the fxphd deans blog

No rest for the weary, as break week is a bit of misnomer for the “behind the curtains” part of fxphd. In reality, it is an incredibly busy week and a key chance to get to some mid-term sysadmin work done, start firming up the October08 term courses, re-doing the fxphd tour movie, and planning the next 5 weeks of classes.

We made some under the hood web changes this week with an improved torrent mechanism and an even clearer display of the class schedule for members. Those are things we don’t want to do in the thick of a new term, as even a misplaced quote mark can wreak havoc on our torrents and files. With over 6TB transferred per month…..changes aren’t something we take lightly. Here at the loft, fxphd and Hootenanny added a new XServe, LTO-4 and external 12 drive RAID to handle all our assets…even that takes some time to set up.

David Hamner has started as an intern at the Chicago loft and has been a great help in getting things done. He’s ramping up to speed on filming with our fxphd workhorse the HVX200 and diving head first into brushing up on Final Cut Pro and learning all of our compression/distribution scripts. Having David around will free up Mark Dascoli to make even more improvements on the site and provide better support to our members. Though I have to say — Mark already gets huge props from members for his attention to detail and responsiveness. We might not do everything right, but almost everyone seems to feel we’re there to help people out when things go wrong.

Thanks to our friends at Pixar we got to go to the Sydney opening of WallE today. With Director Andrew Stanton and Sound Guru Ben Burtt, … oh and WallE himself. Thanks to a team of 6 Disney imagineers, a fully robotic WallE greeted guests and posed for photos.

While introducing the film, Ben Burtt explained how it was actually his voice that is processed for the famous voice of Wall E and how he used vacuum cleaners and house hold items to produce the sounds of the robots. Burtt joked that he knew of no other artists who did his rather specialized job of designing robot sounds. Stanton remarked that he grew up inspired by ScFi films - many of which Ben Burtt had worked on: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ET etc.

One man’s personal view from the fxphd loft:
For once the highlight of the show was easy: The barcamp on the roof at sunset. What a great night and a great group of people. We had a great turn out and a fun night. I had to dart off to a meeting backstage at the Jim Cameron /Stan Winston deal, but I managed to find the party later in Korean town. I was struck as I know John and Jeff were by what a great bunch of talented and fun people are in fxphd - it is an honor to serve in such company.

Tech highlights for me personally: I loved speaking to people I respect like (in no order) Per H. Christensen, John Knoll, Scott Squires, John Dykstra, Mike Fink, Ben Grossmann, Kim Libreri, Ian Hunter, Ed Catmull, Tim Sarnoff, Pablo Helman, Matthew Gratzner, Mark Stasiuk, Ron Brinkman,… who did I miss ??…

Of course, as always I was humbled to be working alongside John and Jeff - who are both so talented and so amazingly hardworking. It is truly hard work at a show like Siggraph but such a great honor to hang with our team for now nearly ten years, I am blessed to call them friends- yet alone partners… Special thanks to Matt Graham who worked day and night doing producing, filming, editing and never once complained. To Jimmy and Mark who backed us up. To all the people who helped, off sided, acted as cameraman & women, runners and friends -thanks for making this trip so brilliant - I must fly - literally I am at LAX but thank you so much.

We arrived in LA yesterday - we had a great afternoon at Third Floor and then headed downtown to what will be the home of fxphd for the next week, our apartment studio, or the ‘fxphd loft’. We will have two camera crews doing interviews for 8 days solid at Siggraph, starting Sunday with Mental Images in a discussion for BKD on car finishes in Mental Ray. Our Studio is roof top just near the convention centre, and it will also be home to this years Siggraph fxphd bar camp party.
If you want to follow the latest press releases and blow by blow of Siggraph you can follow us on twitter
www.twitter.com/mikeseymour and
www.twitter.com/johnmontfx

I’d like to say that we had a vastly important reason to be at the ballgame today, but we are about to work really hard for 10 days straight, - and in this industry one needs to make time for more than just work. But we did take some cameras and had some fun - especially given the insanely great seats we had, right down at the front of Wrigley stadium the home of the Cubs since 1916. It seemed like the other 40,000 + fans had as much fun as we did watching a brilliant game. Mark DeRosa delivered a grand slam and Alfonso Soriano added a three-run homer, both with two outs - to help the Cubs slam the Astros, 11-4.

for more from the game click below
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We have just completed a big shoot for the DOP course on fxphd. The plan was to do a serious production shoot day - as if for a major feature film and discuss all the real world issues such as LUTs-on set grading, lighting and blocking for 2.35:1 scope etc.

