Hello all,
Here is my submission for the Reduser Portrat Competition. It is a complete honor to be selected as a finalist. There were some really gorgeous shorts on display and seeing it all on 4k monitors all the way up to 12 feet was spectacular. Had to hold it back a bit, but this meant a whole lot to me.
Although still web compressed, I uploaded a 4k version to YouTube which can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azNkijQMvoA
In the spirit of what I've been doing with my Scarlet-X "Skully" thread on Reduser.net, I thought I'd share the workflow and sort of the marathon-like week long journey that took place to make this short happen.
Postmortem, Project Details, and Post Workflow
Project Details:
Camera: Red Scarlet X #316, "Skully"
Format: 4k, 23.98, RedCode 6:1, 1/60th, ISO 320-3200
Runtime: 3:59:12 - 5,748 frames
Lenses Used:
Canon EF L Series Primes:
24mm f/1.4L, 35mm f/1.4L, 50mm f/1.2L, 85mm f/1.2L, 135mm f/2L
Canon EF Primes:
20mm f/2.8, 100mm Macro
Canon EF L Series Zooms:
24-70mm f/2.8L, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS
Leica R:
60mm f/2.8 Elmarit-R
Sigma EF:
14mm f/2.8, 300mm f/2.8
A Bumpy Start
I'll save the gruesome details, but my initial concept for the portrait was cancelled and I almost didn't shoot anything. While in the midst of post work on a commercial I suddenly found myself dealing with a catastrophic computer hardware failure. Luckily I back up regularly and didn't lose a thing. It took a bit of time rebuilding and reinstalling everything on my main color and edit system. I found myself about 10 days before the deadline wanting to participate yet due to that time crunch my original plan was out the window. After thinking it over and a few Redusers motivating me to work towards submitting an entry I decided to buckle down and get focused on what exactly I could pull off within the timeframe. The short above represents exactly 7 days of work. 24 hours of pre-production, 3 production days of shooting, and 3 post production days.
Pre-Production
I spent a day doodling, writing down ideas, buying some wardrobe, and building props. Started with a brisk brainstorming session which led to about 20 ideas. Then I went through a review process eliminating the impossible and not so good paths and found something interesting. After deciding which direction to go I started fleshing out the idea. Mathematically speaking, knowing the short couldn't be longer than 4 minutes; I made a delibrate decision about working with a 6, 3, and 1.5 second cut mindset based around a 160bpm music track (that would need to be scored later). I figured that I had about 50-70 cuts to get my idea across with approximate shot "bleed". That's not a lot of time to tell a deep story, but you can get a lot done. I kept this in mind as I started storyboarding and jotting down my notes.
I had to make some quick decisions about casting and locations. I have a list of actors I've worked with before and in this case it was important to have some familiarity with the talent as speed was going to be of the essence during the shooting days. I narrowed it down to three actresses. Sarah had the facial expressions and acting chops that I was looking for the role and I hired her for the 3 day shoot.
Similarly I wanted to shoot at locations that I was a bit more familiar with and I wanted to choose a few that were important to me in some way. I'm an explorer of sorts and I had this abandoned farm in mind that I found one day while roaming through the desert. I've done a fashion shoot there about a year ago, but I've always wanted to put it in motion. For the "woods flash-to" I had a great forest in mind. However, the entire fantasy world gag was dependant on shooting at El Matador beach which is about 150 miles away. Lastly I wanted to choose something interesting for the hanger. I have been instructing on Sundays at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects (which happens to sit on a movie studio lot) and thought the hanger there would be a kick for students to see. Oddly, that's literally up the street from Red Studios Hollywood.
After a brief run to my gear locker, an art supply store, and a thrift store for props and more wardrobe I decided to do a few camera tests for the magnifying lamp shots. I knew a few things, but was looking for some more information on reflections and how light would play on the glass. Because I was using fluorescent lighting I decided to shoot the entire project at 1/60th. As I occasionally have done before, I used my ugly mug for the reference.
After that test I grabbed some dirt from the backyard and used about 12 ounces of super glue (ouch my eyes!) to make sure that my hero prop of the "little world" wouldn't get destroyed in transit. I keep rock jars with rocks from every place I travel and I thought it would be appropriate to actually use my newer one for the piece. I went over the wardrobe and liked the black, color, black, color, black scheme I had with these garments. The original shirt I had in mind didn't look great however, and I had some wardrobe from the feature film "The Postman" laying around that I acquired ages ago. That top was aged "post-apocalyptic-y" and used in the film and had some nice thread detail I liked.
Fleshing Out the Concept
Knowing that this was to be shown at 4k to showcase Red cameras and post production workflow I decided on a few things early. The first thing was that I wanted to shoot at locations showcasing a lot of detail and hopefully incorporate that detail mindset into the props and wardrobe. Second, part of the challenge here was showing the viability of the 4k workflow. I've been working with Red material using Adobe Production Premium for a long time now and that personally wasn't the big challenge here. However, I wanted to up the stakes (go big or go home) and I made the decision to somehow incorporate what isn't so common in such a small deadline; 3D and 2D 4k VFX work. Third, I wanted to show the flexibility of the Scarlet X by shooting in both low light and high contrast/bright setups, hopefully to disprove some of the myths about what Red cameras can and can't do. Lastly, I wanted to see if I could pull this off by myself. Not for egotistical purposes, but rather to see if I could pull this off within the deadline and to see exactly how much work I could get done in a week. I am one of those nuts that likes the pressure of deadlines.
