The program allows you to load either 3D target heads/mouths/expressions, or drawing or stills of the claymation mouth variations for all the major mouth shapes related to all the major mouth sounds. You then feed in a .wav file and the program will do a first pass at lip syncing it based on the audio alone. Once done you can modify it to better suit your character. In the later versions you ca then go further and time out the eyes, eye brows etc .

I think this course will be great for people wanting to learn more about this aspect of film making either because they want to move into doing post for this style or work, or they want to use miniatures or stop motion in one of their own projects. But I doubt anyone with a passion for the craft - that does what we do for a living would not love this subject area. It is the birth of visual effects and the last bastion of what I like to call ‘inventive film making’.

Without a doubt we had an absolute ball today - it was just heaps of fun. Tomorrow we have an early start and we are pouring latex - I mean does life get any better ?

Man after kung fu in China and some of the other classes we have coming up… this will be our best term ever.

We shot at 120 fps, 96 fps and 47 fps. We also tried super sharp shutters, 22fps and a bunch of cool tricks. We tried a couple of audio tricks as well. In this upcoming fxphd we are adding Audio courses, so we figured we’d try a few high speed photography audio tricks ! Not something that may immediately come to mind - but we gave it a shot. Of course sitting here the morning after, I am dying to know if they have worked. But this term we are about creative problem solving and that means trying things that may not always work… but man I hope they do.

Yesterday we met with local production companies and film effects houses. I was surprised to learn that FCP is so strong here, for all the talk of piracy - that Intel Mac tower makes for one heck of a dongle. One of the companies we visited yesterday specializes in episodic TV - on a grand scale - they have done 19 series and over 700 episodes. Not only do the work exclusively in FCP but they grade in Color. And for anyone worrried about the level of vfx here, we saw a 3.15 mins opening shot yesterday - made up of 6 separate shots, all rolled into one long seamless killer period establishing shot - it was really well done and the local artists here have clearly got what it takes to produce intelligent complex vfx shots.

With the help of five local crew we went to great lengths to get our RED to the top of the Wall. It is all for next term’s fxphd which launches in a few weeks. The shoot went so well, and we ended the day sleeping on the Great Wall and photographic it again at dawn.

Actually you might like to know the weekend we had when we were told we have the weekend off in Beijing….

I guess I started thinking about this and the global community because one of our longtime profs Tahl Niran recently returned from India where he also experienced this strong support from phd members and other artists. He posted a few short paragraphs about his trip to India in our members forums and with his permission I thought I’d share them with the wider audience. Click through for that and more….

Since it is an advanced course, due to the complexity of a shot, we decided to cover a single shot over multiple classes. It’s an HD resolution greenscreen shot covering matchmoving, keying, object replacement, and environment creation. Deveraux coordinated the generation of assets from other fxphd profs and artists around the world — including tracking data, 3D object creation for projections, and multi-channel open EXR CGI renders. It’s about 1TB of material per course member — that’s a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

On top of the great project-based classes, the last two classes of the term are sure to be hit. We’ve got guest prof Frank Reuter sharing his knowledge, whom many consider to be the worldwide king of nuke tools and customization.

Which is timely given that in Background we just started working on our ‘tourist’ edit that lacked coverage (!). Coverage is actually so much more than just overlapping actions in different takes. In fact, we start with the classic “wide and punch in for the closeups”, and produce something that is well OK… we then show how to do real coverage based on subtext, motivation and story point of view.

Our director for this was Alex Davies, who had just come off set on the new Baz film AUSTRALIA where she was acting opposite Hugh Jackman. Her insight into blocking, designing and staging a shot were brilliant. You’ll see Alex in 2 weeks time on the DOP course. She is such a talented actor / director it was a joy to work with her. Actually the whole crew was great - but it is funny filming empty spaces for later vfx work. In this photo we film a blank piece of concrete - on both a RED and a Panavision supplied 35mm BL4, but you’ll be glad to know the concrete gave an oscar winning performance.

Multiple views of the same scene may sometimes be stored in separate files rather than in a single multi- view file. An OpenEXR file that contains one of multiple views of a scene should identify the stored view using the multiView header attribute. For example, if RGBA data for the left and right views of a scene are stored in two separate files, both files should contain a multiView attribute. In one file the attribute lists only the left view; in the other file only the right view is listed. Each file has four channels, called R, G, B and A.

In talking to one of the authors Matt Welford (Weta) the team also think the extension should be saved as .sxr when storing stereo images. “Currently this is the what several other vendors are using the format (Nuke, Silhouette, RV) and we can do internally with Shake” he said. The OpenEXR extension was proposed by Welford and Peter Hillman.

For sample files - click read more below