IFF Boston, Part 2
April 27th, 2009
My second viewing of the 1st shorts package and the Boston IFF was just as good, if not better than the first. First off all, Hanging out with the Tower 37 crew before hand was great! I got to catch up with everyone and see some people I hadn’t seen in quite a long time. After the show, we all made our way to a bar/restaurant in Somerville (wish I could remember the name!) for drinks. One of our ranks, Basaam, did a suberb job of explaining to us all why he thought the film Undone (one of the shorts in the festival) was one of the best. Previously, I had thought the film was too long, too ambiguous and contained several elements that I thought were a tad cliche. Basaam, however, explained in great detail about the language of film, and how Undone was speaking that language very effectively. I came out of the discussion with a new appreciation for the short.
All in all, I had a great time, and I can’t wait to hear about the two other festivals that took place that night!
IFF Boston, Part 1
April 23rd, 2009
Tonight, I went to see “The Incident at Tower 37″ at the Boston Independent Film Festival! It screened with 5 other short animated films, one of which was by Don Hertzfeldt. Mr. Hertzfeldt has been doing traditional hand drawn animation since before I was born, so I was pretty excited to see some of my work in the same screening.
In my opinion, Tower 37 had much steeper competition in Boston than in did in Providence, but I really think it held it’s own in fine style. The other films ranged from rather abstract mixed media to full 3D animations. Along with Don Hertzfeldt’s hilarious yet powerfully thought provoking “I Am So Proud of You”, I really liked “Skhizein” by Jérémy Clapin. The latter was about man who finds himself 91 centimeters to the left… I won’t spoil it!
I’m looking forward to Saturday when I’ll be joined by some more of the crew, at which point part 2 of this story will follow! Also, If you are planning on going, buy your tickets online now and get to Davis Square an hour before the show starts. I showed up a half hour early and the line went around the corner, so I can only imagine the crowd on a Saturday night!
finishing school
March 26th, 2009
So recently at work, I’ve been assigned many tasks which have been dubbed “finishing school”. Finishing school is basically another word for anything it takes to put the final touches on a shot. For the most part, that involves painting. Painting is a great way to fix things like crunchy motion blur, popping keys and my favorite/most hated thing in the world, hair.
When restoring motion blur, I generally have to reveal the background plate first, then paint in as much of the original motion blur as I can. If the original plate shows through too much, I have to reconstruct blur by using a smudge tool or simply lightly painting in a solid color. Many frames later, I have to take my freshly painted frames, take a difference matte between the comp that I painted on top of and my painted frames so that I can restore the grain that I lost through blurring and smudging.
Hair is a little different story. In my experience so far, there are two types of hair. windy, fast moving hair and stiff furry hair. First of all, the reason hair needs to be painted in the first place is because pulling a key and doing edge refinement on hair is a) very difficult and time consuming and b) not worth the time in most cases. Windy hair is easy. For example, let’s say you replace the background of a shot with an actor in the foreground. Her hair is majestically blowing in the wind. I get the comp with most of the hair visible in the comp, but where small blurry strands of hair pass over the replaced background, they disappear. All I really have to do in this situation is find the right color and opacity to paint with, and carefully paint back in the hair frame by frame. Since those windy little strands move so much, painting on each frame works great since the hair jumps around so much in the plate anyway.
