Closing Cinelosophy, Final Thoughts, and Migrating Platforms

When I first started this blog, I did it for my family and for myself.  I had a few objectives with it.  First, I wanted to be able to chronicle my experiences in film school so that my family back home could follow along.  For my family that might be reading this, thanks so much for following along.  Second, as I was just starting film school and the next chapter of my life, I wanted a medium to be able to pour out my thoughts and ideas as they were developing.  That's why I called it Cinelosophy - I imagined that this blog could be an interesting combination of my journey studying cinema and my own personal philosophies.  For a time, I think that was true.  But, as time went on, I began to use this blog for school.  Our professors wanted us to blog our experiences, and I already had a blog.  Perfect!  Because of that, the blog migrated more and more towards the cinema studies side of things, and my personal thoughts and opinions on things began slipping through the cracks.

Through this process, I learned a lot.  For starters, I learned that I have a hard time breaking consistency, even when I should.  For example, this summer we were assigned to keep a journal/blog of our work through our Advanced Compositing class.  You might have seen the Advanced Compositing posts where I blogged about driving to the beach to shoot my GoPro footage or shooting green screen plates in the sound stage.  The goal behind these assignments were to keep professional blog posts chronicling our experience in this class.  However, since this was more of a personal and informal blog, I felt a sense of obligation to keep the tone consistent.  I couldn't just keep it a professional post, it had to feel like my post.  This might not seem like a bad thing - of course I should be keeping my personality in my posts!  But that leads me to the second thing I learned: I learned that I'm not a huge fan of blogging about more personal things.  I learned that I enjoyed blogging about the "cinema" much more than I enjoyed blogging about the "philosophy."  Maybe this will change over time, but right now that's where I stand.  I think that my effort to keep this blog inherently "Cinelosophy" while also transitioning into a more professional blog ended up hurting my blog posts in the long run.  Instead of being clear and concise, they just kind of existed, rambling on in one way or the other.

The sub par quality of my posts indirectly led to a pretty big experience for me: the first C of my entire life.  Throughout all of middle and high school I was a straight A student.  I held myself to the highest standards.  In college, that changed a little.  My freshman year I found that college was more challenging, especially when the grading scale changed and 90-94 was a B in several of my classes.  Nonetheless, I kept my grades extremely high and finished my first year with a 3.86 GPA.  The pattern continued into film school.  I finished my first year with all A's with the occasional A- or B+.  This Summer in my advanced compositing class, I received my first ever C.  At first I was really upset and even angry.  I thought the grading scale was unfair, I thought I couldn't possibly be wrong.  But after mulling it over for a night, I realized that I deserved the C.  And this was a huge revelation for me.  For the first time ever, there was a class that I didn't put the effort into.  There's no easy way to say it.  I just didn't try very hard.  When I accepted this reality, I really put a lot of thought into it, reflecting on the class, what went wrong, and where I could have done better.  There are so many excuses I could make, and most of them I found myself making!  The biggest excuse was that I was putting more of my effort into my directing class and my thesis development class.  But upon reflection, I was transported back to high school and my hugely influential basketball coaches, Coaches Paul and Drew Strauch.  The Strauch's didn't tolerate a lack of effort, and they especially didn't tolerate excuses.  I could give dozens of examples, but time and time again the Strauch's showed me that effort isn't finite.  You don't have "only so much" effort that you have to divide between tasks.  The Strauch's taught me that while time might be finite, effort is a choice.  And when I thought about that, I hated the fact that I let this class slip away from me over the summer.  Do I feel like there were things out of my control that made this class especially difficult for me?  Yes, absolutely.  But sports are no different.  Players would get injured, other teams got lucky from time to time, and refs would make bad calls - all out of my control.  But if each and every player didn't stand back up and give 110%, we were going to lose the game.  Period.  Sometimes, you give 110% and lose the game anyway.  But at least you knew you tried your best, and that spirit would carry over into the next practice and create a hunger for victory in the next game: a victory that would give you a chance to redeem yourself.  I didn't give this class my best, and recognizing that has really torn me apart.  So to my professors: I truly thank you for giving me this C.  Really.  It's a strange thing to say but I mean it.  It's the kick in the pants I needed to get myself back on track.  And now I feel that hunger for victory again.  I feel like I can redeem myself.

So here I am, with just over one semester left in college before I graduate, and now more determined than ever to give everything I do 110%.  Beyond experiencing the first C of my life, I went through a series of challenges through this summer and into this fall, and I think I have grown because of each one of them.  Regarding the blog, I've made some decisions based on what I've learned.  As graduation grows nearer, I believe it's time to steer my blog in a more professional and artistic direction.  I think I need to retool the blog to be more of an evolving portfolio as opposed to a blog full of personal thoughts on my experiences.  Moreover, I want to move the blog in a more visual direction.  If it's to be more professionally focused and portfolio oriented, I think the blog should be much less wordy and much more visual.  As a filmmaker, I am trained to tell visual stories.  Why should my blog be anything different?  With this new direction in mind, I think it will be best to archive this blog and begin a new one.  I plan on taking the opportunity to try a new blog platform that will be more visually friendly.  Blogger has been great, but in my two years of using it I have discovered that it's really aimed at writers; I have little to no customization over the visual components, so migrating to a new platform is the way for me to go.

