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Congratulations to my team and the crew for a job well done on Real Steel! The show is up for the Best Visual Effects, along with Hugo, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two, Transformers 3, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Full nominee list is here.

FX Guide has some excellent breakdowns and explanations of the work Digital Domain did in Real Steel, Click here to read it! There are also some hour long podcasts about it below!

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.

Well, I'll be. It's a new year, a new show, and a ton of new stuff has happened since the last time I posted 6 (SIX!) months ago!  Wow!  If you've been following the blog for a little while, you might have noticed digitalGypsy going down for most of December, right around the same time that VFXTalk was having a little meltdown/fiasco.   didn't know about the craziness that was happening until I was contacted via Twitter and told of both my website being down, and the fiasco on VFXTalk.

Let's recap what's been happening in the world of visual effects, and how we fit into it.  During late summer there was a number of recent discussions concerning freelance wages, unions, committees, you name it. There have been a plethora of blogs out there that are decidedly more appropriate, and there has been momentum on that front.  I've removed myself from speaking about it, simply because of the time constraints I have, and there are people way more eloquent than me discussing and organizing things.  I'm going to link o them here. Both VFXSoldier and VFXLaw have been good for the community, way more so than I have, and while they both choose to remain anonymous, I heartily recommend their blogs for reading!  Often, anonymity is the smart choice.  There was recently an IAMA on Reddit entitled 'IAMA vfx artist for 14 years, and it sucks and I don't care anymore' or something to that effect.  Professionals can often get stigmatized for what they may post online, even if it's unrelated to the company they work for!  Personally, I'm not anonymous, anyone can contact me, and I have received flack for posting opinions here, on CGTalk (most definitely, banned from there for talking about salaries and wages!), and on VFXTalk.  

Since July/August of last year, I've been heavily involved in the next big show (well, one of the next big shows!) that Digital Domain is doing, Real Steel. There is a production website for this, steelgetsreal.com, where you can see the trailer for the film, released last month, mind you, full frame Flash content on that site. I'm one of four lead compositors on the show, which encompass a number of amazing effects, several of which you can see in the trailer.  We have a pretty big compositing team, almost 30 or so, and roughly seven of them under me. The robot names have not been released yet, so I'm not going to mention them. However we are doing a fair number of robots! And no, this is no relation to the fighting robots of Rock'Em Sock'Em.  I think some other company is trying to get that off the ground. From what I've heard and read, this is more a story piece than a film about robots fighting.  I'm hoping it does well.

For this show, we ended up getting another comp intern. Well actually, two!  One of them is working directly with me, while the other is working with another lead.  This time around there was less instruction, and more production.  The interns are actually having to complete production shots! Shouldn't be too difficult, right? :) Time will tell.  They've been extended to the end of the show, very similar to how Tom, my intern from last year fared.  Speaking of Tom, he's now back at Digital Domain in our roto/paint department, proving his worth. 

On the outside vfx side of things, you may have seen my machine shop from the previous post six months ago.  I'm currently working on a aluminum puzzle cube, similar in fashion to a Rubiks Cube. There are several differences of course, one being that mine is made of metal. The other being that it's see-through. What? You say?  Check out the other website I created for it, Skeleton Cube.com. I put the website up last week in about an hour, and will continue to update it with pictures as the work progresses.

I am hoping to update the blog a little more frequently! Keep visiting, or click that RSS feed up there on the right.

Like everyone in the entertainment industry now knows, the 2010 Oscars have been announced. I haven't commented yet on the list, as I'm going to let conjecture and speculation reign for a little while before I add my two cents (or more!).  I'm also not going to discuss any other awards like best picture or best director, as they are out of my knowledge base.

However, I will comment on the top three visual effects nominees, Avatar, District 9, and Star Trek. Avatar of course was the blockbuster of the year. Currently raking in a total of $2.05 billion worldwide, with a domestic gross nearing $600 million, this is one huge film, budgeted at $240 million. Lots of my friends in the industry have seen this multiple times. It's definitely a 3D film not to be missed, and this is a film that did stereoscopic films correctly (shooting in stereo, rendering with two cameras). District 9 was an underdog, powered by a $30 million budget, a fledging director (whom I acquainted with at VFS), an interesting story, and top notch vfx. This film went on to earn $200 million worldwide with a $115 million domestic gross. Great job Neill! Star Trek was a franchise reboot done correctly by JJ Abrams and his team. This film went on to make $383 million worldwide with a $257 million domestic take home while costing $140 million.

All in all, these three films had wonderful visuals. But what about the other four that didn't make it? Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Terminator Salvation, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and 2012.   As any industry professional should, I saw all seven films in the theatre. These films were made for being seen on the big screen. What did I think of all seven? Here's my quick recap on the vfx.

• Avatar: Spectacular CG environments and multiple completely CG creatures that the audience empathizes with.
• District 9: Seamless character work with integrating CG characters and live action performers.
• Star Trek: Lots and lots of CG FX work in bringing characters and locales to life. A couple CG face augmentation shots, lots of environments.
• Harry Potter: A number of complete CG shots, well integrated FX.
  
• Terminator: Big and new terminators, miniature and stunt work blended well with CG environments and characters. Many great matte paintings.
• Transformers: Big metal robots fighting. Oh, and small metal robots too. Spectacular destruction sequences.
• 2012: Amazing FX destruction sequences, completely CG water sequences (both above and below).
  

  Image via Wikipedia

Judging from the selections, I can only guess that the three finalists were chosen because they had a simple and decent story, and the characters (both CG and live) brought the film to life.  In many of the non-nominated four, I didn't really care for the characters or how they would end in the movie, even while they were very FX heavy and some of the best work this decade, the characters fell flat, and I think the nomination committee chose their finalists not on the complexity of the work, but on the characters portrayed in the films and how they brought them to life.  You empathized with Neytiri and crew in Avatar. You felt Chris Johnsons rage and sadness in District 9, and you were blown away by the reimagining of the traditional characters in Star Trek. You realized that the vfx was a part of the story, not that the story  was written around the vfx (which is more evident in 2012 and Transformers 2). I'm glad that the three were chosen the way they were! I do have to give a shout out to Neill (congrats man!) and Bob (a vfx supervisor who I worked with up north on Outer Limits) representing Canada at the Oscars this year in VFX.