What was involved in creating The Hulk for Marvel's The Avengers? ILM's Visual Effects Supervisor, Jeff White, Associate VFX Supervisor, Jason Smith and other key crew members take you behind the scenes in a two part look at the CG creature effects work done on the film.
Avengers
Some ILM love
in Art
Did not see battleship but the effects look pretty dang good. A Lot of debris everywhere!
Lightroom love
in Photography
Man I really do love Adobe Lightroom. People say to me all the time that they need a better camera when they see some of my pictures (not that my photos are amazing). I just think they expect to take a picture and they are done. I spend a lot of time in Lightroom trying to get the most out of my images. I fall under the philosophy of shooting to the right without clipping and try to get the most robust digital negative as possible.
Here are some before and afters of a trip I took to Mexico. I went to Tepoztlán during dia de los muertos
Trail to El Tepozteco
Grave in Tepoztlán
If you do not use the Split toning feature in Lightroom you are missing out! I recommend heading to LR now and trying it out ASAP
Uncle Drew
in nba
Diablo 3
in Game
If you want to know what I will be doing at midnight tonight its pretty easy. DIABLO 3!!!!! Might as well check out the making of it after the jump!
Mickey
in Art
I just purchased this "Mickey" print by David Cook. Check out the video of him creating it down below.
Vector Process from kids on Vimeo.
Battleship - Industrial Light & Magic: The industry standard
Not to crazy about this movie but you can't deny the quality of the visual effects. If I see this in the theater it will be for the visual effect alone.
The Other Guys VFX
in VFX
The Other Guys was on tonight and the drinking scene was on. I was wondering how they did it and found this breakdown.
The scene from The Other Guys is the same concept from the Philips 21:9 Carousel video. Check it out its pretty amazing.
My Name Is Walter Hartwell
I scored the first print for breakinggifs! The artis is Daniel Danger and the print looks really nice. Its from the pilot episode and is titled My Name Is Walter Hartwell
Update
on 2012-05-15 04:45 by Kenfisk
This is an edition of 300 but only sold 200 online.
breakinggifs
in Art
breakinggifs.com has a big announcement May 10th.
Paul Sheer has created this website so he can claim to have the greatest breaking bad gif site on the internet and I think he has won. When he did something very similar with the TV show Lost they had some great work for sale by great artist, Olly Moss, Tyler Stout, Daniel Danger Ken Taylor, and Kevin Tong. I personally never watched lost so I am a little more excited about this opportunity to buy some Breaking Bad art. Breaking Bad to me is one of the best shows on tv right now. It continually gets better each and every season, which not all shows can say that.
Check out the video down below
Here are some examples of the Lost art.
Olly Moss's Locke's Secret
Kevin Tong's The Hatch
Ken Taylor's The Smoke Monster
Tyler Stout's Lost Print
If the Breaking Bad prints are of this quality I am going to be a happy yet broke person. Still isn't for sure that they will be doing prints this time around but I hope they do.
Beast
Beast of the Southern Wild was one of the projects that the Students at AAU worked on in the collaborative class last year and the beginning of this year. They did an amazing job getting all the shots that they had finished at a high level. Check out the traile, and go see it June 29th 2012.
Shepard Fairey
I thought this video was pretty cool of Shepard Fairey showing a different yet simular process for his upcoming show at Pace Print.
So Cheap Pete's IS Just a Clever Name
So Cheap Pete's IS Just a Clever Name
I understand that this is considered a custom frame even though I pulled one off the self and just had the plexiglas add. What I don't understand is the turnaround time. I went in on Saturday November 12th and was to,d it would be ready by November 30th. Eighteen days to switch out the glass with plexiglas and put an acid free backing on. Seems a bit extreme if you ask me.
So now that I have experienced Cheap Pete's way of doing things I am now going to start looking for much cheaper ways to frame my screen prints. I have WAY to many to be dropping $200+ on each one.
Plexiglas
So I found a few website that sell UV filtered plexiglas. I'm still waiting back on the price from one website but Here (http://tinyurl.com/87q3g3y) you can get a sheet 1/4 thick 24 x 36 for $36. Thats a savings of $37! This website also offers discounts if you buy more than one.
2 Sheets 5% discount
4 Sheets 7% discount
6 Sheets 10% discount
8 Sheets 12% discount
10 Sheets 15% discount
Frame Backing Paper
When you get your print or poster framed and the plexiglas is place and the backing there is another step that should be considered. The frame backing paper. This is one more step that can help keep your art work pristine. This (http://tinyurl.com/6rudblk). You get 25 sheets for $18.99. Not bad at all. I like the idea of the individual sheets(which is a little more expensive) than a roll since I really do t have a good place to make cuts ie I'm lazy.