Lighting Design and Concepts
The exteriors themselves didn't have too much lighting design as they were shot in daylight. I did get lucky and unlucky with clouds that provided some nice diffused light here and there, but I had to balance that variation later in the color correction stage. A goal under those conditions was to show some rich shadow detail and the impressive dynamic range of the Scarlet X without the aid of HDRx. I made the decision to shoot the close ups and the very wide shots later in the day to get a bit of the magic hour effect.
The interior of the hanger is a different story. I did light the heck out of that. However, I lit it fairly dark and shot most of that at f/2-f/4. I wanted to incorporate the color red as this was a Red specific contest. You'll see it in the reflections, glints in the eyes, fill light, and lens flares. There's a lovely moment when you first strike on the florescent magnifying light that you briefly see the color red, which you can see above in the lamp tests. Hopefully that wasn't too "in your face", but it was something I thought would appropriate for this project. Here's a diagram of what the lighting was in the hanger:
That 55 watt tube on the ground was gelled and placed to show the last second of "daylight" as the hanger door closed behind her.
Production Shooting Days
One thing that bit me hard on the first day of shooting was the cold air and wind. While it did look nice to have the dead trees come alive with movement, it did effect my shots and shooting speed. The first shot of the day and the first shot in the short was low and at 300mm, and I knew then the wind would be an issue all day. I attempted to bag and flag the wind as much as possible, but because I was shooting this by myself with the amount of setups and lens changes ahead of me I just simply didn't have time to do this for every setup. That wiggle at the peak of the establishing shot with the jib looking at the farm in particular could have been stabilized, but I had bigger fish to deal with in post. Sadly the wind blew down the garage where I was going to have the pebble pick up insert shot, but I used it for the background of that sequence instead.
After a marathon first day everything else went rather smoothly. On the hanger day I came in two hours early and did my pre-light and built my little set. Talent arrived and we got to work. The last day was more about getting fairly precise shots and darting to the ocean to grab the giant boulder insert. Lot's of driving that day. For the slider moves I used my trusty Kessler Cineslider with the 500 motor. This allowed for the sliding move, pan/tilt move, and focus pull to be operated by one guy. However, on the first shots I did actually use a small dolly I built years ago for another production. I used PVC pipe and flattened the dirt under the track. Had to toss in a little DIY problem solving in there.
Under a crazy deadline and trying to get a handsome amount of setups done per day it was important to have fun where there was fun to have.
Post Production
I did my own data wrangling and kept things very organized. I imported my .R3Ds straight into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and made the selects extremely quickly. After that I created some dummy 12, 6, 3, and 1.5 second markers to assist with my edit and began cutting. I needed to keep that time base for the music scoring process later. The real challenge was editing and telling the entire story within 4 minutes at a pace I desired. Only 4 shots didn't make the final cut.
Color Workflow
I wanted to have fun with the color correction and grading process. I was a digital colorist on features for a few years and one of the reasons I chose to buy a Red was just how flexible RedCode Raw is. My first light color correction was performed in RedCine-X Pro. However, I decided on a slightly unorthodox grading workflow by using Adobe Camera Raw. I really wanted to flex the Adobe Production Premium muscle for some reason. This workflow required taking my clips and transcoding them to 16bit TIFs and then exporting the graded files into DPX sequences to re-link back in Premiere Pro.
I exported key frames from each shot and began my grading process. One of the techniques/tools that I learned back when I was a full-time colorist was to create a "color quilt". All that is a single image with frames of an entire sequence or sequences with thumbnails representing each shot. This gives you a visual index to see if everything is being pulled together and matching up nicely. Back in the day and this was something software needed to be written for as we were on Linux boxes using proprietary grading software at the time, but with Adobe Bridge color quilting is actually a very simple process. I have a customized an Adobe Bridge workspace called "quilt mode" so I can quickly review frames for such an occasion. Very quick and easy to make selects, group, and edit what you're looking at. I would have killed for this a few years back.
I had a great time grading. I pushed the post apocalyptic world the hardest via a tonal curve with the midtones and darks lifted a fair amount. I kept the lights to highlight roll off smooth. On top of that I smacked the red, green, and blue hues around. Then went in and pushed saturation around a bit. That was a good torture test. This is precisely the type of grade you can't do with other compressed codecs out there. The hanger interiors were more subtle, but I did enhance the sort of sterile light coming from the lamp as that was a point of interest. I did knock the red down a bit. The tonal curve a very slight S to it minus bringing the blacks down. I attempted to have similar hues hitting existing in both the miniature world and the fantasy world. Not too over the top, but hopefully enough to get the concept across. Lastly I went in and added some vignettes and graduated exposure adjustments to shots to help put the focus on specific areas of the frame and guide the viewers attention.
I don't own a Red Rocket, but my cut was under 4 minutes and I trimmed my clips to have handles of 12-24 frames depending on if they had transitions or not. This also gave me a small amount of wiggle room in case I wanted to fine tune the edit. During this transcoding and exporting stage it gave the opportunity for a couple hours of sleep.
