Really well executed Moco work here from Ollie Larken. I’ve supervised over 100 Motion Control shoots myself and I’m in love with the process. You just can’t get something like this any other way.
LINK to Larken’s film Lapses in Light
Weather you are shopping your new reel around looking for work, or trying to land that big film/cinematic/tv show for your facility, one thing is true. Throughout your career in visual effects you will have to explain yourself and the work that you do to people who probably have no idea how what the heck it takes to get VFX done. For most perspective clients and some perspective employers, VFX is a black box were ideas (and money if you’re lucky) go in and finished frames come out. I have had the unique position of not only pitching visual effects ideas to the powers that be, but being pitched to by young hopefuls and freebie seekers. Here is a quick lists of Do’s and Don’ts that can help you navigate the often tricky waters of the visual effects pitch meeting.
Do Come Prepared - Bringing your reel? Bring two just in case. Don’t know if there is going to be a TV and player set up for you when you get to the meeting? Bring a laptop. I have a huge backpack I bring to every meeting with a special compartment filled with AV connectors. Remember you’re the VFX guy, you’re supposed to solve technical problems. It may sound ridiculous but I have thought to myself many times, “If this guy can’t figure out how to play a DVD, how is he going to run a 3d package”
Don’t Go Negative - In a pitch meeting you may feel it necessary to degrade a competitor or former colleague to make yourself look better. Don’t. Seriously, you never know who is in the room with you. That guy you just called a talentless so-and-so could be the nephew of the guy who has the power to give you the job. Besides, you should be confident in the quality of how your work stacks up to the competition without having to lower yourself to petty name-calling. Save that for the office Holiday Party.
Do Have a Plan B - Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men. Here you are strolling into a pitch meeting, grinning ear to ear, knowing that you have the perfect CG methodology that’s going to land you that award winning gig. Then, in first 30 seconds of the meeting, the Director says he hates CG and he wants the whole job to be motion control. In this situation, it is better to have thought of an alternate plan before hand rather than the somewhat less desirable alternate option of soiling your pants and asking to be excused from the meeting. The choice is yours.
Don’t Show Weekness - One of my favorite VFX Supe stories goes something like this. As a young tike of a 3d animator I sat in on a meeting where the VFX Supe I was working with was hashing out the details of fairly complex sequence in a room of writers, producers and execs. At a certain point the Supe slumped in his chair and covered his face with his hands. A producer asked him what was the matter. His reply? “You’re all f****d!” Needless to say, at the next meeting there was a new VFX Supe. People in power can smell fear. Don’t let the pressure get to you.
Do Know Your Work - You should be able to give the details of ever shot on your reel with your eyes closed. I have been asked ever question imaginable from “How long did this take to do?” to “Which film stock did you shoot these elements on?” Most of these questions are designed to expose poseurs and get a glimpse at the depth of knowledge you really posses about your craft. Sometimes these questions are designed to make the asker feel like a reel smarty-pants. Either way it’s up to you to have an answer.
Don’t Give Up Ever - The only thing that you can say for sure about going out and pitching VFX is this. Sometimes, you will fail. My advice to you is, walk it off. Suck a lemon, do a couple of push-ups and get right back in there. If you got into this business cuz you wanted a never-ending series if warm fuzzies heaped on you then you should probably pick up a copy of “What Color is Your Parachute?” and start looking for a new career direction. Just keep pushing forward and if your your work is good, and you have a little luck, you should be OK.
’s blog Animation - Treasures is mostly known for it’s collection of painstakingly recreated backgrounds from the golden era of Hollywood studio animation. There’s lots of great eye-candy for animation buffs here but also more than a few lessons for VFX folks and heck, anyone in the visual storytelling business. Hans covers a plethora of topics from the use of color to composition, using a wide variety of examples. The visuals are just plain splendid so make sure you take the time to browse the site directly and skip the RSS reader.
I’ve run across a few music videos of late that have some pretty well done and creative VFX that might get over looked because of their intentionally low-tech style. Enjoy!
TV on The Radio, Me-I
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpO23hgua7g[/youtube]
A nice mixed bag of comp CG and traditional stuff here. Found this vid at Nathan Love’s website, a shop in NYC that specializes in animation and design heavy work. Very nice looking website BTW.
They Might Be Giants, With the Dark
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rUbs33eboY[/youtube]
Great stop motion-work from Mizushima Hine for TMBG’s new album. You can also see his stop-mo version of Ana Ng in a hi-rez qt HERE.
Grandaddy, Jed’s Other Poem
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxe40xXQKko[/youtube]
Calling this VFX is a stretch even for me. But hey, it was made on a computer (an Apple ][+ to be exact) and it is animated. You can even download an emulator and source code if you want to run the video yourself.
Welcome to Headphone Check, my randomly occurring series of posts about what VFX guys and gals are listening to while they work. Since this is our first time out, we should cover the ground rules. We all need to pump up the volume sometimes to get through those long tedious shifts. You also need to live with the person sitting in the Jerker next to you day after day. Here are some simple tips to help you navigate this sticky wicket.
Rule #1
For a VFX artist , Supe or Producer, the headphone rule is always in effect. Nobody wants to hear your Brazilian house beats coming out of your tinny mac book speakers. Put on your ear goggles and crank it up. My headset of choice Grado Labs SR60s, the sound is great and you won’t have to ake out a second mortgage on your condo to score a pair.