Maybe I'll occasionally come back and post something a bit more personal here, but at the moment I don't really plan on it.  So if you've actually been following my blog, I hope you'll join me at my new one.  It will be something different, but it will still be there.  Blogger, so long for now.  Maybe I'll be back.  Someday.

You can find my new blog at austinbaur.wordpress.com.

Thanks for reading,
Austin

My Newest Student Film (F3) is Done!

SO EXCITED!!!!

This post is a few weeks late, but after over 380 days my third student film is finally done!  The film is called "At the Feet of the Union" and is about a young Confederate soldier in the Civil War who is struggling with self doubt.  I've blogged about it before, especially during the visual effects cycle, but now that we have been through the sound edit, the color grade, and all the formalities of picture lock in the film school it is finally finished.

Mixing in the mix stage.

The sound edit was a one week process that started in a calibrated edit bay.  Most of my film was shot during a horrible rainstorm, so almost every single line of dialogue had to be replaced.  I recorded ADR several months ago in an isolation booth, so I already had a good head start on the dialogue edit: I didn't need to do much cutting and filling of white noise at all, which saved me a lot of time.  The school has a great sound library, which is where I pulled all of my backgrounds from.  For foley, I grabbed my friend Travis and spent a day in the school's foley booth.  The foley booth is a lot of fun.  There are multiple surfaces to walk on to create various footstep sounds and dozens of strange props and materials in there to make sounds.  We did all of the footsteps, clothes rustling, prop noises,  and body sounds in foley.  Finally there were a few hard effects I needed to add in, such as guns firing, and I grabbed those from the library again.  After the edit came the mix.  The mix was supervised by Chuck Allen, the post production supervisor at FSU.  Chuck has a career of experience in the music industry behind him and really facilitated the mixing process.  Sound editing is a creative process that is a lot of fun and has more to do with story than anything.  In my opinion, once you learn the basic tools your skill as a sound editor wholly depends on your creativity as a story teller and your understanding of soundscapes and how they can enhance a story.  Sound mixing on the other hand is a highly specialized and technical skill set.  Chuck took my edit and ran it through various auxiliary sends and returns and helped guide me through a strong mix in one of our mix stages at school.  He gave me creative control as far as volume levels and equalizers are concerned, but there is no way I could have done what he did to my film without him.  (We finished the film in a Dolby LTRT format, which I had never even heard of before.)  This experience really showed me the value in getting professionals to work on your film in the finishing department.

My DP, Victoria, working the control surface in Resolve.

Then we moved into color correction and grading.  This is one of my favorite parts of the post production cycle.  I just find it to be really fun and I have invested a lot of time into learning multiple color grading softwares.  This was the first time I got to grade a film in the full version of Da Vinci Resolve.  Previously I have only ever worked in the Lite version, but the full release gave us access to some very powerful noise reduction tools, which helped us out A LOT because at the time of shooting our F3s none of us had had any experience with the equipment package the school provided us.  I had a chemistry teacher in high school who would constantly tell us he believed the best way of learning was through exposure, and that is definitely the school's approach when it comes to gear.  They threw a Red Epic our way with some old 16mm lenses and basically said "have at it."  Each show we continued to learn more and more about the camera and the lighting gear we were using, but the noise reduction was a great tool to help us fix our mistakes.  For example, when it started pouring rain outside during our night exteriors, we lost the ability to light the scene because of the danger of water and electricity, so we pulled up a jeep and used its headlights in tandem with a practical fire on set.  We decided to go with a zoom lens so that we wouldn't have to change lenses in the rain.  A big problem with this was that we couldn't open up the T stop below a 3.5 or something like that, so we ended up with dark and noisy footage.  But if I had to go back and do it again I would make the same decision.  I believe that my DP and I made the best decision we could given the circumstances of the shoot, and the noise reduction really cleaned those night exteriors up.  It was great.  There's an odd little texture that comes from the NR sometimes, but it is WAY more tolerable and WAY less distracting than the noise, so it's just a tradeoff we had to make.

