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