October 2011 Archives
After working long hours the last couple of weeks on a commercial, a question came up about the rate of divorce in this industry. I've been hitting about 60-65 hours in a five day space, roughly 12 hours a day. This isn't the norm for me, but for some people in the industry, it's just the beginning, which I can't seem to fathom. So I'm taking an informal poll, out of the sample of readers here. Feel free to direct more people to the poll, just to see where it takes us. I'm trying out this polling service, so also let me know if it's any good for you, or if there's a different one you can recommend!
Holy.. No sooner than FXGuide does some cool features on Real Steel, but the first commercial I helped out with at DD is online and there's a making of. I was only on the show for the last two or three weeks helping the team out on this stereo commercial (is this the first stereo commercial out there?). Here's the commercial from Vimeo:
And here's the six minute making of.
http://www.fxguide.com/fxpodcasts/fxpodcast-real-steel/
A highlight from the bottom.
Stage 7: Have great compositors
DD used a similar multi-pass compositing approach as it had done with its Makebot Nuke plug-in for I, Robot. But as the Real Steelcharacters had no real translucency, the process was easier, although artists still did a multi-pass approach as a multi-channel OpenEXR.
Compositing has certain key tasks, such as:
• match the black levels
•match the highlights
• balance the mid tones match the softness, motion blur and atmospheric conditions that integrate a shot
• allow light wrap
• match lens curvature and properties.
But, as you can imagine from the company that gave birth to Nuke, the DD compositors did a lot more than just standard multi-pass compositing. For example, in the end stadium shots there was a need for massively large stadium crowds. DD's composite team delivered live action real stadium crowds, yet they never had more than 500 extras on set. One location in Detroit was used as two locations in the film.
Oh my goodness.. It's been about two months or so since I last did a big update, and several things have been happening on my front in the digital world.. After the wrap of Real Steel, which officially was near the beginning of summer, we had been working on some marketing stills and sequences for the show which you may have seen here and there. Finally it's out! I've been working on the film since July 2010, so this has been a pretty long road to finally see this film in the theaters. We had a cast and crew screening last week, and it was good! Mind you, I'm a little biased and jaded since I worked on it, but if you have a son in the right age range, they will love this film, and they'll want a robot of their own.
