Monday VFX Test
This is what James and I did this morning. Considering we'd never done 3D tracking, camera matchmoving, compositing 3D elements into scenes using After Effects before today, it's quite an accomplishment. Some of the keying/mattes aren't fully clean, but this was more about matching the 3D elements to the greenscreen footage. I'm happy with the results.
Tech Support: Life in Computer Repair
This is a video that I worked on with a friend right after high school and before college. It's a parody of Trauma: Life in The ER. Jason and I sat down the night before the shoot and wrote out a loose outline, which was basically some ideas of problems that could happen to computers. We gathered up all the spare computer parts lying around my garage and brought it to his house and we just started shooting. I think I set up one light, but that was it. It surprises me that we were able to make this with out any script or much planning. Why can't shooting be like this now? Anyway, I found it again the other day and thought it was still pretty good. And yes, we do know that the things we're saying don't actually make sense. It's a parody. I know you can't put dsl on a laptop… it needs a faster processor. Heh.
I have a problem with action-adventure games…
I like adventure games. I like the investigating, the puzzle solving, the strong story-lines. I like action games and first-person shooters. But recently I found that I have a problem with Nintendo-styletm action-adventure games. This genre includes the recent Zelda, Metroid, and Paper Mario games. I haven't finished any of the recent games in any of those categories. I've gotten to the final boss and lost interest and it's not because they're not good games and that I didn't enjoy the gameplay or the stories. It's because they're too predictable.
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Maps - To The Sky Video
This is the video we made as an entry to the Radar Festival. When we chose the song (which was a while ago) we had a much different concept for the video. Not entirely different, but different enough that we changed everything we had to shoot. At one point we were an hour away from our scheduled shoot time on the original concept with one actor (out of about 10 necessary actors) and a green screen in a room barely large enough to hold it. We shot the green screen footage the next night after discussing what to do to make the video work. That was actually a recurring theme to our discussions while working on this. We'd get to a point that seemed impossible to pass given the time restraints and the reality of what a limited crew can accomplish. But we figured it out and I'm pretty happy with the result. And happy it's done. Mostly. You can also check out some still images from the video in this gallery.
Heinz Top This Commercial Contest
I know you can view my commercial on my website, and it's a little higher quality than youtube, but if you like it please view and vote for my entry over at youtube as much as possible, thanks! Click the image above to view it.
Heinz Ketchup: The Desert
Arrowhead Water Commercial
It's been a while since we've shot anything (we being Dawnrunner Productions). Luckily though, Darrell had a simple one-shot idea for us to shoot this past weekend. We headed out to Treasure Island in the late afternoon with four giant bottles of water. It was amazingly windy but that probably helped to give us the perfect clear view of the San Francisco skyline. Unfortunately it also meant that there was a constant mist of ocean spray hitting the lens. I did my best to keep it clean, but there's nothing you can do in the middle of the shot. Darrell also chose the music for the commercial and now that it's edited together I think it's a perfect fit. I tweaked the colors slightly from the camera orginal, but not much. In final cut I duplicated the video layer, set the blending mode to overlay and applied a gaussian blur and tweaked the levels. That gives it a nice smooth glow effect. I'm really happy with the results.
Check out Dawnrunner.com
The film production crew that I've been working with lately has updated their website. If anyone reading this is in need of a commercial, music video, or corporate video, contact Dawnrunner Productions so we can help you out!
Discussion problem from my math class
We had a pretty interesting discussion in my online math class this week. Here was the prompt from my teacher:
Module 13: Color Planet
People who write about the theory of color often envision the range of visible colors as a geometric "color solid." To explore this concept, imagine we live on a planet of which every cubic inch is a different color. The familiar "color wheel," containing the colors of the rainbow at their highest intensities, is a band around the equator. The North pole is pure white and the South pole is pure black. Let's say pure red is located at the point of 0º latitude and 0º longitude, with yellow at 120º W and blue at 120º E of this point (I am using the simplified red-yellow-blue color wheel we all learned about in grade school–you CMY and RGB sophisticates can keep your comments to yourselves for now!)
Describe what it would be like to travel around this planet. What colors are on the North-South axis through the center of the planet? What color do you think corresponds to the place you were born? What would happen, color-wise, if you moved West from that location? What about if you moved North? What happens if you dig straight down? Can you come up with any general rules relating movement on or within the planet to what color changes you'd experience?
If all visible colors are uniformly distrbuted on and within this planet, what is its shape? Is it spherical like the Earth, or not? Explain your answer.
We'll be talking about both the nature of color perception and the geometrical mapping of space in this topic, so try to check in often throughout this module–there will be many further questions for you to comment on as we explore and develop our understanding of this color planet.
And my response: (after the many other responses to the orginal prompt the question turned to finding specific colors based on Lat./Long.) (more…)
Game Developer’s Conference 2007 Footage
The Game Developer's Conference was pretty insane. We ended up shooting over 15 hours of footage during the week. Most of the time we were running two cameras gathering interviews and b-roll from around the conference. I'm pretty happy with the footage we shot, particularly the shots from the Nintendo and Sony keynotes. We were lucky enough to get seats in the first row for both of the keynotes and I got some really good shots.