2020 Round-up

 What a year of progress 2020 has been for this project! Despite what has been happening in the real world with COVID-19 and what not, I have made probably the biggest leap in progress with Diamonds Reimagined than I have since starting this project two years ago.

For starters, the screenplay has gone through numerous alterations since the start of the year, which has lead me to recently finish the Fourth Draft. I've tightened up the dialogue and even done careful re-structuring of scenes that haven't turned out quite as well as I originally devised when testing in Moviestorm or otherwise. Sometimes I just come up with better ideas, which seriously improve the script.

Last year I began implementing Moviestorm Mods (Addons) into my scenes which were a lifesaver because of how limited the assets of the software were in comparison to the needs of my project. And so too has this year's development of me being able to create new assets via Sketchup, which finally gave me the opportunity to animate car sequences that are authentically 1970s as well as build sets that were previously impossible to create.

But whilst using Sketchup has been of great help to enhancing the project, it has also been at times an absolute nightmare. There have been countless moments of frustration and anger when I realise that a Sketchup model I have spent ages tweaking or just finding is too complex for Moviestorm to render, meaning the software crashes. So whenever a complex model is rendered, you can tell how relieved I am. 

In addition, it has not been easy finding a way to convert my models to Version 6 Sketchup files, which are the only type that Moviestorm can render. No doubt this is because the Sketchup converter (and indeed Moviestorm itself) has not been updated for quite some time.

Nevertheless, I wish to thank the Moviestorm Community for all the help they have given me this year in solving some of these issues. I'm sure there is much I would not have known how to do in Moviestorm without their useful information.

Before I wrap things up here, here is a video montage showing sped-up versions of nearly all of the animated sequences I have worked painstakingly hard to animate and edit in 2020 for the project. Naturally they will all make sense once you see them at their full length in the final film.

WARNING: It goes really really really fast...

So what's next for the project in 2021, you may ask? Well, it must be noted that 2021 will be the 50th Anniversary of the original Diamonds Are Forever's release in 1971. The project will go full steam ahead in completing numerous sequences such as the Motorbike Desert Chase, sequences aboard the Baja Oil Rig and even a shooutout between Bond and Spangled Mob gangsters.

In light of the sad loss of the man who portrayed Bond in Diamonds Are Forever; Sir Sean Connery, I will pay special attention to getting the animation of Bond himself just right. And whether I am finally able to get voice actors for the project next year remains to be seen, but I shall certainly make sure the voice for Bond sounds good for Connery's likeness.

But the main thing that will hopefully materialise by the end of next year will be the very first teaser trailer for the project. 

At the moment it is too early to tell what it shall be like, but I shall definitely need more footage and a few voiceovers to make it work. It is my intention that this trailer will raise more awareness about the project.

For now, cheers and happy holidays!

The Retro Captain

Arrival in Las Vegas sequence (Short transition scene) - Newly animated!

 

This sequence is one I've just finished animating in-between my work on the Motorbike Desert Chase. It's one I improvised on the spot and does not come from the script. The intention is for it to bridge the gap between Bond departing from Slumber Inc and going to his hotel in Las Vegas (which in this version is The Whyte House rather than The Tropicana).

Big Scene development post 2: Motorbike Chase in Whyte Tectronics complex and across the Nevada desert (Part 1.5)

A small update on progress of the Motorbike Chase sequence's development. Storyboarding is still underway, but about 1/3 is finished. In the meantime, I can share with you a couple of rough tests for different elements of this incredibly complex chase.

As you can see, most of the vehicles are working quite well. There are problems with them that are somewhat unavoidable (like how the vehicles 'snap' into place during their turning animation) when I'm animating them, but I will use some careful editing to limit the issues to a degree.

What I haven't shown in this video is what I call the backdrop stage, which is where I film all the closeups and mid-shots of the passengers in the vehicles using a video playing on a backdrop behind them. Here is an example in a still, which has a blank backdrop as a placeholder:

And so there you go! There's still quite a bit of work to do on the sequence, but everything is coming along nicely for the most part bar a few limitations from Moviestorm's method of animating vehicles. Next time this blog is updated, there should be a video showing all of the completed storyboards in order. At least, that's the plan.

Big Scene development post 1: Motorbike Chase in Whyte Tectronics complex and across the Nevada desert (Part 1)

There are two chase scenes in total that I have to animate for Diamonds Are Forever Re-Imagined, one of which is a replacement for the infamous Moon Buggy sequence where Bond escapes from the Whyte Tectronics complex in a very comical vehicle.

