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Wednesday, 03 January 2007 20:50 |
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It's 2007 and I've taken the opportunity of a week's break to start work again on the Something Real sequels, Broken Dream and End of All Things. I'll update those particular sections of the site when I have more to show but for now I'm just capturing all the footage from DV tapes and tracking every shot that requires Kasta. Hopefully, I'll have chance to capture the original digibeta tapes now that the technology and storage has caught up with my ambitions, but we'll see. The big plus of doing all this two years after shooting (yeah, I know, it's the only bright side) is that I've now got the tools to do a much better job in a shorter space of time. I'm currently re-tracking all the footage with PFTrack 3.5 which Dinamo bought last year to do Con Passionate. We were able to use a beta version ahead of its final release and it proved to be a superb tool with plenty of options for solving very difficult moves. So far, PFTrack has managed to track everything (with a few nudges in the right direction) that I was more-or-less unable to do previously. Over the weekend I might go back and uprez all the footage for End of All Things to HD to enable a more accurate track. I have to deal with a lot of lens distortion on the eleven-minute shot that requires a bit of resizing during compositing and HD frame will make this easier. I'll be using Digital Anarchy's Resizer 2 for that. Actually, the feature of PFTrack 3.5 I'm playing with at the moment is the optical flow and depth map extraction. I'd always wanted to add more fog into the scene so I'm going to try and use the tracking information to produce a z-depth image for each frame. It may not work but it'll be fun trying! At Dinamo at the moment, I'm working with Llyr Williams compositing about 70 greenscreen shots for a Within Temptation music video. It's all got to be done by this Monday so things are very stressful. After that, I'll be working on a virtual environment for a short film that was shot with the Thomson Viper on the same stage as the one for Con Passionate. Both projects are very challenging - the music video is very pressured and the footage has a few issues, the short film needs high quality effects to create a completely convincing environment. Both are in HD. Oh, and I've been summoned for jury duty for the end of February. Great! |
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Sunday, 03 December 2006 22:59 |
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At last! We've finished the animation and visual effects for the second series of O Na! Y Morgans. Our main task on this series was to bring to life the Morgans' pet hamster Danedd, whose antics featured in every episode. This created a number of challenges for us, not least because of the changing script that had to still keep within budget and schedule. The more of the hamster that S4C saw, the more they wanted! Nevertheless, and despite some tight scrapes, the final delivery was dispatched last Thursday and I could breathe a sigh of relief. I can't rest, however, as there are a number of projects that urgently need my attention, some of which have to be completed before Christmas. I also need to start transferring my own films back to my hard drive so I can begin prep work ready for animation and compositing. There are also some big developments at Dinamo that require my expertise and input that I'll reveal at a later date. I'll be updating the website soon with a new Morgans showreel detailing our CG work and I'll also take some time to deal with the look of my site, which certainly leaves a lot to be desired. This was the first Joomla site I built and the two others I've done since are in a far better state. My last project is Creative Xulu, a media information website that will provide support for the various media industries in Cardiff and beyond. It'll be launched in the next few days, albeit in a basic state, and built up over the course of six months to feature a links directory, a jobs board, a company database and hopefully a raft of articles and tutorials. Keep and eye on it and I hope to see you there! Busy, busy. |
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Sunday, 12 November 2006 11:08 |
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Hmm. It's been three months since my last blog post. I really must take more time to keep it updated. What's changed since last I wrote? Well, I've been hard at work doing the supervision and compositing for the second series of O Na! Y Morgans, which is currently being broadcast at 4.25 every Friday on S4C. Following on from the success of the Chrismas Special and its CG turkey, the second series features a new character: the Morgans' pet hamster Danedd. This means that there are less 2D animation sequences in this series and far more CG sequences that increase the workload considerably. I also have to be on set for each day's filming to advise the director, coach the actors and cameramen and take all the photos and measurements I need to get the work done to a suitable standard. (This standard is, of course, very high, to the detriment of my own health.) That said, like Con Passionate and Cymru am Byth before it, this series has been a fantastic learning experience and will stand all of Dinamo in stead for future FX work. On a personal front, I've had my 30th birthday and survived. I also managed to get a little tipsy (not particularly difficult for a teetotaller) but got everyone else completely plastered in the process. My car passed its MOT and I've bought far too many books from Amazon that is really healthy. Exciting. I need a new hobby now that my previous interest is now my work! On the filmmaking front, there have been some interesting developments. Something Real was recently shown on LA Underground, a non-profit cable TV show available on a couple of cable providers in LA (channel 36) and online at http://www.la36.org. I'd sent it to them quite a while ago and had completely forgotten about it until I was sent an email detailing the transmission. Great! I thought. I'm pleasantly surprised it's still getting shown around the world, especially as I haven't done much to push it this past year. Lo and behold, just after the screening, I receive an email from a very kind and enthusiastic person who happened to catch the film and has asked me for a copy to use in her classes as an example of the philosophies. It's strange and surprising how the world works some times! In response to her email, I wrote the paragraph below to try an explain the films and I think it was a valuable exercise to do. The sequels have been sitting around for two years now and I think the time is right to revisit them. They're certainly too wordy, and if I had the opportunity (or the narcissism and masochism) I'd do them all again completely differently, but the ideas are right and still apply. I'm sure the text is more than a little pretentious, but who cares! I'll keep you posted. "The philosophies behind Something Real are mainly related to my own musings about the complexities and simplicities of life and evolution. On a superficial level, they stem from my own interest in the works of Iain M. Banks, a scottish writer who produces both sci-fi books and more contemporary novels. His ideas of utopia and future civilisations caught my imagination as a plausible route for where our species is heading. Since then, I've been able to think about these ideas far more and combine them with further readings, including that of Richard Dawkins who has popularised a lot of ideas about evolution. Although I disagree which Dawkin's method of delivery and attack on religion, I am an atheist and so Something Real and its sequels feature some discussion about organised religion. Further on in the story, I have Reydon's ideas of returning to a simpler form of life spiral out of control, twisted into a philosophy he barely understood himself. My point throughout has been that you can never return to the past when you have knowledge of the future. Since we are the sum of our collective experiences, knowledge keeps pushing us forward and to dwell on the past is to invite recrimination and regret. I believe we're heading towards a time when we'll have the technology to create consciousness and live without hunger, but we might throw it all away for fear of losing our need to survive. However, I think that these ideas can also apply to contemporary situations (as all good sci-fi does) and it's a useful lesson to learn. The sequels were a way for me to answer some of the questions and criticisms of SR and to show that questions about human intelligence, whether we're ready for wealth and utopia, and whether what we create and build will one day turn on us and destroy us, are cyclic and are always in the backs of our minds when we question technology." |
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Updated Cymru am Byth and Think Inside the TV Box |
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Wednesday, 16 August 2006 22:56 |
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Just a quick update for two of the articles in my work section: Cymru am Byth and Think Inside the TV Box. Both were projects completed earlier this year when Con Passionate had ended. |
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Jon Rennie