Rule #2
Over the air audio needs a 2/3rds majority. Here’s the deal, everyone thinks that they have great taste in music and a fantastic sense of humor. Well, they don’t. If you feel you have something to share with your cubical buddies, make sure they are into it first
Rule #3
Don’t put anything on your iTunes playlist that you don’t want to defend at a later date. It’s easy as pie to peek over onto someone else’s monitor, so don’t think that guilty pleasures like Tina Turner’s Private Dancer (just a random example of course) will go unnoticed.
Now that we have that out of the way…
You may know Patton Oswald as the voice of Remy from Ratatouille. If you haven’t heard his stand-up, you are in for a treat my friends. His new comedy album, Werewolves and Lollipops, is definitely NSFW and covers all kinds of VFX nerd friendly topics like the intricacies of the Starship Enterprise chain of command and a fantasy that involves traveling back in time to kill George Lucas before he can make the prequels. Don’t worry though, it’s not a total dorkfest. Oswald turns his misanthropic eye to everything from KFC to the Bush administration. This is one of the best stand-up albums to come out in a good long while. Besides I can truly relate to statements like “My Geekyness is getting in the way of my Nerdyness”.
LINK to Werewolves and Lollipops on iTunes
StumbleUpon-ed Ian Hubert’s personal website Robot Soup this weekend and found a pretty wicked homage to the much loved and lamented Fox series Firefly. Ian isn’t afraid to ask the tough questions like
“What would happen of Serenity got chopped in half by a giant ninja robot?”
Maybe Whedon would have gotten around to that in season two. Unfortunately, we’ll never know. Thanks Fox!
LINK to Ian Hubert’s animation
The act of adding an additional layer of depth of field over an image in order to make a large scale scene look like it was a shot in miniature (sometimes referred to as “Smallgantics”) has been discussed and linked around the interwebs for a few months now. This effect was achieved before the days of the computer using a tilt-shift lens to create multiple areas of focus on the same frame. I was asked by one of the television shows that I work on to recreate this effect on moving aerial plates of the Las Vegas Strip. If you search around you can find plenty of web pages and a few Photoshop tutorials on how to get this effect, but most of them involve a bunch of fakey soft-mattes that would fall apart if applied to moving images. There are no tutorials on how to miniaturize a moving plate. The closest is one site that describes the steps as “many proprietary processes and software to make it work.” Lame! Here is a quick before and after video that steps through the process that I came up with. Nothing fancy but here goes.
Click the frame below to play the movie or open it up in a separate page HERE.
[quicktime]http://vfxhack.com/wp-content/uploads/smallgantics.mov[/quicktime]
Have fun making your gorgeous wide shots look like they were shot on a train set!
LINK to my “smallgantics” tags on del.icio.us
The life of a VFX Supe/Artist/Producer is a busy (and often thankless) one. There are many details to keep track of and when something falls through the cracks you seldom never hear your boss say “That’s O.K., you remembered the 99 other things you were supposed to do. Great Job!” So, in my quest to become more organized, I’ve adapted a GTD-like approach to storing and retrieving all the little bits of info that fly at me throughout the day. For those of you who have been living without an Internet connection for the last few years, GTD stands for “Getting Things Done,” a book by David Allen. The book lays out a detailed system for increasing productivity that I am much too lazy to follow. Besides, I would be laughed off any self-respecting film set for toting around forty-three folders of crap in a portable file cabinet.
One of the basic tenets of GTD is to collect everything. Focal lengths, camera heights, bid requests, lighting diagrams, notes from editorial, notes from the writers, notes from the craft service guy, the amount of information that needs to be logged and followed up on is staggering.
Enter my VFX Moleskines.
I’ve tried pdas, smartphones, laptops and none of them compare to good old pen and paper. Wanna draw a diagram? No problem. Use different colors for emphasis? Go ahead. How about a double underline? Hey pal, knock yourself out. My Moleskines are mostly reporter style. It gives me more writing area and they stay open on the desk while I’m transferring my notes to a computer. I’ve posted a Flickr set that details the inner working of these life-saving little gems HERE. I’ve added notes to the images to get into some of the details.
Remember, information is King. Often times, a well-placed nugget of information can mean the difference between being the conquering hero and being cast out into permanent visual effects exile.
Note: My notebooks are essentially PigPogPDAs, a Moleskine hack with instructions posted HERE.
I have to admit the whole “Oh my goodness, it’s one continuous shoot!” gag is pretty played out at this point. But gosh-darn-it, this one sure does look purty for a somewhat predictable concept. I sense some projection map hackery going on here but all in all worth a look.
LINK to the full short (via motionographer.com)
also if you can’t get that link to work you can also check it HERE
Here’s a couple of pictures of me
Q: What the hell am I doing?
A: Aside from looking like a complete douche, I’m puppeteering some ghosts for a friend’s indy film.
I tore up some pieces of fabric, wrapped them around a foam ball, stuck a dowel thru the whole thing and swirled it around in a fish tank. No fluid sims, no fabric run-ups just good ole’ fashioned movie magic.
A buddy of mine who was on set and sent me this pics. After the horror subsided (the camera does add 20 lbs. ya know) I sent him a reply about how stupid I looked. I asked “WTF, am I doing?” he wrote back.
“At least you are doing “real” VFX old school style and honestly probably having a better time then if you were just sitting in front of a monitor”
Amen brother.