The replacement instead puts Bond (and Tiffany Case since the structure of the story has been changed to delay her switching over to Bond's side) on a motorbike where he'll be pursued by cars, all-terrain motor-bikes and even a Dune Buggy across the Nevada desert.

I started the development of this escape scene by first animating a typical Bondian shootout scene, as demonstrated by this still:

From this I then tested placing Bond and Tiffany onto a Motorbike to see how well they would sit on it and move about. The Dune Buggy, which is driven by the minor henchmen The Spang Brothers (taken directly from Ian Fleming's original DAF novel), was also tested.

Then I properly began filming the Chase Sequence, beginning with the segments that take place inside the complex itself before Bond and Tiffany reach the exterior in the desert. Long corridor sets were neccessary to achieve this, so that we could have some moving backgrounds behind a Mid-Shot of the characters just sitting on the Motorbike without the vehicle actually moving.

But now that I've reached the point where I have to make the sequences set outside the complex in the desert, things get trickier. Making accurate desert terrain and replicating the scenery from the original film is no easy task, so I have to improvise my development process here.

To begin with, I re-constructed the dome and its surroundings such as the Toll Booth seen in the film. Not everything was completely to scale, but the angle of the shots I was using made the objects look further away than they were.

Then I filmed the only shots for which this exterior set is needed, as the rest of them written in my script all come from the original film.

For reference, here is a sample of this series of shots from my screenplay where Bond shoots the car barrier off the toll booth in order to drive past the Security Guards and into the desert.

With those shots finished, I am now at the stage where I have to create the most complicated parts of the chase. The Motorbike and the other vehicles have to drive and do stunts across realistic desert terrain, and filming all this will entail a lot of trial and error.

So I've decided it's better for me to first plan out the various shots for the chase scene by storyboarding it. At the same time, I can practice making desert terrain in the animation software without filming on them. And this "practice terrain" can be used as the background of storyboard shots like this one, where I just put a greyscale pencil filter over each element.

Once I know what I want the shots to look like from the storyboards and I have good experience with creating the terrain, I can properly continue with the animating.

And that's it for now! This will no doubt be one of the most complex scenes to make for the whole project, but I can assure you it will still become an exciting sequence once it's done. 

I will update with another post on this scene sometime in the future once more progress has been made on it. Till then!

What? Use a ridiculous Moon Buggy like that to escape from a scientific facility? No thanks, we'll zoom on the Motorbike instead.

  

Short Clip - Shootout in Whyte Tectronics first floor car park

 One of the scenes from the original film I'm replacing is the entire sequence of the escape from the Whyte Tectronics facility, in which Bond drove a bizarre looking Moon Buggy across the desert.

In Diamonds Are Forever Re-Imagined, however, Bond will instead be driving a motorbike. The vehicle chase across the desert with the Motorbike is still being animated, but today I can share a small clip showing a shootout that happens prior to the vehicle chase.

Once again, this is a only a rough cut. No voice actors are used, and some sound effects that will be implemented later are missing. I hope you enjoy!

Update #4 on (mostly) completed animated scenes

In previous posts I have talked about multiple scenes that I've recently animated for Diamonds Are Forever Re-Imagined, but this time I am going to share one entire sequence that has taken 3 whole months for me to animate and edit together!

For the most part, the scene is complete. A few sound effects (mainly for the cars) haven't yet been implemented and not all of the shots have been polished for issues such as chroma-key fringing. 

You may have also noticed three synthetic voice clips at the beginning, but these will eventually be dubbed with recorded dialogue by voice actors.

As per usual with the production of this film, here are few of the stills created for this scene:

That's all for now! As for what I'm animating next, I'm still hard at work with the middle of the film. My aim is to finish all of the Whyte Tectronics scenes by January or February of next year, one of which includes a vehicle chase to replace the Moon Buggy Chase from the original film...

Credits - Test Version

 Just a little test run for the credits of Diamonds Are Forever Re-Imagined! Not complete of course but the music is there and around 50% of the text. As you can see, it pretty much ends the fan-edit the same way as the original, except that the credits are longer.

Just to be clear, the epilogue scene as a whole won't be radically different. There will be a few cuts here and there and a few animated shots at the beginning, but Tiffany still gets the last line!

A sneak-peak at exterior scenes set in Las Vegas

Much of Diamonds Are Forever Reimagined is set in Las Vegas, just like the original film. A large portion of changes to the original film take place in the middle section of the film, where most of the action in Vegas occurs.

