Jack Wyatt and the Gun from Hell

I began writing Gun from Hell in 2015 while living in Northern New York. The script went through numerous drafts after I relocated to Colorado to work in commercial productions.

Pre-production began in 2016 and required nearly a year to organize. Due to the film's technical nature, we meticulously storyboarded every shot and mapped out every angle. Executive producer and actor Rodrigo Tactaquin played an integral hand in discovering almost half the film's cast.

Production started in 2017 on a soundstage in Colorado Springs with partial scenes shot in Northern New York. The film implemented a combination of Panasonic, Blackmagic and RED cameras, each suitable to their task. Gun from Hell became one of the only independent feature films shot entirely on a green screen. Fragmented availability of the cast meant that they rarely performed on set together. Instead, they filmed scenes separately. The goal was to composite everyone together later on. Despite sharing moments on-screen, some of the cast did not meet until filming wrapped.

In post-production, I modeled a digital world from scratch using consumer software like Cinema4D and Element3D. Environments consisting of deserts, mountains, a town, and a forest the size of a football field, were composited with live-action footage using Adobe After Effects. The tedious nature of the green screen sometimes required several actors, filmed separately, to be composited into one image. In many instances, performers had to be rotoscoped, traced frame-by-frame to lift them from one background, and placed onto another.

The audio was an equally vital component of post-production. Additional dialogue replacement (A.D.R.) was recorded for nearly all the cast, requiring them to re-read all their lines in a studio. Every sound effect, grand or small, was recorded in post.

Altogether, post-production spanned nearly two years. From conceptualization to completion, Jack Wyatt and the Gun from Hell was five years in the making.