Rise and Shine
Monday was my first day of many other to come at rise visual effects Berlin as an intern. Strangely it’s exactly as I imagined it, maybe even a little boring — but hey: It’s my first week and they won’t hand me critical or very creative stuff right away because the team is a little stressed keeping a deadline for a feature film project due in 2009. I hope that I’ll be involved in stuff for the big screen myself sooner or later…
Monday started off more or less as expected: I was up way too early and had terrible dreams about some ranting video game nerd, thanks to the fact that I had been watching quite a number of episodes of that Angry Videogame Nerd. After some strong coffee I packed my Sony α 100; looked for my paper at the threshold which wasn’t there – not a good sign – and went with my flipping and flopping shoes to the subway station, as swift as the wind because I needed to catch my train, but not without buying some salmon bagel along the way. And I didn’t feel too girlish already not to listen to Good Morning by Ikimono Gakari.
Ikimono Gakari – Good Morning. Life Album (ライフアルバム) (2008)
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I was too soon. So I munched away on my bagel, alienating the people who watched me, not many though. rise starts at 10am in the morning when most of the commuters are already at work so I always get a nice seat on the city trains. It took me about fifteen minutes to my station, Treptower Park where I got off and headed for my bus station, thanks to Google Earth I knew exactly where to look. I got on the bus with the correct number and after the first turn it felt wrong somehow. And after the first stop I knew I was on the wrong bus. I got out after traveling six hundred meters into the opposite direction.
The street I got out was a one-way so I couldn’t just take a bus back. I had to walk. Back at the station where I boarded the wrong bus I realized that none of the departing vehicles was going near my workplace. And I was already late.
And so I passed the Federal Criminal Police Office, and was looking for that “big road” I had seen on Google Earth. To cut it short: I was walking in a wrong direction again — I blame Google Earth! When you keep zooming in and out all the time, there is the tendency that distances look longer than they are in real life. Well… some do. After I found out I called rise to tell them about my late arrival. It was okay, still I don’t like it to show up late on the first day of work.
Finally I was walking towards the radio tower and closing in on my workplace, sweaty back and aching calves, after all I walked 3.5 kilometers in 30 minutes — my personal best so far.
At work
I entered the building and, oh please god no!, stairs. Just as I was wondering whether I was wrong again a black sign with the rise logo told me to Keep Rising! and after some more steps I was at a large door. As I opened it I could hear somewhere the first few notes from the Super Mario Bros NES game but nobody was sitting in the lengthy lobby. To the right were some white stairs descending into a much darker area, muffled voices coming up from there. So I walked down.
The first thing I saw was a very hyper Jack Russell terrier chewing a small ball running up to me.
I shook hands with the couple of guys hanging about, first of all Florian, my supervisor. He introduced me to the others whose names I instantly forgot although I prepared myself to memorize any names people would tell me. Before I could think much about it I was shown where the toilets were, where the render farm was located (in the coolest room in the office), the HD-screening room and the kitchen with the espresso machine. Continuing his tour de force I was shown how the intranet works, where to hand my render jobs to, how to preview and check log 1 image sequences and where to put the garbage. My first job: Study the inhouse wiki.
So after about five minutes of drinking coffee and getting somewhat acquainted with my coworkers, one being a graduate of the FH Salzburg, I was sitting at my workstation browsing the house rules, the naming conventions and what inhouse tools they use, most notably Dawn, which makes it possible to load film-stock LUTs into the graphics card’s display of log footage.
Shortly after that I got introduced to another intern and I was handed my first job: For the cheesy TV thriller Die Patin III, (“The Godmother III”) there were 120 effect shots to compose, obviously the director got crazy about VFX. Oddly about 95% of the shots are just green screen shots of scenes with people driving in cars and talking to each other — boooring! I got handed the shots 016-01, 016-02, and 016-05 which tells you nothing but I just like numbers.
I was sitting in front of two big CRT displays, in front of a quick and dirty keying setup in Nuke 4.8 by one of the other interns and for the first time I felt a little overwhelmed and didn’t know exactly how to pull a good matte from the footage. It was terribly low exposed (because the shots are meant to take place in the night), grainy and Veronica Ferres hair is just hell to key. Plus I started seeing chromatic aberration on my screen. But I can’t tell whether it’s my eyes or the old CRT.
After a short break at noon that’s what I kept doing the whole day: Pulling a good matte from rather tricky footage. In fact, that’s what I was doing on Tuesday too. I suppose the fun starts, when applying these setups to the following shots and they work!
What I have learned:
- That eating a salmon bagel while waiting for your train is a hell of a mess as it is disturbing to other people.
- Where my bus is not leaving.
- What the Federal Criminal Police Office looks like from the outside.
- Many things about file handling, LUTs and house rules.
- That employees at rise are offered free massages now and then.
- That working hours end at 7pm but nobody seems to care.
- That Veronica Ferres is getting old.
- Where to get a pizza for 2.50 € and yummy ice cream for 90 cents.
- The difference between big VFX production houses and students (I’ll get into that some other time).
- log, as short for “logarithmic” means here that every pixel in an image or image-sequence has its RGB-values assigned logarithmically as opposed to linear which results in an image that lacks saturation and contrast. If this image is exposed back onto film stock, however, it will look just right. And to simulate how a log image will look on the big screen there are look-up tables (LUTs) for different film types and/or gamma settings. ↩
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