the fxphd deans blog

A quick tip about fxphd’s topic and courses, if you want a hint about what is coming months in advance of what we publish, you need only follow our twitter feeds and see what we are researching on fxguide.

One of the most popular courses we have this term on fxphd , the AE production course by Gareth Edwards, is a direct follow on from an fxguide story on Attila the Hun.

This month alone we have been seen to be doing things around the ACS 50th Conference, Stop motion, stereo cinematography, installing flames and digital rendering of car finishes… we are not saying these will be courses, but our fxphd courses do not come from a vacuum, they come from months of research, interviews and building key industry contacts.
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Well what’s been happening in and around our various fx offices ?

John’s been installing flames, Mike’s been in New Zealand training and photographing (thanks to PostGrad Brenton Cumberpatch), Jeff’s been at music festivals and doing some VERY cool music videos. While around the rest of fxphd, the Profs have been getting ahead, while Post-grads have been playing catch up. At fxguide we have been working on a range of stories from a variety of post houses and sources.

But in travelling around you get a chance to look at different post communities and you get time to ‘ponder’, especially on a long flight like the one I am on now. Without internet access to interrupt you, one gets a chance to put on some really good blues on your headphones and formulate trends you notice globally. Actually, with the limited access one has to the internet in hotels - you get a lot of time to think on business trips !

I was thinking about content and us making it - as an industry and I started to wonder: how do we fund quality journalism? How do we fund quality drama? Why does this matter? Because a lot of us make TVCs that get played in those shows, and still more of us make work on those big budget episodic shows. As I travel around and talk to post houses it sounds like money continues to move from TV spots to other indirect and online places, making TVC budgets tighter, all while the quality levels get raised and the schedules get shorter. In short it is harder to make a buck in Post.
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One of our most popular professors at fxphd is following up his successful AE design course with a brand new Cinema 4D course this term. This course is a direct result of input from our members, who strongly lobbied for a design centric offering in the Maxon app. Not surprisingly so far this term, the classes are getting great reviews from artists taking the course.

Clapham’s company in the UK, hypa.tv, focuses on design with clients such as The Discovery Channel. In this week’s class he’s taking a look at Mocca IK rigging as well as the Sketch and Toon plugin for rendering. I’m looking forward to the culmination of the course: a three week project taking a design task from conception to final output. He’ll take the project from boards, to modeling, to texturing and lighting, to rendering, and then final assembly and enhancement in After Effects.

Next week is our break week during the term — so it’s a great time for members to take a break and for those who have joined in the last several weeks it’s a time to catch up on classes.

We had a great time last week preparing for the dv Rebel lighting class. When we did the first course, Stu wanted more backyard built professional rigs.. so we have been trying to follow up on that this week. One of the fun ones was a desk light using a circular fluorescent light fitting. It is designed with a magnifying glass so you can look through the magnifying glass at something lit by this round light. We found one of these as damaged floor stock at a local lighting shop for under a hundred dollars got them to swap the light for a 5000K colour temp globe and then back at the office we popped out the middle magnifying glass… bingo - circular “kino flo style ring light” !

Now I am sure the kino Flo one is better - but ours comes with a handy stand to hold it and theirs costs around US$1250. Anyway with just one desk lamp light - no flash - no photoshop… we have a cool portrait light.

It works best with wide angle lenses - but I got to say - dv Rebel or as I called it OSIPSFM “old school innovative problem solving film” is fun!

We have been editing at the tech penthouse. It is true that there is the film on the page, the film you think you shot and then the film that you have in the edit. In our case I handed over the edit completely to Charles Ivory, a great editor. Charles has been editing this project to test both RED workflow and also to give us some great material for our Background Fundamentals course.