My fellow, filmmaker Brian Ramage teams up with Philip Bloom (yup that’s right), to create a project called RIVEN.
See the video telling what is this about, have fun, and support it if you like. Guys talk about themselves as well a dive into the story and their plans.
Here is the kickstarter page for the project.
The movie called “Rock’n'Ball” is a story about a boy that has a huge talent for football, but is experiencing life challenges because of his broken family, lack of money and society intolerance. It’s a fun and dramatic story about friendship, family, love, football, music and most important – striving and fulfilling your dreams no matter what. It was a double pleasure to work on it since my good friend filmmaker Igor Ryabchuk was a camera operator on the project.
While being not a vfx driven movie “Rock’n'Ball” had a certain amount of common vfx tasks to complete including keying, match-moving, wire and rig removal, fixing continuity issues, replacing objects for legal purposes, screen replacement, enhancing lighting in some places, stylizing footage for vintage effect and main title design. It was a pleasure to work this project together with the guys from BraindraintraiN, it was a collaborative effort that wouldn’t be possible without their expertise, skills and art direction. Check out some before and after images.
I got myself involved into early development stages of a full length CG animation project. I certainly lack experience in this field apart from possessing general producing techniques and knowledge. So I bought a book. I always do so when I wanna know or learn things in depth.
Here is what I think of it.
It was nice to read about ink and paint departments and techniques behind non CG animations. Yes the book is from 2001 or so, so big CG animation hits were not yet made. Despite all of this it touches a fair deal of CG production. Shows the difference, talks tools and pipelines.
A while ago VES posted An Open Letter To VFX Artists And The Entertainment Industry At Large Visual Effects Society: 2.0 Now I hear that VES is putting together the Bill of Rights for Artists. I support all of that along with many other vfx people out there. The information and the movement itself made me thinking on the issue and the reasons for industry being in unsettled state.
The Visual Effects Producer: Understanding the Art and Business of VFX
I just finished reading “The Visual Effects Producer: Understanding the Art and Business of VFX” written by Susan Zwerman and Charles Finance. I must say that this book is really good. Like really really good.. I know it’s like 2 years old but it sure covers principles, approaches, workflows and every other aspect of VFX Producing that was, stays and will be relevant for a long time. Already it is said enough about this book in the web. Here I’ll post my “aha moments” and personal favorites from reading.
1) The book covers VFX Producing on all stages of production. And while covering such a wide range it maintains the depth of analysis and information. Gotta say tho that the book is about film VFX and mostly Hollywood centered
I have to be honest, I wanted to shoot and edit a cool video of me telling what a great experience and learning it was doing VFX for “Digital Antiquities“. But just shooting me to look and talk nice takes much more then a fluent English. Meanwhile my works section in this blog stayed pretty empty. What I present now is a ‘making of’ video (at the bottom) and a text description with all the cool stuff.
Just today’s morning I had an honor to jury a few video shows created by kids (yrs 8 to 15). They were done for the “How to make your own internet show” class organized by kyivcast.com and www.detki-monetki.biz(both in Russian)
My fellow juries were Pavel Shyryaev – among everything, experienced animator, and Aleksei Dmitriev – among everything, sommelier and video-blogger and our goal was not to set the winner but to give a somewhat professional feedback on the work children did.
I must say that all of the video was quite good. The story, content, composition, acting, directing, editing, presentation and overall performance. I mean how cool is to be around 12, and receive a training on all the grown up production stuff, as well as to get in the team of people where you can discover and develop your creative and artistic ideas fulfilling them right away.
Short list of what was taught to the kids:
This is a very cool idea to make a project like this, this is a very bright step for parents to engage their children into this, this is so much fun and development for younger soon to be professionals. I’m sure kids will continue making video, act, make art etc.
Thanks for good laughs, a cake and a new experience for me. Kinda jealous that I had no such school back in my time tho.
Keep up the good work!
Yesterday I almost dropped dead from happiness when I saw a trailer of a film, I was slightly involved in, on the homepage of apple trailers. The film is called Surrogate Valentine, visit the site and see the trailer below. Now i did few minor replacements and some paint – not the most groundbreaking visual effects in the world, but I don’t care as long as it helps to tell the story. And sure this is not the most important achievement (that would be hitting the gym more often:). But this means a hell of a lot to me. And also it proves again that the world is much much smaller then you think, that the market is global for a long time now, that your life changing experience is right around the corner.
I wish all the best to the whole cast and crew and the film itself. Special thanks to Dave Boyle – creator of this film, for the opportunity to be a part of it.
A Bottle and a Mug
When I was painting the picture on the left today (shut up, I’m just learning) I remembered one trick that I use from time to time in my VFX work. For this picture I had to transfer the range of tones onto paper, finding out which one is lighter or darker and how they relate to each other. And often when you just look straight at the object your eyes and brain kinda fool you. You see that those are two different object, but on closer examination it turns out they are of the same color and blend together. Similar situation happens when you are on a greenscreen stage, judging its lighting. To quickly see if the lighting is even just squint your eyes – you’ll lose all the details like tracking markers etc. and will have a green/blue blurred picture with easily distinguishable darker and lighter areas. You can also use your peripheral vision just looking off to the side of the green/bluescreen. Gives you same sense of what needs more light.
Those eyes breakers are good in your compositing job too. Judging color, composition, finding lightest and darkest spots becomes easier. And also sitting and making eyes at your After Effects project make you a compositing Jedi, or at least make you look like one ;)
I thought I’d share this video here. This is a trailer of a second season of FUTURESTATES – a web series of ten independent short films, telling stories of how America and the World will live in future. This trailer features 6 out of 77 shots that I completed for one of the short films. More info on the team, production and how in the world i got myself there coming when it all gets released.
UPD: Here is a trailer for the short itself.
RSS Feed
Twitter