The Alien
I wanted this alien being to fly around overhead. To just sort of exist and have it be something she was used to. She would glance up at it here and there, but I wanted it to feel like normal everyday life. We don't know if this thing caused the apocalyptic world or perhaps it is some sort of guardian. I wanted that open ended for the viewer. Some think it's scary, some think it's cool. I like that room for interpretation. I've been creating similar creatures for the artwork of my next music album, however I have never thought of bringing them into motion. Plus I needed to design new ones for this project that would actually work. I've been rendering those out at 5k to print HUGE, but they sometimes take up to 12 days for a single frame. The visual effects take up a total of 1072 frames, nearly 20% of the whole short. I needed many frames as these aren't exactly short shots and I had about 48 hours at this point. I needed to optimize a few things and change a lot of other things. I would call this experimental at best and started tackling some geometry and lighting concepts.
After wrapping on the first day of shooting I raced home and began on the concept art for the aliens. It's not my prettiest work, but I needed to get some ideas down on paper to start developing a look and visual feel.
I had a few ideas in there I liked. You can clearly see my excitement in my notes when certain ideas clicked and felt right. After wrapping on the second day of shooting I began to model and perform some look development. I wanted their skin to feel like a liquid trash bag.
Things were coming together and after wrapping shooting on the third day I began some quick animation and render tests. I wanted them to almost have a gliding/anti-gravity feeling to them. Mysterious and not too threatening. I moved onto a final lighting test using the same high dynamic range image based lighting techniques that I've used on major motion pictures. Which led to:
You'll notice I changed the red orb to more of an orange. This represents their life force and energy. If you pay attention during the wide shot with the windmill as the orb retracts into the body of the creature the shot itself seems become darker. Hopefully eluding to some potentially more weirdness that's left unexplained. I rendered out my animations at the end of the third day of shooting, which is also why I shot at the farm on the first day. By time I was ready to sit down and edit I had my 4k 3D animations ready to go.
Visual Effects Workflow
Awaking from my slumber after the color work had been transcoded I had to get cracking on the visual effects shots and integrate my creatures into them. That meant it's time to open up Adobe After Effects CS5.5 to get down and dirty with motion tracking, keying, compositing, matching focal blur, matching motion blur, adjusting levels, color correcting, and exporting. Not the quickest stuff to do at 4k on long shots. The keys themselves showcase yet again the advantage of having a a lot of dynamic range and shooting with a "fat negative" mindset. There was no green screen shoot here and these were wild extractions within the plates themselves. However, because there's so much information there, even when the alien needs to be behind her shirt (which gets very close to the tonal value of the sky) I was still able to pull off a seamless composite without rotoscoping individual frames. I did a few animated effects like the rack focus on the 14mm wide establishing farm shot to the alien to match the lens pull. I had to smooth out the tracking on that shot as parallax made some of the initial track not make any sense at all. That was a combination of a lack of consistent geometry within the frame to grab during the jib move and the distance of where exactly where I wanted place the alien in the sky.
Soundtrack Scoring
On the evening prior to the deadline I found myself with a completely silent short. However, I prepared for this by using a specific time base. I exported a low resolution proxy of the short and cracked open Image Line's FL Studio (long time user) and sat in front of my keyboard. First I synced up some quick clicks to get the pacing down. I knew I didn't have the time I normally would desire to knock out something like this. I started developing some sounds and created a couple samples to use for the longer wispy strings. My main goal with the track was to have a somewhat somber tone with a twinge of hope lingering in the background. One key point I wanted to hit was having the string section during the fantasy tree scene to also exist during the wide windmill shot hopefully showcasing some sort of duality about what serenity and beauty is. After I had my track written I launched Adobe Audition and did a bit of equalizing and mastering. Lastly I exported the stereo .wav stems and re-linked that within my Adobe Premiere Pro project.
Exporting
Everything was done at this point. I contacted Michael over at Light Iron to get their DPX specifications as I've never delivered content to them prior to this short. I verified my color management through After Effects and made sure things looked right. On my computer it took about 1 hour to export a full DPX which created about 200GB of data. I set the DPX, Uncompressed Quicktime, and Low Resolution Proxy export to kick off using both After Effects and Adobe Media Encoder then took a 3 hour nap. When I got up I verified the data, copied it over to a SATA drive and dropped it off at Light Iron prior to the deadline. Post work was about 66 hours of work within 3 days. I didn't log the hours I worked on the alien after each shooting day, but I can assure you they were long days. After the deadline I slept for about 15 hours on Saturday.
Last Thoughts
I want to thank Jim Jannard, Jarred Land, Michael Cioni, and all of the people at Red and Light Iron who chose the finalists and made the Reduser Party an unforgettable night. I viewed this project as a test and a challenge. This is the first time I've been able to use a great deal of my toolbox on one single project and it's amazing to see just how much you can get done in a week. A few years ago, this really wasn't possible. Now I really know. If this effort shows anything it's that 4k isn't something to be scared of and if you weren't there already, it certainly has arrived now.
I hope you enjoyed the short. It was a wild adventure getting it done, but I had a fantastic time. It's really something I can look at now with a big smile on my face. Seeing and listening to viewers reactions at the party at NAB 2012 as I "ninja'ed" through the crowd and spied on them is a memory that will last the rest of my life.
Cheers,
Phil
Here is my submission for the Reduser Portrat Competition. It is a complete honor to be selected as a finalist. There were some really gorgeous shorts on display and seeing it all on 4k monitors all the way up to 12 feet was spectacular. Had to hold it back a bit, but this meant a whole lot to me.
Although still web compressed, I uploaded a 4k version to YouTube which can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azNkijQMvoA
In the spirit of what I've been doing with my Scarlet-X "Skully" thread on Reduser.net, I thought I'd share the workflow and sort of the marathon-like week long journey that took place to make this short happen.