On the other hand… If no one bothered to comb the actor’s hair before shooting and he or she doesn’t move around too much, you’ve got a real problem on your hands. Small little stiff hairs that stay put are just as hard to key as those long fast moving ones (at least they are on the show I’m working on… we’ve had to work with some real crappy footage). In this case, I’ve had to start a new comp, using the frames from the compositor in order to track in still frames of hair. Some times, this isn’t so bad. If the actor doesn’t turn his/her head, it’s easy to get a good track and integrate the patch of hair into the rest of the head. If, however, the actor tilts and rotates (which of course happens way more) I have to do a million different little patches and tie it all together with paint strokes. This lead me to my current dilemma:
For the past 3 days, I have been working on the head of a single character in a single shot that is no larger than 400 square pixels when he is closest to the camera. The shot itself has been through 65 versions while I have taken it up to version 70. The pipeline of this shot is as follows… I first work in Nuke to track in patches of hair on top of the comp. This involves trackers, 2d transform nodes and gridwarp nodes in order to keep it looking like it should really be on his head. once that’s done, I bring those ‘prepaint’ frames into Silhouette so i can paint out color bleed from the original plate, blend the hair patches into the rest of his hair and fix some odds and ends (this process cannot be replicated by the way… if i change the patches, I have to repaint…). Next, since no one was able to stabilize the plate appropriately in Nuke, we had to have a Flame artist do it. So I have to take the frames onto a flame and run it through a Furnace Steadiness node. Finally, I take it back into Nuke so I can split screen a tree from an earlier version that somehow started to sizzle in the later version.
Now… some of this is bitching. I could re order these steps to reduce my work, but every step is so dependent and fragile that at this point, no one wants to mix things up and change the order of opperations. A rationale that I am ok with considering if something goes wrong with it at this point, I might go crazy.
Anyway, we’re almost done with the movie which is great since I’m getting very tired of working till midnight every day!
March 2nd, 2009
I want to talk a little bit about Twitter. Specifically, what I like about it, what I think it should be used for and also what I don’t like about it. First of all, to get a good idea about what Twitter is, where it came from and a really good look at what people use it for right now, click the title of this post for an awesome TED Talk about it.
Alright… I like it because it’s short and sweet. You can’t drone on and on (like I do here). If you wanna say something, you have to do it fast. In terms of sharing information, it’s mostly done by links to external websites. If you follow a lot of people doing different things, you get exposed to a vast array of articles, information and interesting things that you would otherwise never even think about. From a personal aspect, I enjoy the short snippets of what other people, specifically my friends, are doing. I don’t want a minute by minute journal of their day, but it makes me think of people that I would otherwise rarely think about.
I think Twitter becomes annoying once in a while if I don’t find people’s tweets interesting. For instance, I started following a website called WindowsObserver. I received a tweet about ever minute about completely inane things involving individual people I didn’t know. Basically, I think those that tweet should remember their audience and make their tweets relevant to as many people as possible. If you want to keep your friends informed of your dinner plans, get a second twitter account just for them because I don’t want to hear about it!
Basically, I like being able to share information with a lot of people at once. It keeps me occupied during the day. It gives me new things to read that I otherwise wouldn’t think about. To everyone that says they hate Twitter, I say that’s alright! Don’t use it if you don’t like it! It’s just as much of a problem as too much e-mail and people using the internet too much in general. It’s overall impact is actually pretty small, so don’t freakin’ worry about it!
The Incident at 92Y Tribeca
February 27th, 2009
Last night I went to the Hampshire College Alumni Screening. The Alumni Reel was absolutely incredible. I had no idea that so many Hampshire students have gone on to do such amazing things! The work represented spanned the gamut from short animation to Hollywood visual effects. I’m just as happy to be a part of the post-Hampshire community as I was to be part of the student body. I did not get much of a chance to speak with some of the older alumni that were there since I was mostly preoccupied with The Incident at Tower 37 which screened after the Alumni Reel.
