'HUNTERS' THE MAKING OF: The Idea

The idea for 'Hunters' pretty much came to me where all of my ideas come from, the restroom haha.

When I first got the idea for the film, all I knew was that I wanted dinosaurs. I wanted to set a standard for student film making with absolutely no budget. I really wanted to show that you don't need to go to a big and expensive film school to learn how to create a good film. So once the ideas for the film popped in my head I immediately jotted my ideas down and made notes of how the story would flow.

Now this was 1 month before the Fall semester of Mt. San Antonio Community College was set to begin, and I wasn't even sure I would get the class for certain. But I was so eager, my mind was so set on making this film happen that I couldn't resist to start pre-production.

So before I started any work on the actual film itself, I needed to make sure I was absolutely capable of achieving the dinosaur effects and animations on my own. Me and a couple of buddies of mine went to the park and I told them to pretend like they're running from a 'big ass' dinosaur. The awkwardness of the raw footage is humorous; that and Van's horrible wardrobe (the guy with flip flop's in the video below).

So I got home, fired up Boujou and commenced the 3D tracking. One of my fears was that the footage would be completely unusable due to the fact that the Canon T2i, and basically all DSLRs, have a CMOS sensor. The Jell-O effect that comes out of these sensors really screw things up when it comes to 3D tracking. I also shot everything handheld so this came out to be more of a stress test on how shaky I can make the footage and still create a close-to-perfect 3D track. Fortunately, everything worked out great. I exported my tracks and brought them into 3D studio Max.

Now, the animation. I DID NOT create the dinosaur models or textures. I purchased them off of Turbosquid. Unfortunately, the animation rig (the bones that allow you to move the models and animate them) were so horribly designed that I had to redo all of the rigging. Rigging is something I despise, I absolutely hate it because I basically suck at it. But with a lot of patience I was able to rig the dinosaurs I would use. I created really rough animations to show everybody what I was capable achieving in a short amount of time. I completed 1 test shot per day.

The following is the end result:



Once these tests were completed, I knew I was ready to start writing the story.