Crazy Beat

Happy New Year to all! This year will bring lots of new (and hopefully exciting) things my way. So what do I hope for from this year?

I’m currently snowed in working hard on my dissertation about how the increasing role of post production and VFX in films is changing the role of the director (or not, as the case may be). After 5th february I am out in the real world, free of educational shackles and ready for anything… Or not. As the case may be, I’ll be taking February to complete my VFX work on The Dark Side of The Earth pilot before it goes to Cannes Film Festival in May to hopefully gain some interest. After that, I need to find a real job, perhaps in film visual effects, but maybe something less specific to begin with.

In the meantime I’ll be available for freelance design / video work if any prospective clients are reading this. I’d also like to work some more on icons, wallpapers and GUI freebies in my spare time. I hope to be able to work on some exciting projects that are still in pre-production stages with friends from my university, and will post more about those in due course.

I can’t really say much about our main project other than that it is a planned sci-fi mini series designed to be viewed on portable devices and small screens. Hopefully it will become more than just video content, as the nature of the content could potentially be a lot more interesting than mere podcasts, but I’ll post more about that here once its developed past a proof-of-concept pilot.

Of course, once we are finished developing the series we’ll be watching it on our Apple Tablets. John Gruber’s post on the possibilities of what an Apple tablet could be is the most interesting speculation I have read about this by far. I am excited to find out what Steve has up his sleeve come the 26th…

I have written about how much I enjoyed Moon before, and now we are approaching awards season director Duncan Jones is trying to start an online campaign to get Sam in the running for an Oscar. This is something I can wholeheartedly get behind as I think his performance was phenomenal. Whether or not those at the Academy can ever be persuaded to feel the same way on the other hand, is a whole different matter.

There is more info about Sam’s role and the Oscars in general at this great Moon fansite which I encourage everyone to go and read, so I won’t post too much on here – but please spread the word, and if you use twitter tag your tweets with #SamRockwellOscar and encourage others to re-tweet!

So please – spread the word in as many ways as you possibly can, be it Facebook, Myspace, good old simple conversation – lets get Sam what he deserves!

Update: Go and show your support on Facebook now!

Back in May when I was at the Cannes Film Festival I didn’t manage to see Up, Pixar’s latest animated feature and their first to be produced in stereoscopic 3D. Of course it was showered with fantastic reviews, and knowing that I would have to wait until October to see it released in the UK (despite the fact it opened a few weeks after the Cannes showing in the US), I was rather annoyed and very worried I wouldn’t be able to avoid all the spoilers.

Roll on to October and I had indeed managed to avoid all of the spoilers and went to see the film last night. Now, I am a self-professed Pixar fanboy, and Wall-E is one of my favourite films of all time, but Up really is something special.

Not only was it very mature for a family film, for example  – there were a couple of instances of bloodied wounds (a first for a Pixar film I think?), and the very heart of the story focused on the main character’s love and longing for his dead wife and to fulfil their lifelong dream of exploring South America – not to mention the fact that the main character was an elderly man.

I thought Pixar dealt with the issues of life and death in a very mature way which could connect with audiences of all ages – this also applied to all of the comedy; Its nice to see an animated family film where both the kids and the parents can laugh at the same jokes, as opposed to offering slapstick comedy for the kids and wittier jokes and film references only adults would get (something Dreamworks is rather fond of, actually).

Of course, one of the film’s main selling points was its 3D. The new wave of 3D is something I am very much NOT sold on, having recently seen Coraline and being left wanting more (much more, in fact), I had dismissed the latest 3D wave as as much of a gimmick as its previous incarnations, but was curious to see how Pixar would use the technology. They didn’t disappoint.

Although not a life changing experience, the way 3D was used in Up really did help to complement the film – with only a couple of instances of something leaping out of the screen. Overall the third dimension was used to enhance subtle depth of field effects and made the characters sink into a beautifully rendered world, as opposed to simply leaping out from it every now and again. Others making 3D films can learn a lot here and I would love to see even one other film use 3D this well.

Overall, Up is simply a charming adventure tale that anyone can enjoy, the 3D only adds more depth (in a very literal sense) to a great story being played out in a beautifully rendered world. Anyone with even a passing interest in animation should really go and see Up, and you really should see it in 3D if you have the chance. Next week I plan on seeing Toy Story 3D, it’ll be interesting to  see if Pixar has been able to adapt it into a 3D experience anywhere near as exciting as Up.

During the last 2 month I have been to the cinema twice, and both of those times I was in complete awe of what was on screen. Even better, both of these films were science fiction epics, and even better than that they each represent the opposing ends of great sci-fi. I am (of course) talking about Moon and District 9.

Lets start with Moon:

The first feature by Duncan Jones, who has spent the last 10 years or so working in advertising and refining his directing skills. Although Duncan is David Bowie’s son, this film is no Space Oddity. I won’t explain the plot here as its easy to find anywhere online (and if you haven’t seen it you REALLY, REALLY should), but Duncan has managed to produce a science fiction epic in the style of the 70’s classics, and some of his self-proclaimed influences: Silent Running, 2001, Alien, etc.

