Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Here Comes Hulu

Network Television Finally Reaches the Web Legally

As I type this, Hulu is temporarily closed as it is prepared for public roll-out on Wednesday.

What, you might ask if you’re too busy creating images to watch them on a beta website, is Hulu? As best I can tell, it is an attempt by network television - specifically NBC, although other networks are apparently invited to join (and ABC and CBS have not as of yet) - to take control of how its content - its shows - can be viewed online. Not offline - this is not IPTV, where you can order up a show to watch on your 50 inch plasma - instead, it’s a direct response to YouTube as the online home of every type of video. Instead of continuing only to demand the removal of network shows from other services, Hulu attempts to be the place to go to get them, and it makes its money back via advertising. In some ways it’s a brand-new model, and inevitably in other ways it looks an awful lot like the old model.

(1) Comments • Most recent comments by: Ben, • Permalink

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Creative License Renewed!

adobecards.com: sign of things to come or a splashy tease?

Now if only you could create something like this entirely with Adobe software.

Or does the joker indeed get the last laugh? 

(1) Comments • Most recent comments by: Scott Gentry, • Permalink

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Star Wars Main Title (as if by Saul Bass)

Parody illuminates two contrasting styles

A friendly reminder: if you want your motion graphics work to be shared far and wide, humor and satire can be a great way to go.

Note: the AEList apparently beat me to the punch on this one… s’okay, wanted to test video embeds here anyhow…

(2) Comments • Most recent comments by: Mark Christiansen, Alex Montoya, • Permalink

Monday, February 25, 2008

Golden Compass: First Flop to win VFX Oscar in Nearly a Decade

For once a great performance is not overlooked simply because hardly anyone saw it.

Visual Effect Academy Awards™ are not much different from any other category in at least one respect: great performances in films that underperform at the box office tend to be overlooked. I and many others thought that Transformers had this year’s visual effects Oscar™ all sewn up not only because the work was amazing - not just the amazingly complex 3D animation but some really fantastic compositing. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (on which this author contributed a few shots) was clearly not going to win as that would break an Oscar taboo: the repeat winner (since Pirates 2 took a statue only last year).

And yet, nearly as much of a long-shot seemed to be The Golden Compass simply because the film was a flop, and Hollywood is allergic to losing money (despite many examples to the contrary) - this despite that many in the visual effects community believe it contained the most ground-breaking work, raising the bar for complex interactions between computer generated creatures (realistic looking daemons, the animals representing the soul/anima of the human characters) and recreating grand scenes of steam-punk London and Oxford and grand vistas of the Arctic. Not since What Dreams May Come has a vfx film lost money at the box office and taken the statue.

Perhaps Hollywood’s love of giving the prize to anyone but ILM - who along with the 49ers were the bay area force no one could beat in the 80’s and early 90’s - trumped the box office vote. However it happened, a great visual effects film (albeit a failed re-telling of one of the best novels of the past decade) won.

(4) Comments • Most recent comments by: Ben, Mark Christiansen, Ben, anonymous, • Permalink

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Adobe’s Magic 3D Lens

Adobe’s foray into the hardware market, or just a cool peek into the near future?

Check out this video in which Adobe engineers debut some much rumored hardware designed to interface with a future version of Photoshop (and, perhaps, other of our favorite Adobe apps?) to provide persective and depth of field in post.

Not only is it a stunning demo, such a lens might not require mechanical controls for changing focus or aperture; the lenses are the fixed focus type found in your point and shoot camera.

It’s possible to recreate depth of field in post, or do without it entirely, Gregg Toland-style (but since we all know that DOF is crucial to a cinematic look, that ability may be more useful for 3D artists who need that kind of image fidelity).

Adobe has vastly increased its investment in research and development so this is hardly the last innovation we’re likely to see, particularly in cases where the proof of concept comes from academia.

(1) Comments • Most recent comments by: Chris Meyer, • Permalink

Monday, February 04, 2008

Recreating 1970’s San Francisco: Contrasting Approaches

David Fincher and Gus Van Sant take contrasting approaches to recreating the oddest decade of a unique city.

Every day that I cycle from my home into the Presidio I pass through the intersection of Washington and Cherry streets, site of a murder that is the centerpiece of David Fincher’s film Zodiac, a film that fabulously recreated the San Francisco of the 1970’s. Last weekend I cruised Castro Street (not what you’re thinking when you read that) to witness its own fabulous 1970’s makeover for Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, about San Francisco’s most famous murder of that era.

There is great irony here: the corner of Washington and Cherry has the timeless quality that goes with old-money upper class neighborhoods, yet Fincher chose not to shoot there at all, instead painstaking recreating the neighborhood as 3D matte paintings and shooting the taxi driver murder in front of a green screen. These allowed them to add period details that perhaps no non-local filmgoer could notice, such as that the street trees would have been 35 years younger - this for a scene that takes place at night.