Postmortem, Project Details, and Post Workflow
Project Details:
Camera: Red Scarlet X #316, "Skully"
Format: 4k, 23.98, RedCode 6:1, 1/60th, ISO 320-3200
Runtime: 3:59:12 - 5,748 frames
Lenses Used:
Canon EF L Series Primes:
24mm f/1.4L, 35mm f/1.4L, 50mm f/1.2L, 85mm f/1.2L, 135mm f/2L
Canon EF Primes:
20mm f/2.8, 100mm Macro
Canon EF L Series Zooms:
24-70mm f/2.8L, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS
Leica R:
60mm f/2.8 Elmarit-R
Sigma EF:
14mm f/2.8, 300mm f/2.8
If you click on any image it will enlarge.
A Bumpy Start
I'll save the gruesome details, but my initial concept for the portrait was cancelled and I almost didn't shoot anything. While in the midst of post work on a commercial I suddenly found myself dealing with a catastrophic computer hardware failure. Luckily I back up regularly and didn't lose a thing. It took a bit of time rebuilding and reinstalling everything on my main color and edit system. I found myself about 10 days before the deadline wanting to participate yet due to that time crunch my original plan was out the window. After thinking it over and a few Redusers motivating me to work towards submitting an entry I decided to buckle down and get focused on what exactly I could pull off within the timeframe. The short above represents exactly 7 days of work. 24 hours of pre-production, 3 production days of shooting, and 3 post production days.
Pre-Production
I spent a day doodling, writing down ideas, buying some wardrobe, and building props. Started with a brisk brainstorming session which led to about 20 ideas. Then I went through a review process eliminating the impossible and not so good paths and found something interesting. After deciding which direction to go I started fleshing out the idea. Mathematically speaking, knowing the short couldn't be longer than 4 minutes; I made a delibrate decision about working with a 6, 3, and 1.5 second cut mindset based around a 160bpm music track (that would need to be scored later). I figured that I had about 50-70 cuts to get my idea across with approximate shot "bleed". That's not a lot of time to tell a deep story, but you can get a lot done. I kept this in mind as I started storyboarding and jotting down my notes.
I had to make some quick decisions about casting and locations. I have a list of actors I've worked with before and in this case it was important to have some familiarity with the talent as speed was going to be of the essence during the shooting days. I narrowed it down to three actresses. Sarah had the facial expressions and acting chops that I was looking for the role and I hired her for the 3 day shoot.
Similarly I wanted to shoot at locations that I was a bit more familiar with and I wanted to choose a few that were important to me in some way. I'm an explorer of sorts and I had this abandoned farm in mind that I found one day while roaming through the desert. I've done a fashion shoot there about a year ago, but I've always wanted to put it in motion. For the "woods flash-to" I had a great forest in mind. However, the entire fantasy world gag was dependant on shooting at El Matador beach which is about 150 miles away. Lastly I wanted to choose something interesting for the hanger. I have been instructing on Sundays at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects (which happens to sit on a movie studio lot) and thought the hanger there would be a kick for students to see. Oddly, that's literally up the street from Red Studios Hollywood.
After a brief run to my gear locker, an art supply store, and a thrift store for props and more wardrobe I decided to do a few camera tests for the magnifying lamp shots. I knew a few things, but was looking for some more information on reflections and how light would play on the glass. Because I was using fluorescent lighting I decided to shoot the entire project at 1/60th. As I occasionally have done before, I used my ugly mug for the reference.
After that test I grabbed some dirt from the backyard and used about 12 ounces of super glue (ouch my eyes!) to make sure that my hero prop of the "little world" wouldn't get destroyed in transit. I keep rock jars with rocks from every place I travel and I thought it would be appropriate to actually use my newer one for the piece. I went over the wardrobe and liked the black, color, black, color, black scheme I had with these garments. The original shirt I had in mind didn't look great however, and I had some wardrobe from the feature film "The Postman" laying around that I acquired ages ago. That top was aged "post-apocalyptic-y" and used in the film and had some nice thread detail I liked.
Fleshing Out the Concept
Knowing that this was to be shown at 4k to showcase Red cameras and post production workflow I decided on a few things early. The first thing was that I wanted to shoot at locations showcasing a lot of detail and hopefully incorporate that detail mindset into the props and wardrobe. Second, part of the challenge here was showing the viability of the 4k workflow. I've been working with Red material using Adobe Production Premium for a long time now and that personally wasn't the big challenge here. However, I wanted to up the stakes (go big or go home) and I made the decision to somehow incorporate what isn't so common in such a small deadline; 3D and 2D 4k VFX work. Third, I wanted to show the flexibility of the Scarlet X by shooting in both low light and high contrast/bright setups, hopefully to disprove some of the myths about what Red cameras can and can't do. Lastly, I wanted to see if I could pull this off by myself. Not for egotistical purposes, but rather to see if I could pull this off within the deadline and to see exactly how much work I could get done in a week. I am one of those nuts that likes the pressure of deadlines.
Lighting Design and Concepts
The exteriors themselves didn't have too much lighting design as they were shot in daylight. I did get lucky and unlucky with clouds that provided some nice diffused light here and there, but I had to balance that variation later in the color correction stage. A goal under those conditions was to show some rich shadow detail and the impressive dynamic range of the Scarlet X without the aid of HDRx. I made the decision to shoot the close ups and the very wide shots later in the day to get a bit of the magic hour effect.