First of all, a shout out to the students, alumni and Chris who made the film look and sound incredible! It was a unique experience to see the finished product of a project that I had worked on for close to 3 years in various stages. Being able to reconnect with those who I had worked on the film with was also a great experience. I’ve gotten so many new ideas and perspectives on Tower 37, Hampshire’s media production program(s) and the entertainment industry in general. I’m going to try to recap all the things I got to talk to people about, but I know I’m going to miss a lot of it. Here it goes…
Tower 37 as a collaborative student project. Chris mentioned that the collaborative approach to teaching computer animation is very uncommon among undergraduate institutions. I think this is an eerily true statement. My favorite analogy that I heard was teaching computer animation individually would be like telling an actor that in order to learn how to act, you would have to write the story and script, build the sets, rig the lights and play all the characters yourself. Clearly, that would be ludicrous. So why is computer animation taught largely to individuals? In the short time I’ve been working professionally, I can already see the results of this educational isolation. While the artists that come from individualistic programs are incredibly creative and talented, they find it more difficult to work with others on a project. This is not necessarily true of their interpersonal interactions, but rather their technical interactions. For example, rigging a 3d model for animation requires not just joints and painted skin weights. It also requires self-explanatory controls. If someone is used to working alone on projects, making your work accessible to others could be a completely foreign concept, but one that is very necessary in the professional world. Anyway, Tower 37 has prepared all those who worked on it with an intimate understanding of what it means to work collaboratively and effectively with others.
Taking a project from start to finish. Last night, after seeing my name in the credits, I felt very strange. My time spent on the project seems so long ago and so removed from what the film looks and sounds like that it’s difficult for me to “own” the project as I once did. Our VFX Supervisor at Brickyard recently passed on a nugget of wisdom that really hit home with me last night. That is, it doesn’t matter how hard you work. It matters how smart you work. Anyone can take a shot from 0% to 90%. It takes real guile, skill and confidence to take a shot from 90% to 99.9%. I would say that I effectively took most of the film to around 85% to 95%. It was those who came on the project after I left that truly finished the film. Though, I don’t want to put myself down too much… After thinking about it, I realize that the last 10% wouldn’t have been possible if the groundwork and infrastructure hadn’t been laid out. If I and those like me hadn’t gone through the steps we went through, there would be no movie. So therefore, I am pretty proud that I was able to do all of the things I did and that I really do feel like I own parts of the film, even though I didn’t finish them.
Hampshire College in geographic context. I’ve been reading and hearing a lot recently about Plymouth Rock Studios and the MA entertainment tax credit. By 2010, a full capacity movie studio will be built in Plymouth, MA. Combined with the tax credit available in MA, this should bring an unprecidented amount of entertainment industry work into the state. With this in mind, I really feel like Hampshire’s unique program with its collaborative approach can and will produce talented artists and filmmakers just in time to take advantage of the jobs and opportunities that having a studio in the state will bring. Several people I’ve spoken with recently have told me and down right encouraged me to pick up and move to LA. LA is where the work is. However, I’m resisting that temptation in the hopes that I, and other’s like me, can weather the storm and participate and influence the birth of a movie and entertainment industry right here in Massachusetts.
endurance and rotoscoping
February 2nd, 2009
I’ve been made aware that it’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything. The title of this entry is endurance and rotoscoping, so let me try to explain what that means. January has been a very busy month. Since January 1st, I have been at work every single day except a single Sunday. I’m fairly exhausted, but also quite happy with what’s been happening and how much I’ve gotten accomplished just in this month.
At work, we’ve had deliveries to make twice a week. Every Monday, we post low-resolution quicktime movies of our progress and on Friday, we ship a hard drive full of 2k .dpx sequences to LA. This means late nights during the week to get ready for Friday and weekends to get ready for Monday.
Another thing that has changed since the new year started has been our methods and practices regarding rotoscoping. There are 4 dedicated rotoscope artists and one of us is a lead roto artist. Her promotion carried new responsibilities that no one had before. Appart from rotoscoping herself, her responsibility is to schedule the 3 other’s time as well as her own and to approve roto as either “temp” or final”. This change happened at roughly the same time as our new VFX supervisor, Sean, arrived. Since his arrival, nearly every procedure has been adjusted and tweaked for efficiency and I have to say, I think we all feel a little silly at the way we were working before he arrived. At least, I do!
