Confidential: postproduction

Very brief breakdown of how has been realized the alien's eyes for an ad.



The software used was AE: at the end the composition had something like 52 layers (for no more than 6sec of video). The real challenge was create a good rotoscope for the eyes to match a shaky footage. By this you learn (again) how much is important to have a good plate :) (and remember you: shake it in post).
There were other five shots but this is the only one we (fsiddi and me) are allowed to show.

Working on lens flare

I was wondering how to achieve the same beautiful effect you get thanks the VideoCopilot plugin Optical Flare, without having to actually buy that..
searching on Vimeo I found this very nice tutorial that explains exactly that.

This is what I managed to achieve, tweaking a little bit..

original plate

after lens flare and color grading

So.. hope you like and, especially, hope to be soon able to upload the whole video.
I'm afraid, anyway, that it will take some time.. still have to record all the sound FX and there is still no music at all..

Long time

Hi everybody. Back after a very loooong time.
I've been in US for three weeks and came back with lot of nice photos of textures that I'll be publishing in a few days. Then I worked for some other multicamera editings.. too much boring to do this again in a future so I've decided to quit this business.

Now, I'm planning some real serious studyings for the next weeks and I'd like to share with u some titles I recently discovered and, in some cases, even bought :)

First of all:
- Maya Studio Projects: Dynamics, Todd Palamar. Bought. Seems really interesting. I'll tell u how it is in a few days.
- The VES handbook (...). Bought. It's huge.. and seems awesome!! But I'll need a longer time to read it XD
And last but not least:
- Introduction to Maya Fluid Effect (DVD), Wayne Hollingsworth from Gnomon Workshop. I don't have this one, but saw some works of the author and seems really interesting.


So. Stay tuned.

Dof

Dof: depth of field.

The very first tool that photographers have to drive the attention where they want this to be in an image.

I think it even is a fisiological feature of the sight: it is impossible to look at something blurred without feeling strange and, sometimes, even feel some kind of pain.

This way, the photographer forces the audience to look where he wants them to.

This very simple video uses the Dof to drive the attention and through this read a little poetry.

First real script

Hi everybody!!
Finally I made it! I've just wrote my firts script with his own very little UI!  :)
The script is able to create a custom locator that comes without any of the standard attributes and with some attributes copied from the default particleEmitter. Then it goes on linking those attributes to the same attributes of all the emitter you select in your scene. In this way you can easily change just one value to change every emitter you have previously selected: one "locator" to rule them all.. :)

I'll be showing as soon as possibile some images where I used this script.
See u soon!

R4 concept

Hi there! After the last job and becouse of the really boring lessons (see the previous post) I've been thinking to something to not just waste my time.. so I ended up thinking about this robot and a whole story connected to him.

Here's the first concept for R4.. the texturing is made as a "matte painting", so it still isn't part of the model itself (I still have to prepare the UVs), but up to now it's enough to understand which will be the next improvements needed. As Giulio suggested, I'll have to work on the details of the rust, especially along edges.. hope bumps will help :)

I will be posting some news about this guy soon.
Hope you enjoy!

P.S: Don't be shy. Every comment is welcome!

Boring lesson

 Have you ever had to follow a really really boring lesson knowing that the only reason why you are there is becouse you simply HAVE TO?
Is it boring, isn't it?
Well, since you cannot run away (you HAVE TO stay there) the only way not to go crazy is freeing your mind. And this is where my mind went just yesterday..

A really boring Patology lesson.. :)
Hope you enjoy the Medieval style!!