When I was recovering from the removal of my first titanium plate back in November 2011 and was bored from beeing in bed all the time I put together a little viral video. Back then Elder Scrolls Skyrim was the game to play on any console or computer, so as per se at 4 am on a foggy sunday morning I had an idea to film a little video with a Dragon. The script was made up in my head in an instant, my brother was up for some fun action acting so we set out into the woods of Pohorje to do our little viral. 

Unfortunately for the video but fortunately for me snow came to Austria the next weekend and I was back on skis before I could actually finish the idea. Another problem that needed solving was the missing of a useful dragon mesh with enough skeletal animation to make the plate I shot with the ball trackers look half ass believable. Since I couldn’t find one and the one that was usefull was 400 Dollars I didn`t finish composing that shot. So if ever I come back to this little Sunday project for which out of boredom I must have spent quite a few hours in post I might finish it :P… just for the scene with the tracker and me fidling with the stick use your imagination XD that’s what we call zero budget production XD.

For our more geeky readers here a bit of techno-babel:

“I decided to shoot at 1080p with snynced shutter all flat so I get the desired movie look.ISO was locked at a steady 125, grain was added later. I made a few different grades and ultimatlly decided for a pronounced autumn tone with leaves being a little exaggeratively colored and trees contrasted… it should add a bit of feel that puts the entire scene somewhere in a neutral woods setting. I wanted to avoid the regular “dark woods” grade as that would facilitate being lost while that was clearly not the case as our protagonist walks into the woods and is surprised by the dragon. In the original Idea the dragon would be  of a reddish/brown skin color.


Another thing I wanted to do was CinemaScope at a 2.35:1 aspect. As I do not have anamorphic lenses at my disposal I compensated with wider shot angles and a crop. As I shot 1080p it did give me a reasonable amount of vertical crop but virtually no horizontal. Also it turned out that the Crop-lines I use are a little tighter then the actual fail-safes so in turn by doing aggressive croping on some scenes I purposely left a bit of the black bars in tact as I was to lazy to redo some of the scenes for the final export.


On the audio front I did recently redo the sound-stage of the entire clip in 5.1 after upgrading my audio setup. It was a good exercise since I haven’t done any 5.1 mixing in at least 2 years. It has been considerably dumbed down since then and the greatest chalange was to avoid crosstalk and matching the levels of individual sound sources. As this was a viral for the theme in the background I went with the Elder scrolls main theme that is an Awesome piece of orchestral music that you might wanna get here. 


The Title it self is a product of a dragon i drew on my tablet a while ago some text and some fire stock. Turned out OK for 30 mins of work 😛


I did export the whole thing as a 2.35:1 h264 clip with 5.1 AAC for vimeo but I do not think its gonna have 5.1. Try downloading the source file to enjoy the advanced audio mix. You will find it on the vimeo page directly.”

But of course this Isn’t the only project I have spend time on next to the freeriding blog stuff and the photography as well as a concert project that doesn’t seem to end 😛 … Look out for these two in the future, at some point… I  work on them as I find time so it`s gonna be a while but in the end they are gonna be done 🙂 Here the title designs 😉