First off, my job as a roto artist has been defined clearly and concretely. I no longer use Nuke to roto, nor am I ever expected to pull keys or provide a blurred edge to a compositor. Before this rule, it was a long back and forth between roto artist and compositor about where an edge should be, how blurry and edge was or how best to pull a key. We now use a program designed for roto called Silhouette. There is no question as to what my final product should look like. Any lens or motion blur, any fine hairs, any kind of transparency is to be addressed by a compositor. At first, it was frustrating because I felt that my job had become too simple and I wasn’t being trusted enough as a compositor, since that’s really what I want to do. However, we’re absolutely churning through roto these days and the compositors seem to also be churning through shots at an amazing rate. Just last week, the drive with 2k comps on it left Brickyard with 78 shots on it. That’s way more than we ever sent in one delivery.
Anyway, I am super tired from working all the time, but I am so happy to have had (and keep having) this experience. The other benefit to working this way is that I feel like I’m getting really good at rotoscoping. Since I don’t even think about how blurry an edge is, or anything like that, I devote 100% of my time to animating shapes. Using trackers and corner pins help a lot to stabilize shapes, but there’s no substitute for layering in motion. It really reminds me a lot about what I know of character animation…
When I start a shot, I first look at what I have to do. If I have to roto houses, or some other kind of rigid object or if I have to roto people or animals. Is the camera panning, dollying or rotating? At this point, I decide if I should try to use trackers to extract motion. Things like houses and cars and planes are great to track since their shape doesn’t change very much. Even if there is a change in perspective, it’s worth it to track a point and animate the change in perspective after the motion has been applied to the shape. People are generally not good candidates for tracking points since clothes, hair and muscles change shape often, especially if the person is walking, or shaking their head or something. If this is the case, I go into character animation mode.
First, I draw separate shapes for parts of the body that I know move independently. Take, for instance, an actor shaking his or her head. I’d probably make separate shapes for the right and left side of the face, both sides and top of the hair, nose, chin and mayb eye brows and neck.
Next, I start to block out the motion based on key poses. If the motion is too eratic or it’s too difficult to tell when the actor has reached a pose, I just pick an arbitrary interval like 6 or 12 frames. Once that’s complete, it’s just a matter of subdividing each frame region until the motion matches. Sometimes, I can get away with changing the interpolation of keyframes to ease in or out, but I have found that it’s quicker to simply place a key fram in between and is also easier to diagnose problems later on.
The other important thing I’ve learned is to try not to ever manipulate individual points on a curve. Instead, try to transform the shape as a whole. This avoids that “wonky” drifting that happens all too often when you start pushing and pulling points. Obviously, sometimes you have to change the shape, like when an actor turns his head.
I remember early on, some one giving me a “standard” time for how long roto should take and it was something like 1 minute per frame or something like that. Now I know that that is an average of all possible circumstances, but it’s starting to make sense to me. Sometimes, you can really nail your key frames and the rest of the motion is automatic. sometimes, you have no choice but to touch each and every frame. I don’t think I roto that fast, nor does any one in reality, but I have to say that I understand it more now, and don’t think it’s a ridiculous number.
Anyway, We’ll be finishing in late March which seems to be approaching faster and faster. I am happy, however, that I’ll get to go to the Alumni Screening in New York this month to see “The Incident at Tower 37″ finally finished! I really am getting pretty excited about seeing it. I remember just last year feeling as if I couldn’t stand to see another fish person for the rest of my life. But now, I’m so happy that it’s been finished and from what I understand, it’s looking and sounding great!
Websites could get cinema-style ratings
December 29th, 2008
I saw this article and found it kind of interesting. My knee-jerk reaction was pretty negative. I’m a big fan of the internet remaining relatively free of government regulation. However, I started thinking about how free-speech is limited in the real world. That got me thinking about what the internet really is.