The interior of the hanger is a different story. I did light the heck out of that. However, I lit it fairly dark and shot most of that at f/2-f/4. I wanted to incorporate the color red as this was a Red specific contest. You'll see it in the reflections, glints in the eyes, fill light, and lens flares. There's a lovely moment when you first strike on the florescent magnifying light that you briefly see the color red, which you can see above in the lamp tests. Hopefully that wasn't too "in your face", but it was something I thought would appropriate for this project. Here's a diagram of what the lighting was in the hanger:
That 55 watt tube on the ground was gelled and placed to show the last second of "daylight" as the hanger door closed behind her.
Production Shooting Days
One thing that bit me hard on the first day of shooting was the cold air and wind. While it did look nice to have the dead trees come alive with movement, it did effect my shots and shooting speed. The first shot of the day and the first shot in the short was low and at 300mm, and I knew then the wind would be an issue all day. I attempted to bag and flag the wind as much as possible, but because I was shooting this by myself with the amount of setups and lens changes ahead of me I just simply didn't have time to do this for every setup. That wiggle at the peak of the establishing shot with the jib looking at the farm in particular could have been stabilized, but I had bigger fish to deal with in post. Sadly the wind blew down the garage where I was going to have the pebble pick up insert shot, but I used it for the background of that sequence instead.
After a marathon first day everything else went rather smoothly. On the hanger day I came in two hours early and did my pre-light and built my little set. Talent arrived and we got to work. The last day was more about getting fairly precise shots and darting to the ocean to grab the giant boulder insert. Lot's of driving that day. For the slider moves I used my trusty Kessler Cineslider with the 500 motor. This allowed for the sliding move, pan/tilt move, and focus pull to be operated by one guy. However, on the first shots I did actually use a small dolly I built years ago for another production. I used PVC pipe and flattened the dirt under the track. Had to toss in a little DIY problem solving in there.
Under a crazy deadline and trying to get a handsome amount of setups done per day it was important to have fun where there was fun to have.
Post Production
I did my own data wrangling and kept things very organized. I imported my .R3Ds straight into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and made the selects extremely quickly. After that I created some dummy 12, 6, 3, and 1.5 second markers to assist with my edit and began cutting. I needed to keep that time base for the music scoring process later. The real challenge was editing and telling the entire story within 4 minutes at a pace I desired. Only 4 shots didn't make the final cut.
Color Workflow
I wanted to have fun with the color correction and grading process. I was a digital colorist on features for a few years and one of the reasons I chose to buy a Red was just how flexible RedCode Raw is. My first light color correction was performed in RedCine-X Pro. However, I decided on a slightly unorthodox grading workflow by using Adobe Camera Raw. I really wanted to flex the Adobe Production Premium muscle for some reason. This workflow required taking my clips and transcoding them to 16bit TIFs and then exporting the graded files into DPX sequences to re-link back in Premiere Pro.
I exported key frames from each shot and began my grading process. One of the techniques/tools that I learned back when I was a full-time colorist was to create a "color quilt". All that is a single image with frames of an entire sequence or sequences with thumbnails representing each shot. This gives you a visual index to see if everything is being pulled together and matching up nicely. Back in the day and this was something software needed to be written for as we were on Linux boxes using proprietary grading software at the time, but with Adobe Bridge color quilting is actually a very simple process. I have a customized an Adobe Bridge workspace called "quilt mode" so I can quickly review frames for such an occasion. Very quick and easy to make selects, group, and edit what you're looking at. I would have killed for this a few years back.
I had a great time grading. I pushed the post apocalyptic world the hardest via a tonal curve with the midtones and darks lifted a fair amount. I kept the lights to highlight roll off smooth. On top of that I smacked the red, green, and blue hues around. Then went in and pushed saturation around a bit. That was a good torture test. This is precisely the type of grade you can't do with other compressed codecs out there. The hanger interiors were more subtle, but I did enhance the sort of sterile light coming from the lamp as that was a point of interest. I did knock the red down a bit. The tonal curve a very slight S to it minus bringing the blacks down. I attempted to have similar hues hitting existing in both the miniature world and the fantasy world. Not too over the top, but hopefully enough to get the concept across. Lastly I went in and added some vignettes and graduated exposure adjustments to shots to help put the focus on specific areas of the frame and guide the viewers attention.
I don't own a Red Rocket, but my cut was under 4 minutes and I trimmed my clips to have handles of 12-24 frames depending on if they had transitions or not. This also gave me a small amount of wiggle room in case I wanted to fine tune the edit. During this transcoding and exporting stage it gave the opportunity for a couple hours of sleep.
The Alien
I wanted this alien being to fly around overhead. To just sort of exist and have it be something she was used to. She would glance up at it here and there, but I wanted it to feel like normal everyday life. We don't know if this thing caused the apocalyptic world or perhaps it is some sort of guardian. I wanted that open ended for the viewer. Some think it's scary, some think it's cool. I like that room for interpretation. I've been creating similar creatures for the artwork of my next music album, however I have never thought of bringing them into motion. Plus I needed to design new ones for this project that would actually work. I've been rendering those out at 5k to print HUGE, but they sometimes take up to 12 days for a single frame. The visual effects take up a total of 1072 frames, nearly 20% of the whole short. I needed many frames as these aren't exactly short shots and I had about 48 hours at this point. I needed to optimize a few things and change a lot of other things. I would call this experimental at best and started tackling some geometry and lighting concepts.
