Transformers & Bits

Well, if you guys and gals didn't already figure it out eventually, Digital Domain was awarded some work on Transformers.. Check out the IMDB page for more info. It seems we'll be doing some work alongside ILM, but as to exactly what our job will entail, who knows! We artists are usually the last to know these things.. From the likes of the page, it was last updated on the 27 of May, so probably right after the Bay buyout they updated the page. I'm thinking that if there's comp work in the fall, they'll hopefully put me on Transformers. That would be sweet. As long as the movie doesn't suck.. And if it does, at least the effects will kick ass.

It's a sunny Saturday here in Santa Monica, and I'm at the moment hard at work waiting for my Nuke project to update and my renders to complete on the farm. I got here at 7am, early enough to beat the rush of traffic, and pretty much everyone else to the office. I find that I get more work done in the morning, and the farms at the places I've worked at are pretty free! Most of my renders and tests get done pretty quickly. I've started to come in early and leave a little later, just to get my shots done on time, or relatively done on time! There are always little things that pop up every time I hit that render button. This week will be the end of my first six day week, and the beginning of several! Lots of OT.

Lots of work coming up in the next couple of weeks, and I think we're on schedule for our delivery. It's tough to judge, since I haven't worked on a show that has had this many compers and this many shots! We have four leads working the show, which is up from previous places, which have had one or two. I'm slowly getting into the groove of what Nuke can and can't do. It's not very limited, and when it is, there are quick workarounds and fixes just a phone call away. One of the perils of always using the latest and greatest in production! It is a pretty different way of thinking when comping, in that there are more data layers to control and be aware of, and just that many more things that could go wrong. Overall, the scripts I've been creating haven't been the most complex, especially with Nuke's inline tree ability, which enables many layers of masks to be used anywhere downstream in the comp. It makes for a cleaner comp, and the various note taking and grouping capabilities really make the software shine. I haven't started doing a lot of expression scripting yet, but from what I've seen some of the other artists do, it's pretty powerful.