the fxphd deans blog

As the year (and decade) comes to a close, we’d like to wish all of our readers and members happy holidays and best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2010. Jeff, Mike, and I truly appreciate the kind words and support we receive from everyone…it is really what makes working on our sites so enjoyable. Looking back, fxphd has just completed our 14th term of helping vfx artists, designers, and production crews improve their craft. fxguide went live just over a decade ago and has seen consistent growth over the years while others have come and gone.

Thanks to the extremely talented artists from around the world who work full time jobs AND spread their knowledge by serving as professors at fxphd. We’d also like to recognize the fxphd crew who work behind the scenes. While Mike and I are front and center, Debby Furnival, Matt Graham, Jimmy Shen, Mark Dascoli, and David Hamner all work incredibly hard to make sure classes get out and members are supported each and every term.

As we like to say at fxphd: you — the readers and members — are the oxygen that keeps us breathing. Thanks again for your incredible support.

It’s been a busy week in Chicago as we’re unpacking from the brief one-block trip over to 230 East Ohio. Everything went great, but we all hope it’ll be a while before we have to move again.

fxphd has a larger and nicer studio space which is used for both class editing and recording, as well as doing on camera filming and product inserts on greenscreen. The folks at Hootenanny and Mr. Moqo also have some more space, including a couple of extra offices for future expansion. We took over the former Outsider space, a post company that went out of business earlier this year (well, officially they say “reorganized”). It’s never great to see another company go under, especially in these challenging business times in post. But it is a good example of one company’s demise providing a fantastic opportunity for another — a space that is already built out and just needed a serious facelift.

We’re covering the move in this week’s PST201 course at fxphd. Liz and Jim will be discussing why taking over an already built-out space is preferable to building out from scratch (even though a landlord would give you hundreds of thousands of dollars for the build-out), how construction is handled, and more. Jim actually helped oversee the move of Avenue Edit (an $18-million company) several years ago so he’s got some experience on the subject.

For a gallery of images from the new space…click through to see the full post.
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We need to have everything packed up by the end of the day Thursday. Movers are scheduled to come by on Friday morning to transport everything the one block to our new offices at 230 East Ohio in Chicago. For those who don’t know, our building is being torn down to make room for a Ronald McDonald House — a comfortable place where families whose children are in the hospital can stay. So it’s honestly for a good cause, at least.

The building we’re leaving was built in the early 1900’s and has housed several post facilities over the years. As a result, the downstairs is filled with old equipment — and environment which is dark, damp, and musky. But there’s some amazing old gear down there, including an RCA 2″ machine…something I haven’t seen since leaving Indiana University’s TV station WTIU after college.

Before they tear the building down, I spent some time in the dark recesses with my 7D my sigma 30mm f1.4 lens. Enjoy the look at some cool old technology — the buttons are amazing. Wonder if I can take that quad machine home? Oh…and that’s Mark, but he’s not packing our gear…just looking through old manuals and confidential documents from companies that shuttered years ago. Check out the photos at my flickr feed.

We got quite a few emails looking for more info and stills from our stereoscopic test shots in Paris. Of course, we’ll be covering that for fxphd members in our STR101 course over the next couple of weeks, but I figured we’d share some happy snaps from the trip with everyone.

Check out my flicker photo set for shots from the weekend using the Element Technica rig. With help from Arnaud Paris of LocaRed in France, we were able to film the motorcycle traveling through the windy cobblestone streets of Montmartre. If you want to see how a rig responds to jostling…that’s a great way to do so. The good news is that once you get that rig locked down, it’s incredibly stable and you really minimize the chances of the two stereo cameras moving independently of each other.

Again, a big thanks to the folks at LocaRED for their hospitality, as well as Stephen Pizzo from Element Technica for getting the rig to Paris.

Had to work this weekend, but I can’t complain. This weekend involved heading over to Europe in order to work with our friend Arnaud Paris at LocaRed in Paris. LocaRed specializes in RED rentals, production, and post production…and, the reason we’re here, stereoscopic filmmaking. The folks at Element Technica were kind enough to get one of their stereo rigs express shipped to France in time to film this weekend for the Introduction to Stereoscopic course at fxphd. Don’t expect the rig to be something you easily can carry around on your shoulder with two RED cameras. But you probably wouldn’t be doing that anyway. The rig is extremely well-built…incredibly solid and rigid which means the cameras won’t move as much independently of each other. This leads to better original acquisition.