After wrapping on the first day of shooting I raced home and began on the concept art for the aliens. It's not my prettiest work, but I needed to get some ideas down on paper to start developing a look and visual feel.
I had a few ideas in there I liked. You can clearly see my excitement in my notes when certain ideas clicked and felt right. After wrapping on the second day of shooting I began to model and perform some look development. I wanted their skin to feel like a liquid trash bag.
Things were coming together and after wrapping shooting on the third day I began some quick animation and render tests. I wanted them to almost have a gliding/anti-gravity feeling to them. Mysterious and not too threatening. I moved onto a final lighting test using the same high dynamic range image based lighting techniques that I've used on major motion pictures. Which led to:
You'll notice I changed the red orb to more of an orange. This represents their life force and energy. If you pay attention during the wide shot with the windmill as the orb retracts into the body of the creature the shot itself seems become darker. Hopefully eluding to some potentially more weirdness that's left unexplained. I rendered out my animations at the end of the third day of shooting, which is also why I shot at the farm on the first day. By time I was ready to sit down and edit I had my 4k 3D animations ready to go.
Visual Effects Workflow
Awaking from my slumber after the color work had been transcoded I had to get cracking on the visual effects shots and integrate my creatures into them. That meant it's time to open up Adobe After Effects CS5.5 to get down and dirty with motion tracking, keying, compositing, matching focal blur, matching motion blur, adjusting levels, color correcting, and exporting. Not the quickest stuff to do at 4k on long shots. The keys themselves showcase yet again the advantage of having a a lot of dynamic range and shooting with a "fat negative" mindset. There was no green screen shoot here and these were wild extractions within the plates themselves. However, because there's so much information there, even when the alien needs to be behind her shirt (which gets very close to the tonal value of the sky) I was still able to pull off a seamless composite without rotoscoping individual frames. I did a few animated effects like the rack focus on the 14mm wide establishing farm shot to the alien to match the lens pull. I had to smooth out the tracking on that shot as parallax made some of the initial track not make any sense at all. That was a combination of a lack of consistent geometry within the frame to grab during the jib move and the distance of where exactly where I wanted place the alien in the sky.
Soundtrack Scoring
On the evening prior to the deadline I found myself with a completely silent short. However, I prepared for this by using a specific time base. I exported a low resolution proxy of the short and cracked open Image Line's FL Studio (long time user) and sat in front of my keyboard. First I synced up some quick clicks to get the pacing down. I knew I didn't have the time I normally would desire to knock out something like this. I started developing some sounds and created a couple samples to use for the longer wispy strings. My main goal with the track was to have a somewhat somber tone with a twinge of hope lingering in the background. One key point I wanted to hit was having the string section during the fantasy tree scene to also exist during the wide windmill shot hopefully showcasing some sort of duality about what serenity and beauty is. After I had my track written I launched Adobe Audition and did a bit of equalizing and mastering. Lastly I exported the stereo .wav stems and re-linked that within my Adobe Premiere Pro project.
Exporting
Everything was done at this point. I contacted Michael over at Light Iron to get their DPX specifications as I've never delivered content to them prior to this short. I verified my color management through After Effects and made sure things looked right. On my computer it took about 1 hour to export a full DPX which created about 200GB of data. I set the DPX, Uncompressed Quicktime, and Low Resolution Proxy export to kick off using both After Effects and Adobe Media Encoder then took a 3 hour nap. When I got up I verified the data, copied it over to a SATA drive and dropped it off at Light Iron prior to the deadline. Post work was about 66 hours of work within 3 days. I didn't log the hours I worked on the alien after each shooting day, but I can assure you they were long days. After the deadline I slept for about 15 hours on Saturday.
Last Thoughts
I want to thank Jim Jannard, Jarred Land, Michael Cioni, and all of the people at Red and Light Iron who chose the finalists and made the Reduser Party an unforgettable night. I viewed this project as a test and a challenge. This is the first time I've been able to use a great deal of my toolbox on one single project and it's amazing to see just how much you can get done in a week. A few years ago, this really wasn't possible. Now I really know. If this effort shows anything it's that 4k isn't something to be scared of and if you weren't there already, it certainly has arrived now.
I hope you enjoyed the short. It was a wild adventure getting it done, but I had a fantastic time. It's really something I can look at now with a big smile on my face. Seeing and listening to viewers reactions at the party at NAB 2012 as I "ninja'ed" through the crowd and spied on them is a memory that will last the rest of my life.
Cheers,
Phil
The Electronic Entertainment Expo once again rolled into Los Angeles last week. For many this is the gaming mecca as the top developers are showing off their progress on future game releases. For those in the industry it's also a rare event where many of the companies you would like to work for all swim around in the same pool for a week. It's also a good opportunity to examine modern and future trends in technology and interactive entertainment.
The gaming industry has been transforming and evolving a great deal over the last decade. Budgets are now hitting 1 to 25 million fairly regularly and can soar even higher on larger franchises. Better graphics, more audio content, more advanced game engines equals more art assets which equals more talented artists, programmers, animators, modelers, lighters, riggers, texture painters, etc... Which means larger studios and longer development times. On average most games are developed in 1 to 5 years, but there's a few titles out there that have taken much longer than that. Gaming is now real big business and studios have had to adapt to this concept. Nowadays, since technology has been catching up in gaming, it's pretty typical to see top level VFX artists from the motion picture industry working in gaming and vice versa. It's been interesting seeing how that growth has revealed similarities and differences in projects in both industries.
