Prey Alone’s creators freely admit that their short is a home movie done by geeks, but they were able to pull it off with style. All images © 2004 Fantastic Films.

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view clips from Prey Alone showing the greenscreen work and a trailer for the film by simply clicking the image.

There are many good things about the rise of CG in the cinema, but probably one of the least highlighted and potentially most powerful is the increasing democratization of filmmaking as an art. Yes, it’s still expensive and, yes, it’s still difficult, but CG is not only enabling filmmakers at the top end of the scale to realize their visions on screen, it’s also helping those with humbler budgets tell stories that would just have been simply beyond them before.

Prey Alone, a 15-minute short and a futuristic, dystopian film straight out of the thriller mold, is a case in point. The directors, Stephen St. Leger and James Mather, had the desire to create a film featuring two elements, a car chase and an interrogation scene. And so they did just that, throwing in some thrills such as an exploding fighter plane along the way.

Once upon a time, of course, it would have cost a ridiculous, John Landis amount of money to put that amount of car chase on the screen. But, by shooting in 16mm against greenscreen and, apart from a few hand props, creating the backgrounds and objects entirely in 3D, St. Leger and Mather were able to pull it off with style.

Two things remain highly unusual about it, however. First, it’s an Irish film, but an extremely atypical one. “Not… your typical Irish short film!” comments its website (www.saintandmather.com) succinctly. “In fact, it doesn’t even have a priest as one of the main or supporting characters. No panoramic vistas, no poverty, misery or guilt and it’s not even set in the 1950s.”

Secondly, the comping and tracking on all 350 effects shots was done at home on domestic computers and rendered out at 2K resolution. As St. Leger freely admits, “Basically, it’s a home movie done by the geeks.”

Prey Alone grew out of writers/directors James Mather (left) and Stephen St. Leger’s desire to create an atypical Irish film featuring two elements: a car chase and an interrogation scene.

Genesis and Creation
Any description of the plot would ruin its impact on first viewing, so we’ll leave that alone. Suffice it to say, therefore, that beyond the desire for car chases and interrogation, St. Leger and Mather also profess a liking for the works of what Mather refers to as “cinematic parlor games” as exemplified by the likes of David Fincher (Fight Club) and M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, The Village, etc.). Mather, meanwhile, had been kicking specific car chase ideas and concepts around for a while (“I was always doing tests of one form or another in 3D — it’s how I relaxed on a weeknight”) before they finally decided to name a date to get a script delivered and began to focus on the film.

“The planning of the shoot itself from a technical standpoint was actually kind of vague,” he says. “Sets had been roughed out in 3D and we knew how we were going to light them, where the actors would be standing and the general feel, but we didn’t storyboard all the scenes. The interrogation, for instance, was just two guys talking, so we left much of that up to the day in terms of shots. In a funny way, we restricted ourselves too much in terms of camera moves and freedom with the camera and actors. In hindsight, some of the most successful stuff was the handheld stuff, when one character punches another for example. The freedom of the camera helps the digital backgrounds sit in so much better.”

Those backgrounds were created by a small CG team consisting of Mather, lead 3D animator and compositor Jonathan Ridge, senior CG artist Eddie Sheanon and CG artists John O’Connell, Robert D’Arcy and Paul Flanagan. The main software used was 3ds max for all the 3D work and After Effects for pretty much everything else.