We’re here covering on-set issues regarding stereo…cameras (we used RED), lenses, on-set monitoring, alignment, rigs, and more. But the best part was that Arnaud thought it would be a great idea to put the rig in the back of a truck and drive through Paris filming a motorcycle out the back. Who was I to complain? Driving and filming past the Louvre, through Place de la Concorde and then along the Seine? Life is good…

Tomorrow….more fun in France, including filming the plates for Daniel Smith’s killer NUK203 Nuke and Stereoscopic course.

Cinematographer, inventor, winner of 2 technical academy awards and creator of the Dedolight – Dedo Weigert, was recently in Sydney and I got a chance to hear him talk and also meet this industry legend. I just love meeting key industry figures like Dedo, it is safe to say he has forgotten more about lighting than I know!

His talk centered around a detailed overview of the entire Dedo range which is much larger than I would have guessed. Of course we all shoot with the standard Dedos but that is only part of the product range. Dedo clearly loves what he does and it shows. A very good cameraman in his own right, he builds lights to solve problems not to make money or grow companies (although I am sure those don’t hurt!)
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We have finished location shooting on Moving Day. The shoot went really well. There is no doubt that we were trying to shoot a lot but with a great crew and good weather we got almost all of it. A good location is worth so much. As Jason says in his directing class – the location became a character in the film. The location is a house used for weddings on weekends, so it was virtually art directed for pretty ‘wedding photo’ opportunities.

We are now working on the edit to work out what we need for the green screen shoot. And as you can see from this pic – we are preparing the HDRs for 3D. (This is a tone mapped, inverted polar converted, pic of the main garden set built from those 5D 180 fisheye HDRs.) Next we shoot green screen on flying rigs.

We have started shooting Moving Day out of the Sydney office. The film is directed by Jason Wingrove (who you will know from our Red Centre production podcast), it is such an education to watch Jason work on set. The film is being shot on the RED using anamorphic lens and with secondary photography on the Canon 7D.

The performances and imagery are beautiful. The fxphd ‘Special Ops’ team are just gearing up to start work on the project to produce the various visual effects ranging from matte paintings to cgi and compositing. The anamorphics should make for some interesting tracking issues (when combined with rolling shutter… but we are yet to start post). We are lucky to have the film being edited by Richard Learoyd (iRobot, Knowing), so I cant wait to finish shooting and see the material in a cut.

The Canon 7D is performing alright but it is noiser than I might have thought, but on a Red Rock Micro Capt. Stublin SLR rig it is proving useful. There is no doubt in my mind you would not want it as your primary camera, but it is an amazing secondary camera. For me personally, the main issue with the camera is the recording format and its 8 bit limitations on grading combined with compression artifacts. More on this in this terms DSLR course inside fxphd and in the new Directing Course Jason is running this term.

We just announced the new October09 Term at fxphd and we’re really excited about the new offerings and returning faves. Now that the rollout for the term is done, in Chicago we’re now focusing on moving into our new space along with the folks from Hootenanny. The finishing touches are being added to the common areas and cable pulling has begun.

The building in which we’ve been housed over the last 18 months is being torn down and we’re moving just about a block away to our new space in November. While we’re moving sooner than expected, it does provide opportunity to document our move for fxphd members in PST201 – Building a Post Boutique: Hootenanny Case Study. The course won’t simply be talking about the physical aspects of building a post house, but everything from the business side of things, hiring employees, bidding jobs, and more. Hootenanny co-founders Jim Annerino and Liz Tate will be sharing their knowledge with members of the course of the term…it’s just the kind of “real-world” insight we like delivering at fxphd.

More photos coming over the next several weeks….

We are hard at work this week in pre-production for the next major fxphd film: Moving Day. We had planned this to have been shot at the end of Sept, but casting children is … hard. The film will be directed by the award winning Jason Wingrove. We will be shooting this at the very start of the new October term and posting it during the term. It should be a fun project: the story is Rambo meets Peter Pan at the end of the Secret Garden. This week we have been walking the location and working out the gear, lenses and crew to bring this funny and wild film to the screen. It is amazing how one can rush pre-production and yet anything solved now is 1/100 th the cost of fixing it later in post. Pre-production time is the single biggest gift you can give any film, and I love seeing the project improve as the creative team get to explore an idea instead of rushing to just meet a deadline. If you can max out your pre-production time -do – it is gold.