Good news, I will be relatively stable for the next 4 weeks and able to setup my desktop computer and audio gear, so I should be able to post some more video and audio stuff.
Stay tuned!!!!!
More exclamation points makes it more interesting.
Archive for April, 2009
Site News – More posts coming soon!
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009Tips – Demo reels – what to do and what not to do!
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
I will start by saying that there are a few threads on various forums, so feel free to check them out, but this post is a distillation of those threads and personal experience. I will also keep this reasonably general, as obviously different reels will focus on different things. These are the basics that I believe you should cover.
Actually, this is a resume not a demo reel. D'oh!
I remember reading a couple of long threads about what you shouldn’t have on your reel. To my mind, if you didn’t put on everything that someone mentioned, you wouldn’t have a bloody reel! For example, it is routinely stated that you shouldn’t do light saber battles. Fair call. Fair call, that is, unless you do something like Ryan vs Dorkman, which is a pretty damn cool low budget saber battle. Same thing for spaceships: “Don’t put spaceships on your reel unless they are better than ILM’s work”. O RLY? Are you not supposed to put anything on your reel that is not up to the standard of the worlds best VFX studios? Well that’s great advice if you work at ILM and have a team of people to make your shots look amazing, but it’s not really that helpful if you are starting out and need to show your hard-surface modeling chops.
Also, I will categorically state that my current reel is in no way perfect. Reels should always be looked at with an eye to revise and cull, but they do take a bit of effort to organise, so you don’t want to be fiddling every week on the bloomin’ thing.
Tips: Using RGB mattes in CG compositing
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
This topic came up recently on CGTalk and I also covered it in the compositing course I taught at the Queensland College of Art. I do have a video screencast as well that I did that I will try and dig up as I think it is on my main PC which is in pieces at the moment.
Inspiring, no?
The question was: “How do I use ID passes (or RGB mattes) in my compositing?”
I guess the first place to start is to remember that compositing is all about colour channels. Pretty much the first thing you do when you get your plates is check the colour channels (red, green and blue) to see what kind of information is there. When you are working with straight CG images, it is a bit different. You will often have various black and white mattes rendered out for you to isolate various objects in a scene.
As we (hopefully) know by now, mattes are essentially greyscale (grayscale for you North American types) images that affect an area of your based on the intensity of the pixel colour value, usually with pure white affecting the change the most and black affecting the least. These can be things like images, patterns, keys or rotoshapes.
Industry – Work print of Wolverine hits the torrent sites
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
By now you almost certainly know that a work print of Wolverine has hit the bit torrent sites. You might also know that on one section a major Australian studio’s name is apparent. Now, allegations have been flying and conspiracy theories abound about how or why this happened.
Copyright 20th Century Fox
I have to say, I am more likely to believe the studio in question when it said they it almost certainly wasn’t related to them as they didn’t even have a full copy of the workprint. As far as I know, each VFX house is rarely, if ever, given a complete work-print of the film. You usually get just the sequences your studio is working. FYI, the work-print is an edit without all the VFX and extras added. It will often still have green screen or very rough slap-comps to give the idea of the shot.
In any event, it has been quite interesting seeing people’s reactions. The first reactions were overwhelmingly along the lines of “Why would anyone want to watch an unfinished movie?” to which I respond “Are you so completely off your gourd on bad crack that you haven’t been on the internet in the last 5 years?” People will watch stick figure storyboards with fake voiceovers if they think they are on the cutting edge of downloadzzzz and if they feel like they are sticking it to the man. Heck, even I would be interested in watching a copy if it was included on the Blu-Ray release.
Some people suggested a marketing campaign from Fox to which I say “Is it possible that you might actually be considered barely mentally competent to stand trial for your obvious crimes against humanity?” (I find it’s best to spice up these posts every now and then). I mean, sure we are all aware of cynical viral marketing from the super corporations. Sony seems to be particularly guilty of this, however I think that most sane individuals with any shred of common sense and non-moron infused genes would say that, on average, it would be an exceedingly bad idea to have your studio’s name on a leaked version of a $150 million film. As one less than sharp tool suggested: “Lots of people know about the studio now”, as if studios need to get their name out to the 14 year old loser nerd bit-torrent community. Obviously where the bucks are . . .
Others suggested someone working at the studio. I guess that could be possible, but you would have to really not want a future in the industry if you thought that stealing and uploading a copy of an unreleased movie was a good move. This of course assumes that most people in the industry are of at least average intelligence, but I guess there are always what can be politely called “outliers” 
Of course you have couriers and a myriad of other people, however the drives etc are usually pretty secure.
We may never find out what really happened, however Fox have said they have digitally watermarked all their prints, so it should be interesting to see how it play out.