In November I posted a blog entry discussing the development of a script for my short film Falling Out. In it I mention that it was five months prior that I had first introduced the idea to writer Tom K McCarthy, which would make it now 14 months since we began the project!
As the final film is now complete I am taking a moment to trace the project from inception to completion.
Here is a VFX breakdown hilighting the main elements that were used to create the nuclear explosion in the opening shot of my upcoming short Falling Out. In addition I created a background plate composed footage of moving cars composited into an HDRI still image. Other work includes plenty of animated colour operations, glows, motion blurs, procedural noise and liberal use of camera shake!
Thanks to Dylan Gauld for his great cgi work in Maya Fluids.
Here is a quick breakdown of the VFX shot that I composited for John Fairfield's film Monsters Under the Bed. You can check out the film on the Virgin Media Shorts website.
Dylan Gauld's work on the CGI dynamics for the nuclear explosion from my short Falling Out is coming to a close. I've been experementing with a single frame render that he's given me to see what I need to do to sell the shot. Because we haven't had much time to refine it in Maya I'm doing the colouring in Nuke using an R, G & B ID pass and generally distroying the image as much as possible to hide the seams.
CG ID passes coloured and merged over plate.
Early pass on reducing detail with over exposure effects.
Last week we wrapped principal photography on a short film I am directing called A Stately Suicide. It was my most enjoyable directing experience so far and I was so grateful to be working with such a talented cast and crew. The cast are;
Last week I gave a short presentation on behalf of the Visual Effects Research Lab to our North Sea Screen partners from Denmark and Norway. As well as offering visual effects we wanted to make clear that we could offer a comprehensive digital post production workflow. This particular Red Camera workflow was designed for artist / photographer Wendy McMurdo, allowing her the ability to request changes and see them made quickly during any part of the production process.
I shot an oversized christmas bauble from each side of my room using Magic Lantern on my 550d to bracket the exposures at -5, -2.5, 0, +2.5 and +5eV. The large exposure steps did introduce some banding when converted to HDRI. Also, taking the stills with no tripod and not measuring distances resulted in shallow focus and the need to adjust the input rotation in the spherical transform when matching one lightprobe angle to the other in Nuke. I also realise now that if I took the second set of exposures at a 90° angle form the first rather than 180° then I could have removed myself from the final image.
After enjoying using KeyLight in Nuke to consolidate an edge matte, a core matte and a garbage matte with one node I decided to see if the same could be done in After Effects. Unsurprisingly it is not quite as simple in AE but after reading the Foundry's user guide and a blog post from Mark Christiansen as well as watching a light wrap video tutorial by Jerzy Drozda Jr, I have found a workflow which meets my needs.
The footage I am using was captured directly from the EX1 to ProRes4444 using an AJA break out box for Rachel McLean's Scottish Arts Council project. I now realise that 422 chroma sampling is all we were getting out of the camera but I'm sticking with 444 to avoid a rerender.
After Effects Flow Chart
This tutorial covers the whole three-pass keying process but doesn't discuss the principals of keying or KeyLight in any depth. For a KeyLight tutorial, check out Andrew Kramer's video here. A still frame of the footage is available here for anyone wishing to follow along.
In late September director of photography, Ian Forbes and his writing partner, Andy Smith came to me for advice on a screenplay they had been working on. I liked the tone of the story immediately but it was clear to us all that it still needed some work. I came on board to advise at version three of the screenplay and was asked to direct shortly after that. We have since been through four iterations and made some drastic changes to the events of the story.
Synopsis:
The volatile Lord Spencer must be kept under heavy sedation if he is to be placed in a nursing home without a fight. When Hannah, his private nurse takes all of Spencer's medication, she must enlist Tony, a small-town waster to find street drugs to replace the prescription.
Hospitalfield house, the primary location for the film
This video shows the current state of my work on Colin Andrews' film for the Scottish Arts Council which is being produced at the Visual Effects Research Laboratory in association with North Sea Screen Partners.
I was approached by Graeme Turnbull of the Mill a few months ago to do some visual effects work on a film he is involved with called In-World War. One of the problems was to create NPC's that had their faces pixelated in world space rather than on the cinema screen. I struck upon the idea of mapping the pixelation onto their faces in 3D but it wasn't until I saw this interview with Digital Domain artist Justin van der Lek on fxguidetv that I realised how it could be done.