Naturally, because a lot of the routes taken by the characters across Las Vegas in the film were altered for this fan-edit I needed to construct lots of exterior sets. Therefore, I went to the effort of not only researching Las Vegas landmarks from the late 60s/early 70s, but essentially doing some 'virtual location scouting'.

I had to reconstruct (sometimes only partially) the exteriors of a few of the famous hotels/casinos Vegas is known for, many of which no longer exist or have been refurbished considerably since EON Productions filmed Diamonds Are Forever in 1971.

A few of these hotels I attempted to reconstruct may remain unused in the finished film, but that all depends on how many more scenes I have to animate that can feature them.

For now though, here is a video previewing the locations that have been used so far. Photos of the actual locations as they appeared around the time are shown first, then the reconstructed segments in Moviestorm are shown afterwards.

Replacing the Circus Circus scene: making of the Las Vegas Country Club scene (Old version)

Note: this post describes the making of an older version of the Las Vegas Country Club scene. That version has since been scrapped, and will not feature in the final edit. 

You can read about the newer version in the post linked below:  

https://diamondsareforeverre-imaginedproject.blogspot.com/2024/01/big-scene-development-post-10-progress.html

Circus Circus Hotel and Casino. 

It's the location used in the original film to house the scene where the CIA attempt to capture Tiffany Case using the smuggled diamonds as bait, only for them to lose her due to a mixture of incompetence on the agents' part as well as some rather silly shenannigins including an attraction where a girl turns into a gorilla...

Suffice to say, it is an example of some of Diamonds Are Forever's weaker attempts at humour, and for that reason I always intended to cut the silliness out of my fan-edit to keep the tone consistent. 

Unfortunately, removing certain segments of the scene would render it completely unusable (the Zambora sequence is vital for Tiffany making her escape after all!) meaning I had to scrap Circus Circus completely and start from scratch. 

So where would "Operation Passover" take place instead? My inspiration for a solution came from the Diamonds Are Forever novel, where Bond smuggles the diamonds into the States by hiding them in Golf Balls. 

Therefore I decided to set the scene at the Golf Course closest to the Westgate Hotel (then known as the Hilton which served as the exterior of the Whyte House); the Las Vegas Country Club.
Let's look at some specific shots in the scene as I animated it:

Because of the limitations of the Moviestorm software, it was not possible to actually animate a character playing golf as I originally scripted. Therefore instead I had to open the scene with a man watching TV of a Golf tournament (in reality some stock footage from the 70s).

This shot uses greenscreen that allowed me to place in a background of part of the Golf Course (which I manually had to edit so that it zoomed in on the characters at the correct speed!).

What really made this scene tricky to construct was the fact that I simply couldn't convincingly re-create the entire Golf Course due to all the complicated terrain. So for some shots I resorted to using a backdrop with characters in front to create the illusion of them being on the huge golf course.

In addition, it was important to increase the size of the crowd slightly to make the effect a little more convincing. To prevent the software from crashing because of the huge memory it takes to display so many characters, I would use a similar duplicate of the same shot. This time the background was completely greenscreen but with a few more characters added in.

In other shots however, I had to create small portions of the golf course designed specifically to hide the rest of the empty set in the background. Most were suited towards a specific shot, such as the above example where the small hill behind Tiffany is tall enough to cover the frame.

Shots that cut back to Felix and Bond use a simple image of the Golf Course as the background, which had to be slightly enlarged for this shot as like the original in the Circus Circus scene, the camera is closer to Felix. The only real issue with the greenscreen techniques here is that it leads to a lot of fringing (especially on characters' hair!), which can be a little distracting.

Since there's no padding like the water pistol game in the original film, Tiffany figures out the diamonds are in the golf balls contained in the suitcase she's subtly handed. So she can simply begin rushing through crowds as the CIA pursue her. Again, the framing of the shot never allows the camera to see too much of this small area representing part of the Golf Course.

Tiffany's escape was rather difficult to animate. This was because I had to convincingly get multiple crowd members to run in front of Maxwell and the other CIA Agents in the pursuit so that they would be temporarily blocked from catching her. A lot of adjusting the walking/running speed was neccessary!

The last few shots in the Golf Course were very tricky to set up - in this shot you can see I had to add a little bit of landscape in the background to make things look more convincing. Remember, I didn't have a full set so this was essentially a compromise. 

The people walking whilst the CIA Agents chase after Tiffany also had to react to what was happening around them, which gives the scene a little more realism.

And finally, the scene finishes off with this shot of the Agents emerging from the golf course into the car park. Although I did originally plan to build the entire car park I later discovered it wasn't neccessary due to the framing.

