the fxphd deans blog

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.

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 were just in Beijing and everywhere we saw countdown clocks to the Olympics ( three weeks btw). In the rush for gold, gold, gold, it is easy to forget the massive effort being undertook to televise the games. The Olympics are simply the most complex broadcast in the world.

I had a small role in the Sydney Olympics as I worked along side the SOBO (Sydney Olympic Broadcast Organization). This lead to me having a profound respect for the technicians behind the scenes. So at the risk of jumping the start, and also out of fear that the role of the media techs might be lost in the roar of the actual games, I wanted to pass on some stats I recently saw in the Australian newspaper(7.10.08).

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Last term, we had our first smoke course at fxphd which our members loved. This term, we’re bumping it up to the intermediate level with a new workflow-centric course being taught by Chris Kreynus and several guest lecturers. While it’s technically listed as a smoke course in our schedule, with the line blending between products even more, SMK201 is gonna be a great offering for flame artists as well.

Smoke is generally the final destination for projects in a facility, so it’s truly important to know how to deal with various formats and project types. Kreynus will be covering RED workflow, XML, P2 and AAF, soft-import, and other types of work throughout the term.

But it’s not gonna just be plumbing-type stuff being covered in the course. We’ve got a fun approach to the Lexus RED footage we shot a couple of terms ago — with a re-edit and the creation of a stylized 3D environment using action and batch timeline fx (click on the image to check it out). It’s gonna be a lot of fun!

We got a nice email today from the Producer of a feature film Hunt Angles that Prof. Rose Draper, and I worked on at the start of fxphd.

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We are now working on the DOP new course for fxphd. I have noticed that I have this phenomena called BWV or “brick wall view”. And I actually think many people who are creative and yet get a lot done, have a similar approach.

I feel like I am running hard - on course - but straight at a brick wall. All I can see is this one huge brick wall. I know that there are other similar walls to climb over before I am done, but if I think about later walls - I will slam into the first one. What I need to do is clear this immediate wall first, and to do that I need to concentrate. Maybe it is a bloke thing, maybe it is just me, but if I can really focus on that next wall I can nail it and clear it easily - if I am distracted, I crash and burn.

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We had a great day with models yesterday. You start with a clay model such as this and at the end up with a fully working animation model.
Having seen and even used latex for years, I had never actually been involved in making it, from first principles. It is amazing stuff to work with, and very very precise to make. So precise that the instructions from GM Form require a certain model of Sunbeam mixmaster - so you can mix it with exactly the right settings, mix 7 for 10 mins, mix at 4 for an additional 3 mins etc. And given how much the ammonia comes off during the mixing stage, I may not need to do it very often, even with the extraction fans, feel sorry for anyone who has to been in complex latex applications daily.

Still it is great fun to actually bake a mould and pop the latex figure complete with animation armature, it is the birth of creative stop frame animation process. After all these years in visual effects, I think I have really found the mad scientists in the back room - nice guys - just a tad high on fumes !