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Entries in Visual FX (12)

8:00AM

Christian Worldview Film Festival 2015

The full list of 2015 Official Selections is now online!
Guild & Festival // March 10-14

Here are the films I helped with that will be showing this year.

- Polycarp (Camera, Editor, Colorist)
- Bound (Consultant)
- Roses (On-set Editor)
- Wanted (Editor, Colorist)
- Firefly (Consultant)
- Awakened to Truth (Post Production Director)
- Overcoming Opposition (Post Production Director)
- The Egg Project (Post Production Director)
- Who We Are (Director of Photography)
- Set Free (Consultant)

View the full list here!

Also, if you haven't purchased your tickets to the Guild & Festival, be sure to use discount code JOHNCLAYBURNETT to get $25 OFF!

Purchase tickets here!


8:01AM

Beyond the Mask - Visual Effects

Get ready to be blown away. I definitely was when Aaron took me on a VIP tour. Tour of what? The Beyond the Mask classified visual effects archive room. “We built some awesome sets for the film. Now we’re just making them awesomer,” Aaron told me. He didn’t notice that I had sneaked my smart phone into the room and I snapped a few photos to show you.

Ok, so we weren’t in an archive room; what he showed me was all on his laptop . . . but it was incredible! But let me tell you about it so you can be as excited as I am.  And I do have some top secret pictures to share. Don’t ask me how I got them. . .

The highwayman rides into Philadelphia.

The highwayman rides into Philadelphia.

After I had seen what the visual effects team is creating, it was time to do some investigating. So, I decided to talk to one of the expert artists on the team to find out just how this all works.

Meet Chris Arnold. He’s the lead 3D artist on the Beyond the Mask visual effects team. I was planning to set up a telephone interview with Chris, but switched my plans to involve Skype when I realized that it would be an international call. Chris lives in Ontario, Canada, and is a skilled artist in his field. Chris describes his job this way. “A 3D artist is a generalist set builder and animator that can create a virtual world. My role with a lot of the visual effects shots is to create building assets in CGI.”

Chris works on the prison ship sequence.

Chris works on the prison ship sequence.

Beyond the Mask will employ visual effects to enhance its story, as most films do today, but I wanted to know what the scale of this project was. How many visual effects shots are there in the film? I asked Chris. “I know that we have over seven hundred visual effects shots in the film, but you should talk to Luke, he could get you the exact numbers,” Chris says. Luke is the Visual Effects Supervisor and has been working out of the Beyond the Mask postproduction command central near St. Louis since August. So, I contacted Luke to find out just how large this project was. “We have 741 VFX shots currently, which totals around 65,000 frames of visual effects.  This equals approximately 50.1 minutes of play time on screen.  We have 27 artists on our internal team and are outsourcing some larger sequences to two other VFX post houses as well.” Obviously Luke likes numbers, and as his statistics might show, he is a bit of a computer whiz. Wow. The team is definitely taking this film up another level in excellence.  That’s more visual effects shots than there were in the film Inception!

There are several sequences that Chris is directly involved with. “We have the rooftop chase sequence. We have the prison ship sequence and quite a few others,” Chris said. “We can make it feel much bigger and epic and photo real. For the rooftop chase, we have created over fifteen different 3D models for actual buildings of the time period that are then placed in the scene to create these massive city shots so that we can render them out and populate this 18th Century Philadelphia world.”

I got to preview the rooftop chase sequence, so I followed up on it to see how the visual effects add to this one piece of the film...(continue reading)
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Source Article

8:00AM

10 Movies With Mind-Boggling Miniature Effects

Filmmakers are, by nature, liars. They’re masters of misdirection and optical illusion and whatever on-screen flim-flammery is necessary to get the shot. Which is why, even in our CG-heavy age, the miniature special effect is still in (occasional) demand. Recent movies like Inception and The Impossible proved that the use of small-scale models to simulate large-scale cinematic visuals is not only viable, but can even be preferable to all-digital approaches. After all, the best miniature effects provide the sense of weight and realism that computers often can’t. Here are 10 films whose use of miniatures is so subtle, we’re still kicking ourselves for believing that cars can fly, and that entire resorts, mountains, and cities were harmed in the making of these movies.

[NOTE FROM REELCAST: This is not an endorsment of any of these films.]