It has been about five months since I first mentioned to my writer Tom K McCarthy that I wanted to make a short film which focused on a small group of people dealing with the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast in Scotland. Last week he delivered the first draft of the screenplay. There are several redrafts needed before we get to a shooting script but we both agree this draft holds the essence of the story we want to tell.
Gareth Edwards is a director / VFX artist currently making waves with his new film Monsters. He has an extremely integrated approach to directing and VFX, previsualizing how he can use effects to solve the production problems of working with a tiny crew and small budget. Edwards better tells the story by adding elements from subtle signage to giant monsters and adds production value by recontextualizing 'run and gun' location footage and multiplying background actors.
This multidisciplinary approach must come at the risk of neglecting some production challenges in favour of others, however Edwards seems to be able to tackle each creative and technical objective from a storytelling perspective. This approach avoids the problem, common in less well integrated VFX movies, of including effects which distract from the story rather than help telling it.
Listen to Gareth Edwards' fxguide interview with John Montgomeryhere. Watch his fxguidetv interview with Mike Seymour here.
I have recently finished the live action shoot for DJCAD animation undergraduates Daniel Borg and Michael Wilbourn's animation short 'My Welcome Intruders'. After seeing their great character designs and previous cg and match moving work I jumped at the chance to collaborate and came on board as live action director, editor and post production consultant.
This week I finished post production on fellow masters student Scott Davidson's music video. Scott is a director with a background in documentary and drama and has recently been in talks with a local band to produce a budgeted music video for them. In the interim he directed a no budget promo video on which Ian Forbes was cinematographer and I was editor and colourist. The piece is a documentary realist slice of life in Dundee, something which Scott is in a unique position to capture as he seems to know everybody in this town!
Digital Domain's work for Titanic seamlessly integrates live action, model work, cg and matte painting. They had to develop their own 3D motion tracking software to be able to do so.
I am using James Cameron as a study of a director pushing the state of the art of visual effects for my research presentation on the MSc. By charting his films from The Abyss through Terminator 2 and Titanic to Avatar we see how the needs of his films to show previously unseen imagery lead to some of the most dramatic leaps in effects technology in the past 20 odd years. This is preferable to industry lead developments which tend to reaffirm cinema's novelty aspects and disrupt our suspension of disbelief, cutting us off emotionally from the film and it's characters.
This is an abstract I wrote for the research methods module of my MSc. The podcast I refer to can be found here.
Director Ron Howard (2007) describes his ‘six of one, half a dozen of the other rule’ as a way of fostering a creative atmosphere. He explains that if an objective for the film can be achieved as successfully using a collaborators idea as using his own, then it is a better choice. This is because ‘..they own that, their execution is going to be pure’ rather than guessing at an idea in the directors mind.
By combining the color and the depth image captured by the Microsoft Kinect, Oliver Kreylos has projected the color image back out into space and create a "holographic" representation of the persons or objects that were captured.
The possibilities of this technology are of great interest to me, could we see a shift back to deep focus small sensor cameras where the defocus is a post effect? If your focal plane could be dialed in after the shoot then producing an extremely shallow depth of field look could become a lot more practical. The same goes for other depth effects such as haze and atmospheric effects. What if depth compositing could eliminate the need for roto? Maybe I shouldn't hold my breath for that one.
The 8 camera projection project that I am working on for the Scottish Arts council could certainly have benefited from multiple depth witness cameras.
First three scenes of Katshhiro Otomo's 'Akira' 1988.
James Cameron's 'Avatar' 2009 has been cited as heralding a cinematic revolution, using cutting edge technology to portray an imagined reality in greater detail than previously possible. Over 20 years previously, Katsuhiro Otomo's 'Akira' 1988, showed us an example of world building based upon a cinematic reality which broke free from the physical constraints of live action film making. This was a film made for cinema, created with 16000 with large cels of animation designed for a 35mm print, requiring eight companies to provide the immense budget.
Akira's visual language owes a lot to the study of photographic realism. In the few scenes shown above, we see realistic use of spherical and anamorphic lens flares, interactive lighting, texture, motion blur, camera angles and focal lengths, perspective and parallax as well as incredible fidelity of detail.
