Behind the scenes trailer surprise for the Dark Curse Book Trailer
Do you ever watch a movie and try to figure out how they did certain effects? Well, this trailer may surprise you. There are some computer generated visual effects in this video that really highlight the talent of Mr. Michael Miller, multi-award winning special effects expert and Mr. Jacob Henderson our animator of all creatures not of this world! Lol
Watch the trailer first, before you read further and pay close attention to the details.
The two dragons took hours and hours of work. Jacob uses a special software program to create them. In the program you actually start creating your model from the bones. Yes, you actually have to build the bones of the creature you're creating.
The red dragon gave Jacob a hard time because every time it would move its head a hand bone would protrude! What the?!!! The eye-bone's connected to the hand-bone?!! Too strange! But, once the hand-eye coordination was overcome the video was finished and we were dying to show it to Christine.
There is a lot of hard work that went into making this trailer. It was most certainly a labor of love. Mike and I stayed up until 2 AM for four days putting in over 12 hours a day. Mike and Jacob put in way more than that creating virtual landscapes, the dragons, etc. And hearing Christine as she watched the video over the internet made every single second of that all worth it!
If you've watched the Dark Curse trailer keep in mind that none of the backgrounds are real. This is all CGI (computer generated images). But I think what might surprise people is that the evil mage, Xavier, is not a real person. He is also computer generated. We did take about 3 pictures of different people and blend them, then add to that and animated it. The teeth, which are pointed and disturbingly spooky are actually taken from a piranha photo. They are in fact fish teeth.
Usually Christine has tattoos made for the trailers if any character has a tattoo. But, the new dragon tattoo didn't get done on time so that too is computer generated.
The shot with Nicolas getting stabbed is indeed in the book. But in the beginning, that shot was not at the end. Mike and I watched the footage over and over and it finally hit me that the way the actor responded with the knife in his chest sort of matched up to the book cover. That was entirely unintentional. But it seemed like fate that it happened that way so we changed the shots around so that the stabbing scene would be the end and the book cover would come up.
We ended up cutting scenes from this one. We wanted it to be fast paced and exciting and having too many scenes seemed to slow it down so some were cut. In the end, I think it made for a better trailer.