To provide some real interest we took the same location + same actors and had 2 scenes shot as if back to back in the film, but one is upbeat, happy morning (daylight interior) and the other is at the same location but serious very heavy, dramatic and shot at night.

This gave Ben Allan our Prof. of DOP a chance to really shine. Ben came up with some really intelligent and unusual solutions, it was great to watch him work. And while it was a serious long day, I must say we joke around on set quite a lot and have a really great time. After all this is the entertainment industry - and if we cant have fun at work - who can ?

Off to Chicago tomorrow to film and then Siggraph.
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The shoot we did on Monday at Resolution Digital Studios for the new advanced After Effects course at fxphd.com went fantastic. A shoot day is always a long day but was a blast to do. Chicago-based DOP Bob Faison and gaffer Ron Lahey did an absolute brilliant job of getting the set together and making sure we had some great footage. Big props go to Fletcher Chicago for supplying the RED camera (as ours is happily based in Sydney). They provide rentals for high end shoots across the midwest and North American and are simply a pleasure to work with….we can’t recommend them highly enough.
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We had a great day all around on Monday shooting footage for use in the AFX302 course. We were at Resolution Digital Studios (RDS) Chicago, which is a fantastic 32,000 square foot facility with production studios as well as full post production capabilities. I spoke at a RED event at RDS a year ago and was blown away by the size of the place….and getting to work with them was absolutely brilliant. They have a gigantic 5,600 sq foot main stage, white cyc stage, and an apartment/kitchen set.  We took over their green screen stage to film using the RED camera. The crew at RDS was incredibly professional and helpful and worked hard to make sure our day went without hitches.

We’ll be sending out much of this footage to members of the After Effects course taught by Mark Christiansen and Mark Coleran. Christiansen came up with the creative concept and we collaborated on the script along with director Sam Pillsbury. The talent was great — really took the ball and ran with it. It’s such a joy to work with an entire crew of professionals. More from the shoot as well as happy snaps from RDS in the coming days. In the meantime, we gotta get busy editing this together…..

Last night we filming another fxguidetv with Paul Debevec. Paul was in town for a Siggraph Asia lecture, which was hugely interesting and completely packed out.

While some of Paul’s talk covered the history of their research, the later part of the talk was on the amazing new research that he and the team are doing on human faces. The work is outstanding and revolves around breaking out the diffuse and specular light reflectance of a real human face. It turns out that you can film someone and separate the face photography into these two key light aspects. In so doing you get a wealth of information that allows you to do amongst other things, highly detailed face scanning/modeling (without lasers or life casts), very fast computer rendered sub surface scattering and even lightwave frequency varying diffusion normal maps (for RGB) - The work was partly shown last year at Siggraph and we will have more about it in next week’s fxguidetv AND in fxphd.com. As well as coverage from Siggraph itself.

This week we co-sponsored the local Final Cut User group event, and one of the organizers was fxphd Prof. Doug Suiter. Doug actually attended the event via ichat video window from London.

The night focused on FCP server. I really like Server. I think asset management is one of the huge issues we still need to solve. At fxphd we publish 15 hours of content a week. We have been hanging out for this. It does have some big soft spots, namely audio. While audio can be logged, the tools for even viewing the assets makes it impossible to know what type of audio any clip is. Yes I can go and with a few key click I can find out but that is not the point. I want to preview it - scan it and manage it like the rest of my assets. Still for major multiple seat FCP setups like ours - Server is a key solution. And the User group was a great get together to discuss it and explore how users are deploying Server.