The Beasts are a small bunch of teenagers from North Wales, who occasionally manage to organise themselves to be in the same place for a bit and do some filming. The first film that we made was on a phone after school one day, and featured Mike taking off some extra clothes. It got a few views on youtube, so er… we made some more!

Cast & Crew

Ben Barton – Actor

Ben Kay – Actor, Web guy

Bryn Parry – Actor

Eryl Grant – Actor

Huw Kinsman - Cameraman, Editor, Special effect guy, Motivator, Everything else.

Mike Jones – Actor

Equipment

Canon HV20 (Pictured) – Bought in late 2008 to replace the (not so old) Sony , this is a high-definition tape-based digital camcorder with excellent picture quality. It also contains an optical image stabiliser which should put an end to shaky camera shots. This will be used to film all of our stuff from now on. Unfortunately, the camera broke in October 2009 due to a faulty circuit board, but a replacement is being sought so filming can continue this summer!

Velbon CX 686 Tripod (Pictured) – This semi professional tripod has a fluid pan head to keep the camera moves nice and steady. Other than that, it’s a tripod and it does a bloody good job of holding the camera up.

Sony Handycam forgotten the name - The first ‘proper’ camcorder to be used by the Beasts (before that we just used the video function on digital cameras), this had fairly good picture quality; however, the quality in widescreen mode was far from perfect as the camera squashed the image to fit on the 4:3 sensor. This was one of the reasons for upgrading to the lovely HV20 above. This camera will probably be used only for behind the scenes filming from now on.

Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects – Used for editing and special effects respectively, demo versions can be found on the internet. Alternatively, you can ‘borrow’ a full version from Adobe.

A computer – with a processor and some RAM and some hard drives and some other stuff to run the software on.

Lots of patience

Online resources

Detonation Films – Loads of free explosion stock footage. All of the explosions in The Alien Film came from here.

Video Copilot – Amazing and free After Effects tutorials.

CG Textures – Large repository of free textures.

Blender – Free 3D modelling and animating program, used to make the UFO in The Alien Film. Very powerful but can be quite (very) hard to use.