Well, things have been a little quiet around here for the past month or so…. for a few reasons….

1. I’ve been on holiday in Australia for a month or so. I managed to completely avoid thinking about work or VFX-related stuff for most of the time, so I certainly wasn’t going to be posting on here….
2. Draw is currently on hold by the production team. As soon as they start up again and have a date set for shooting, I’ll be back and will keep you all updated on here.

I’ve not actually got anything else going on outside of my actual day job (which I can’t, as I’ve explained before, talk about on here) at the moment. I might be doing a little bit on a music video, but I’m only going to be on that if the guy who was going to do it can’t.

Other than that, I’ll let you know when things get going again…. I’m trying to do more gig photography at the moment, which is taking up a few evenings a month, and trying to make sure I’ve got some kind of a social life….

Just after deciding to put Roy’s Odyssey on the back-burner for a bit (explained in the previous post), James Hamer-Morton (director of Enter The Zombie) approached me about doing the visual effects on a new short that he’s writing/directing.

The short is (currently) called Draw, and is about a girl who discovers that she has a pencil that causes whatever she draws to become real, only to realise that some of the side-effects are not quite as desirable as she had imagined.

The film itself will be about 5 minutes (or less), and has a grand total of 18 visual effects shots. Half of these are 2D only, and are mainly transitions from hand-drawn items on a page to the real object. The other half involve a plant that grows out of the page into the room, and will involve a reasonable amount of 3D.

It should be an interesting short to work on - I’ll keep you updated on it, but probably won’t be as open with it on a shot-by-shot basis as I have been with Roy’s Odyssey. (Until the film is finished and released, that is….)

Things have been a little quiet around here recently - I will get back to doing the shake tips, but, for now, I thought I ought to give you an update on what’s happening with Roy’s Odyssey.

We’ve decided, for the moment, to take a step back from this project. The script isn’t entirely finished yet, and the production company are getting more paid work through that they were expecting, so are dedicating more of their time to working on that. They’re going to get back to us when there is something to do, but for now, that project is going on the back-burner.

There is another little (under 5 minute) project that we’re going to be working on in the meantime - but more details on that one tomorrow.

Does anyone have a green-screen plate that I could use for a tutorial?

I posted a (long and rambling) tutorial on CGTalk about a method I use for cleaning up green-screens. I didn’t post any images in the tutorial (apart from a Shake screen-shot) as the only stuff I’ve got here is stuff that I really can’t post online…

So does anyone have a green-screen plate I could use for this? The worse lit the better… (within reason)

E-mail me if you can help!

Cheers

Over the weekend, I did another shot for Enter The Zombie (previously discussed here)…

This shot was the be the ‘matrix code raining’ shot:

This shot went through 3 stages. I realised from the start that it would require some element of 3D, although I was hoping to minimize that. I started on getting the matrix rain working. I did this with a few shake macros that I wrote specially (if people are interested, I can put them up on here… I do warn you - they are very slow). I rendered out 5 different rain strips (200 x 576 each) that I could then pick and choose from later:

I then created the 3D model of the head. I only had the front image to work with on this, but I knew that it didn’t have to be exact - just give some idea of the curvature of the head. I set the texture projection on this to be planar, rotated just off to one side of the camera. I rendered this out as UV values, which I could then use later to project a texture onto in Shake:

(This was actually done as three seperate sections - head, neck and shoulders)

I could then project the rain onto the 3D model in Shake to give some sense of the contours of the head. To give some semblence of texture to it, I multiplied the result of this by the luminance of the original plate. Without this, it looks like, funnily enough, a crappy 3D model with green matrix rain projected onto it:

Straight corner-pinning was enough for the walls. Again, I multiplied the rain by the luminance of the original plate (which is why you can still see the person in this shot):

And, finally, I added a transition from the code to the real image. For this, I spent a lot of time watching this shot from The Matrix Reloaded, to try to get it as close as possible to what they had. The main elements that I brought through were the green glow that remained on the skin, and the pixelization. My pixelization was just that, while they had shadows on the pixels so that they felt like they were falling into place. Also, their green glow still had elements of the code in, which I didn’t manage to keep. The final shot is, though, a reasonably good representation of the film’s, and was fun to do (in 1 day, too!):

There is also a video breakdown of the shot, which can be viewed here

Any questions, do ask - it was a fun shot to do!

