it the Atlantic Dining Palace, and in the script I implied it was part of the Whyte House.

Thing is, I've never been completely happy with it. Aside from some good lighting, the background and layout never quite looked as impressive as I wanted it to be.

I had tried adding in things like dancers performing in the background, but this just looked too distracting. You're supposed to be focused on Tiffany in this sort of shot, not the dancers behind her.

Since this scene is vital for progressing the plot however, it had to stay in. But upon tweaking the dialogue, I decided I also had to change the scene's setting.

This way, it wouldn't look quite as unfair for Bond to be having a meal with another woman not so long after he'd done so with Plenty O'Toole.

Instead of a fancy restaurant setting, the scene would be in a private lounge which has a bar.

The name of this lounge comes from a line of dialogue in the original film, which mentions that the Whyte House has a 'Starlight Lounge' at one of its highest levels. This would put it a floor or so below Williard Whyte's Penthouse.

Rather than this being a situation where Bond and Tiffany are going out for a meal, the scene now has a slightly less glamourous tone to it. 

Tiffany has ordered Bond to come to "talk shop" in this lounge, where although they both dress fancily, the topic of the conversation is supposed to be more businesslike.

Not that James Bond would miss an opportunity to put on the charm of course! It's all part of his usual attempts to seduce the film's main Bond girl.

Bond's outft in the scene is partially inspired by a chocolate brown pinstripe suit made by Anthony Sinclair for Sean Connery. It was intended for him to wear it in the original Diamonds Are Forever film, but ultimately went unused.

Although Moviestorm does have a black pinstripe suit I didn't personally feel a brown pinstripe suit would suit Connery's Bond. Hence why I chose to just colour the suit brown, so it therefore is more like the ones that Connery's Bond has worn before.

Tiffany Case wears a red evening gown with a pretty necklace, which I felt suited her with her red hair and her objective of gaining the real diamonds from Bond's possession.

It's worth noting that this will technically be the first time the viewer sees the animated version of Tiffany in Diamonds Reimagined. 

Like in the original film, there will be a gap between when she last appears at Los Angeles International Airport when she and Bond went their separate ways, and when she reappears on behalf of her superiors.

So naturally, I wanted her to make an impression in her reappearance. First things first though, it's absolutely true that the hairstyle of her 3D character model does not match that of Jill St John's in the original film.

Unfortunately, the character models in Moviestorm just don't have available the kind of hairstyle that St John has. 

It's the same reason why I couldn't replicate Lana Wood's hairstyle for the Plenty O'Toole character model.

I am no 3D modeller, and since the Moviestorm software is barely supported these days, I decided to compromise and pick a different hairstyle that suited the character models.

With the set for the Starlight Lounge though, I'm very happy. As you can see in the screenshot below, I was able to add a backdrop of a lovely sunrise over Las Vegas to be seen from the windows.

I also added a glass dome on the ceiling with a star-shaped pattern of colours. It only will appear in a few shots, but I thought it added some character to the setting.

That's all for now - I am continuing to tweak and re-shoot small scenes here and there that I have previously worked on. 

But the long phase of re-shoots is nearly over, and with the next major sequence update I hope to discuss the work on the animated Penthouse scenes.

Till then,

- The Retro Captain

 

Big Scene development post 11 - Completion of the Journey to Whyte Tectronics sequence

Finally, the last major sequence of what I have dubbed as 'the long re-shoot phase' of the project is finished!

Back in March, I briefly posted about the work being done on the set for a drive-by shot. And today, I will detail the work that has gone on since then.

To do this, I'm including five clips from the scene.

Opening the scene

Let's think back to the original Diamonds Are Forever film for a moment. 

Following the Circus Circus scene, we cut to Bond waiting anxiously at a car rental, and then Felix shows up to inform Bond that they've lost Tiffany.

In the new version of that particular scene I have animated, Bond is instead waiting in the car park outside the Whyte House.

He is of course, in his Aston Martin DBS (which as you'll see, I had to modify to put the steering wheel and dashboard on the opposite side).

Instead of Felix and the agents driving up to him, Bond is informed of their failure by Felix via walkie-talkie.

The reason for this is that in the moments after the clip below, Bond actually sees Tiffany driving past in her car, and will pursue her.

A large part of the set you see in this clip is actually cannibalised from the gigantic exterior set for the Las Vegas Country Club sequences. 

I basically deleted everything from that latter set except for the parts of The Whyte House that I had built.

Then I turned that part around so that I could build the front of the Whyte House, with its car park. 

This enabled me to have a nice establishing shot where I could pan the camera directly down to Bond in his car.

The rest of the set, as we shall see later, was built to include a roadway for a drive-by shot later in the scene.