Technical processes aside, I want to talk about what working on a seven minute film for 380-some-odd days did to me creatively.  The production itself wasn't really 380 days: we took a huge break in the middle of that time to continue or regular classes, but that said the F3 was still very much on my mind during that time.  During the year of classes I took during the post cycle of my F3, I feel like I became a completely different filmmaker.  We had some really strong directing classes with Jason Maurer, co-director of the feature length animated film Delgo, and Antonio Mendez Esparza, writer/director of the award winning Spanish feature film Aqui y Alla (Here and There).  I also began an independent study with Jason (which I am still working on) during which we break down scenes from films and work on pre-visualization techniques.  Beyond that, I have really gotten to know our parallel class of students in the Production BFA program and have worked on several of their thesis films.  I feel that this year I had a lightbulb moment, where suddenly some things started to click.  The visual grammar of film, as Martin Scorcese calls it, is really starting to make sense to me and because of a particularly laborious film seminar I went through this year I believe I have much firmer grasp on the core principles of storytelling as a screenwriter.  So the bright side is that I feel like I am a better filmmaker than ever.  The downside is that these discoveries I have made and the things I have learned all taint the way I look at my F3, and when go back to work on sound or color or visual effects or whatever, I just can't stop looking at what I consider to be my mistakes.  Having to constantly go back and analyze and critique my seven minute film for an entire year was a surprisingly difficult experience.  It really made me question my own talent and abilities and really resulted in a lot of soul searching.  It's really hard to adopt a constructive mentality when you know that you won't be shooting your next short film for months and months to come.  In short, I never want to go through a process where I spend so long on something so short ever again.  It's destructive to morale, and doesn't create any opportunities to keep practicing and improving.  I hate to say it, but I don't like watching this film anymore.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that I believe I have watched it over 500 times.  Mistakes should encourage you to be better in your next endeavor, but in this case that encouragement disappeared quickly because there was no end in sight, and the mistakes became like weights looming over my head for a year.  That said, now we are DONE and I am more confident than ever in my ability to make a great new short film moving forward into thesis.  I'm an optimist, and even though the whole F3 process was arduous, I hands down believe that I learned way more from that process than if everything had gone smoothly and I was happy with my end product.  Not only have I learned to become a better filmmaker in terms of blocking, shot selection, cinematography, etc, but more importantly I have learned how to handle high stress situations, how to deal with malicious criticisms, how to adequately self-critique myself, and how to persevere and dig myself out of a creative rut.

Now... on to thesis!

Advanced Compositing, Visual Effects Shot Weeks 2-3

I've got a two parter for this post.  First:

THE FAILED SHOOT

For my shot I had the lovely idea of a first person shot, much in the style of a video game like Call of Duty or Halo.  I wanted to shoot on the beach because I thought that could be very cool, but I needed a GoPro to replicate the first person shot.  Enter my awesome teacher, Ron Honn:

Ron Honn, ripped straight off Google Images.

Ron let me use his GoPro Hero 2 camera.  It's an older model, but who cares, it's great!

My buddy Collin agreed to be my actor, so together we met up at school where Ron gave us the GoPro.  We were in business!  Time to hit the beach!

The closest sandy beach to FSU is Alligator Point beach.  It's about 40 miles south and you have to go through some serious back roads to get there, so at times the speed limit can be rather slow.

The route from FSU to Alligator Point

Collin at the entrance to Alligator Point

I only post the map for one reason: to emphasize the distance.  It took a solid hour and a half to reach Alligator Point.  And that's an hour and half through nothing except about a dozen roads boiled peanut stands.  Why do I emphasize the distance?  So that my critical mistake becomes all the more apparent: I didn't check the battery on the GoPro.  Nor did I bother to check and see if there was a card.  I have never done this before in my life.  I told a professor of mine, and he laughed calling it a "rookie mistake."  I corrected him and called it one of a "complacent veteran."

But no worries.  Collin and I were problem solvers.  We could use my phone! I went to go get my phone.  DEAD.  The navigation to Alligator Point had completely drained the battery.  But it's okay, Collin had a phone too.  Using a batman mask Collin brought for no apparent reason, we were abler o rig together a face mount for the iPhone by velcro-ing it to the mask and tying it back with some duct tape and a scarf.

The batman face rig!

Somehow, this was going to work.  And that's when Collin's phone basically stopped working.  He had told me that his phone's camera had a hard time focusing, but I didn't think it would be a big deal.  It was.  His camera cannot focus on anything past a few inches.  It just can't.  We tried everything to fix it.  Nothing.

After sitting around for another hour trying desperately to figure something out, we left quietly in defeat.  A day wasted.

THE SUCCESSFUL SHOOT

Three days later we made the trip again.  This time, nothing was going to stop us.  I had the GoPro fully charged with a 64GB SD card.  I brought along a Contour ROAM, a GoPro equivalent that lost the branding wars years back when the portable cameras were first introduced.  It was fully charged and ready to go.  I brought an iPhone charger with me so we could use my phone if we had to, and I even brought my laptop in case I needed it to offload anything or reformat any cards.  We were golden. This time, the GoPro worked like a charm.

Collin strapping on the GoPro

At the beach after a fun days shoot!

I call this shoot the successful shoot, but there was a serious caveat.  This day the beach was MUCH more crowded… that means quite a few people I'll have to paint out in post.  It also meant I didn't feel comfortable pulling out our super cool prop sic fi gun, which would have added a lot of production value.  Fingers crossed, I hope this works.