This shot should be a relatively easy-to-do digital doubles shot. The characters are deliberately very small on screen, and there is limited camera movement (although there is some, as I feel that the cameras should all be very slightly dynamic for the whole of this sequence)

You can either watch it on it’s own here, or as part of the whole sequence here

The two characters in this shot will both be digital doubles. They are far enough away from the camera to easily get away with this.

The background will be billboards with buildings on, with maybe edges of a couple of 3D buildings closer to the camera.

I’ve been working on a few shots today, making changes from the meeting with Dom last week…

The shots that have changed are:

RO_101_010 : Fliers are closer to the camera, plus camera-shake has been added.
RO_101_030 : Re-animated to make the character still be flying at the end. Plus gave it a more dynamic camera.
RO_101_040 : Tighter shot, plus moved some buildings closer behind.
RO_101_050 : As above
RO_101_075 : New shot - same action as RO_101_070, but from a different angle.

I’ve tweaked the cut quite a bit - you can see the new cut here. The only bit I don’t like at the moment is the cut betwee RO_101_075 and RO_101_080.

Generic flying shots…. After a meeting with Dom last Thursday, we’re going to be making them both tighter shots and moving him closer to the buildings behind to give more of a feeling of speed.

You can either watch them on their own here (040) and here (050), or as part of the whole sequence here

The fact that we’re pushing in on the characters mean that it should be easier to shoot them - equipment-depending, they might be lying on a green table or suspended from wires, but however we do it, it should give a reasonable shot.

The backgrounds will be (what a surprise) 3D buildings in the foreground and billboards in the background.

This shot is one that we know needs more work done on it - at the moment it doesn’t feel as though the character is actually flying back towards the camera by the end of the shot, and there really needs to be some kind of camera move in it - I’ve been thinking that there ought to be more overall movement in the shot - the camera following the character more, more momentum in the shot, and ending with a shot closer to RO_101_050.

You can either watch it on it’s own here, or as part of the whole sequence here

This is one of the shots that, at the moment, I haven’t really got a clue how to go about shooting it. If the turning section of the shot is further away from camera, then we can pass off between live-action start, digital-double turn, and live-action end. Otherwise, it’ll either need a wire-rig or some elaborately funky camera move.

For the backgrounds, I’m planning a combination of 3D buildings for the foreground, and layered billboards for the more distant ones. (And yes, I did just copy and paste that sentence from the last shot… What’cha gonna do ’bout it? :-p)

We’ve tried a couple of things for this shot so far. The first version didn’t have the two characters far enough apart. It felt wrong when one of them turned around and flew in the other direction - it was taking too long for them to meet. I tried a version where we start on the yellow guy and pull further and further ahead until we see the red guy come into frame. I just couldn’t seem to get the camera move right on that one, so I decided to just go with making the yellow guy further behind for the whole thing. This might change.

You can either watch it on it’s own here, or as part of the whole sequence here

The two characters in this shot will probably both be live-action, although, if that wasn’t working with the yellow guy, I wouldn’t feel too bad about making him a digital double, as he’s going to be so small on screen. If we end up going for the kind of shot I described above, though, he’ll certainly start as live-action, probably with a digital-double hand-off part-way through.

The red guy will, obviously, be live-action all the way through. How we’re going to shoot the flying live-action characters, I don’t know yet. If anyone’s got any experience doing this kind of thing, I’d love to hear from you (do post a comment, or, if you’d rather, e-mail me).

For the backgrounds, I’m planning a combination of 3D buildings for the foreground, and layered billboards for the more distant ones,