April 2010
103 posts
“A celebrity is one who works hard all his life to become well-known and then...”
– Fred Allen (1894 – 1956) U.S. comedian and satirist
The Effects of Dragons, Fire, and Fur at...
CGSociety :: Production Focus 29 April 2010, by Renee Dunlop Just as the title, ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ implies, DreamWorks had an unruly task to wrangle. From layers of furry clothing to characters with two heads, there was a lot to keep an eye on. By the time the DreamWorks Animation film was in the can, VFX Supervisor Craig Ring might have wished he had two heads (and could...
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient...”
– Dr. Seuss (1904 – 91) U.S. cartoonist and writer
VFX Fall Preview: 10 Movies to Watch
*Where the Wild Things Are (Warner Bros., Oct. 16) But the visual effects that are usually the most beloved each year are the ones that move us. Framestore, Digital Rain, Iloura and Quantum Creation FX are all part of bringing Spike Jonze’s version of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s tale to the big screen. Judging from the trailer, the combination of digital faces and...
VFX Fall Preview: 10 Movies to Watch
*A Christmas Carol (Buena Vista, Nov. 6) Robert Zemeckis and his ImageMovers (with some help from Gentle Giant Studios and Plowman Craven & Associates) have crafted another performance capture epic. This time Jim Carrey takes on Scrooge of all ages as well as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future in this stylized version of Charles Dickens’ classic. With each film, Zemeckis...
VFX Fall Preview: 10 Movies to Watch
* The Box (Warner Bros., Nov. 6) Richard Kelly’s horror thriller finds Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple presented with a twisted gift. Inside a box is a button, if they choose to push it they will receive $1 million, but as a result a stranger will die somewhere in the world. Providing vfx for this Twilight Zone-like tale are Pixel Liberation Front, Gradient Effects and Quantum...
“’Hope’ is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And...”
– Emily Dickinson (1830 – 86) U.S. poet
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time , An Interview...
Hollywood News: How do you assess this summer’s box office battle? Can Prince of Persia win in spite of not being in 3-D? Jerry Bruckheimer: I hope so. I don’t know if it will win it, but it will certainly be a contender. It’s a terrific film, so we hope for the best. Jake, you’ve dabbled in action before. How did you enjoy being a full-on action hero? Jake Gyllenhaal: You were struggling for...
Can You Create The con folder?
We all have read that the ”con” folder can’t be created in Windows XP. Neither can a folder with no name can be created. Well, guess what it’s possible to do both. And here’s how its done :- *Rename folder from the right click option…….. Now press alt and press 255… (The digits must be pressed from the numpad or using the fn key in laptops) To create...
Password Protect Folders Without Software
For this to work you must :- *Be having a login password for your user account. *Have formatted the partition where the folder is using NTFS. And here’s how its done :- *Right-Click the folder you want to make password protected and chose “Sharing and Security” *Check the “Make This Folder Private” box. The password for this folder to open will be...
Alice’s Visual Challenge: Make You Believe ‘World...
HOLLYWOOD — Not unlike the March Hare, visual effects guru Ken Ralston hurled everything but the kitchen sink at Alice in Wonderland to conjure a big-screen version of Lewis Carroll’s magical mystery world. “The whole movie is based on the fact that we’ve got to make you believe this world of insanity,” the four-time Oscar winner says. “Therefore the audience needs to believe Alice’s interactions...
The Last Airbender is Also Being Converted into 3D
Deadline has learned that Paramount Pictures is jumping on the post-conversion 3D scam bandwaggon with M. Night Shyamalan-directed The Last Airbender. I had a feeling this was coming as producer Frank Marshall filed the following tweets earlier this month: Looking at 3-D test… Looking at 3-D for various projects, I think it’s here to stay, but not right for all movies… So far, feels like it’s...
“Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one...”
– George Moore (1852 – 1933) Irish novelist
Plans to turn Leavesden into permanent studio...
It was a few weeks ago when we reported that plans were underway to turn Leavesden Studios - the huge complex where all eight Harry Potter films have been shot - into a full on studio and keep a permanent Harry Potter area for fans who’d like to see the real sets. The Watford Observer is reporting this evening that those plans have now been approved and finalized: Warner Brothers, which has...