Lots of people today… Oh boy.  Plus side, there were A LOT of cute dogs :)

Advanced Compositing, Visual Effects Shot Week 1

This summer in my Advanced Compositing Class we will be spending the entire summer creating one really big hardcore [hopefully] photo real visual effects shot.  I am looking to create a first person action shot, very much in the style of the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare trailer, which you can find by clicking here.

This first week was our green screen shoot.  We shot on the Red One on the green screen stage at Florida State University.  Check out some shots from my shoot!

It starts with the morning meeting.

Victoria looking inquisitive and Ron being awesome.

Here are some stills from shooting the plates for my shot, starring Collin as a hardcore looking tactical soldier guy:

And here are some stills from other students' shots, including Collin again wearing parts a home made Halo Spartan costume!  (Made by the incredibly talented Turner Sinopoli.)

And I took some creative liberties and went ahead and used one of these stills to promote my latest feature: "Halo: Lockett"

This will be my greatest work.

I'll be sure to be posting regularly as these shots progress!  Partly because I am required to, and secondly because I enjoy posting these blogs.  Until next time.

Stay On Target... Stay On Target

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 8

So here I am... eight weeks in, three days left... and I sit here at 11pm in the lab with my two remaining classmates, discussing the qualities of various kinds of pasta.  I've clearly switched off my targeting computer.

There are only three days left for us to complete visual effects on our third student films, woohoo!  It's a really exciting feeling and I can't wait to see how all of the films turn out.  Overall, this entire process has been an amazingly remunerative experience.  That said, I also am super ready to move on to the sound and color editing of my F3 so I can see it all come together and beyond stoked to move into thesis development this summer.  I love building Legos.  Love it.  But I'm at a point now where I'm just gluing the pieces together on this lego set and I'm ready to start a new one from scratch.

The F3 visual effects cycle, though filled to the top with fun and value, has began to feel like a road with no end.  But now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel - I just need to stay on target and be more focused than ever these next three days to get all of my work done quickly and to an exceptional level so that Christian's movie can be the best it can be.

Next week, I plan on posting a final review blog post where I will deep end on everything I went through and took out of this process.  Until then, I've got to go - Vader's come from behind, Han is nowhere in sight, and I've switched off my targeting computer.  Now, I just have to trust in the Force.

Looking Behind

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 7

Thorin: Where did you go, if I may ask?

Gandalf: To look ahead.

Thorin: What brought you back?

Gandalf: Looking behind.

As I write these weekly posts, I have been making efforts to try as best I can to stick to content related to visual effects and my problem solving process when it comes to the new challenges that each week brings.  But this week I want to dig into my headspace a little, if for no other reason to clear my head by writing what's inside of it down.

As with anything in life, an important and critical skill set to have is to be able to stay focused and work clearly despite what difficulties you might be going through.  (Bringing this point up in a sentence is simply my way of justifying this blog post ;) )  I've been feeling a little discouraged and drained lately.  I'm not sure why and there's no clear emotion or cause for me point at.  But between some difficult situations involving other students, the monotony of the lab, some things going on back home, and the constant struggle of becoming a better artist I've just felt a little down lately.

One thing I think I've pinpointed is that in my more recent work, I am missing some of the raw joy of creativity that I used to feel.  I was just scrubbing through the first "real" short film I made in high school, called "PCRT211", and was missing how much fun I had making it.  It was just me and a camera, a couple friends for actors, and an iMac with Final Cut.  Similarly I was thinking back on weekends where I would spend literally hours upon hours on Video Copilot doing Andrew Kramer's tutorials and beginning to craft my own aesthetic.  It was a blast, and purely raw creative expression.

This school has conditioned me to question and question and question every creative decision I make.  And for the most part, I think that is a GREAT thing, because it makes my work BETTER.  But, I am also coming to realize that it's really important to look back and remember where I came from and why I'm doing this in the first place, and sometimes just putting pencil to paper (or mouse to photoshop document) and starting to freeform something - anything - is super important.  This might be one reason I love playing music.  I am not a serious aspiring music professional like I am a serious aspiring filmmaker, so when I sit down to jam on my guitar or piano or drums, I am not really thinking about anything - I'm just playing.  I don't ever consciously decide to hit the third, the fifth, or the seventh.  It just happens.  And if it sounds awesome it sounds awesome and if it doesn't it doesn't. And if it doesn't I keep playing and having fun until it does.

So I am going to be working hard over the next few weeks and definitely into the summer to create things for fun.  To remember why I want to be an artist and to find the great spiritual joy that comes deep inside from creating things I really enjoy.  There's a lot more to that than just lighting a shot to a visually pleasing aesthetic or simulating a dust blast competently or compositing a spaceship scene.

What's strange is that right now in this very moment I know more about filmmaking than I ever have in my entire life - and yet I'm trying to find the inner voice I had in high school when I made "PCRT211".  What's really ironic is that I believe the very fact that I recognize that is part of what makes me today a better filmmaker than I was then.

I'll finish off the post with some stills from "PCRT211", based on the short story "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury.  Unfortunately, this film was taken offline by the Bradbury estate for copyright infringement.