1. Blade Runner

Courtesy of The Single-Minded Movie Blog

By the time Blade Runner bombed at the box office, the use of miniatures in movies had been well-established. Close-up shots of tiny models were popularized by WWII and Godzilla films, and honed to a science by Star Wars and the motion-controlled camera rigs that Douglas Trumbull and his special effects crew pioneered. It’s no surprise, then, that Trumbull was behind the flying cars, or Spinners, in 1982’s Blade Runner.

Though some shots featured a full-size prop, many of the in-flight and zoomed-in shots were of a 44-inch-long replica. Trumbull’s master stroke, though, is the use of bright, flaring lights on the miniature Spinner, partially obscuring the model while also creating a sense of dynamic, cop-car scale.

2. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Courtesy of The Single-Minded Movie Blog

It was 1984, and we were gullible, easily tricked into thinking that Indie and company really were tearing through tunnels in a minecart while other carts full of bloodthirsty cultists gave chase. But the majority of that sequence was done with action-figure-size models (of both the good and bad guys) in 10-inch-long cars.

As with most miniature shots, the trick, apart from the painstakingly detailed models, was to slow the camera’s speed to match the smaller scale—for many shots, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) jerry-rigged a Nikon F3 still camera, cutting its motor speed by two-thirds.

3. The Abyss

Courtesy of The RPF

In retrospect, of course The Abyss was packed with miniscule versions of massive vessels. This was 1989, long before Titanic and Avatar gave James Cameron the kind of clout that could launch a thousand full-scale ships. So most of the vehicle shots feature models—for example, the 1/8-scale mini-subs that, like Blade Runner’s Spinners, were studded with working lights, and that also housed projectors, to display pre-filmed images of the actors against the inside of the domed cockpit windows. Even visuals that audiences might assume were breakthrough CG work, such as the iridescent “alien” vessels, were simply detailed models, many of them shot moving through smoke to simulate underwater murk.

4. Back to the Future Part II

Some miniature effects lose their magic once you know what to look for. That’s not the case with the swift, but completely mind-boggling night-time shot in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II, when the flying DeLorean comes in for a landing, with no visible cuts between the car hitting the road and the actors piling out. The shot starts with a 3-foot-long scale model, which swoops in and touches down. It passes behind a streetlight, which masks a split-screen effect—the car that emerges on the other side of the pole is a full-size vehicle, part of a completely different, but perfectly matched shot.

5. Independence Day

Roland Emmerich’s strangely gleeful detonation of the White House—a 1/12-scale miniature—gets all the glory, but the real highlight of Independence Day’s Oscar-winning visual effects comes during the on-screen carnage in New York City, when a wall of flame is shown rolling through the streets. It’s a dazzling trick of forehead-slapping simplicity: the modeled cityscape was tilted sideways, with downward-aimed cameras perched above. So as the fire bloomed upwards, climbing the miniature environment, it looked as though it was spreading laterally. The final effect is as physics-defying as an alien bombardment should be.

6. Titanic

Courtesy of Jeff DiSario

Though Peter Jackson and his Weta Workshop special effects company later tried to coin the term “bigatures,” in relation to giant miniatures, James Cameron and Dream Quest Images might have beat them to it, first with a 70-foot-long nuclear submarine model in The Abyss, and then with a number of large models in Titanic, including a 1/8-scale replica of the titular ship’s stern jutting up from the water (after the vessel has snapped). Positioning seaborne extras in front of the sprawling miniature allowed Cameron to avoid a composite, green-screened shot. Other scenes used various other partial or full replicas, with the biggest complete miniature of the ship stretched 45 feet (or 1/20 scale, above).

7. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Courtesy of Weta

All of The Lord of the Rings movies employed so-called bigatures, a term coined by a Weta Workshop model-maker to describe the 9-foot-high miniature of Barad’Dur, castle home of Sauron and perch for the villain’s baleful, all-seeing eye. Nearly every memorable environment, including Helm’s Deep, made extensive use of models, but Weta’s crowning achievement in miniatures is arguably the city of Minas Tirith (above) in 2003’s The Return of the King, which stands 14 feet tall at its highest tower, and sprawls some 30 feet wide, with as many as 1000 houses dotting its bulk. The besieged city is often shown surrounded by a CGI landscape, forming the basis of composite shots, and portions of it were hyper-detailed enough to stand up to extreme close-ups.

