With all the major studio releases hitting screens this Spring & Summer, there’s been much ado about ’stereoscopic 3D’ and what exactly that might mean for the ticket-buying audiences filing into theatres to see it. Long gone are the days of throw-everything-at-the-screen free-for-all’s like “Coming At Ya!”, with the 3D effect being forced down the viewer’s throat at every turn; but are they?

Not all stereoscopic 3D is really 3D, so the argument goes. Hence in point, the recent release of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, a major studio release if there ever was one, shot in 2D (as is traditionally the case for non-3D films), but augmented on the post production end for release in 3D. This is the Rubicon; is it to be, or not to be 3D?

Apparently, scores of folks are having all manner of trouble seeing the faux 3D effect without some manner of hassle, ranging from it merely being a nuisance (and closing one eye) to ripping the glasses off in a screaming as their eyes explode. Not really, but you get the point.  Gizmodo has an interesting article up, written by a visual effects supervisor with a rant about the 3D that’s not really 3D; where AVATAR rocked the effect, making the transition for most of the planet from 2D to 3D seamless, he’s got some interesting stuff to say concerning the manipulation / augmentation of the film image into 3D after the fact, something he feels the studios will be pushing on us, the paying audience, more often in the coming months.

So grab an aspirin and have a look for yourself- be sure to read the commentary following, as there are some very interesting points being made concerning 3D generally.  Cheers, Luge

Fresh out of the rabbit hole ala Alice in Wonderland, Director Tim Burton’s back at it on the stop motion animation front with a fancy new project… his feature film adaptation of Charles Addams’ classic, hilariously ghoulish cartoon drawings of The Addams Family! Universal’s family film unit, Illumination Entertainment, have acquired the rights to Addams’ drawings, once a staple of the illustrious New Yorker magazine. Outside of being inspired by Addams’ original work, Burton’s version of the Addams Family will part ways from other renditions of the Addam’s Family, specifically the 60’s television series, the early ’90’s feature films or the Broadway show opening this spring.Burton, whose visual creations are currently on display at a MOMA exhibit in New York City, is expected to spearhead the visual look of the film. Burton’s plans to impart the considerably sharper wit found in the original drawings, versus the dulled down sensibilities deemed more appropriate for the original family television series in the ’60’s.

This should be alot of fun!

(source: Deadline New York)

You haven’t seen Evil Dead until you’ve seen it in clay animation!

Pulling a new rabbit out of the hat (or ghoul from the basement, as it were), UK-based stop motion animator Lee Hardcastle has boiled down Sam Raimi’s classic, campy horror-fest The Evil Dead into a clay animated opus of demon-bashing, limb-severing, sanity unhinging madness that only Bruce Campbell might endure…. and he’s done it inside of 60 seconds.

OUTSIDE IN is a film composed entirely of still images garnered from NASA’s immense archive of space exploration still photographs.  Hundreds of thousands of them. The film,  using innovative visual techniques to create full motion, «Outside In» is being created on home-built computers by filmmaker Stephen Van Vuuren in his basement studio.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/1245909]

Keeping the budget within some semblance of feasibility (to complete the film on his own, without studio help), Van Vuuren is exploiting recent advances in desktop computer tech (and years of experimentation) in wrangling a vast array of amazing imagery, literally hundreds of thousands of still images, into a full motion film. Much like an animated epic, whereas every frame is a still image in and of itself, these are all disparate stills, shot by the NASA Cassini spacecraft merrily snapping away as it whirled to Saturn. For Van Vuuren, these multitudes of photo’s are the buildings blocks of his photo-motion collages created using Photoshop and After Effects.  Amazingly, the finished film will be screened at 4K resolution, in IMAX quality, on massive screens with concert-quality surround sound systems. Accompanied by a synchronized light show, folks ready to have their minds blown will be witness to the awe-inspiring demonstration in planetariums, museums and in limited-release IMAX venues.

Check out the website HERE- there’s lots of opportunity to help get this Labor of Love project to completion. There’s even an opportunity to be a “Virtual Extra” in the film!

Excelsior!

Luge

It’s a sad day indeed when one of Toronto’s largest, and more influential, animation and visual effects entities abruptly shuts it’s doors, literally leaving it’s employees on the street, jobless.Monday afternoon about 3:00 PM, the staff at C.O.R.E Digital Pictures was informed of the closing of the company, effective immediately. Everyone was asked to gather up their personal belongings and exit the building. The company had gone into receivership, and would be out of business.

It’s a tough way to leave a gig, surely, and I hope that the folks previously working at CORE will eventually see their remaining paychecks. I’ve a number of friends and associates feeling this directly- my hear goes out to them and the remaining crew of about 150 or so folks that were working on various projects Monday. Here’s the blurb from The Hollywood Reporter:

The folks at Clyde Henry Productions and the NFB are onto something very cool once again with Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop!, a 23  and a half minute short featuring the voices of Meryl Streep, Forest Whitaker and Spike Jonze. The short film is included on the Blu- Ray release of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, released March 2nd.  Here’s some info from the press release;

“The film, a collaboration between the National Film Board of Canada and Warner Home Video, will be included on the Blu-Ray release of Where The Wild Things Are, which hits stores on March 2nd. The 23 and a half minute short film was created by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, the Oscar-nominated team behind the short Madame Tutli-Putli.

The Story: Once Jennie had everything. She had two bowls to eat from, two pillows, and for cold weather, a red wool sweater. She even had a master who loved her. But Jennie didn’t care. In the middle of the night she packed everything she had in a black leather bag with gold buckles and looked out of her favorite window for the last time… Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life follows Jennie’s surreal, suspenseful and unexpectedly moving journey to gain new experiences and realize her dream of becoming the star of the World Mother Goose Theatre.