Render Me This, Batman PART 2!

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 6

I love my title pun, "Render Me This, Batman," but I quickly became upset that I used it last week because this week the title is SOOO much more fitting.  So, I just decided to use it again and stick a part 2 after it, just like Hollywood nowadays, right?

Last week I spent most of my time lighting and comping for the animated show "Yeti In Paradise, and that inevitably results in rendering.  My renders on that show took a while to complete, but weren't particularly difficult or time consuming to set up, especially considering I was only able to render on two computers.

This week I am working on the animated show "Live Tree Or Die", and our renders are substantially more complicated and taking much longer per frame.  So... I am currently rendering on nine computers.  Nine!

I understand that professionally I will be rendering on render farms that are set up, maintained, and run by a highly specialized and talented IT crew, but for now at FSU we have to manually set up each render - which all things considered really isn't that bad.  The fact we have more than one 32-core machines to render on alone is amazing.  We have a second computer lab at the end of the hall called the DA Suite, and I decided to take it over.  After faculty worked out a spreadsheet for all of the producers to use so that we could allocate computers for each film to render on, this week I was able to come away with nine.  Like I said, each computer's render had to be manually set up as opposed to the more standard system of shipping the scene off to a farm, and to set up the same render on nine machines meant piping the scene through the server and then copying the whole project file to nine separate machines.  Then I had to manually test the the file paths and set up frame ranges on each computer.  All together it took me about two hours running hectically back and forth between two labs to set this up.  What I ended up with was something that would make Lucious Fox proud:

A sea of computers all quietly chugging away in the DA Suite, each using 31 of the 32 available cores to process :,)

Tears of joy.

Now let's hope we didn't miss something in our test renders.....

Render Me This, Batman

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 5

This week I moved on to my first animated show of the cycle, "Yeti In Paradise" directed by Lauren Hammond.  I was really excited for the opportunity to work on some animated shows because, while I don't personally have an interest in animating, I definitely can see myself working as an artist on animated films in the future.  I also might like the opportunity of directing one some day should the opportunity arise, but I'm not sure yet.  It's something I definitely need more experience in, which is why I was excited that Lauren was happy to let me jump on her show as a lighting artist.

I've been working hard over the past couple of days on helping Lauren to set up her render pipeline.  She has also helped me learn more about the general animation workflow working with reference files and repeating files when transferring storage volumes.  These are things I was aware of and understood conceptually, but had never actually had to do.  Getting that practical experience was great.

I also have been working on lighting the third shot in Lauren's film, during which her protagonist, Clark the Yeti, walks into a travel agency to buy some tickets only to be rejected and thrown out of the building.  Poor guy :(  We ran into some aesthetic issues with this shot.  We realized after the first day of working on the shot that the space was too flat to achieve the kind of long-shadowed look Lauren wanted.  So we reworked the shot today to achieve a new look that we were both happy with. I think this collaborative experience has been really valuable for both of us and I think we covered a lot of ground on Monday and Tuesday (in regards to rendering) that will end up saving Lauren a lot of time in the long run.  It makes me feel good to know that my contributions will still be helping out the show even after I leave it.

In other news, this morning I worked on cutting together some breakdown reals to present to FSU President John Thrasher, the College of Motion Picture Arts Dean Frank Patterson, and the associate/acting Dean Reb Braddock.  This was a really cool experience for me.  It was awesome to show my work to to them and to represent our college and class.  Seeing how impressed they were were the work our entire class was a huge morale boost for me, and I hope that my classmates feel the same way.  I was particularly happy to see Dean Patterson.  I don't know him well, only having met him a couple of times, but he remembered me well and showed a huge genuine interest in my work even though he's currently on leave.  That is huge to me and means so much.  It's clear that he cares about his students and his school.

This whole cycle has been getting me really hyped to move on to thesis.  I can't wait to continue for all of us to become better artists and to see what we can create.

Beam Me Up, Christian

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 4

This has been a really exciting week for me in the visual effects cycle: first, I wrapped all of the visual effects on my F3, "At the Feet of the Union" !!  W00T!!!  Second, I got to move on to Christian's science fiction film, "Flying High", as a matte painter, which I couldn't be more excited about!  Christian is giving me the opportunity to create an entire alien planet for the opening sequence of the film, and he is giving me almost complete creative freedom.

I already posted some of the mountain shots from my F3 a few posts ago, so this post I'll just post some of the ones I haven't posted yet as well as my work so far on "Flying High."

This is a really dark shot, but it is supposed to be.  We didn't have the time or resources to set up a whole Confederate camp, so instead I comped one together.  Classmate Collin Lockett modeled some great tents in Maya for me and textured them using onset texture references taken by AC Grace Colley.  Then I lit the tents, rendered them out, and brought them into Nuke to mix together the tents with several different live action plates.

In a similar fashion to the previous shot, we didn't have the time or resource to recreate a Confederate company.  There were seven of us that could dress in costume, including myself.  We shot 36 plates on set and changed clothes and props between each take, and then it was all stitched together in Nuke and then projected onto rudimentary geometry so that the camera could slowly push in.

