Cupid

First off, I really have to thank my friend and former work colleague, Melvin, for providing me with this opportunity. As per my previous post, I have spent a lot of time learning about VFX compositing, and he came to me with the offer for a VFX sequence in his short film. The timing was perfect, as even a few months earlier, I wouldn't have felt ready to tackle it (I certainly wouldn't have turned it down though!).

Melvin is presently studying at AFTRS, Australia's premier film school. This is his second year, and he's spent the last several months directing Cupid, a short film about that dude who shoots love arrows (not a euphemism).

I'm not certain if I should be sharing my shots from the film, since, although my shots are completed, the final film is not. But I of course am putting them into my demo reel, so they'll be posted soon enough. So for the interim, here's a test I did for the major effect shot (that would be Shot 7 -- oh, how I hated you!):


Gives nothing away, right? Well, let's just say that it's a reveal shot, obviously of a character. To explain what's going on would be to spoil the film's major conceit, and I'm not a spoiler! At any rate, that was just a quick and dirty test to discover how to do the shot in question. The final result is quite different to what you see above, but tests like this pave the way for the final, more complex composite. From the above shot, Melvin was able to instantly send me feedback on the elements he liked, and the ones he did not, although I must say that the core of what you see in that youtube vid is still intact.

What's changed is the stylistic approach. This is because the design was never really nailed down at any point during the process, instead being an elusive, amorphous blob of potential that manifested itself more and more clearly as time went on. It's a quirk of the manner in which Melvin and I worked together, and the upshot is that we learned some imperative lessons when the fat lady started singing.

So consider this a teaser: I intend to outlay the top lessons I've learned from the experience in a future post. For now, I'll tell you that it damn near wiped me out! It's almost a week since my part in all of this ended, and I'm still not fully recovered. But we literally took it to the last possible second to complete it all. I'm talking about starting the final render 9 hours before it needed to be handed over for grading. That after a long, sleepless night and some sleep-deprived delerium in between short periods of work. But I took comfort in the fact that this is exactly what happens in the industry at large. Livin the dream, man ... livin the dream!

A preview

Ok, so here's that shot I've been talking about. I still haven't finished it, but it's a nice work-in-progress for you to check out:



So the animation is out, and the camera move gets downright weird at one point, but that's okay, because it was all about lighting and compositing, and in that sense, I feel that I've almost nailed it. I'm just gonna add volume lighting and some more particle effects -- and a heat-vapour once the rocket's flame clicks off -- and it should be done.

After that, I'll put together a tutorial on how I did it, but no promises just yet :)

Now then, let's get pished!

WIP for year's end

Was just impatient to show off a work-in-progress of my recent project. As mooted before, it's just a practice exercise for me to learn with, but I'm happy with what I've got so far. Check out these pics:

Before

After

As you can see, I've dramatically lit the scene by playing in Combustion. I will reveal later on how I did this, once I've got the whole thing sorted out. Note also that the flames on the logs were added later. It was made in the same file in 3D Studio Max, but rendered as a separate pass. I think it can do with a bit of tweaking here and there, but it shows the power of compositing and how, with a bit of smarty-pants trickery, you can get some great atmos out of an otherwise boring shot.

Coming up next will be some volumetric fog and some extra particle effects, plus the full video which will really show off what I'm trying to achieve here. But that will have to wait until 2008!

Tail end of Xmas; a new year; impatient to do work

So the big consumerism day has come and gone, and now we're all gonna get really pissed , set of fireworks and pretend for about 5 minutes that we're much better people than we really are -- really!

To be honest, I want to get that behind me as well. I suppose I've grown past the whole new-years thing, and I'd much rather sink my teeth into some graphics instead.

I've been working on a test shot, which I shall reveal soon, designed to teach myself how to work with lighting and some other elements when compositing a 3D shot. I've spent a few hours here and there over the last 2 weeks putting this shot together, and it's almost time to render everything out and sink my teeth into the exercise proper. But I didn't go into work today (what with there being no actual work to do) and therefore did no extra on this shot. And since I'm not there, I can't even post up a work-in-progress pic. Oh well. I may do some tomorrow, and render it out whilst I get drunk over the new year. Then come back on January 3rd and try with an almighty headache (so I'm presuming) to work the composite.

Well I have the highest hopes of it all working out, because then I will have passed a milestone in terms of creating a visual effects shot. After that, I will only need to perfect my camera tracking and on-set data knowledge, and I might be worth some money to the industry!

By the way, if someone is willing to give of their time to help me learn about on-set data collection, and how to use it, please email me!

End of 2007 -- peace out! Let's not screw up '08, eh?