Castro Street, meanwhile, is as different from its 1970’s self as any vibrant commercial tourist destination would be, and yet for Milk, the filmmakers are going back in time using set decoration: redoing the storefronts that have changed hands (you have to hand it to Rossi’s Deli for appearing virtually unchanged in 30 years) and repainting the Castro Theater, the cinema that is the neighborhood’s visual centerpiece. Hilariously, they have taken the level of detail right down to the real estate listings (in the window depicted below).

In an era when even a romantic comedy has 2-300 digital visual effects shots, what’s up? I’d like to hear your suggestions in the comments, but I think it’s mostly a question of taste, or even what you might call comfort zone.

Yes, the director of Se7en and Fight Club can afford have an artist or two spend a year of their lives working on one effects shot, a time-lapse of the TransAmerica Pyramid being constructed, even though it’s tangential to the storyline at best, so you could follow the money and simply say that Zodiac was a bigger budget film. But locations aren’t cheap, especially in high-end coastal cities.

So this is really a study in contrasts. Fincher makes an investigative drama and can’t help but insert almost-unreal effects and even motion graphics into the story (at one point the letters from the Zodiac killer occur as three dimensional projections all around the offices of the Chronicle). Van Sant, on the other hand, is an old-school actor-centered independent filmmaker, just the kind who really hates green screens and handing over key shots to digital artists. I don’t doubt there will be effects shots in Milk, but it looks like the heavy lifting is happening in “pre,” not post.

Lighting •
Shooting •
Special Effects •
Visual Effects • (3) Comments • Most recent comments by: Ben, Mark Christiansen, Ben, • Permalink

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Adobe Hacker Effects

Magnum and other great improvements growing through the cracks in After Effects

The After Effects development team is surprisingly small, especially given how much innovation has gone into each revision in the app’s 15 year lifespan (as of this past month - Happy Birthday, After Effects!). Like a Hollywood feature executive they can only greenlight a handful of great ideas each year.

That’s what makes a tool like Magnum part of what could be a sea change, if Adobe can figure out how to harness the energy of thousands of passionate and smart After Effects users. You may have heard about Magnum already: give it a single layer in a comp that has cuts and it figures out where they are, and splits that one layer into many. I used it this week to break down a client rough cut for shot organization prior to receiving their actual edit.

The thing is, cut detection is a supposed to be hard - Final Cut Pro has it, but unless I’m mistaken it’s restricted it only to captured miniDV footage. But Magnum’s author, Lloyd Alvarez, made use of what I knew would be a major addition to scripting once someone figured out how to do something useful with it: the sampleImage() method, which is the first expression command that can actually get pixel data. Magnum cleverly performs a series of Classic Difference operations between adjoining frames to analyze if the data change between frames is significant enough to indicate a cut.

Since Magnum is a script, I can open it, and when I did, I was stunned to find helpful comments on each line explaining exactly how the script works. Not only is Lloyd giving this thing away, he’s encouraging others to learn from his example, hiding nothing. Now if that’s not an example of the gift economy replacing the economics of scarcity, I don’t know what is. Lloyd gets to be considered among the smartest AE artist/developers on the planet, and Adobe’s community gets a new feature for free. So the question is, what can the next version of After Effects do to remove more of the obstacles between people like Lloyd and great ideas like Magnum?

Compositing •
Software • (0) Comments • • Permalink

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Flat Earth VFX

Some new (to me at least) and interesting info in this morning’s seven and a half minute NPR story about the Rhythm & Hues studio in Mumbai that recently completed work on The Golden Compass and Alvin and the Chipmunks:

• India is on track to take $1 billion/year of Hollywood computer graphics production within the next few years.

• Tax breaks in the UK are so generous they make it difficult for US studios to compete DESPITE the unprecedentedly weak dollar.

• Talent costs, which would not logically decline over time (or ever) in the west, are low in Mumbai and Hyderabad - it’s the connectivity costs which are high. Connectivity is a commodity which would logically decline over time, in many cases rapidly.

• Perhaps most significant, there’s clearly no marginalizing the contributions made by the 200 person Mumbai office, who are heard being congratulated for work on the Monkey in Golden Compass - a major CG character. The CG creature (animal) work on that film has received universal praise; some claim it’s the best yet in any film (I haven’t seen Golden Compass yet and can’t comment).

This is not like the in-betweening studios that do The Simpsons - the Mumbai R&H office is heard receiving credit for a major breakthrough with the monkey ("a central CG character") in Golden Compass.

I corresponded with a couple of R&H folks (from the main L.A. studio) who said that the job simply wouldn’t have been possible without Mumbai, that it allowed them to bid a bigger job than had been in their scope (so everyone benefited) and that although the Mumbai folks started out with the ‘simple’(meaning easier to work on from remote) stuff—roto, tracking, and simple compositing, and gradually introducing the more difficult stuff as communications problems got solved, and their capacity and capability increased.

It looks like a nice place to work!

Compositing •
Visual Effects • (0) Comments • • Permalink

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