This shot wasn't intended to be a visual effects shot, but on set it was raining and the fire burned out.  So I keyed out a healthy fire from another take, tracked it into the moving shot, then recreated the flicker by keying out the real flicker from the healthy take and rotoscoping out problem areas like heads and hands.

This is that matte painting I made for Christian's F3, "Flying High".  The scene involves a stoner named Hunter rescuing his friend Thompson from an ominous alien planet.  Christian tasked me with creating that ominous alien planet.  He gave me a list of descriptive words and 5 pieces of concept art from some of his favorite films that reflected the mood and look he wanted.  So after looking everything over and talking over some basic layout with him, I went to town in Photoshop creating this matte painting.  I started by using some texture brushes to block out the colors and shape of everything I wanted, and then I began texturing some of the planar surfaces using high res texture photos taken from the set.  Then, I began gathering a library of images that would fit the painting from the public domain.  From that point on it was just a matter of warping the images to fit into my blocking, recoloring the photos to look like the belong together, adjusting lighting and value to create depth, and adding it atmospherics.  I was even able to fit in the famous Vasquez rocks!  That was my subtle way of tipping my hat to some of the most influential science fiction moments in the 20th century.  I had a lot of fun bringing in some of the intricate detail into this painting.  My favorite parts are the rivers of blue lava.  I really like what those bring to the shot.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week!  Next week I start work on the animated film "Yeti in Paradise" then the animated film "Live Tree or Die" before hopping back over to "Flying High" for the the last two weeks of the process.  It should be an exciting time, I am really looking forward to the changes in scenery!  I have found that staring at the same shots for too long can sometimes be discouraging, and it can definitely become monotonous.  I'm really excited to keep moving forward in this cycle and to see what it brings.

Back to Business

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 3

Technically week four, I'm back after a week off for a rocking Spring Break in LA.

For week 3, let's talk about Nuke.

I have been spending almost 8 hours a day in Nuke for three straight weeks now.  My total time spent in Nuke comes out to about 27 or 28 hours a week, which means that since this cycle has started I've spent close to 84 hours or so in the program.  Couple that with the 10 hours or so a week I was spending in the program over the 8 weeks before VFX started for classwork/homework and the experience I brought in from our intro course last semester and it starts to add up to a lot of hours in the program in a relatively short amount of time.  I have really learned a lot about the software and am immensely happy with my progress in it.

This past week I have spent the majority of my time working on crowd replication and 3D camera projection.  These are big steps for me.  The crowd replication shots pushed my knowledge of keying and forced me to start looking for creative solutions.  Here are three things I started doing to my keys that made them stronger keys that looked like they belong:

1.  Edge Correction

One problem I was facing was green tinted edges around the edges of my comp.  Getting rid of them by eroding in sometimes wouldn't cut it.  It took me a while to sort out how to pull this off, but I eventually figured out that I could make a separate pipe off the keylight node, erode in the key to get rid of the edge in the alpha, then invert that alpha so that only the edge was present.  Once I had isolated that edge, I could use it as a mask on a color correct node and get rid of the green by grading it out.

2.  Core Mattes

One problem I was running into was the key pulling data out of the green channel across the entire plate, not just the screen.  This wasn't always an issue; it only became an issue on some of the noisier footage that was shot slightly underexposed.  To solve this problem I had to matte an alpha channel into the plate by using a shuffle node, then feed that shuffle down a separate pipe and merge it back into the main pipe after the key was pulled.  Then I just had to make a rough garbage matte in a roto node, animate it quickly to follow the action, and apply it as a mask to the new merge node.  I don't think this is the best or most accurate way to make a core matte considering it requires me to animate some roto mattes.  However, in this particular shot all of the subjects in my plates were standing almost completely still so this method was extremely fast and the results were great, and I do believe the best methods are the ones that provide the best results the fastest on a shot by shot basis.

3.  Keymixing

The ability to quickly and easily key mix in Nuke is one thing that makes Nuke a superior keying solution to After Effects.  In After Effects, it is possible to "keymix," but it requires either duplicating your plate as many times as your keymix will require and then masking and keying each plate separately or precomposing your composition after each key.  Both equally obnoxious and frustrating.  In Nuke, it's as simple as pulling another key and then plugging both keys into the keymix node and applying a fast garbage matte roto mask.  It's very fast and is just as easy to mix in the twelfth key as it is the second, as opposed to After Effects which gets harder and harder with each mixed key.  Keymixing was a fast and efficient way for me to isolate color variations across the green screen and take care of them.