What the internet is, is very different from what the internet was. In its infancy, the internet was available to very few people. Back then, it truly was a network of computers talking to each other over the phone. No one was selling things, no one was stalking anyone and it was hard to break a law while surfing the web. People were simply sharing information. One of the unique properties of yester-web was the relative anonymity it provided. On a superficial level, no one was required, nor expected to say who they really were. There was no individual identity. On a technical level, most personal internet access was done via dial-up connections an ISP with a pool of IP addresses. Each time you dialed up, your IP address would change. You’d basically start over.
Now, the internet is becoming more and more about identity. In order to offer highly specialized and personalized services and advertising, websites large and small require a user name and password. More often than not, this un/p combination is linked to an e-mail address, maybe even an address and for merchant sites, a credit/debit card. Since at its core the web still doesn’t care who you really are, every private website requires its users to identify separately on that website. It just so happens that out of convenience, most people choose the same name over and over for all of their web activity. Various efforts have been made to standardize web identity, but none have really been taken seriously and have all but fizzled out.
The other huge difference between then and now is the legal issues surrounding the internet. The internet is no longer simply computers talking across long-distance phone lines. The internet is becoming the backbone and thickly woven fabric of every day life. The economy, government, private commerce, military, schools; all of these organizations rely on the internet. Therefore, laws governing conduct and property must apply and be adapted to the internet.
If theft is possible over the internet, laws must be there to protect people. If intimidation, fraud or libel is possible over the internet, laws must be there to protect people. Arson and destructive terrorism is possible over the internet! The internet has grown out of its pre-teen years and is now in full-blown adolescence. It needs guidance in order to mature into a happy and healthy adult-hood.
So to bring it back to web-ratings… I think it’s a good idea. I think it can be a valuable tool for parents, just as movie-ratings are. I also believe that if a website does not wish to submit their own website for rating, they should not be forced to. Like the Creative Commons movement, this web-rating system should not try to enforce rules, laws and decorum. Rather, it should be there to support it in good faith.
Holiday Update
December 28th, 2008
I am still working for Brickyard VFX on the same movie. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even like the movie, but I count my blessings every day that I get to work on any movie at all! Our due date for the entire movie is March 23 and as of yet, we haven’t been told of another movie in the works. This is a little concerning since if there is no project for us to work on, we don’t work. I am, however, confident that something will come along soon because they’ve started to fill full-time staff positions which means they want the company to be a more permanent enterprise. So, in a nut shell, I hope to be here in Boston for a while.
The one big thing that is supposed to change quite soon is that I will be moving to Cambridge. I found an apartment about 2 blocks from Central Square, which is close to 2 miles from my office which should make my commute much much shorter. My future roommates are all my age and are either working or in grad school. I’m very much looking forward to moving to my new place and getting settled for the new year!
The Proposal Trailer
December 10th, 2008
Well, the trailer for the movie I’ve been working on is finally out. You can view it here on Trailer Addict. Now you get to see what I do every day. In all honesty, there’s not a lot of my work in there given the fact that rotoscoping is not exactly the most visible part of the post-production process.
Anyway, things are well. Very little has transpired that is new or exciting, however I remain ever hopeful.
Recent Events
June 17th, 2009
Quite a bit has happened since I last updated this little soap box. First and foremost, The Proposal, the film that I had worked on for nearly 9 months, is being released in theaters this Friday. If you stay all the way until the end, you can see my name in the credits! Go see it to support the Massachusetts film industry!
After The Proposal wrapped up, I had about a week off before being called back to work on a commercial, and about 3 weeks ago, I was “reactivated” to work on a fairly complex shot for another movie that Brickyard has been working steadily on for quite a while.
In other professional news, Brickyard Filmworks is trying to launch a new training program designed to attract and train talent for entry-level positions when Brickyard wrangles in a new film. I think it’s a great move, not only for Brickyard, but also for the industry in MA. If enough serious talent is in MA, then more and more work will come out of LA and into my favorite state!
Tags: Brickyard, Proposal
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