Moon is charmingly understated, mainly dealing with the protagonist’s internal struggles. It isn’t effects-heavy, but all of the lunar effects shots were done using miniatures.

I simply cannot emphasise how much Moon impressed me – in a movie climate where for the last few years science fiction has been all about explosions and big budget effects (not that I’m not a fan of these, on the contrary!) Moon is a refreshing breath of fresh air. The fact that Duncan managed to do this with only $5 million is purely an added bonus!

District 9 on the other hand sits at the other end of the spectrum – it is an effects-heavy action sci-fi adventure obviously dealing with big, difficult issues in the kind of bold way only science fiction can – this, combined with the fact that the effects work with the story (and aren’t just there for some eye candy) are what makes District 9 really special. I know a lot less about it than Moon, but will definitely be keeping an eye on Neill Blomkamp, who previously directed the Peter Jackson-led Halo movie visual concepts (take a look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUcreY0X33k – the man clearly knows what he’s doing when it comes to gritty sci-fi). Again, Neill managed to do this all with a budget of $30 million – Michael Bay could learn a thing or two here.

While District 9 has receiving glowing critical reviews and huge box office success ($126 million worldwide thus far), Moon has only had the luxury of the former (although it has earned back its production costs). While Moon’s appeal probably isn’t as wide as an action-heavy sci-fi epic presented by Peter Jackson, it is a really fantastic film and should be seen by anyone with even a passing interest in film in general. A worldwide viral advertising campaign would probably have helped it a bit more too!

So to sum it all up – if you like film (especially sci-fi), then you simply must see both of these films. Don’t wait until they are on DVD either, they are best viewed on the biggest screen you can get into. Lets hope that both Duncan and Neill will have long careers in the movie business – the future of sci-fi is brighter than it has been in a good few years. Roll on Avatar…

So on Thursday I had my last lecture for 3 weeks – short summer holiday here we come! Aside from a dissertation to start, house move to commence, various paying jobs that need to be started and lots and lots of reading to catch up on there is also that tiny compositing project I have going on..

So over the past week I’ve managed to squeeze in a few hours of compositing for Dark Side Of The Earth, so I’ll give a quick update as to the progress of the shot I have been focusing on (which is still very far from being 100% finished, but I will get there soon!)

This particular shot is a little trickier than the last shot I covered as it is roughly twice as long (at 113 frames) and the characters manage a 360 degree turn around eachother as they fight. But, the bigger the challenge the more satisfying the solution, take a look:

The Original Shot

Obviously a few things need to change – namely the puppeteers need to vanish, the ceiling element and ropes must be added in and the whole thing has to match up and play smooothly (to simplify!)

The Current Shot

So this is where the shot is now – puppeteers have been successfully removed (apart from in the spokes of the swordsman’s wheels – barely visible here but a real issue when he turns sideways) and the ceiling element has been added into the background. Next I need to clean up the masks that have brought back in character elements (such as The Swordsman’s shield and arms) so that they move a little smoother, and correct the edges of the ceiling element so that it seamlessly connects to the background. In order to finish the shot I’ll need to add in some convincing rope elements and light them accordingly to make them fit the shot. At least its on its way!

Finally, take a look at the script behind this 113 frame (around 4.7 seconds) shot:

Node Tree

Put simply each ‘node’ is a single action, mask or object – when interconnected they can work together to mask out characters, bring objects back in and add entirely new elements to the scene. Quite a lot going on but its a lot of fun when things are working properly.

Next time I’ll update with a rundown of a completely different shot, in which we had to almost entirely rebuild The Swordsman himself!

Combining the fact I needed a 21st birthday present with a big chunk of cash I’ve been saving for the best part of the last 2 years for a new computer, I am lucky enough to be the proud owner of an 8 core Mac Pro and 2 LED Cinema Displays. This system should certainly help the 2k compositing I’ve been doing on my iMac until now! I opted for a dual quad core 2.26 GHz machine with 8GB of RAM and 2 NVidia cards in order to power the LED Cinema displays, in short its my dream setup and I am incredibly pleased with it.

However, there are a few little niggles involved with using the LED displays with a mac pro that I have not read about anywhere other than the Apple support forums, so I’ll talk about them briefly here.

1) The cables provided on the LED display are incredibly short (of course it was originally designed for the macbooks but Apple now market it as a display compatible with all of their systems). This is slightly annoying when using dual displays as I can’t have them quite as far away from the machine as I would like; I can imagine for anyone wanting the screens further away from the mac pro than simply above it on the desk this could be a major problem. I have however ordered 2 3 foot mini-displayport extension cables from www.monoprice.com at a reasonable $6 each. According to posts on the Apple support forums these work a treat, so thats problem 1 solved!

