Guerrilla Filmmaking Class by Godzilla Director Gareth Edwards
Tuesday, May 27, 2014 at 1:26PM 
Gareth Edwards is my hero.
His next film will be a Star Wars movie. His current film is Godzilla.
Prior to that, he made the microbudgeted Monsters, which he shot himself on a prosumer camcorder, in Mexico, with a tiny crew.
He did all the visual effects himself.
This was a crazy-like-a-fox methodology that he first boldly used on a BBC historical drama called Atilla the Hun. Fortunately for all of us, he documented his post-production process on that film with a course at FXPHD.
Now FXPHD is making that course available for standalone purchase of $99 USD.
I can’t recommend it highly enough. His approach of combining accesible, affordable tools and techniques with a progressive refinement of the entire film as a whole is masterful, and offers profound insights to filmmakers and visual effects artists of all levels.
Disclaimer: I get nothing for promoting this offer. This is me speaking to you from my heart: This is the best hundred bucks a filmmaker could ever spend.
Reader Comments (3)
Stu,
I love that you are promoting Gareth's class, he is more than awesome. We got to spend 3 days with him right after he completed Monsters. We shot some videos about him for Adobe (in 2011). He made a demo for us on the fly for Warp Stabilize which was new at the time. It was inspiring to see what he pulled off with so little resources.
Pure talent, and a blast to be around.
Check him rocking an old Letus adapter for Monsters:
Gareth shilling for Adobe
Wow, what a deep bag of tricks this man has. Impressive. He gets away with murder in literally every shot! Thanks for the tip.
Some comments for people still wondering about this:
* I think it's definitely worth the $99. It's about ten hours long, and it's really dense and deep. I have only watched the first two hours so far and it's already worth the price.
* It centers on defining what's important and what's not. The two phrases I have heard most often so far are "it doesn't really matter" and "you can get away with it". And he does get away with it, with methods I would never have thought could possibly work.
* His ability is overwhelming. I'm feeling pretty dumb right now. I was even dumber yesterday, but I wasn't so aware of the fact.
Thats really cool that that the Atilla class has been dusted of by FXPHD. That was the hardest VFX shoot I've ever been on. The greenscreen was on an old abandoned Soviet missile base - they had to run a gieger counter over it before we shot, as they'd apparently stored nukes there. It was 92 deg outside and greenscreen was so bright it made your vision go pink for a couple minutes when you stepped off....
If you're interested in how to make big budget effects on what was a very small budget - you should buy this. Actually, you should buy this because Gareth is really pretty funny too.