In addition to these three keying techniques I used to help sell my crowd replication shot, I also added  in a 3D camera move in an effort to help glue the shot together and draw focus to the center of the frame.  In order to pull this off I had to utilize the technique of 3D projection mapping.  In After Effects I have created 3D moves by separating assets onto planes and pushing them back in z space dozens of times, but I had never attempted projection mapping before.  In AE, projection mapping is an overly convoluted and difficult process that I rarely had a need to even attempt, and when it could have come in handy I just chose to look for an alternative solution.  In hindsight, I really should have put the time into learning how to projection map in AE, but in Nuke it was an amazingly logical and fairly straightforward process.  I roughly modeled the scene out in 3D space using planes that I oriented to match the space (ground plane, house, people, etc) and then projected my comp onto the 3D scene using the Project3D node in Nuke.  The more accurate your 3d geometry, the more correctly the projection fits and the more accurate your camera move becomes.  But this scene was so simple just using rough planar geometry was enough to get by.  Again, the fastest way to achieve the result is the best.

I have learned a lot about Nuke over the past few weeks by being forced to think through all of these issues and come up with creative solutions.  I am really excited to see where I go from here with Nuke, and if I continue to learn and progress at this current rate I truly believe that by the time thesis visual effects roll around I will be at the level of total photo real compositing.  I just have to work on my 3D rendering first :)

Time to Go Mobile - Putting the Pedal to Floor to Deliver Market Fresh VFX in 8 Minutes

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 2

We're now over a week into visual effects production on our third student films at FSU and progress is really cranking.  I've only been working on my own film so far, and that has created an interesting feeling and approach to the work I have been doing.  I wrote last week about the schedule that I am trying hard to stick steadfast to, and now that I've experienced a full rotation of that schedule one side effect I hadn't really intended is that it almost industrializes the experience of creating art.  As opposed to writing or directing, with visual effects I really can just come in to school, put in an eight hour shift, and go home.  Writing, directing, and other steps towards the front end of the pipeline seem to occur more organically to me.  Ideas form slowly, taking shape over time with excitement and coming together to culminate in the amazing experience that is the creative process.  This is where working as the primary artist on my own show in this workplace of an environment starts to create the interesting feeling I mentioned above: because this film is MY idea and MY passion, I want to scrutinize every pixel of every frame and spend an eternity on each shot making it absolute perfection, even if that level of perfection is beyond my current skill set.  It is very hard for me to move on to a new shot whenever I "finish" one, because to be honest I'm not satisfied with any of my shots.

Let's flip the tables to when I'm not working on my own show anymore.  Presumably, I will be working towards another artists vision, obviously putting my creative fingerprints on their work but still reaching towards something that inherently isn't mine.  Suddenly, I might not be a huge fan of a part of my work (for aesthetic reasons) but it fits the directors vision and he or she loves it.  When this state is achieved, I feel like it will be much easier to move confidently from shot to shot knowing that I have completed my task and satisfied the director.  I believe that reaching a level of personal satisfaction will be easier if I am meeting the expectations that others place on me, because I won't have the burden of creating my own "perfect aesthetic."

This isn't to say I won't put forth 100% effort into other peoples' shows - on the contrary I plan on giving every show I work on everything I have to give.  I just theorize that it will be easier to be emotionally satisfied with my work when I'm working towards reaching someone else's design, because I always find flaws in my own work.  Ultimately I'll just have to wait and see if this reins true.  So far in my "career" as an artist I have only worked as a visual effects artist on two films that weren't my own, and I was only on each film for one week.  But it seemed true during those two weeks, so we'll just have to see if it stays true for the five weeks I work on other shows during this VFX cycle.

I keep telling myself that never being satisfied with my own work is probably a good thing, pushing me to work harder and get better, but ultimately it becomes a discouraging emotion and that's what I'm pushing through right now - finding the strength to stay on schedule by leaving one shot behind and moving on to the next.  Speed and structure are important, and without this kind of schedule it might become really easy for shots to get pushed back and pushed back and for things to missed and for deadlines to never be met until eventually the film never gets finished.  

Additionally, Ive found that this week has been a little difficult in the lab for personal reasons.  Artists will quarrel with other artists and sometimes feelings get hurt on both ends of the spectrum.  I believe it's crucially important for me to take those kinds of experience personally, examine them, grow from, become a better artist from them, and work through them, continuing to create quality work in a professional environment.  I can't let disputes bring me down, I have to harness what they can give me and find ways to improve from what they bring.

To sum up, I've come out of this week feeling a little discouraged with my own work, but I'm trying to use that experience to propel me to make better work than ever.  I'm also working at a pace that is completely new to me.  In fact, it is this speed that inspired the title for this weeks post.  It came from a fantastic YouTube video I discovered a couple of years ago after The Dark Knight Rises came out.  You can watch it here if you have the chance.  I encourage it, I found it quite enjoyable.

I'll finish the post by showing some of the shots (at various levels of completion and also highly compressed) I have been working on thus far.  I shot in Florida, but am striving to make the show feel like Tennessee.  Hope you enjoy!

Thomas and General MacArthur overlook the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee at Sunset.

The same shot from a slightly different angle.

