Wheels & Wires
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!
Mac Pro + LED Cinema Display First Impressions
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!)
Deep Red
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.