[INTERVIEW] HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD...
After a few years in the videogame (FINAL FANTASY X, TOMB RAIDER 5) and french movies (Vidocq, Asterix Mission Cleopatra) Nicolas Aithadi took on the Londonian Adventure and joined The Moving Picture Company and worked on such projects as TROY, ALEXANDER, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. He is now working on the next installment of the HARRY POTTER franchise What got you where you are? I started...
Percy Jackson and the Olympians; The Lightning...
Christopher Columbus has directed ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians; The Lightning Thief’ for Twentieth Century Fox. MPC Vancouver provided a range of visual effects and post production work for 160 shots across 9 sequences for the movie. Their main areas of work involved creating Greek Gods and simulating a firey inferno. The team also replaced numerous legs for Grover the faun and Chiron the...
The first Monsters, Inc. film was genius. It’s probably third in my list of favorite Pixar movies, behind Toy Story and Up. But it’s been nine years since the original was released, and most people had started wondering why there was no sequel on the way. But there is. Monsters, Inc. 2 has long been rumored, but nothing official had been revealed. Until now, with Disney chairman Rich Ross...
“Opportunities are not offered; they must be wrested and worked for. And this...”
– Indira Gandhi (1917 – 84) Indian prime minister
AE TUTORIAL(Procedural Carpaint by Anselm von...
Step 1: This tutorial works with simple tricks! Nesting Compositions into each other and setting Mattes (called knock out layers) with alpha and falloff passes we rendered.We start with a new Composition and drag the Ambient Occlusion rendering into it. An additional added Brightness&Contrast can be used to eventually adjust the layer to have more or less AO going on.
Step 2: Our base coat...
Happy endings for writers who create in coffee... →
housingworksbookstore:
In 2006 we went to Toronto coffee shops looking for writers and asked them what they were working on. Harry Potter stories, you may remember, came to life in an Edinburgh café. The little-known creators gazed up from their laptops or pages of longhand and told us about the novels, poems and blogs in progress. The Star ran excerpts. What has happened to these aspiring...
“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
– John F. Kennedy (1917 – 63) U.S. president
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“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become...”
– William Arthur Ward (1921 – 94) U.S. writer
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Scripting in After Effects : Creating a Concussion...
1. Open After Effects 2. Import your concussed/ faint footage in to a new composition
3. Duplicate the footage (ctrl + d / cmd + d) 4. Change top layer footage’s transparency (t key) to about 40% 5. We want the top layer footage to move on the x axis to create the effect. To do this we are going to use an expression, Alt + click on the positions (p key) stopwatch and insert the following: ...
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where...”
– Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 62) U.S. writer and philosopher
Frantic Films VFX Takes On 'Dragonball: Evolution'
Award-winning VFX studio Frantic Films VFX, a division of Prime Focus Group, has contributed 334 shots to the forthcoming feature film “Dragonball: Evolution” from Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by James Wong, the movie releases in the U.S. nationwide on April 10, 2009 and stars Justin Chatwin, Emmy Rossum, Jamie Chung, and Chow Yun-Fat in the live-action film adaptation of the...
AFTER EFFECTS CS5
AE CS5 is jet-packed with new features and workflow improvements that may seem a bit techy and possibly boring when compared to my feature request which was a 3D jet-pack generator but it seems to have been overlooked. What IS great about many of the new features is that they simplify some of the dirty work in after effects, like rotoscoping so that you CAN be more creative. The Mocha integration...
“Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were...”
– Baltasar Gracián (1601 – 58) Spanish writer and priest
20 GREAT GOOGLE SECRETS
20 Great Google Secrets http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1306756,00.asp excl.gif No Active Links, Read the Rules - Edit by Ninja excl.gif Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web (see www.pcmag.com/searchengines But most people don’t use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to...
“Whether it’s choosing a career or deciding what charity to get involved...”
– Dave Thomas (1932 – 2002) U.S. founder of Wendy’s
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