E3 circa 2005
On a personal level, when I was younger and much more of an avid gamer, E3 was like a giant candy store. Colorful and tasty stuff could be found everywhere. As my career progressed from a gamer to a working artist I treated it much more like a networking resource. I remember so clearly hustling my business cards and folios around the show floor. Meeting up with other artists just starting out and sketching in front of the West Hall. Meeting many pioneering minds and nerding out with them. Good times. Different times.
E3 has certainly transformed much since then. It appears to be more media driven. Which is great for gamers everywhere as they now get unprecedented access to unreleased titles and the developers behind the games. It's both bigger and smaller at the same time. These days it's still a networking resource for sure, especially this year for me. But it's also an opportunity to say hello to friends you've made along the way. Often I only get to see these individuals once or twice a year (because they are so busy making games). Like all aspects of entertainment, these artists put in long hours and long weeks to produce a high quality product at the end of the road. Even the simplest games represent a great deal of passion and sacrifice to get a project realized. When I was younger playing Street Fighter or Super Mario Brothers I never really thought of that. After over a decade in entertainment production and post production VFX however, I'm acutely aware of those concepts :)
As I mentioned earlier, as the technology evolves, there's a larger need for talented creative technical artists as well as higher quality assets. Detailed and accurately shot texture, modeling, and animations reference. Spherical high dynamic range imaging for light probes or lighting reference. Shooting promotional graphics and behind the scenes content. Lots of imagery that ends up in and outside of the game. This is the kind of content that's slowly been seeping into the games field from the motion picture industry over the last decade. What's really interesting is now both industries are pushing graphics to new heights and seeing how they implement the material which often times calls for creating new technology to be developed along the way. Advancement, growth, and adaptation are the signs of successful developers and often where the most exciting content is birthed from.
Here are a few things that caught my eye this year at E3.
This year what I noticed more than previous years was the focus on the immersive realistic gaming experience. Many titles showed a great deal of effort put into their almost photo real graphics. Most notable was Battlefield 3 from Electronic Arts. Instantly within the first few seconds of playing you are quickly dropped into the Iran-Iraq border with your five man squad and you begin to feel you are pretty much right there with them. The visuals pumped out by the Frostbite 2 engine from DICE and it's use of dynamic global illumination with exceptionally smooth ANT animation tech really blow you away. In the demo I experienced you were placed in a full on siege with a deployment of tanks with a mission to take out a specific compound in the desert. The combined effect of the graphics with extremely impressive audio queues makes you quickly forget your playing a game. You really feel every shell blast and get into the intensity of the moment. Hats off the the development team for their efforts. Visually speaking industry wide this is a technological milestone.
On the somewhat realistic, but slightly more stylized front were a few games that focus more on a cinematic storytelling experience. This visual style has been evolving recently and rapidly with previous success from franchises like Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, and the Uncharted series. Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception from Naughty Dog really provides an impressive adventure film experience and feel. Filled with more intense moments, a quick wit, and a high quality story with equal caliber voice acting; Uncharted 3 appears to successfully build on it's previous successes within the series. These games continue to raise the bar and really showcase what the Playstation 3 can do. Oddly however, I didn't seem to get the memo, but I counted no fewer than 6 titles that prominently featured ships, being on ships, or ships crashing at E3. Ships are the new black (thank you Metal Gear Solid 2), but I have to really give kudos to the Naughty Dog team as their swaying and rocking ship gameplay was clearly the most fun and well thought out.
One of the games that I was very surprised with and looks extremely promising is Crystal Dynamics new Tomb Raider. The series that really broke ground way back in the day of the first Playstation with their fantastic third-person shooter and puzzle solving gameplay. There have been many sequals at varying levels of success with the property. The popularity of the games and the feature films based on the franchise have really made fans wonder where they can take Lara Croft next. Within the same ballpark of Uncharted 3 gameplay and a bit of the Resident Evil 4 puzzle/survival/action the new Tomb Raider looks to show you a very different Lara Croft. The game sets Lara at the younger age of 21, to show you where it all began. And it looks like Crystal Dynamics is pulling out all of the stops by creating a much grittier, tougher, much more bruised up version of Lara. The general darker art direction is highly effective as you are experiencing Lara getting hurt, stumbling on small obstacles, and fighting off badies while an expressive and reactive voice acting performance from an as of yet unnamed actress convinces you that a real person is on this adventure. This should provide a unique level of attachment for players as they will be experiencing what Lara experiences. There's a lot to be excited about the new survival adventure direction and a great deal of potential for the final game in 2012. Already from the previews and promo graphics we can see that a new combat system and aiming mechanic is on the way. There's a lot pressure on this one for the Crystal Dynamics team, but so far I really like what I see.
Not every game focused on reality or a cinematic feel. Rayman Origins from Ubi Soft featured gorgeous 2D animation presented in a 2.5D world which really impressed gamers with it's strange comedic charm. One extremely stylized game that stood out for me was Journey for the Playstation Network. Journey is attempting to follow That Game Company's success with off the path titles like flOw and flower, which have really won over gamers with their approachable gameplay and unique visual style. Journey is going to be focusing on much more strange and introspective concepts as you exist only as a "cloth creature" in a large world where seemingly your only goal is that mountain with the light shooting out from the top. There's no dialog. You can indeed play with other players as they will inhabit the same world and call out to you. Apparently the team at That Game Company took a trip to the Pismo Dunes and were largely inspired by the landscape, a place that I myself have been to many times. It's all been very cryptic from what I've seen, but I do think that Journey will explore some very interesting concepts like solitude and bonding in ways that many games today don't present. There's going to be a real focus on letting gamers discover this world, it's history, and their role in the whole thing on their own through exploration. There likely won't be any "answers" given in the game, and even after completion the player will probably have more questions. I think the developers are after exactly this. The art direction is minimalistic and there's a real focus on color palettes and mood. I'm a sucker for titles like this and can't wait for it to be released towards year's end.