The Airport

In clip two is the scene where Bond arrives at McCarren International Airport, a location which also appeared in the original film. 

But rather than being there with Tiffany, the new version has him see Tiffany hand over the smuggled diamonds to Bert Saxby.

This is a scene which went through some re-shoots to improve the cars. Originally, they had cartoon-like blacked out windows, which was done partly to save memory by not showing the driver.

Although I still use that technique for some cars throughout the project, it just doesn't really look good when the car is in the foreground. So you need to see the driver somehow!

By now, I have figured out a way to get the driver into the car. But I still need a shot of the car reversing, and my car prop is not designed to do that. 

That's why I need a second car prop on the set, which I use when the first one is hidden. How then, do you save memory for a shot without duplicating the character model of the driver?

The solution was simple - I simply create a stationary dummy prop like the one in the image below to replace the driver.

Using a dummy driver like this is a technique I hope to replicate for future scenes featuring characters driving. After all, it will be useful for wide shots on complex memory-heavy sets.

Pursuing the Minibus

Now for the third clip:

In the last big scene development post I already talked about the petrol station scene. So I won't go over it again in detail here.

The only new thing of note as seen in the clip is how I faded into the next shot. 

I didn't want to have to build more details into the set just for another angle of the station. 

To remedy this, I kept the same viewpoint of the petrol station and had the DBS drive off-screen, passing right by the camera.

Although I originally intended the petrol station set to be built on the same set as the one with the Whyte House visible, I again had to scrap that idea to save memory.

Getting into the Tectronics complex

The fourth clip above is a scene which proved especially tricky to animate. 

I needed Bond to infilitrate the Whyte Tectronics complex in a manner similar to the original film. But since he's not in Metz's minibus, how is this possible?

I decided that conveniently, another vehicle would enter through the gates, which Bond could get into the back of.

You might be able to tell from the image that the Ford F100 I used, with its very large trailer, could barely fit through the gates!

Therefore, I had to alter the set just to have the gates open wide enough for it to just squeeze through. 

Even then, just animating the damn vehicle's path to drive through was a chore.

Funnily enough though, this proved to be to the scene's advantage. It actually improved on the way I originally scripted it!

In the script, I simply had Bond come up to the trailer and silently open the doors. I couldn't do this in the Moviestorm animation software as the doors were too high up.

Although I had already conceived of the Ford F100 slowing down, having Bond jump onto the back meant I could create an explanation for why the driver doesn't suspect something's up.

In the clip, you see him reacting to the sound of Bond jumping onto the back of the trailer. I have him look first through the driver's mirror as initially he might think that the trailer had scratched against the gates.

Then of course, he looks through the window behind him into the trailer. By this time though, Bond has already quickly climbed out of view.

Ending the sequence

Finally, let's examine clip five.

This one is relatively simple in conception. Bond is in the trailer of the Ford F100, which is now parked in the underground car park of the Tectronics facility.

I had to rebuild the F100 to have it on this set, so I could animate the driver closing the door. But then, he has to insert a card into a slot to go through some double doors.

That double doors shot was tricky for two reasons. One, the Moviestorm software doesn't have a card prop that a character can put into a slot.

I therefore had to animate one in my editing software by having it move in sync with the driver's hand.

The largest problem though, is that the double doors prop didn't wrap the texture for the 'Restricted Area' sign properly!

As you can see in the photo, the text on one of the doors got flipped. This is because the full texture wraps around onto the other side of the door.

Once again, this had to be fixed in the edit. I rendered two versions of the same shot, which each used a different texture for the door. 

This allowed me to have at least one door with the text not being flipped. 

In the edit, I then cropped one version of the shot, using the gap between the doors as a dividing line.

Finally, I could overlay the cropped shot on top of the non-cropped one. This produced the seamless effect you see in the clip where the text is not flipped on either door.

What next for Diamonds Reimagined?

The long re-shoot phase is nearly over now. So after making minor tweaks to some other previously animated scenes, I will then move onto animating the new versions of the scenes in Williard Whyte's Penthouse!

All will become apparent in the next post, which will be another mini update...

Till then!

- The Retro Captain

Mini update #1 - Progress on Las Vegas roadway set: Convention Centre dome

I'll be doing more of these smaller updates for a while, as most of the work on the project at the moment is on individual shots on complex sets for the sequence of Bond pursuing the Ford Econoline to Whyte Tectronics, which I talked about in my last post.

I've finished all the shots set at the petrol station, but now I need a shot of the Aston Martin DBS and Ford Econoline driving past the Whyte House and other buildings. The intention is for it to replace this shot from the original film:

The Ford Mustang will be replaced with the Aston Martin DBS

Here, you can see the work in progress re-creation of the Las Vegas Convention Centre dome, which as per usual with real life locations, I am basing off multiple reference photographs. It will only feature in this one shot, and simply in the background.