Close up on Thomas at Sunset, the Smoky Mountains a haze in the distance.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire - Welcome to the Production Pit

F3 Visual Effects at FSU - Week 1

First off, I'd like to say that this weeks title was completely stolen from my friend Collin, who titled his blog post the same thing.  But then again, the title is originally from Chapter 6 of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, so I'm just stealing what Collin stole first.  It's my way of a not-so-silent protest.

This week we started visual effects on out F3s, our third student films at FSU.  For the zero people out there that actually keep up with my blog and are wondering about what happened to the F2, maybe someday I did briefly gloss over it it posts here and here.  I probably won't ever go into a detailed BTS of it like I did with the F1, but going behind the scenes of the F1 was more of a reflective exercise for me in my spare time and I've kind of changed how I do that now.  Now I keep a small journal and sometimes I'll go outside and noodle some thoughts in it or something.  Our workload at school has also changed dramatically: new city, new professors, new curriculum - essentially a new life.  I think it's important to change how you do things as your world around you is changing.  I had an English teacher in eighth grade who made sure he made at least one big change in his life every couple of years.  For example, one day he decided to start brushing his teeth left handed and he's been doing it ever since.  Likewise, a couple years later he decided to start tying his shoes backwards.  Never went back.  I've never tried doing something like that on the minor scale that he did, but I think that the concept would apply in the macro to our lives as a whole.  But what the heck do I know, right?

For the F3 visual effects cycle, the faculty are giving us eight weeks.  I got scheduled as an artist on four films, including my own.  So this comes out to roughly two weeks per film, but that's not how I got scheduled.  I'm spending three weeks each on two live actions films as a matte painter and compositor and one week each on two animated films as a lighting artist.  I couldn't be more excited.

For the entirety of film school so far everything I have done has been on a Mac, but for this cycle we were moved to a lab colloquially called "The Production Pit" - all PC's.  The adjustment has taken a little time to get used to - mainly I keep hitting alt instead of control because that's where the command key is on a Mac - but the machines are much faster and more powerful and I haven't run into any issues.  We also have dual 35" monitors and HUGE tablets.  Sometimes I have to pinch myself.

We've only been in the VFX process now for two days but already I have been incredibly productive and am super excited about my results.  This year I am tackling all my composite shots in Nuke instead of After Effects, and while I will always love After Effects - and still firmly believe it is a better program for 2D motion content creation - Nuke is an absolute dream.  I am able to achieve better results faster, and that's something that just doesn't happen every day.  So far I have completed one matte painting asset and almost completed one shot composition, and I believe that they are on the photo-real level which makes me unbelievably satisfied.  I have been working towards the goal of photo-real set extension for years now and this shot might be the first time I have ever accomplished that.  Years of practice from middle school up is really starting to pay off... at least I think it is.

One reason I believe I have been able to complete a matte painting asset and photo-real composite in just two days is because of an incredibly efficient time management workflow really stressed on me by my professors Jason and Ken.  They have pushed taking a 5-10 minute break every couple of hours, not working over time, timing yourself while you work, and meticulously logging all of my hours.  Additionally, my professor Jonathan helped all of our shows set up incredibly detailed shot breakdowns using a management solution called Shotgun.  This workflow has kept me laser focused in the lab.  I built a playlist in the glorious Spotify of some of my favorite music and some new music, made an account at www.toggl.com to start timing myself while I work, put my headphones on and have been powering through tons of work at a high speed and still had time to relax and play basketball in the afternoons.  This new schedule really excites me because if this pace continues, not only will I be getting more work done but I will also have more time to myself to get back in physical and spiritual shape.  In the F2 VFX cycle, I worked close to 16 hours a day for two weeks straight, and by the end I looked horrible, felt horrible, ate horribly, and each day dragged on and I got less and less work done.  If I really can get much more work done in this much more reasonable F3 schedule, I will have discovered possibly the greatest thing in the history of mankind...

I'm really looking forward to continuing through the visual effects cycle and becoming a better artist, while having more time to myself to develop thesis and other short film ideas.  I've also freed up a lot more time to play basketball, which is great especially considering I'm out of shape right now and my intramural team needs me more than ever as we move into the playoffs.  Tonight we played our first playoff game and won by 1 point with 2 seconds left.  It was awesome.  Hopefully and can keep winning and extend our season by another five weeks - that championship t-shirt really would look great hanging up in my closet.

ZBrush Studies and Character Art!

Being a character artist or concept artist isn't really something I aspire to be professionally, but this semester I am taking the character art class and starting to play around in ZBrush and boy is it fun!  This is definitely something I see myself picking up on as a hobby, and I think it's a valuable skill set to have also even if it's not the career field I plan on going into; you never know when your skill sets might come in handy, right?

Additionally, the class has served as an interesting lens into writing.  Studying the look and feel and design - the art - of a character forces you to really dig into their backstories and their personality.  It is great practice for becoming a better filmmaker as a whole.

After five weeks of practicing with ZBrush, and lots of HORRIBLE models, I've finally made something I think is worth posting, even if it's not the greatest.  This is my second attempt of sculpting the female torso, and I think it came out pretty well.