8. The Dark Knight

Courtesy of Behance

Christopher Nolan is famously averse to all-digital VFX, opting for air-launched miniature Batmobiles (or Tumblers) in Batman Begins and a memorable midair, multi-plane stunt in The Dark Knight Rises. But maybe the best, most deceptive practical effects sequence in Nolan’s Batman trilogy happens during the underground chase scene in 2008’s The Dark Knight. The Tumbler slams into a garbage truck, then swings around, skidding and speeding down the tunnel. The car, truck and tunnel are all 1/3-scale models, built by New Deal Studios, with motion-controlled cameras zipping along tracks alongside and behind the action.

9. Inception

For the climactic explosion of a mountaintop hospital (actually a figment of one character’s dreaming imagination) in 2010’s Inception, Christopher Nolan once again tapped the miniature-builders at New Deal Studios. The crew built a giant 1/6-scale model, topping 40 feet, mountain included, and then blew it up. But that was just the rehearsal. New Deal rebuilt and remounted the miniature, and destroyed it again, in a 5.5-second-long detonation sequence, filmed at 72 frames per second (two to three times normal filming speed, with the shots later slowed down to match the scale).

10. The Impossible

Image courtesy of FX Guide

While disaster movies like Deep Impact and 2012 have demonstrated menacing, purely virtual tidal waves, nothing comes close to the devastating tsunami sequence in 2012’s The Impossible. To simulate the initial impact of the 2004 tsunami on a Thai resort, Magicon GmbH created a handful of 1/3-scale bungalows, as well as the surrounding trees and nearby pool (above). The crew then dumped a million liters of water on their creations, creating a 1.5-meter-high wave.

CG artists added poolside umbrellas and additional trees, but the (perceived) scale of the destruction, including the way the miniature buildings are left shattered and skeletal, is more convincing than its bigger-budget equivalents.

...Read the full text here!
9:00AM

Apple - Mac Pro

"A sneak peek at the future of the pro desktop."

When we began work on the next Mac Pro, we considered every element that defines a pro computer — graphics, storage, expansion, processing power, and memory. And we challenged ourselves to find the best, most forward-looking way possible to engineer each one of them. When we put it all together, the result was something entirely new. Something radically different from anything before it. Something that provides an extremely powerful argument against the status quo. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s next for the pro computer.

Even if you aren't interested in the Mac Pro, it's worth visiting the website (and scroll down) to experience the creative and amazing sneak peek they've put together!

Click Here to read more!

8:00AM

START your project with Post.

(so we don’t have to “fix it” later)

IMG_1505

“Oh we’ll just fix that in Post.”  

“Oh we’ll just fix that in Post” …Those are 7 of the most famous words in all of media production.  Whatever happens in the field, it doesn’t matter, those technical wizards in the darkened rooms with computers galore can make it absolutely perfect.   And that IS true if you have an endless budget, we can pretty much fix and create anything your heart desires.  But as I’m sure many of you don’t have an endless budget, there is often a more cost effective solution.

Get Post Production involved right from the beginning of the project.   Seems when most folks get a project started they call together everyone necessary to make it happen EXCEPT post production.   It’s like the Post isn’t important even though that’s where your project is going to end up and be finished.

First off, in today’s digital world, solid media management is paramount to any project.   When you erase your digital card / hard drive / storage device you’re using in the field, that data is gone forever.   In post production, we’re used to managing a tremendous amount of data for any given project so we can help establish a solid data management workflow from file naming convention down to storage and archiving the data so everything you shoot is protected.    If you simply shoot the project and walk into a Post facility with a bunch of drives, the first thing you’re going to pay for is someone to go through and organize the entire project into something manageable.

Not to mention one of the biggest issues we run into is lack of complete camera data.   This happens constantly when we receive raw camera data from the field and at the very least you can lose timecode and at worst loss of picture or audio or both.   It’s so important to transfer the digital camera data correctly for the type of camera you’re using or information will simply get lost between the field and Post.   There’s nothing more frustrating for a Producer than having hours upon hours of footage that all starts at timecode 00:00:00:00 from Reel 001 and trying to give notes to the editor.   Get Post involved at the get-go and you can be better prepared from the moment you walk in the door.

IMG_1506

Getting the editors, graphic designers, animators, sound designers and even colorists involved from the beginning can also add a lot more creative input on your project.    When you share your vision and plan for your project, very often those who will finish the show can share some insights on projects they’ve recently completed, ideas to make your project different, additional camera angles and shots and so on.   Post artists can also help determine what’s better to shoot practical in the field or create digitally later.   In other words, starting with post production can oftentimes lead to a much better end product and certainly help you to get the most bang for your budget.

