production blog

behind the scenes and more

Professor Profile: Charles Poynton

By Mike Seymour

In this, our first Professor Profile, we speak to Charles Poynton who is teaching the DCT301 – Camera Tech and Colour Science course this term. Every month or so we will be profiling a professor from fxphd so you can learn a little more about where they started, how they learned their craft and what motivates them. We are proud that Charles agreed to go first, and we hope you enjoy the series.


Squeezing the most out of a 5D Mk II or ALEXA signal

By Mike Seymour

“So if you are a really keen young Camera operator and you see EXTENDED range – you’re going to pick it – I mean who wouldn’t? Normal and Extended – you’re 26 – you’re going to pick Extended,” joked Charles Poynton as part of his lecture at fxphd last week.

What Charles was talking about was the Extended range on the ARRI Alexa, but the same discussion could be had about the Marvels Cine Profile for the 5D vs say the Technicolor Cine profile.


Studio Profile : Character Animation inside ILM

By Mike Seymour

Maia Kayser is a Lead Character Animator at ILM. In this, our first video studio profile, we travel to the Presidio in San Francisco to Industrial Light & Magic to see what it is like to be a woman doing digital character animation in films such as Rango.


Arri ALEXA vfx Metadata Extraction Tip

By Mike Seymour

The workflow for VFX to extract Lens Data and Tilt/Roll information from the Log-C Quicktime files coming out of an Alexa Plus – this allows one to extract dynamic per frame Alexa meta data from Alexa files. (This was originally posted at fxguide.com)


New Term – New Production Blog

By Mike Seymour

With the start of the new term, we have redesigned the home page and we have significantly altered this blog. We started this blog to keep you up to speed with the Dean’s activities – but we decided you can do that easily elsewhere – in particular via the fxphDOD podcast. This blog will now be featuring production tips and updates from the projects that we are doing.


Best wishes for 2012

By Mike Seymour

From all the team here at fxphd, the Professors, staff and team – have a really wonderful Xmas and best wishes for the New Year. – Travel safe these Holidays.


Siggraph Asia and Weird Science

By Mike Seymour

This week we have just returned from Siggraph Asia and I wanted to share a really odd side of Siggraph: The Emerging Technology exhibits. This is weird science, actually this is often just weird. I am not sure what the criteria for getting into the Emerging Tech exhibition exactly is, but I suspect it involves [...]


Bear in there

By Mike Seymour

After having earlier been accepted to Cannes, our little film BEAR has been accepted into Sundance. 64 short films were selected from 4083 submissions for Sundance.  Like Spider (its sequel) before it, Bear will be in competition.  Congrats to dir. Nash Edgerton and the team – especially the member of fxphd who did such a [...]


Podcasting

By Mike Seymour

I know this is not strictly fxphd production related but it is the same family… I wanted to write about how much joy and success we have been getting from our podcasting lately. We run a series of podcasts • fxpodcast : a serious technical in depth look at issues from Siggraph papers to Union [...]


Final USA post

By Mike Seymour

So as I indicated in the earlier posts, while we did a lot on destruction tech, plus covered up coming feature films and also project management stories ( – as you are seeing in this terms Background course with RV, Shotgun, 5th Kind etc), there was a lot of stereo work discussed on this last [...]