behind the scenes and more
“Joan of Arc” is the working title for our latest production inside fxphd. In this entry of the production blog we share with you some of the gear and approaches we take when shooting material on green screen how we record lighting information for the creation of HDRs. This material is already part of several [...]
I’ve been excited about the possibilities of Thunderbolt on the MacBook Pro since it was announced almost a year ago. The problem was the wait. In a recent rc podcast, Jason and Mike commented about the delays in seeing products actually shipping. Due to various factors, including a lack of controller chips, Thunderbolt devices have taken a while to materialize. But we’re starting to see some cool products come to market that are especially suited to production and post production.
A few of our favorites include the Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter and the LaCie Little Big Disk. These fit in nicely with our needs of nimble production travel for fxguide and fxphd, where we shoot with the RED EPIC, SCARLET, and the 5D.
Why do they fit in nicely? Basically it’s the size/weight and the vast increase in speed.
In this, our first Professor Profile, we speak to Charles Poynton who is teaching the DCT301 – Camera Tech and Colour Science course this term. Every month or so we will be profiling a professor from fxphd so you can learn a little more about where they started, how they learned their craft and what motivates them. We are proud that Charles agreed to go first, and we hope you enjoy the series.
“So if you are a really keen young Camera operator and you see EXTENDED range – you’re going to pick it – I mean who wouldn’t? Normal and Extended – you’re 26 – you’re going to pick Extended,” joked Charles Poynton as part of his lecture at fxphd last week.
What Charles was talking about was the Extended range on the ARRI Alexa, but the same discussion could be had about the Marvels Cine Profile for the 5D vs say the Technicolor Cine profile.
Maia Kayser is a Lead Character Animator at ILM. In this, our first video studio profile, we travel to the Presidio in San Francisco to Industrial Light & Magic to see what it is like to be a woman doing digital character animation in films such as Rango.
The workflow for VFX to extract Lens Data and Tilt/Roll information from the Log-C Quicktime files coming out of an Alexa Plus – this allows one to extract dynamic per frame Alexa meta data from Alexa files. (This was originally posted at fxguide.com)
With the start of the new term, we have redesigned the home page and we have significantly altered this blog. We started this blog to keep you up to speed with the Dean’s activities – but we decided you can do that easily elsewhere – in particular via the fxphDOD podcast. This blog will now be featuring production tips and updates from the projects that we are doing.
From all the team here at fxphd, the Professors, staff and team – have a really wonderful Xmas and best wishes for the New Year. – Travel safe these Holidays.
This week we have just returned from Siggraph Asia and I wanted to share a really odd side of Siggraph: The Emerging Technology exhibits. This is weird science, actually this is often just weird. I am not sure what the criteria for getting into the Emerging Tech exhibition exactly is, but I suspect it involves [...]
After having earlier been accepted to Cannes, our little film BEAR has been accepted into Sundance. 64 short films were selected from 4083 submissions for Sundance. Like Spider (its sequel) before it, Bear will be in competition. Congrats to dir. Nash Edgerton and the team – especially the member of fxphd who did such a [...]