Moving Day – now a free ‘making of’ iBook

Many of our readers will know already about Moving Day, a short film directed by Jason Wingrove and written by Mat Graham, which tells the story of a young girl who moves with her family into a new manor, but ends up encountering some particularly feisty fairies. Moving Day was produced with the help of members of fxphd, fxguide’s sister VFX training site. And now thanks to fxguide/fxphd readers, we’re very pleased to announce a free behind the scenes iBook on the making of Moving Day, available right now for download from the iTunes store.


See behind the scenes photography from the set.
A screenshot from the Moving Day iBook.

All you need is an iPad to view this 70+ page breakdown of the film – from writing, concepts, storyboarding, shooting, visual effects, editing and sound production. Inside you’ll find detailed info plus a number of videos and image breakdowns of the process. It even includes the entire nine minute short film.

The iBook, which we have made thanks to your generous donations in our recent sponsorship program, showcases the creation of some evil fairies and the young girl’s ingenious use of a flamethrower to overcome them. You can watch breakdown videos and flip between before and after images – there’s also a 3D fairy model to explore.

Breakdowns like this one for the film’s fairies are included in the iBook.

fxguide’s own Mike Seymour and John Montgomery were Moving Day’s executive producers, with other fxphd prof Tom Gleeson as DOP. The film relied on a completely digital production workflow, filmed in Sydney on RED One cameras. The visual effects, supervised by Mike Seymour, were handled by professors and students from fxphd, making the film truly a worldwide effort. Several fxphd courses followed the production of Moving Day and challenges inside some courses were even part of the final film.

Here’s an outline of the iBook:

Both on-set greenscreen and digital fairies were part of Moving Day’s visual effects.

1. Introduction
– Jason Wingrove – director
– Read the script

2. Pre production
– Locations, design & storyboards

3. The Girl
– Working with Darcy

4. The fairies
– How to make a fairy

5. Production
– Cinematography
– On-set effects, costumes & props

6. The flame thrower
– Shooting the scene
– Tracking, fire and smoke & compositing

7. Post production
– Editing, sound design/music
– Digital effects
– Closing credits sequence

8. It’s a wrap
– Posters & reception

9. Watch the film

You can download the free Moving Day iBook at Apple’s iTunes store here.

4 thoughts on “Moving Day – now a free ‘making of’ iBook”

  1. I can understand why you release the book for the ipad but there are professionals out there who are not using Apple products. It would be great if you could release an android or pdf version of the book as well.

    1. I would think the two biggest reasons for making it iPad-only is the massive marketshare (and growing) compared to other tablets, and the ease of making an interactive book through Apple’s free iBooks Author application. Perhaps you should write to Google and see if they can come up with something that’s on par with that, and then they can look into creating an Android version. Even so – the marketshare for Android tablets are still relatively low – especially when splintered off from the Amazon Kindle Fire store. As far as the PDF goes – It seems clear to me they wanted something interactive – not just another passive PDF file.

  2. Michael Richards

    I have tried downloading the free book but it says that it is only available for purchase from the US (itunes) store. Since my credit card was not issued in the US, this means that I am unable to download the free ibook. Is it possible that you can make the download available manually or in another format?

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