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Enigma recently made its festival debut at Dances With Films in Hollywood where it won audience choice for best short. THESCRATCHPOST was able to catch up with Matt Shumway, Co-director and Visual Effects Supervisor, to get the scoop about the long journey of Enigma.

Enigma Origins

Enigma was a little idea that grew into an almost 5 year journey for my brother and I. The idea began way back in 2004 when we were helping a friend out with his film. While on set, my brother Jason and I were talking with the manager about the stage. He told us there was a space ship set in the room next to us, so naturally, the scifi geeks in us had to go over and play on it. Within a few minutes of playtime, we knew it was time for us to make a movie together.

We had been toying with the idea of doing a “Shumway Brothers film” for a while. We each have very different backgrounds in film. Jason comes from the live action world and is currently an Editor for E networks, and I have an Art background currently an Animation Supervisor for Rhythm and Hues Studios. We really wanted to do something in the scifi world because we thought it would be the perfect genre to mix our specialties. So from that day on we began writing the script.

Eight hours later we had our script! Then after a nights sleep we realized that script was terrible and proceeded spending the next 6 months sculpting a better and more thought out idea.

Pre-Production

With a rough script completed, we started preparing the many things that needed to be accomplished before our January 2005 shoot. First and foremost was assembling our cast. The wonderful thing about living in Los Angeles is that there is no short supply of acting talent, so we placed an ad in “Backstage West”, a popular weekly paper for actors.

The ad stated that it was for a scifi short, it would only include copy, credit, and meals. Within two weeks we had gotten over 500 head shots. Over several days we sorted through the photos and pulled about 80 to call for a casting session. We did 2 days of casting. In the end, we reviewed our favorites on tape and called back about 15 for a final round. Of those, we chose our final 10 for the cast. As the cast was being assembled, we were also hard at work at developing the look and design of Enigma. Two characters in particular needed extra special attention before shooting could begin. One was our alien, Eidolon, which was to be our actress Iris Corliss completely redesigned by makeup. The other was to be a full CG character named Phobos, the pet of our lead character Kyliegh, played by Nadia Salamanca.

Eidolon was a combination of efforts by myself and our Makeup Supervisor Liz Pisano. The name Eidolon means phantom. We wanted her to have a ghostly type appearance. With that, we really wanted to stick to a black and white palette. It allowed us to really play with the light and shadow come production. I started out with some basic sketches. After that, I took several pictures of our actress and brought them into Photoshop. Then I just started painting on her face and body. This proved to be a really efficient way to get things moving. After a few rounds of revisions I was pretty happy and took it to my brother to make sure he was happy as well. I then took it to my make up artist and said…make that! Fortunate for us, Liz is super talented. After a life cast of our actress and a sculpt from Liz, Eidolon was born. For her costume, another painting and the recruiting of our wonderful mother, who is an expert on the sewing machine, Eidolon was complete.

Phobos was one of the main things I wanted to bring to this film, a full cg character. I didn’t want to just do a boring robot, or lifeless cg creation. I really wanted to bring a living, breathing, and organic CG character to the film.

For a couple reasons really. One, you never see that in independent film. Second, its what I do for a living, and I had the blind confidence to pull it off. Much like Eidolon, Phobos went through many design changes.

My initial ideas had Phobos with a giant head for some reason. My brother actually fought me on that, and in the end, he was absolutely right. To this day, I’m not sure what I was thinking! But that’s the joy of having a partner in crime when making a film. They can tell you when you are doing great, and when you, well, aren’t doing so great! The most important feature of Phobos was to be his eyes. Hence why I leaned towards a large head. In the end, I ended up with a simple design. It was something that could be easily posed and understood, and wasn’t weighed down by anything heavy to kill us come render time. This error toward simplicity and readability found its way through most of the design for Enigma.

While I was handling the design, Jason was prepping the many other things that are involved in live-action filmmaking. This Included the renting of the stage, grip equipment, camera, and lenses. Though we were on a very tight budget, we wanted to make sure that if you saw it on screen the money needed to go there. The majority of our production budget went to the stage and the camera. We shot on the Panasonic Varicam with Zeiss lens. We wanted to shoot HD simply because we could not afford to have the FX scanned back to film. In the end, we loved it and will probably never shoot film. After weeks of script re-writes, fight rehearsals, design, building of set pieces, costume design, and makeup tests, we were finally ready to shoot!

Lights, Camera, Action!

Enigma had an 9 day schedule. 2 days for set prep, 6 days of shooting, and 1 day of breakdown. We had a lot to accomplish in those 6 days of shooting. This was my first experience with live-action film making and I loved ever minute of it! Something so refreshing after slaving away at animation one frame at a time to then go on set and get the shot you need in seconds! We had assembled a really talented and loyal crew. The hours were very long and nobody was getting paid. It is really a sight to see people working so hard at their craft for love of the craft. Obviously, we would have loved to pay everyone, hopefully for future projects we can!

Shooting went fairly smooth for as chaotic of a schedule we had to get through. The toughest thing to shoot around was our alien character Eidolon. She had to be in makeup for 6 hours everyday. Which means, we wouldn’t get her till after lunch. Then we would only have so many hours with her before the makeup started to fall off. So we had a tight window each day to shoot her scenes. In the end, we got most of what we needed. We were planning to do a round of pickups about 6 months later and had to unfortunately push a scene to then. But thanks to a hard working crew we fit in 4 weeks of work into one. Enigma had been shot, now the real work was about to begin!