On the guilty pleasures front there are many titles that I've been looking out for. Duke Nukem Forever is finally going to be a reality after 10 years of development. Id's Rage, which has been in development for 7 years is also coming out in the Fall. Gears of War 3 was also at the show and will be released in September. Ubisoft has been knocking my socks off for a while now with Assassins Creed franchise and it looks like Assassins Creed Revelations is about to do that again. With the new implementation of a new hookblade to help with whizzing by the world below and the added bomb weapons; the series looks as fresh as ever. The compelling storyline of Ezio and Altair as well as Desmond, who's currently stuck in the Animus, look to not only further the intrigue but also conclude several storylines. Strangely whenever I visit the farmers market I have weird flashes of myself walking through the crowds, pushing people out of the way, hoping to avoid the attention of the Templars. This game I believe is a direct cause of this and this condition should have an official medical name.
Twisted Metal is back and on the PS3 for the first time. I can't even explain how happy this makes me. The team at Eat Sleep Play looks like they really fleshed out the gameplay and story of many of the characters in the series. The revamped style really looks like it's building on what made TMI and TM2 so great. The overall game from the demos also just seems to be a richer experience with insane boss fights and apparently you can swap out drivers in vehicles. Reinventing the game that revolutionized car combat games has had to be an extreme challenge. I'm a little surprised Sony didn't feature and highlight Twisted Metal more at E3 as it was playable and had some of the most entertaining gameplay and visuals at the entire convention.
I also have a real warm place in my heart for anything zombie related (my birthday is next month friends). And while a few titles at E3 this year focused on are blood thirsty undead buddies, none impressed me more than Dead Island from Techland. This game definitely pays homage to the tone of 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, and Dawn of the Dead. It would appear the game provides the same survival story style that I adore about those films. There looks to be an impressive story with multiple characters that develop as the game moves forward. What I like the most about Dead Island is the variety of zombies. There are many different types that vary in speed and strength. You have to plan out your combat/survival situations to accommodate for this, which is a nice change up to the normal hack and slash mentality of a lot of zombie games. This may end up being mandatory playing (for educational purposes) while we wait for the Zombie Apocalypse. I know I've got my survival suit ready.
Wii U? No, no, no. Ling.
On the new hardware front Nintendo announced their new system at E3 this year. It's their first official HD console and sports a large 6.2 inch touchscreen on the main controller. An interesting idea. Nintendo demoed a lot of concepts where the user would interact with the controller's screen and the television to produce a new game play experience. Like swinging over a golf ball on the controller and viewing your struck ball traveling on the main screen. Very original with lots of potential. Especially for first party titles. However, it will be interesting to see how third party developers embrace this concept as no other system does anything like this. This particular above controller was tethered to lovely girl working the Nintendo booth. She could not confirm or deny if she would come included with the standard system. The Wii U is coming at a good time in the industry. Sony's PS4 and Microsoft's next console efforts will likely not be out for two or three years. So with Nintendo finally stepping into next gen by partially skipping next gen, they can get a good jump on next next gen with there next next gen system. If that makes any sense. It's going to be a graphically impressive system no matter what the case and with the combination of a unique interface there's a lot to be excited about there. Innovation and experimentation in this case peaked my interest.
Playstation Vita Above is not to scale
Another interesting hardware release is Sony's PSVita or Vita. With both front and rear cameras, a front multi-touch touchscreen and a rear multi-touch pad, dual analog sticks, a reasonable price tag, with six-axis sensors to boot there's a lot for developers and gamers to get excited about. It will certainly be the first handheld unit capable of graphics at this level. There's currently no HDMI out on the unit, but I imagine after so many people being critical about that post E3 there might be a motivated effort to add that to the hardware in some capacity. The Vita will be coming to the market at a time where we are saturated with mobile devices that multitask as phones, eReaders, and can play games. Luckily for Sony none of these multitaskers have yet to be stellar mobile gaming systems.
That's my little wrap up from E3 this year. Lots of meetings, lot's of talking, lot's of walking. A lot of titles to be excited about and many that I didn't mention here. It was good to get my hands on some new devices and games. Some of these titles won't even be done by next year's E3, but its often nice to get a preview of things to come and see where all of this going.
Below are a few other images from E3 2011
Greetings and welcome to The Digital Imaging Blog!
The intent behind the content of this blog is to share concepts, techniques, theory, imagery, and other thoughts about digital imaging and it's relationship with the entertainment industry. This is not a camera review blog, but I will be sharing some thoughts on equipment and tools. Occasionally there will be a look behind the scenes on different shoots and the creation of production artwork.
Also, I'll be spotlighting many talented individuals I've befriended over the years throughout the industry ranging from cinematographers to photographers and conceptual designers to animators. Many of these individuals have inspired or influenced my own abilities over the years.
Mostly though I'll be discussing topics of interest and focus on the balance between technical knowledge and a creative mindset while applying that to image making.
Phil
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