Since 1997 Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski have formed the artistic partnership called Clyde Henry Productions. The pair have created award-winning films, ads, illustrations, comics, and music videos. Their first professional film, Madame Tutli-Putli, produced by Marcy Page for the National Film Board of Canada, received international acclaim – over 50 awards to date, among them the Best Short Film and Rail d’or prizes at the Cannes International Film Festival and an Academy Award Nomination in 2007.”

Great interview with the fellows from Clyde Henry can be found at Animation World Network, HERE.

Enjoy!

Being Saturday and having a little time on my hands, I thought I’d shoot this along…
maybe it’ll inspire some creativity!
I got started in the animation biz working at a small, very fun East Coast studio that specialized in clay animation. We did alot of interesting stuff with plasticene clay, always with a keen eye to design considerations. Cool thing was plasticene opened doors to accomplish almost anything you could think of- metamorphosis, melting, replacement animation, fluid stop motion, crazy expressions, dimensional ’squash & stretch’, 3D relief on glass… the possibilities seemed endless.

The base material, colored plasticene, was readily available at any art supply store, easy to manipulate, could be mixed with wax for special effects, and was used widely (and still is) internationally by such animation giants as Will Vinton Studio (’member the California Raisins?), Aardman Animation (Wallace & Gromit), Broadcast Arts in New York (Pee Wee’s Playhouse), and of course, Olive Jar Animation in Boston. Fun, colorful, and anyone could get their hands on it (and still can) to give it a try.  I loved it.
In that, I stumbled across a wonderful article highlighting Plasticene in all manner of art, advertising, poster design and of course, animation over at Smashing Magazine.
Check out this very cool gallery of pics and video-  wonderful examples of the possibilities of Plasticene. Swing by to check out the showcase and find some inspiration!
Cheers, Luge

Tag along for a virtual studio tour of Portland-based LAIKA Studios, creators of the Academy -nominated stop motion feature, CORALINE. LAIKA, (formerly known as Will Vinton Studios), has an interesting history as a producer of top-notch stop motion animated series and films- have a look at their roster of commercial director’s reels- great work all around. In that, it’s a treat to have a look at the place from an ‘outside’ perspective, so I thought this little clip would be of interest for anyone not embedded in the stop motion animation community, but are curious nonetheless. Check out the clip HERE.

Lots in the works for these folks, so here’s hoping they can pull off a couple projects and keep the hordes of animation folks in Portland working for awhile!

Several years back, Matt Silverman, Creative Director of Bonfire Labs, took it upon himself to enlist some of the best vfx, motion graphics artists and animation pros industry-wide to build visual effects training videos that were timeless, concept-based and above all,  software-agnostic.

The original videos were released on VHS (I’m feeling that-) and have since gone the way of the dinosaur, as such. That being the case, Matt (being a generous guy), has since begun digitizing those hallowed VHS tapes, henceforth loading them online for the benefit of we mere mortals. Now how cool is that? Below is the first of the bunch from Series 2 (which covers compositing, keying, tracking, paint and rotoscoping).

These things are just plain brilliant, and if you’re like me, you see a good thing when it’s handed to you. Grab these while you can. The  Batch of ‘em are stashed HERE.

Cheers! M.

I’m looking forward to seeing Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. Not for the obvious reasons, such as the coolness that a 3D Stereoscopic Wonderland promises or even the sense of awe spurred by Burton’s aesthetic craziness.

I’m really into the what’s going on behind the curtain.

Looking around a little, I dug up some very cool green screen technology that, while not cutting-edge-new. ), it’s still pretty neat; a portable, suit-case sized pre-visualization system that accurately merges live-action fore-ground elements to computer generated, virtual background elements in real time. It’s been getting a workout on several high-profile television series (‘V’, the recently exhumed ‘Knight Rider’) and of course, ‘Alice In Wonderland’. Inventor and MIT alum Eliot Mack, the guy responsible for bringing this thing into the world, has developed a system that allows directors and cinematographer’s to view accurate renditions of how a final shot will look in high-definition, as opposed to actors in front of a wall of green screen or a pre-comp rough assembly. He calls it PREVIZION, and it’s got a huge amount of promise, albeit a rather hefty price tag to boot (for now). Here’s the skinny, below.

To fully appreciate the system’s benefit on set, consider the typical visual effects process (in layman’s terms, for brevity). A shot is recorded in front of green screen, digitized and uploaded to the VFX pipeline. VFX Artists key out the green screen background, then identify camera tracking and calibration points. Depending on the complexity, this can take days for a single shot. Next, VFX artists drop in background elements (skies, previously recorded live action footage, etc) and composite these elements together into a unified shot, taking anywhere from hours to weeks. Utilizing camera-mounted sensors, Previzion keeps tabs on what the camera is doing; where the camera is oriented, which direction it’s shooting, and what it’s focused on. Accurate tracking data is thus generated on set, and ready for introduction into the VFX pipeline. On set, the merged image is viewed on a high-definition monitor, enabling the director to adjust actor’s positions and make changes in lighting to further enhance realism in the shot (making the live action on the set look like it belongs in the virtual world of the background).

When the camera pans, tilts, or zooms in or out, the background imagery adjusts to match the camera view. This goes for focus shift as well. Seeing is truly believing. Have a look at the system in action HERE.
It’ll be interesting to see how long this technology takes to work it’s way into the lower budget brackets, providing a cost effective alternative for indy filmmakers, much like stereoscopic technology has over the last few years. Personally, I can’t wait- I’m working out the wrinkles in my green screen this weekend.

Previzion is sold thru Lightcraft Technology