Recently in Film Category
Well, I don't even know where to start on this.. It's been quite a while since my last posting, and all sorts of stuff have been happening. I was on a little indie project called The Avengers, which came out last weekend and made $207 million. I had high hopes with Whedon directing, and I was no disappointed. Not too shabby. We'll see what it will do this weekend against some new weekend competition.
Some other big news was that IATSE was actually starting to follow through with organizing VFX. Head to VFXsoldier's site to read more, and there's always the Twitter option. I'm on Twitter as well, but I've been much less vocal than some of my other brethren in the industry, as I'm tied to Digital Domain, and don't talk much about the subject in general. There are other places to get union information, and this site doesn't have much to do with it. Instead, I try to still give you insight into the work that I'm doing and what it means to work as an artist in this industry.
Tupac at Coachella was a huge hit, and it showed that DD still has some chops in making jaws drop. There are other great things happening in the pipe, but I will have to share them later in the year! Because of Tupac, DDMG has rebounded, and is now at $7.79 as of today. You can see the spike, and I attribute it to the performance at Coachella.
After The Avengers I was tasked with helping out the team with G.I. Joe for a little while and then with Jack The Giant Killer (we're listed in IMDB as a vendor). While the movie has been pushed almost a year to March 2013 I will most likely not be on it for the remainder of this year.
Today is a short update, but there will more frequent updates in the near future!
Do you know what I love most about this job? This visual effects one, where I work 45+ hours a week? It because the outcome is cool shit like this.
Which game you say.. The Superbowl! I am not, but I did help create a commercial for the next G.I. Joe film, which supposedly ran right after the National Anthem. Did you miss it? Here it is below, already on Yutube.
I only did one quick shot, and actually helped out a little on another. It was a very quick turnaround.
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.
