Making Wolverine: Committed - The Plan

Richard Mathis | 09 February, 2021

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The Wolverine

Back in October, I was talking with Lydon from Dorkside Fitness and we decided we wanted to do something really cool and a bit more video than we'd been doing. In this video I'm going to talk through what we planned, and what we did, then I'll break out a bunch of other articles that dive deeper into each subject.

We had a few goals

Create something true to the comics
Create a LOT of content, not just the final video, but content throughout the journey so everyone has a lot of content to share with their fans.
Push our limits so we learn a lot and use this as a springboard to many more such projects going forward.
Avoid anything that would require too much digital editing, if we can't do it practically, we can't count on it looking good.

I feel like we accomplished most of our goals, but it wasn't without a lot of hiccups.

The Initial Plan

Originally we thought it was going to be pretty simple, and basically amount to:

Create ninja outfits
partner with a stunt team
practice the fight.
film the fight.

Sounds easy right? Shouldn't even take 4 months, surprised we didn't get it done back in September.

No Plan Survives First Contact

So we reached out to the Arhat Orphan brotherhood, I'd done some BTS on another Wolverine-themed project with them and thought they were amazing. I asked, told them our idea, and they said yes!

It only took a few meetings to realize that this is what it would take to actually make the project.

Design ninja outfits that could be used with stunts
Make ninja outfits for ninja and ninja bosses
Make stunt-safe versions of all weapons and wolverine claws
Design and make arrows that were light enough to glue onto Wolverine as if he'd been shot
Make duplicate shredded versions of Wolverine armor to show "battle damage"
Make Battle Wolverine cowl
Test and make decisions regarding "berserker eyes"
Write script we could actually do.
Practice, Practice, Practice.
Teach Lydon how to do stunts as the Wolverine.
Refine script continually based on what we learn through practice and remaining time.
Find a location
Decorate a location
Find an FX makeup person
Film the scene over multiple days
Record voiceovers
Record FX plates
Make FX footage
Keep everyone happy over months of grueling practice with no immediate reward.

Each of these except the script, started small, but ended up scaling bigger and bigger as we refused to compromise too much quality while trying to accomplish something really amazing.

The script, started big, and ended much smaller than expected. Which is fine, because we'll film those other scenes across many more vignettes. What was most surprising is that we had already scaled back from something too complex, got rid of crazy powers, thought just a few pages would be what we could handle, well those 2 or 3 pages of script was reduced to just a few paragraphs.

Was it worth it?

Heck yeah! We learned so much, honestly so much! I'm going to write a bunch more blogs describing this journey, but seriously, it was amazing, and I can't wait to share the final product with you all!

In the meantime, enjoy some more BTS photos!