Red Camera Workflow at the VERL

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.

HDRI light probe environment light test in Nuke

LDR still at eV 0

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.

Field of View Calculator

This is the best online field of view calculator I have come across yet.  It is simple, gives you all the info you need and has all the sensor sizes you are likely to need.

Field of View Comparator from AbelCineTech

Three Pass Keying Tutorial

Before and After

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.

'A Stately Suicide' a short film in development.

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

Burning Building Projection Test

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.

Non-player Character test for 'In-World War'

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.