the fxphd deans blog

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.

Do you ever wonder how our industry or section of it is seen? I recently gave a speech at the AHAA conference in Miami. One of the great aspects of doing some of the less obvious conferences – other than meeting some really great new people and learning about their market is that you can stumble into some sessions that you would not ordinarily go to.

Such it was that I found myself having a meal at the AHAA Account Planners Award lunch. I did not even know Account Planners had awards yet alone regional specialists. Apparently Planners have their own issues, challenges and even humor: I learnt that the Client is concerned about MY product, the Client Exec about MY Account, The Creative Director about MY ad, and it is only the Account Planner that is concerned about MY consumers.

I built my career in advertising and for an hour or so last week I was surrounded by some really wonderful committed individuals who I swear I had never thought about professionally for all my years in Advertising. From what I could gather from my analysis of really nice but seemingly alien career discussions – Account planning spins around insight. Between the chicken salad and the key lime pie and coffee I didn’t fully nail what this insight was actually into.. – but I did learn that the hallmark of great account planning was being jealous of the “insight” when you saw it. I did not have a clue what these guys were awarding – I applauded with the best of them – for the best of them, but I did not have a snow flake in hell of knowing why.

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On the weekend we published the list of technology that was up for the Tech Science Oscar this year. This is the body of work to be considered rather than a formal shortlist. This process allows anyone who feels there is a prior claim to flag it – in a friendly and non-confrontational way before the formal awards start.

I scanned the list and knowing quite a few people, we shot off some emails to say congrats – in some cases actually alerting people to their ‘nominations’ – which was fun. But in doing so I was struck by the enormous contribution of ILM. Of the eleven submission, two were reported as being ILM supported: OBAQ/DOALL and Imocap. But actually a third: Ambient Occlusion was developed at ILM – but Ken McGaugh had moved on to DNeg and the Academy had used his new company in the press by mistake – a point Ken was first to point out. Still a fourth submission – Point-Based Color Bleeding has an ILM component – as it is a Renderman feature and Pixar has attached an ILM name to the submission in acknowledgment of the contribution ILM made. So of the eleven submission: fully four are ILM related.

Add to that picture that five of the remaining eleven submissions are outside our world of vfx: RigTight (1st call Studio equipment) which is an actual rigging system, Lens Motors from Heden, Audio desk from Euphonix or DI related Fuji DI stock and Film Master (Digital Vision).

What you are left with is a picture of a company commited to R&D and who’s contribution to our industry is simply immense. Congrats to ILM, and to all the considered submissions.

After watching UP again at a Sydney VES preview event, here are my 10 tips for better stereo 3D imaging, or what I like to call Lessons I learned from Pixar after watching the best 3D I have seen yet:

1. It needs to work in mono first. If watching the mono the cuts seem odd- (because it is cut that way just for stereo 3D), then you are approaching your film the wrong way. See Journey to the Centre of the Earth
2. Dont push it on divergency – my eyes look in, not out
3. Be careful with defocus and 3D stereo. In the real world if I look around the shot… I bring that part of the shot into focus.

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I am curious about everyone thoughts here, but I am getting the impression these days that people don’t go to their fave web sites anymore, rather they see links to stories or sites they know and follow those links or they just google a topic.

Do people write articles online anymore or is it all video and Youtube and linked from twitter??
What is interesting – speaking as someone who is on a team that produces a lot of original content, it is amazing to see the amount of reposting and linking that goes on when you do write an original story (vs reprint a press release). In one sense, everyone is microblogging to the few remain people who are actually blogging.

To be honest it was Scott Bourne who first called our site a blog to me – until that point I had never really considered fxguide as a blog – heck we started in 1999 – many years before the term blog was first heard.

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I was recently in LA talking to friends in the episodic market and we were discussing the move to digital production. In an article on fxguide in June we commented on a Hollywood Reporter article reported that 66 of 70 pilots this season was shot digital. The reason we recounted was that the possible SAG strike had put a threat may be over film production. The theory was that if a television show shoots on film it falls under SAG jurisdiction but if it is shot on any digital format the show moves to AFTRA jurisdiction. In talking to people on the front lines that is only part of the truth. They claim anecdotally that this was the public reason but producers have just come under such cost pressure and on a major network show you can lose say $150,000 an ep from the budget by moving from film to digital.

Why are these shows under such pressure ? Well the economy of course, … but also have you seen star salaries lately ? Quoting from AFR/TVguide, Kiefer Sutherland makes US$550,000 an ep, – yes an episode – for 24. Hugh Laurie (House) or Mariska Hargitay /Chris Meloni (Law & Order SUV) US$400,000, while comic actors like Charlie Sheen end up via salary and ownership banking US$875,000 an episode. Yes $875,000 for an episode for Two and a Half Men. The popular press has been reporting on how much worse it is over at reality TV recently. Ryan Seacrest (American Idol) is pocketing $15,000,000 a year. Even Jeff Probst gets US$150,000 an ep for tabulating those results on Survivor. Of course these are modest compared to feature film salaries.

As a Channel 4 Doco in the UK reminded us, “If anyone is going to be foolish enough to offer me one million dollars to do a movie, I’m not going to be foolish enough to turn it down’, was once remarked Elizabeth Taylor back in the 1970s. Today, $1m would just about get you a reasonable TV name, but not a film star. Hanks, Pitt, Gibson, Carrey and others are able to start negotiations at $US25 million per picture.

I know that a film star can open a feature and opening weekends drive box office, but back to TV for a second: the network viewership is splintered, the revenue from advertising fractured by online, direct, ad skipping, and time shifting. Even with increased revenue from TV shows on DVD, – do we really think Zach Braff on Scrubs is worth US$350,000 an episode? Clearly society does, but the by-product of this has to be smarter, tighter production. So if Julian McMahon wants $175,000 an episode for Nip/Tuck – you better not waste money in post !

[image title="newspace-0165" size="thumbnail" id="682" align="left" ]We’ve only been in our new offices for just over a year, but already we’re having to move to a new location. Our current beautiful old loft space is being torn down at the end of the year to make room for a Ronald McDonald House. It’s hard to complain, since it is a charity “hotel” of sorts for families whose children are in the hospital — and with a new one being built nearby there will most likely be a demand for affordable places to stay.

Liz Tate and Jim Annerino, owners of Hootenanny with whom we share space, found a nice space about a block away from our current location. It’s actually the former haunts of Outsider, a post company that shuttered earlier this year due to the economic conditions. This sad event for those owners actually ended up being a blessing for us, as the space already includes a machine room, cable runs, and edit/graphics suite-sized offices.

We have a bit of teardown to do at the space — removing the loathed drop ceilings, fluorescent lighting, and more. Our plan is to film during construction and show the building out process to our fxphd members. I’m sad to move…but change is always exciting.