the fxphd deans blog

At the end of last week I flew up for the day to film Mark Coleran’s first After Effects class for this term.  If you haven’t seen Coleran’s work on feature films, you really need to check out his reel to confirm the quality of his work.  His work on Bourne Ultimatum, The Island, AVP, and other films is simply brilliant — and it is fantastic he’s sharing his knowledge with fxphd members.

But why in Ottawa? Coleran is currently applying his excellent “fake” UI skills to a real UI project: Gridiron Flow. If you haven’t seen the previews of Flow, it is a fantastic new app which automatically tracks the history of assets you use in creative projects.  It’s currently in private beta and will eventually see light first as a public beta. We’re lucky to be involved in the beta here at the fxphd loft in Chicago — and it is definitely a cool product. This product again shows why we’re huge fans of the folks at Gridiron.

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We had a great shoot yesterday at an aircraft hanger. We were shooting for next term and for this term’s DOP course. Over the next two weeks in the DOP course we are covering lighting for drama and coverage for Drama.

Which is timely given that in Background we just started working on our ‘tourist’ edit that lacked coverage (!). Coverage is actually so much more than just overlapping actions in different takes. In fact, we start with the classic “wide and punch in for the closeups”, and produce something that is well OK… we then show how to do real coverage based on subtext, motivation and story point of view.

Our director for this was Alex Davies, who had just come off set on the new Baz film AUSTRALIA where she was acting opposite Hugh Jackman. Her insight into blocking, designing and staging a shot were brilliant. You’ll see Alex in 2 weeks time on the DOP course. She is such a talented actor / director it was a joy to work with her. Actually the whole crew was great - but it is funny filming empty spaces for later vfx work. In this photo we film a blank piece of concrete - on both a RED and a Panavision supplied 35mm BL4, but you’ll be glad to know the concrete gave an oscar winning performance.

There are some great debates that rage in technical post circles - a good one is shooting stereo parallel or convergent. We have been researching 3D for some time at fxphd, and more recently for an up coming “Art of Digital 3D’ story. As I have often said “my father once said to me (and he really did) Son, you can read the entire works of Sigmund Freud - but sooner or later you have to take a girl on a date !”

So we decided to shoot some stereo 3D. And we’ll post the results in fxphd (our research findings on fxguide). The debate on the possible success or not of 3D at the ticket office is really interesting: no sooner had people pointed to the breakout success of Hanna Montana in 3D - then U2-3D flopped. But either way there are some really interesting technical issues - and we love complex technical issues.

We have also been really lucky to have Jeff Olm join us in the Sydney office to start work on what will be some great Scratch training for fxphd. Jeff joins the team for next term and we will be covering not only 3D workflow and RED workflow but also creative color grading in general. The new Scratch course will be out in about a month - but look for the Art of Digital 3D next week on fxguide. The “Art of” series are some of our most popular stories historically - they also take the longest to write.

As people who read this production blog know well, we like shooting with a wide variety of lenses, we want to be able to advise and train on a full range of shots - especially unusual cool setups!

Having been in production and on set for 20 years - I thought I could not really be surprised by a lens. But I laughed out loud when we fitted a T-REX to our RED this week for a fxphd RED class. I had used Century Periscope before but the T Rex is insane - it could turn 180 degrees back and film the red filming it !

The thing is a monster.
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