the fxphd deans blog

While Mike has been having a blast working hard on our new production courses, I’ve also been busy behind the scenes trying to get a couple more courses added to the new term. So I’m really excited to announce that we just added a new Z-Brush course for the October 07 Term.

This course, taught by Siju Thomas (view his online gallery here) is going to focus on learning to sculpt with an artistic perspective. The course will be grounded in anatomically accurate sculpture of a humanoid creature form…a hunter turned were-lion or a gorilla-man. We will be building a character from inside out finishing the body and then finishing the cloth all as separate parts. I love the idea of learning the app through a project — it’s really the best way. We will be offering discounted educational copies of the software (for non-commercial use) to fxphd members.

For more information about this and other October07 Term courses at fxphd, visit fxphd.com. We’ve got one more cool course to announce, but that’ll have to wait until next week…..

(Finally I post something nothing to do with RED)

This term we do our first stills photography course. We are honored to have Tim Wheeler as the professor. His work ranges from serious annual corporate reports to prodct advertising. Tim, a very successful photographer, has agreed to run our first course - a broad overview of professional photography, including subjects such as:

- table top product shots
- landscape
- portrait

We just finished filming some of the portrait classes and the results are stunning. We asked Tim to photograph our own Angie Richards three different ways:

1, Straight corporate portrait for an annual report or company press release
2. Fun - Rolling Stones magazine shot
3. Serious actress

In each case, other than minor wardrobe changes, it was the same actress with the same hair and makeup - with almost the same set of lights. However, the results are so dramatically different it is great to watch. I should also say it is nearly impossible to take a bad photo of Angie. But seriously, it was a great day’s filming and we all learned so much from Tim.

I will post more in coming weeks as we do more stills production.

We are now filming for next term. Of course one of those courses is the RED - and I dont mean to ONLY post RED shots. But they are some of the more fun shoots we have done, and this one was a blast with a 28mm to 290mm zoom lens. Our thanks to the Camera Collective for lending us this amazing lens. We shot with this in part to test the rigging and setup around the camera itself and we learned some interesting lessons.

Next week film takes us to South Australia. We take RED footage onto a daVinci Resolve, explore the new RED software, and more filming for the DV Rebel course. Later this week we’ll have a sneak peek at some amazing images from our still photography courses.

Have a good weekend.

With a small crew in hand we took off recently for some open spaces to film with the coolest toys (sorry professional) camera ever, RC Helicopters. At one stage we were film with the RED camera out of the car while we had a helicopter swooping down on us all at 70 km/hour!

I’m sorry if this is work… Anyway we were filming for an upcoming class and we had the coolest time….

We have started filming for the RED courses. In this class we will be dealing with mounting the camera - everything from tripods to Steadicam. The RED course is one of 21 courses at fxphd (12 of which will be brand new).

More info on the RED courses will be posted on fxphd.com soon….

We are continuing to test the RED - this was a bit of fun - we hooked the HDMI output to a 50″ plasma - world’s largest video assist ! This week we also do steadicam, rigging and res charts.

As you guys have all no doubt seen I posted to the front page of fxguide rather than here the actual photos from the RED day and the first day of fxphd production. But I wanted to share something what John jokingly said we should sue over copyright violation - we made the front page of Engadget !!

Note from John:
Of course, the reason I wanted to sue is that the idea of Mike being on the front page of one of my favorite sites — Engadget — just kills me. I’m so not worthy now….