Framer's Tape
When you have your frame backing paper in place the last thing you need to do is seal it to the frame. A good product to do this would be acid free framer's tape or sealing tape. (http://tinyurl.com/78amr4z)
Corner Bumper
Here you can find rubber bumpers for the back of the frame to protect your walls. $1.50! For a set of 25 pads not pad at all. This will prevent the frame from marring the wall.
Update on 2012-05-01 07:50 by Kenfisk
So the UV filtered plexiglass that i posted about isn't as good as the plexiglass at Cheap pete's.
Lesser of Two Evils
in Cameras
WE have been working on a project called CXL for a few weeks now. In those few weeks we have shot some greenscreen footage for the film on the Panasonic hpx500. The director Sean Gillane explains to me that this is more of a broadcast camera and not the best for Greenscreen extractions. We decided to give it a try since our other option was a Canon 5D Mark ll. The issue that this camera has when trying to pull a good key are the Red and Blue channels. These channels have a tendency to be noisier than the Green channel. Also you end with with this nice white line around the image that makes it really hard to key. Check out my examples of these channels bellow.
Red Channel
Blue Channel
The Canon 5D Mark Two is a great camera and I love shooting with it. To steal a phrase from Stu Maschwitz (his prolost blog is a must read) the 5D is an amazing Rebel camera, and it has done a lot for the VERY independent and not so independent film making community. That being said it still has a lot of issue when shooting on Greenscreen. the main issue is that its output is H264. You end up with compressed footage that you have to try and get a key from. Check out this alpha channel with a lose key pulled, you can see the compression ‘s square artifacts. This will make pulling a key tougher, especially around the fine hair area.
Nice chunk of compression
Compression causing the hair to crunch
In this photo you can see on the back of her hair that its starting to crunch. This is due to the compression. There are tricks around this of course but I would obviously prefer to use a better camera.
Quick comp with crunched hair
One way around the compression issue would be to use a Aja Ki Pro mini. We thought this was going to be our savior for our compression issue. It bypasses the camera’s compression and you get a nice ProRes 422(HQ) file. The only problem was that it didn’t seem to work with the 5D. We could only get a 29.97 FPS and no 1080p. Major let down when we found out that we could not use the Aja Ki Pro Mini.
We have one greenscreen shoot left and I still need to figure out if we should use the Panasonic hpx500 or the Canon 5D Mark ll. I keep going back and forth with this one.
Ill see some keying results with the hpx500 and say “Lets use this one on the next shoot” then I see some keying results with the %D and say the same thing.
We are shooting in a few weeks and I am now leaning towards the 5D. One major reason is because the plate for the GS shoot was shot on the 5D and thats really the only reason.
If anyone has any suggestions feel free to post some comments!
Drew Struzan's Frankenstein!
I cannot wait for this to be sold! I have read that it will be upward to 30 color screen print which Kevin Tong did the color separation for. This also marks the first movie poster screen print from Drew Struzan so, this is gonna be some hot shit and will sell fast! I can only hope I am lucky to get one. Check out the amazing poster after the jump.
CXL
Before the big CXL shoot Sean was trying to prep everything he could and that included the greenscreen. He didn't have the time do the full screen so he only painted from just above the waste down, including the floor. With only half of the room being painted this created some concerns for myself as the Visual Effects Supervisor. Its hard enough lighting a GS evenly, but its even harder to do so when it isn't painted evenly.
I will be posting some shots of the finished comps soon!
CXL
If you are unfamiliar with A Year Without Rent you should start reading Lucas McNelly’s blog. The idea is he travels around the country helping out independent filmmakers on their films and they supply him with a couch to sleep on.
I am currently the visual effect supervisor on a film called CXL, which Lucas helped us out on for a few days. He was a big help and a much needed extra hand for our small production. Here is his take on his first day of the production.
A Tiny Day in the Jackson Hole Backcountry
I really love tilt shift photography and the look that it gives you. I could watch good TiltShift photography all day long. When I saw The Social network I thought the Henley Sequence was amazing. I understand using Tiltshift came out of necessity rather than a conscious decision but it really worked and it was pulled off.
Here is a nice video of a Day in Jackson Hole. There are some really cool shots in this video and looks like there was some sort of budget since it looks like there are some really nice helicopter shots in this video.
Here are some iPhone apps for faking Tiltshift. I've used Tiltshift Generator and it is worth every cent, its a great app.
Papercuts video
Here is a video some friends and I worked on for Papercuts. I added the fog elements that are chasing him through out the video. I had some really nice shots in here but Sub Pop didn't like them and went with another shot I did that I didn't think was as good. Oh well that happens more often than not. I had about a week to do about 8 shots for this video, would have liked more time since I did it in my free time after work. I am actually in it for about 2 seconds at the :43 mark with my grenades hoodie on talking to the director Andreas Trolf. The video aired on MTV2 and my old roommate said I'm a sell out.
Director: Andreas Trolf
Editor: Jim Dirschberger.
Papercuts - Do What You Will (OFFICIAL VIDEO) from Sub Pop Records on Vimeo.