This is not the final camera angle - once the set is complete, I will likely choose
a better framing for the shot.

Furthermore, it has become apparent that the shots I originally made for the McCarren International Airport scene need redoing, in order to improve the car animation. Once this drive-by shot is completed, the Airport shots will likely be my next port of call.

Big Scene development post 10: Progress since 2022 and plans for the project in 2024!

Woah! I know it's been a while since I last updated this blog, but fear not - this project is still alive and well! 

Although I have made progress, most of the work has been re-doing or tweaking a number of scenes I'd animated earlier. 

Not because all of them were complete rubbish, but there are often minor details or specific chunks of scenes which I now know I could do better. After all, over the course of creating the animated scenes, I have become more experienced with using the Moviestorm software.

Take the Oil Rig climax for example - in many shots I used a low poly model of a Bell Helicopter, which unfortunately didn't render as well as I'd hoped. 

As you can see in the screenshot below, the texture of the bodywork is just plain white, and the glass of the window is not all the same opacity. 

So I decided to redo a number of shots featuring the white helicopters, and replace them with ones where I use a much more detailed model.

Furthermore, I made alterations to the various shootouts, particularly the one inside Blofeld's office. This was not just to improve the animation or even add special story beats, but simply to make the scene flow better when I re-edit it.

The main thrust of 2023 for the project, however, was of course the re-shoots of the Las Vegas Country Club sequence. As I went over in my last post, I've since become unhappy with the effects I used to bring it to life the first time around. So I decided to use practically no greenscreen, except when neccessary. 

I first re-did the cutaways to Bond and Felix, which are now set on the balcony of Felix's room in the Whyte House, rather than the golf course itself. This was relatively enjoyable to work on, as I naturally prefer animating simple dialogue scenes. The set was basic, but as you'll see in the video of the sequence at the end of this post, I added a few 'easter eggs' on the table. One of them is a reference to the scene from On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) when Bond was in Gumbold's office, waiting for his safe cracking gadget to do its work.

I then moved onto building the sets for the golf course itself; both the exterior and the interior. My intention was to more or less replicate the real-life Las Vegas Country Club based on existing photographs from both the 1970s and now.

Credit to vintagelasvegas.com for the fantastic collection of
photographs they have of Las Vegas from this era. Without them,
I would not have had such good reference for building these sort of
exterior sets.

I did naturally use a bit of artistic licence in deciding what to add to the exterior; a dining area, a viewing balcony, etc. The real location may not have had them in the 70s, but I wanted to create good opportunities for interesting shots. I'm very fond of using low angles, not just for artistic purposes; they also allow me to hide the ends of the set.

Of course, the real Las Vegas Country Club is situated behind what used to be The Hilton Hotel (now known as Westgate Hotel); the location used for The Whyte House in the film. So naturally, I had to build a simple model of the WH for the background of the exterior set. I would like to think that Willard Whyte also owns the golf course, which could make it The Whyte House Country Club.

I am overall satisfied with the final result, even if it took an excruciatingly long time to complete the exterior set. I hope it looks pretty convincing to viewers, especially as I had to remove certain parts of it for specific shots just so I had enough memory to render them!

Anyway, having finished that sequence, I have since moved onto the final major scene I will be reshooting. This is the following sequence where Bond pursues first Tiffany, then Saxby and finally Metz through Las Vegas and then into the desert, leading him to the Whyte Tectronics facility. 

In the original film, Bond had already forced Tiffany to help him, so she was the one pursuing Metz to the facility, in her Red Ford Mustang. Bond of course, snuck into the back of the minibus whilst Tiffany stalled Metz at a petrol station. 

In Diamonds Re-Imagined, I changed things up so that Tiffany only learns that Bond is not Peter Franks until after the night-time car chase, so Bond is instead driving in his Aston Martin DBS (which returns from OHMSS!) to pursue Metz. Tiffany meanwhile, is in the minibus with Metz as a passenger, as she has only just passed on the real diamonds.

This is how part of the set for a roadway outside of the Whyte House looked when I started constructing it. Once again, background objects will be important for the creating the right perspective in the shots!

Whilst I am currently building a roadway set to show Bond in the DBS tailing Metz, I have also partially recreated the petrol station from the original film for a few shots. This allows me to replace the Ford Mustang with the DBS in the background.

The original version, with the Ford Mustang.

The animated version - notice Tiffany seated in the back of the minibus!

 That's all for now; the next time I post, I'll go over more of the progress on this scene as I continue building the roadway set. For now, enjoy the finished new version of the Las Vegas Country Club sequence, which replaces the original film's Circus Circus scene:

Till then.

- The RetroCaptain