Slice of Life - laser cutting movie props
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- Posted in Architecture, material: MDF, material: wood, miniatures
Luka is the director of the award-winning sci-fi short, "Slice of Life''. He uses his FLUX Beambox Pro laser cutter to create miniatures in his movies.
Slice of Life is a VFX artist and a director from Croatia. Together with a friend, he runs a production company specialising in TV commercials. Creating commercials is their job, but film is their passion.
“Our last short was a science fiction film and we created the futuristic world by using miniatures. It’s an old school approach that was extremely popular in the 70’s and the 80’s, but nowadays it’s almost completely replaced by digitally created visual effects.
We fell in love with that technique, it gave a certain charm to our film, and we decided it will be our visual style in future projects as well. When we are building miniatures for filming it is important to make them as perfectly and precisely as possible so they will maintain the realism when filmed.
It is very hard and labour intensive to do everything by hand and that’s where the FLUX laser cutter comes in. With the help of the FLUX laser cutter we can make the pieces for model building extremely precisely and, what’s very important – fast.”
“There are not many brands of laser cutters available for the ‘hobbyist’ or ‘semi professional’ user. One option is to go with the lower quality CO2 lasers from China, but from reading user experiences I realised I would need to spend a lot of time and effort to upgrade them and get them working properly in the first place. That was a no-go for me. I wanted to spend more time doing creative stuff and not fixing my laser cutter.”
“So when I searched for a serious product that would work right out of the box, FLUX was the name that popped out immediately. I appreciated that there was minimal assembly needed, the software that came with it is very intuitive and I started using the machine half an hour after I got it. And lastly, there are many users of FLUX laser cutters, so when I had a question about how to do a certain thing I could easily find the answer on FLUX Facebook groups or YouTube. That’s extremely valuable.”