In celebration of Steampunk
Our friend and collaborator Craig Kief shot this super cool steampunk video for Lovett directed by Christopher Alender: So in celebration of all things Steampunk, here are a couple images that caught our eye recently: The Day the Wires Came Down by ~ornicar on deviantART Joe Benitez’s amazing work on Lady Mechanika: Lady M 3rd printing by ~joebenitez on deviantART And, of course, for those into CosPlay who want to BE Lady Mechanika here is Steampunk Couture:...
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Blue versus Green
I attended an event at the DGA on March 12th comparing the visual effects used in the original Tron with those of the recent Tron:Legacy. There was a lot of great information about the state of the industry, work flows, etc. All good. But one comment made by the VXF supervisor of Tron:Legacy (I think it was Eric Barba at Digital Domain) stuck in my head. He mentioned that he “convinced” the director Joseph Kosinsky to shoot on blue instead of green screen because he felt it was more flattering to skin tones. Interesting. When I mentioned this to a DP friend of mine, he said that he understood skin tone has way more blue in it than green. Therefore, eliminating green by keying it out will lose less information. That didn’t sound quite right to me, so I did a little photoshop test: That certainly seems to indicate that there is less blue than green in skin tones. And with a quick glance at the color wheel, it’s easy to see why. Blue is in fact a complement to orange (which is to say opposite) and thus only factors in to increase value and saturation. So next time we shoot blue screen. Not so fast – that is really only one of the factors to consider when picking screen color. Putting aside clothing (blue jeans) and eye-color concerns (not really a big deal anymore – easily solved with a junk matte), one ought to consider the Bayer filter issue. Without getting too far into CMOS chip technology issues, suffice it to say that the 2 dominant CMOS cameras, Red and the Alexa, are more sensitive to green than blue light – so there will be less noise to deal with in the key. (But with the new MX chip and the Alexa, they are so low noise I’m not sure that should be of primary concern anymore… practical experience necessary here – I’ll report back.) So maybe if I was shooting with a Genesis/F23 or F30 (which use rgb and luminance stripes instead of a Bayer pattern and thus doesn’tt favor green), I’d shoot blue. Aha: Tron:Legacy shot with the Pace Fusion system with Sony F35 cameras. So what other issues are at play? Color suppression? Well this is, I think, where we see shooting people on blue screen has some merit. When you color suppress green out of an image, you use its complement – magenta. Now, when a pixel is fully green and you add magenta, it becomes neutral. But in the dynamic texture of human skin, right next to that green pixel is a more neutral pixel and that pixel turns magenta – not a very flattering color in human skin tone. So when suppressing the green spill off the face, you have to pick your poison – get out more green but have some magenta or leave some green. (A common approach to the magenta spill is to desaturate the image after you’ve calculated the key – which is a look we got used to in vfx blockbusters back in the 90s.) In the case of blue spill, orange is the complement – a much more natural color for human skin tone. So why did we leave blue behind if it is more flattering...
read moreRich Ferguson’s “Human Condition” music video
Ok, here it is: the finished piece. Though it is a very effects heavy show, I am happiest with the unity of the story world and the clarity of concept. But for the geeks in the room, VFX breakdown...
read moreSome stills from 2010
Last week there was a call on RedUser.net for images originated on the Red and it inspired me to go find some of the fun stuff we shot last year. The parrot was himself such a work of art that it felt like all we needed to do was point and shoot – along the lines of “if you want to take a pretty picture of a girl, find a pretty girl and take her picture”. The actor in the middle shot was Lonnie Colon – a great talent – the street was downtown LA for NY. I was trying to capture the vibe of bopping through Washington Heights to D’Angelo’s Left and Right. The hospital scene was shot at a technical college where they were teaching surgical tech – location, location, location. Pulling these made me feel pretty good about our commercial work last year. All shot with HR 10-1. Now on to...
read moreAnother still from Rich Ferguson’s “Human Condition” video
As I come to a close on the post for this video, I spend more and more time obsessing on the details. For instance. In this 3d render, the lights do not glow in the reflection, so that had to be added in the comp… The motion tracking is being done with Synth Eyes – phenomenal once you get the hang of it. 3d in C4D, Red1 (before my MX chip upgrade) shot with Red Pro Primes. Nice glass. Comping grainless Red footage –...
read moreContour Camera
We’ve been shooting a lot with the new Contour cameras – much like the Go Pro though with a more sports-friendly form factor – and this image gets to the heart of the matter. We mounted, or rather Joe Case our Second Unit DP actually mounted the camera onto the bat itself. Cool imagery, but the compression artifacts are from the footage – not jpeg compression in the posted image. My response to the shot is, “Great, now let’s reshoot it with a real camera.” Ok, but how? A DSLR might look better, but attaching it to the end of a baseball bat is probably not feasible – I’d be very worried that anemic 1/4 20 thread on the bottom of the camera would just rip out when the bat swings (and yes, we shot that). You could use an SI-2K, but then you’d be tethered. And frankly if you take a look at an SI-2K rig Guy Ritchie used for a recent Nike spot, it isn’t exactly a comparable solution to the Contour. More on that here: Guy Ritchie NIke Spot The answer might be this new industrial camera from Allied Vision Technologies It uses the same Kodak KAI-02150 CCD chip as the Ikonoskop ACam dII and because it is a CDD – that means no jello wobble – which is completely terrible on these little sports cameras. It’s on my to shoot...
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