Inception
In other news, I had this weird dream in which Mick Jagger broke into my house to reclaim a painting that I had previously stolen from him. Upon catching him in the act he asked me to do some VFX shots for the movie version of his heist which would have required a CGI replacement of his head except for his lower jaw which was to be shot in front of greenscreen.
I have difficulties piecing together the images that were mashed up by my subconciousness, but this awesome dialogue reminiscent of Clients From Hell probably played some part in it:
And if one day Mick Jagger is in a movie like this remember: you’ve read about the plot here first 🙂
Tron
The new TRON trailer is out, which brought back memories of a TV show from the 80s. AUTOMAN! Check out the opener. Pretty neat VFX for a TV show back then.
Will neon glow become the next best design element, superseding the Apple-style gloss effect? We’ll find out soon enough.
Here’s a music video that already does a good job at resurrecting a 30 year-old image of cyberspace: Mark Ronson – Bang Bang Bang
edit: great, youtube disabled embedding of the video. Go this way instead.
Mingr TV commercial
Here’s the video for the Chinese Mingr commercial I did at Pixomondo Shanghai last year.
Tasks: compositing lead, art direction, set supervision
Enjoy!
[flowplayer src=’mingr.m4v’ width=640 height=360 splash=’mingr.jpg’]
If you can’t make it good…
Found on FXRant. Tracing back the source of the image through countless blogs leads to a t-shirt at threadless though.
When movies first came out with audio, did the directors abuse the new technology in the way 3D is employed now? Did they crank up the volume all the way all the time just to prove to the audience that they can make use of “this new thing”? Or are 3D-sceptics like people who decried talkies as “just a fad”? Well, at least there was never a need to wear hearing aids just to enjoy the new technology.
Except for Avatar all current 3D movies use the technology like HTML was (ab)used in the early days of the internet. Make it blink! Make it scroll! Except you didn’t need any special glasses to look at web pages. It’ll take some time until both producers and directors accept 3D as “just another tool” to tell an appealing story. For Alice it was unnecessary in my opinion and turned a good-looking movie with an ok story into an amusement park ride for children.
Right now, given the mass of movies converted to 3D it really seems like studios are treating 3D as a fad and are trying to make some quick bucks by winning back viewers from 2D home cinema and pirated downloads before the hype is fading.
Sure, an audience that flocks Transformers 2 will always flock Transformers 3D (and Titans was a box office hit as well despite the bad ratings and bad 3D). But regular movies in 3D? Where the camera doesn’t move all the time and nothing gets thrown into your face? Letting your eyes wander in a static shot with defocused parts in it destroys the illusion of 3D. Cameron knew how to reduce the depth of those wide panoramic shots in Avatar. But will lesser known directors be able to convince their producers to spend extra millions on 3D just to deliver almost 2D-like shots that suit the cinematography of a slower movie? And will the audience pay for expensive tickets and put on those annoying glasses for that?
Mega Piranha!
I’ll go on record saying that there are far too few movies out there with titles that have “mega” in them. Luckily, as of 2010, there is…. (cue drum roll)
MEGA PIRANHA!
Watch the trailer in all it’s B-movie glory:
Yes, it’s not a spoof. Check IMDB. The effects look like something that came on a free training DVD for After Effects (although the CGI piranhas are not that bad if you put them in perspective…). Reminds me of another great piece of art called “Shark in Venice” which just features stock footage of sharks, lots of continuity mistakes and Stephen Baldwin’s man boobs. Wait a second… He actually was diagnosed with breast cancer according to Wikipedia? I guess that makes that joke a bit tasteless. Oh, and he’s also a hard-core right-wing guy who “threatened to move to Canada if Barack Obama was elected” (source: also Wikipedia)? Life is stranger than fiction.
Anyway, I’m digressing. This is a good opportunity to post a video clip that I had lying around on my hard disk for quite a while. It’s from a SciFi TV movie called “Heatstroke” and it’s exceptional in its goofiness. I think that’s a nice example of misguided CGI. A guy in a rubber suit would at least have given the impression that somebody cared about the movie. I pity the guys who had to work on this beach scene:
[flowplayer src=’heatstroke_beach_scene.mp4′ width=608 height=336 splash=’heatstroke.jpg’]
Pixels
Short animation by Patrick Jean and the French VFX studio “One More Production“:
The idea is not that new, for example there has been a Röyksopp music video (“Happy Up Here”) featuring space invaders a while ago. But the compositing on “Pixels” is really nice and there are a lot of great ideas from arcade-style start to finish.
(via “No Fat Clips“)
Los Compos
Auf der Website der spanischen “Etérea Studios” gibt es einen guten Überblick über verschiedene einfache Tricks, um rohe CG-Renderings etwas aufzupeppen. Die Screenshots sind für Photoshop und der Text auf Spanisch, aber dennoch sollte es ein leichtes sein, die Tipps zu verstehen und in Fusion/Nuke/AE umzusetzen.