Post-Production and Visual Effects

If you had told me at the start of this show that post production was going to take 4 years to complete, I would have taking my money and ran. After we shot the show and assembled our first cut, I concluded two things:

This is going to be a fun movie, and damn its going to be a lot of work to finish.

There were green screens everywhere, plates for a digital character that had yet to be modeled, space shots with a simple slate that says “space ship explodes,” and the words “incomplete FX” scattered through out the entire show. Now if we could have worked on the film full time, it would have been less of a daunting task. But having a full time job at Rhythm made it very difficult to work on a project there all day, then come home and work on my own. You get creatively drained. But you push through it. Though I had the weight of the FX on my shoulders, I had lots of of friends contribute their time and talent. None more so than my friend, Kevin Quaid, who was along side me since day one on the show. Kevin and I worked together at Rhythm. He has since moved up to the bay area to work at ILM among other places. He rigged Phobos, modeled the main ship, and did all of the lighting for the show. His technical knowledge was a savior for me. He made some very complex shots able to be pulled off and I can not thank him enough for the years of help he gave me.

I used Cgtalk and other related sites to recruit a few other artists. I found though, it was sometimes more time consuming to give people notes and hold their hand, than to just do the work myself. So in the end, I kept on a few of the artists that really did well, and I just handled the rest. One of the biggest contributors to the effects came from a place I never thought to even ask, Rhythm and Hues. More specifically, Rhythm and Hues India. I was doing some work via satellite for our then budding India facility. The head of the India studio, Prashant Buyyala, asked me about my film and If I needed any help. I of course said, “yes! Anything!” After getting approval from the heads of the LA studio, they offered to help me with the keying of my green screens. They ended up using my shots as training material for new hires and for when people had down time to keep them busy. In the end, India pulled over 86 green screens, and completed over 25 comps. I am so grateful for the work they contributed. It was of course very high quality and made my life so much easier. Rhythm really came through for me. They were so generous with their talented artists.

There were a little over 25 shots of Phobos throughout the movie. Doesn’t seem like a lot until you start tracking, animating, and comping them all yourself. These are the shots I probably lost the most sleep over. If he wasn’t believable, the whole film would not work. The last thing I wanted was for people to think, “oh, here’s the cg thing again.” My goal was to make people forgot the fact he was computer generated and just enjoy him as a character in the film. Some shots were straight forward, simple track and animation. Others had him interacting with cloth and skin. I realized mid way through getting these effects done, I had really gone out of my way to make this a difficult thing to pull off. But I just put on my blind fold and kept going forward.

While the endless mountain of effects continued, we moved on with the film the best we could. We locked the cut as soon as we had blocking and animatics for all the shots in the show. We did this so we could move forward with sound effects and music.

The music was another avenue Jason and I wanted spend some money on. We really wanted a full soundtrack and not your typical independent piano score. That would just not fly for a scifi-action movie. Through a mutual friend, we found the amazing and talented Jermaine Stegall. Jermaine created a beautiful score in which we got to record with a 35 piece orchestra at Capitol Records in Hollywood. That will forever be one of my favorite days in the making of Enigma. We watched these amazing musicians sit down, look at the music for the first time, and play it perfectly. It was a sight to see. Jermaine gave us exactly what we wanted and we couldn’t be happier with the score. We hope to make many more films with him. Sound design was also moving along, but unfortunately could only go so far as the completed effects. So each time we completed a sequence, we would then update a Quicktime and send it off to sound design.

After almost 4 years, the effects were completed. Now, I admit I didn’t work on the film everyday and waking hour. Part of the reason the film took so long was that life can just get in the way. That’s a whole other article in itself! After many ups and downs the light at the end of the tunnel appeared. As soon as the effects finished, we were able to do the final mix on the show. This was a very exciting day. It was really the first time we got to see everything married together. The amount of work and talent that was pieced together is rather amazing. Its an experience that is actual difficult to put in words, but if you made a film, you know what I am talking about.

Soon after, Jason and I output the master tapes of Enigma. It was done. It was a strange feeling. I still had things I wanted to fix and change. However, it was to a point that it really wasn’t going to make things better, just different. It was time to be done. We each took a copy of the master tape and celebrated over a meal in Hollywood.

The Debut and Final Thoughts

Enigma made its public debut at Dances With Films in Hollywood on June 9^th. There it won the Audience Award for best short. It couldn’t have been a better start for the film. Several years of work came together and people enjoyed it. It gave us a large sense of relief and excitement. We don’t know what the future has in store for the film, but we are looking forward to it!

This has been quite a roller coaster ride for me. What started out as a simple project for two brothers turned into quite a personal epic. Doing projects like this very rarely come easy. It takes a lot of sacrifice and tenacity. Many people can start a project, but to see them through to the end can be quite the challenge. I’m impressed by anyone that can make it through the filmmaking process, good or bad. It can torment your creative brain, leave you with sleepless nights, and even have a toll on your personal relationships. But with any art, that which doesn’t break you forces innovation and creation. You never know along the way if its all worth it, but there is a part deep inside that says you need to keep going. You do your best to listen to this voice and shut out any negativity, cause it is going to fight you the whole way.

I really hope people enjoy the film my brother and I have brought to life, but it has already brought me an experience I will never forget. It was a long and sometimes bumpy road, but the journey is what it was all about.

Enigma awards

Currently Enigma is doing the independent film festival tours, and has gotten some wonderful feedback. We want to thank everyone for all the support! You can also follow all the latest news at the Enigma Fan Page on Facebook.

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