Therefore only this little bit was created, with trees used to hide the lack of landscape behind the car park.

Overall, this scene was incredibly time-consuming and tiresome to direct and animate but I think it turned out fairly well. It's not perfect by any means, and only lasts roughly 3 minutes. 

Could it have benefitted from wider shots to show the scale of the location? Perhaps, but in the end the limitations of the software allowed me to create a sequence that while lacking in ultra-complex movement did at least have a sense of claustrophobia. 

In the end, I think it's a decent replacement for the Circus Circus scene that serves to move the plot along rather than bog it down with padding and silly moments. And that is what's most important!

- The RetroCaptain

Update #2 on (mostly) completed animated scenes

Some good progress has been made since my inital post on this subject, but this time I'd like to share some production stills that give a little more insight into what the scenes are about:

SCENE 1

"I don't know James, I think that's taking it a bit too far..." - Felix Leiter

Yes, it's Bond and Felix Leiter! Clearly having a heated conversation in a hotel room, which happens to be Bond's luxury suite in the Whyte House. 

In my original visualisation of the scene, Bond was still wearing the three-piece black suit he wears during his visit to Slumber Inc in the original film. You can see this in this test image I created before animating the scene:

But I later decided to have Bond just wear his shirt and tie for the final scene as it seemed more appropriate for the mood that the characters were in. Also, Bond is going to change into his white dinner jacket for the Casino scenes so it makes sense to show that he's going to change out of the black suit!

On a side note, you may notice the background paintings on the walls behind Felix and Bond. These are a deliberate stylistic choice to reflect the theme of The Whyte House hotel.

Obviously we can see in the original film some subtle details reflecting the way the Hotel themes its areas around different US Presidents (hence the "Lincoln Lounge" where Shady Tree does his comedy act being an obvious reference to Abraham Lincoln). 

My intention here was to extend the theme slightly by showing paintings of battles from both the American War of Independence and the American Civil War (both events involved a famous US President!) to suggest there are multiple hotel suites in the Whyte House that are designed this way.

SCENE 2

"Say, why don't we go someplace and have a drink?
" - Plenty O'Toole

This is a new sequence taking place directly after the original film's famous Casino sequence set in the Whyte House gambling halls where Bond meets Plenty O'Toole. Now the original scenes were shot at the Riviera Hotel and Casino (which was torn down in 2016) so I looked at some reference photographs of that hotel's hallways to inspire the set you see here.

Fountains, pillars, a patterned floor and even a nicely textured wall seemed to do the trick, but just to make sure that it still seemed a part of the Whyte House I added a white ceiling and some white walls near the stairs and the lift you see in this still:

SCENE 3

Tiffany: "You say you're some kind of secret agent?"

Bond: "Oh, just a civil servant."

In my last post on this subject I showed that I'd recreated the Bridal Suite from the original film to redo the sequence where Felix Leiter visits Bond and Tiffany after the Las Vegas car chase. The same set was re-used for this scene where our two lead characters have a personal chat about each other, albeit with slightly more moody yet intimate lighting.

One of the challenges with this sequence was selling the characters' emotions without overdoing them. My script gave a fair bit of detail on this but I decided to focus heavily on as many gestures as possible throughout their conversation. 

Their posture, where their eyes move and especially their facial expressions had to change whenever the tone shifted, but I was also careful to ensure none of these details went out of character. Take Bond for example: I was adamant that the emotion he shows had to be subtle yet noticeable. In the words of On Her Majesty's Secret Service director Peter Hunt; "James Bond doesn't cry!".

SCENE 4

This scene is pretty short but a more recent addition to the fan-edit that does not actually appear in my script. It's based off some deleted footage that's not found anywhere on any home media release but does kind of appear in a few documentaries, including the BBC's Looking For Mr Bond, which can be found online. It's shot from behind the film crew in 4:3 however, and not taken directly from the film cameras themselves.

From what I can tell it's a scene showing Bond and the CIA (now accompanied by Willard Whyte!) returning to the Whyte Tectronics facility and meeting Tom (played by the late Shane Rimmer). In the original film this footage seems to have been removed in the edit and starts the scene at a different point.

But I thought it looked pretty neat so I plan to reinsert it via this animated version into my fan-edit. Here's the current version of it if you're interested, also including a reaction from Sean Connery to the cameraman after the end of the take:

New 'Production Stills' - Sean Connery preparing for his return to the role of James Bond in 1971...

Recently I've been playing around with the character model for Sean Connery as James Bond, and I thought I'd try making some 'production stills' based around Connery's preparation for returning to the series one last time....