So while we’ll never be able to completely eliminate the classic “Fix It In Post” problem, if you bring Post Production into your project from the start, we can help create a smoother workflow, less headaches, and more creative end product.

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Article by Biscardi Creative

12:19PM

5D Leaks

This is the introduction from a very good article from Phillip Bloom's website by James Miller about an interesting technique called "Lens Whacking." If you don't want to bother with creating the technique in-camera, he has a set of post productions presets...that are on sale this week! Details at end of post.

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James Miller is a talented guy. Apart from designing a lot of my graphics and the background for this site he has been my right hand man on many of my UK shoots. Having a talented shooter as your right hand man makes your life so much easier. He has become synonymous with “lens whacking” which he explains about here. You can see more of James’ work on his vimeo page here. One bit of advice. This is a great and cool effect. But like all effects use them in moderation for the most impact! - Phillip Bloom

Lens Whacking, whats its all about then?

When a cameras lens is fixed firmly to a camera the only light falling on the sensor is through the lens. Thats great most of the time and when you want something different you can either add effects, layers, overlays in post. Or you can remove your entire lens.

- Read the Full Article Here -

Here are a couple of examples of James' work and what the effect looks like when done with a camera.

James also sells a set of presets that he calls "5DLeaks" that can be added in post.

20% off code for 1 week only with code philipbloom at checkout expires on 8th February 2012

- Visit the 5DLeaks website -

8:00AM

Learning the Basics - Pt. 3

Several years ago Digital Juice produced several training series for the web called DJTV. It covered topics ranging from Audio, Tech Info, and Filmmaking Basics. One of the shows I enjoyed the most was "Cutting Class" by Chris Gates.

Cutting Class

More often than not, the edits in your sequences need to seamlessly flow, and not distract from the big picture. In this episode, Chris "Ace" Gates, looks at the decision making process and covers some basic training for camouflaging your cuts.

Topics range from Color Correction, Scene Transitions, ADR, Blending Modes,Tips for Text, Green Screen, and more! Chris "Ace" Gates shares some simple but effective editing tips and techniques for utilizing mattes and masks to build multi-layered composites.

Here is a link to watch all the Cutting Class videos, be sure to start with the first video on page 1, for some reason it has all the episodes listed with the last one first.

WATCH CUTTING CLASS

1:25PM

Christian Visual FX Company

Some friends of mine have started a new company that provides visual effects for Christian media. They specialize in greenscreen replacement, motion graphics, CGi and more!

OVERVIEW:

The Effects Forge is a visual effects company that offers a comprehensive pipeline for creating graphics and integrating digital effects into motion pictures and visual media.

MISSION:

It is our mission to provide groundbreaking digital effects for the independent Christian film industry. We seek to promote Christ honoring messages that will impact our culture more effectively when they are visually more compelling.

We also desire to see the Christian media industry reach a level of professionalism and technical quality that rivals the best in the current entertainment field.

- Be sure to check out their website to watch the demo reel, read more about the company, and to see a list of "team members." Here are a few still images from the demo reel.


www.effectsforge.com

6:54PM

FILM PIPELINE - Part 3

Post Production

"At last, we get to the end of the film pipeline.  Postproduction is everything that comes after shooting has finished."

Topics:
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Acquisition
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Visual Effects and Effects Editing
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Editing, Sound (Editing, Design, Foley, Dialog Editing and A.D.R.) and Music (Scoring)
- Job Descriptions for Post-Prod Jobs
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Sound Mix
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Color Grading / Timing and “D.I.“
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Print It!
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By Stephan Vladimir Bugaj

- All the "Film Pipeline" links can now be found in the Basics drop-down menu in the header bar.

10:00AM

Visual FX - Camera Projection

Anyone who does any kind of After Effects work probably knows about Andrew Kramer and Video Copilot. He has a lot of great resources on the site and he also posts a lot of free tutorials on his blog. One of his recent posts is titled "Camera Projection.'

"One visual technique that I find so fascinating is Camera Projection. It allows you to project imagery on 3D surfaces and then fly a camera around in 3D. It has it’s limits but the capabilities are amazing."

Camera projection test from Bart Janssen on Vimeo.

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Tutorial links and another video can be found here.