I saw this vehicle parked in front of LA motion capture facility, House of Moves. This really shows the lengths a VFX freak will go through satisfy their obsessive compulsive itch. Check the details, my favorite being the steering yoke. Wait, maybe it’s the translucent Obi Wan on the dash.
The folks over at Max Bumps have put together a little how-to on the new video Ladies Of The World from VFXhack fave Flight of the Concords. It includes a little Q and A as well as some fun clips of the boys from New Zealand’s 4th most popular folk parody band. The VFX crew over a Ghost Town media tracked the Brett and Jermaine’s heads onto stunt skaters on Venice beach to produce a 70’s flashback extravaganza. The result is a nice mix of Xanadu and the Sabatoge video. The clip is fun, especially the sexy hermaphrodite, and the effects are pretty good for music vid schedule and budget. The heavy use of Colorista and Magic Bullet help blend everything together.
LINK the the full article
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
I’ve posted about Blu’s insane animations shot stop motion on real walls before, but the new piece Muto really take the cake. This is extremely well done and must have taken forever to put together. Thanks again to Azathothx.
LINK to previous Blu post on VFXhack
With all the crazy hours us VFX peeps slog through on a regular basis, certain activities can get swept to the side. Reading seems to be at the top of that list. After a long day chained to the desktop it’s hard to do anything at home but veg and try to unwind. And carving out a hour or so a night for reading just doesn’t seem like the thing to do considering there are several more songs left to be unlocked on Guitar Hero (or maybe that’s just me). Lucky for me I have a about an hour and half commuting time to catch up on my book learnin. Of course holding a page full of printed words up in front of my face while I wind my way down Laurel Canyon every day might prove to be a bit problematic. Audiobooks to the rescue. Now I know some of you are saying “Audiobooks? That’s not really reading.” Well, I hate to inform you that you are wrong. All of my friends who are avid listeners have decided that as long as you listen to the whole audio program in it’s unabridged form, you can say that you have read the book. So there, print snobs. Here are my five picks for great listens picked especially for my VFX brethren.
I’m a huge fan of audiobooks that are read by their author. Hearing Neil Gaiman recount many of the short stories he’s written over the years is pure magic. The tales the gamut including examples of Gaiman’s sci-fi, fantasy, horror and even a bit of poetry. There is a story set in the world of the Matrix and novella that features the continuing adventures of some of the characters masterpiece American Gods. A lot of the stories are bite-sized and easy to finish off if you’ve only got a few minutes to kill between renders.
If you are a know-it-all like me, you must read this book. It gives you just enough info on about this rock that we live on to be dangerous, or at least completely annoying over cocktails. Bryson covers a wide range of scientific discoveries that you alway thought that you should know about and presents them with a mater of fact sense of humor that even makes them interesting. A word of warning though. This book shows how humans scientists use their powers of reason and observation to create “theories”. Intelligent designers might be offended.
Imagine watching the original Star Wars (episode IV, in case you just arrived in a time machine from 1976) without any visuals what-so-ever. I mean just the audio and a blank screen. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it would be a tremendously boring experience. So when, Lucas commissioned the for Radio version of his Sci-Fi classic in 1981 he made sure that it included expanded scenes not featured in the film to flesh out the radio play’s 6 1/2 hour running time. The result is a must for any Star Wars fan and includes great performances from Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels.
I’m not a huge fan of the alternate history genre. I really couldn’t give a crap what some history nerd thinks the world would be like of the South actually won the civil war. But if you are like me, you have spent countless hours thinking to yourself “Now what would I do during a Zombie apocalypse?”. Well World War Z gives you a ground level view of what happens when the dead roam the earth on search of human flesh in the form of first person accounts from the Zombie War. If there is one thing I’ve learned from this book, if you are ever in the front lines of a confrontation with the undead, stay away from large bodies of water.
Hodgman himself reads his Farmer’s Almanac meets The Onion send up of a variety of topics from Lobsters to Hobo Matters. You’ll probably recognize Hodgman from the Daily Show and as the PC on the “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” commercials. Be careful though if you are listening on headphones while other people are around you will laugh out loud and appear to be an insane person to other join your vicinity. Take note that the list of 700 hobo names is available for free from Hodgman’s web site and takes over an hour for him to read.
LINK to hobo drawings at e-hobo
The Finns who brought you the movie Star Wreck have just released a teaser trailer for their new film Iron Sky. The basic plot is that Ratzis escape o the moon circa 1945 and are coming back to invade the Earth in 2018. The filmmakers plan to continue the theme of “mocking totalitarianism” is this release but what is more interesting to me than the actual content of the film is the way it is being made. Wreck was made using a large number of volunteers getting individual shots done in locations all over the world. Call it distributed filmmaking if you will. This endeavor seems to take the concept a step or two further and has set-up a collaborative website were users can sign onto the production and pitch shots and ideas for scenes. It will be interesting to see how a single Directors creative vision meshes with a social networking style approach to film production.
Link to the Wreck A Movie collaborative filmmaking platform
So about two weeks ago, one of my fearless readers informed me that folks searching for VFXhack on Google were being directed to a page informing them that my site was distributing malicious software (gasp!). So began the journey to clear my name and make sure that anyone accessing this Blog could do so free from the fear of being re-directed to a site that tries to sell them arabic ringtones (who is buying those anyway?). The long and the short of it is, that after a re-install of WordPress and some serious text editing of all the posts to VFXhack so far. The site is now clean, and all possible exploits have been patched. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programs of pithy posts and industry laments.
LINK to more info on other WordPress blogs that were attacked
Hey looks like updating the Wordpress install wiped out the all the users in my database. Yipee! So now when you comment you’ll get the added fun of having to re-register your user name. Think of it as a chance to re-evaluate part of your online identity.
Thanks for your patatience.
Reader Eeetu sent over a link to a fairly long running forum on on VFX talk containing many posts of jawdropping examples of node tree hell. Of course Nyarlathotep points out that these ain’t squat compared to the exposure sheets that were needed to do this stuff in-camera in the olden days.
LINK to the thread on VFX talk
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Nyarlathotep passed along this awesome pic that at first glance looks like some sort of Sci-Fi S&M setup but is really an early motion capture rig. There is more info on Dave Sieg’s Scanimation website about this image
I recall seeing a demonstration videotape in which a girl wore a harness equipped with motion sensors connected to a Scanimate. Each sensor was a goniometer, a type of rotary transformer which converts angular displacement into a corresponding phase shift between windings. The wearer of this harness could cause a stick-figure, generated by Scanimate, to mimic his movements in real time. Remember, this was done back in the early seventies, well before any of the recent magnetic or optical motion capture work.
I’ve searched the whole internet (well not really) trying to find the full demo video of this system but to no avail. Any hints from fellow VFXhackers out there could help us all scratch our vintage MoCap itch.
LINK to a cool movie of the Scanimation system in action for Dave’s site
