BROKEN Visual Effects

Could you talk a little about the equipment and software used to achieve the more than 100 visual effects in "Broken"?

Alex: All editing, previz and all the color correction, creating three distinct looks for "Broken," were done in Apple's Final Cut Pro. Apple has recently released many tools that independent filmmakers can use to tell their stories, on a budget. There is no excuse anymore for anyone not picking up a camera and telling a story they want to tell. All the tools are available and affordable.

Sean: All of my compositing work was done with Apple's Shake. All f/x were created on a dual AMD 2800 and a G5. Shake for me is essential to any compositing work. It's architecture allows for setups to be made that allow for quick changes that would otherwise be costly and not time-effective. A good instance would be the muzzle flashes. I created one hand-painted basic flash. Then inside Shake I created a "global warp," so that no matter where the flame was placed in the scene, it would always be different without any additional adjustments. I then created a "template" script for each different type of muzzle flash. Then by using a lot of different expressions, I could control each muzzle flash and its effect on surrounding elements with relative ease. Each flash had a "flash-fader" which controlled whether or not the flash was visible, this "fader" in turn also controlled (via expressions) how much smoke, dust, emitted light, camera shake, and glow was put into the scene ... all from one node. This template was then repeatedly used for each scene with a flash (there are a lot of them) with minor variations depending on what type of flash was being generated. This was a huge time saver considering the amount of shots that needed this type of treatment.