2) The second annoyance is more of an observation, as it doesn’t actually bother me, but I know it would again be very annoying and inconvenient for some – Screen brightness. The f1 and f2 keys control screen brightness on all macs for the last few years, and the mac pro and LED Cinema display setup is no different. However, upon trying the keys I found that they only control the brightness of the screen plugged into the first graphics card. No biggie, I just went to the display preference pane, which displays a seperate brightness slider for each screen. Puzzlingly though, both sliders still only control the 1 display – combined with the lack of physical brightness buttons on the displays this seems to make it impossible to adjust the brightness of display number 2. Personally I like my displays on full brightness, but I know some find this too bright.

My guess is that this is a software issue which will be resolved with the next Leopard update, or in Snow Leopard when it is released. Still a slight oversight on Apple’s part here though which could frustrate some users who have opted to buy a fully-specced workstation and gorgeous LED displays!

Aside from these two small issues the machine and displays look and perform beautifully, and I couldn’t be happier with them. I’ll be getting back to the nitty gritty compositing work on the Dark Side of The Earth again now, so expect an update on that soon. (Also, Neil has just posted a new podcast about the fight choreography over on the official site – go check it out!)

So the latest assignment on my film course was to pick an existing foreign language film, then write about how we would remake it in a contemporary American setting. We were also required to edit together a 2 minute trailer for the remake using existing footage of the actors we had chosen to appear in the film.

I chose Deep Red, a cult 70’s horror from Italian Giallo master Dario Argento. The original film is regarded as a bit of a cult classic, with a murder-mystery element playing alongside the onslaught of brutal, and (for the time) extremely violent murders as a British jazz pianist traverses Rome with his journalist love interest to try and unmask an insane murderer. My American bastardized remake was to star David Duchovney, Zach Braff and Chloe Sevingy (among others), and would take the tale to LA and the hills of Hollywood.

I did the entire project in just over a week, and the trailer turned out ok. I think it tails off towards the end though.. I used clips from American Psycho, The X Files – I Want to Believe, Mr Brooks, Zodiac, Garden State, Friday The 13th (remake), and a few others I can’t remember – as well as a few clips of the original Deep Red of course.

Here is the final package that I handed in:

And here is the trailer itself:

Deep Red Remake Trailer from Aidan Hornsby on Vimeo.

Currently forinvoicing clients I use a database in Filemaker Pro 5.5. The software is currently on version 10, so I could probably modernize my workflow slightly here. My workflow for sorting out invoices is something along the lines of:

Enter what they owe me > Enter what its for > Export PDF at the end of the month and email it to the client

To track time I simply use iCal. While this is by far the most elegant system it has worked quite well for me for a few years now, but I originally started using this workflow because I had to set up an invoicing system rather quickly, and simply haven’t really had time to think about finding a better solution since then!

Well, over at his blog, Sebastiaan de With just posted an overview of Billings 3, his time-tracking and invoice-management software of choice. Now I must admit, this post is partly fueled by the promise of a free license to anyone linking back to his post, but that isn’t all. It actually got me thinking about how dated my own workflow is, and billings looks like an excellent piece of software that I am now thinking of migrating to anyway.

I think the key point here (plucked nicely from Sebastiaan’s interview with Billings’ developer) is that pretty much all of the team responsible for the app had some form of freelance experience. Too much software is developed by people who don’t actually use it for what they are designing it for, or properly understand the needs of their target customers, and it really shows.

I look forward to giving Billings a whirl when I next have some paid work going on!

The Dark Side of The Earth is a fantasy sci-fi film in development by writer / director Neil Oseman. The website contains everything you need to know and a really cool journal chronicling the past few years that Neil has been developing the project.

Anyway, last year Neil shot a 3 1/2 minute pilot scene from the screenplay (on no less than the same cameras used for The Dark Knight) with the goal of using it to get funding to make the feature. The scene features a character called The Wooden Swordsman – the name says it all. This amazing scale puppet was operated by a team of 3 puppeteers during the shoot, and although they did their job incredibly well they inevitably do pop up in almost every single shot of the pilot!

My job, along with a friend from college (and under the supervision of a very knowledgable VFX supervisor from Double Negative) was to help the shots appear as if the puppeteers were never there; and although we weren’t able to complete every shot 100% in time for the pilot’s screening at the Sci-Fi London festival last Saturday (what with an intensive degree course on the go at the same time), we did manage to get a good 80 – 90% done on the majority of the shots.

Below are a few screenshots of the shot that is closest to being completed:

The original shot

Puppeteers removed

Swordsman added back in and a new left frame edge with better smoke element added in

Ropes and ceiling element added into shot

The only thing missing here is the colour grade, which really made most of the shots look fantastic at the screening. I’ll post again when we are nearing completion and there is more to show, but so far it has been great fun and I have learnt a huge amount. Please spread the word of the project if you can, it will be a really unique and special film when it is made.