Director and friend of the site Russel Rocheleau recently released his music video for the song “I Want To Report A Murder” by Otto Kinzel. The Song is from Otto Kinzel‘s 2011 full-length album “We Are All Doomed: The Zodiac Killer”. Why am I posting you this update? Because I can proudly say, that the Zodiac font featured was created by yours truly, four years ago.

So if you like the video and/or the music, be sure to give a thumbs up or leave a nice comment!

After enjoying the breakfast a little too long I was rushing down Königsstraße in my car so I would make it to Pixar’s RenderMan presentation. I already knew what it was going to be considering last year (“The Über-Sprite”, the rocket, the fast-rendering motion blur) but Pixar is rather generous in handing out posters and presents and I wanted me to get another teapot for my collection ¹. I was too late, the room bursting with people. Obviously, word had spread that you get presents. People can be so greedy. I asked if I could make a reservation for the afternoon but it was in vain.

There I was standing, lacking a teapot and a clue of what I wanted to see instead. I headed to the biggest hall and ended up in “PhotoReal Facial Animation” by Patrick Davenport and Steve Caulkin of Image Metrics. They showed the sample clips I already knew so it was no surprise to me that… (click “show” to view spoiler) [spoiler]…Emily’s head was CG.[/spoiler]

You can find the clips also at YouTube if you’re interested.

The crazy stuff Imagemetrics does is providing face tracking with only the use of a video camera. The tracked regions of the face are then moved on a CG model. Tweak the keyframes and you’re done. It’s that easy! Well, it’s not. Steve Caulkin laid out the long way to their Emily demo which occurred to me as not really time saving: Apart from photographing the actress’s face for the texture, there also had to make a cast of her teeth but the molded teeth wouldn’t necessarily fit correctly so you end up taking x-rays to learn how to place the teeth correctly. And that’s only the beginning.
When scanning the different expressions of the actress the data was anything but coherent so somebody had to clean up all the meshes (about 55) and get the details out: Pores and such can only be done with a bump or displacement map. It would be just too much for the statistics-based tracking algorithm.

Steve Caulkin owes me a venti Caramel Macchiato. His presentation was in-depth and very interesting but, alas, Steve is more a guy you put in front of a C++ compiler than in front of an audience and it was hard to follow his low pace.

So I ended up at Starbucks with an iced caramel macchiato before making another attempt at getting into one of Pixar’s presentations. I queued up 20 mins and before they opened the doors there was already not much oxygen left. And I felt the urge for another caramel macchiato.

Pixar’s Carreer Gears was a again a valuable information on how to apply and how to put your reel together for Pixar. Right in the beginning the panelists ² asked the audience to raise their hands of what position at Pixar they’re interested in. To sum things up: Two thirds were character animators, many wanted to become story artists and only a few people were interested in the other stuff. And I bet I was the only compositor in the whole room. Here’s what’s strange: Last year I was told that Pixar doesn’t really do compositing which I thought was a joke or they wanted to pull my leg. Today they also didn’t say anything about job openings or positions in compositing. Very strange.

The panelists talked about their experiences at Pixar and how they got their job and spread the usual tales of people who were hired right off the college. Then they took questions. I must have dozed off somewhere in between but it was mostly asked on the process of applying and what Pixar is looking for. Here’s the stuff I remember:

• Don’t send in a reel when you have nothing to show.
• Put your name on everything.
• Have the DVD region-code free and tested to play on a standard set-top DVD player (NTSC and PAL both are fine).
• Apply for a certain job instead of just applying for the database.
• Send every 8 to 12 months an updated reel to show how you progressed.
• Don’t send every week new reels.
• Write a decent cover letter. They’ll read them.
• Don’t forget the all-important shot-breakdown. Preferably even on screen.
• Don’t chase the ostriches on the front lawn (I guess that’s where I dozed off).

Interestingly I gradually lost my interest and my caffeine addiction kicked in hard after an hour so I left for a chili dog and a precious cup of coffee. At Starbucks they either love me or hate me.

For lack of motivation to look for the right screening room for “Analog Artifacts in CGI” I went with the crowd to witness “Skin & Lighting Research” by Christophe Héry of ILM whom I already know from last year.

Holy moly! In his presentation I saw more formulas than in my whole college education ³ In fact he told nothing new about subdermal distribution and the models on how to calculate them (although I didn’t understand much of the math). So far, so good. But what If you can’t afford raytracing because, say, your artists produced more vertices than the final rendering will have pixels (see Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest)? You’ll have to have an point cloud based approach to dodge memory demanding raytracing. And when you don’t have raytracing going on RenderMan really does the trick fast and good.

Cute as a Button

That lecture served as the perfect introduction to what we all have been waiting for: The Curious Case of Photoreal Head Replacement.

Jonathan Litt had a huge presentation explaining the lighting, rendering and compositing of that huge task. How do you start? They started with a artfully crafted latex-maquette of Brad Pitt’s face made old, for it had a really realistic appeal in subsurface scattering and served as most valuable reference when comparing renderings of the CG head to it.

The head itself was done in Mudbox (yay!) and in it’s highest resolution had about 4.5 million polygons. This high level of detail was preserved by using displacement maps, that further were driven by curves so wrinkles would get stronger or weaker depending on the facial expression. The eyes were modeled and textured anatomically correct (I’ll just throw some expressions at you of what they considered: caruncle, meniscus, conjunctiva, sclera, cornea). As further reference they had a extreme-high-res photograph of Brad Bitt that you could see the micro-wrinkles between his pores. “That’s thousand dollar pores!” Jon joked.

But this perfect model also needed to be lit in perfect coherence to the on-set instruments and light sources. So additionally to the high res long-lat-HDRs that were taken on set, there were extensive survey data on each shot of all the light sources and scene geometry so that the HDRI could be mapped back in Maya onto this surveyed geometry.

The maquette of the head was photographed in LightStage with light from all possible directions (separately). A script then made it possible to color and blend these separate light-passes together based on the information of the on-set HDRIs. Why the hassle? Because the renderings were put next to this near perfect reference and the artists could check on how close they got.

The next obstacle was to choose the right approach on how the HDR sampling should be done, either Inside-Out (I-O) or Outside-In (O-I) from the HDR. The I-O approach is usually used to sample the environment for Global Illumination. You have to fire a lot of rays to cover correctly bright light sources. So you need to find hot spots and treat them as emissions. I-O works well with spheres but with other geometry you get shadow bending ⁴. The solution to this problem was to scatter the origin of the emission-positions during rendering (see the paper of Kollig & Keller, 2003).
probably guess that it didn’t simplify things that the head was moving through the scene.

The solution to all this blocking and head-movement was to reposition the HRDIs on every frame on the position of the body-double’s head. Because there was enough tracking data of the head moving through the scene the mapped HDRI in Maya was rendered in Nuke to match the position of the head which was much easier than doing it from scratch.

What comes now is really sexy: To single out light sources the direct practicals and instruments visible in the HDR were blocked or painted out in Nuke resulting in an HDR image of the ambient lighting. The missing “hero lights” were then positioned as area lights in Maya and given a HDRI texture. This was also very important for the eye-lights.

Still there had to be adjustments made for the eye sockets and eye-lights because on set the lighting was done on the body actors.

I really realized that I want to work at Digital Domain: They value Maya, Mental Ray and, most important Nuke. Adopt me!

Blogging,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The last presentation I saw before going to my car for some sleep was by Steve Preeg on the Animation and Performance of Benjamin Button. The big issue was on how to capture the performance of Brad Pit and have it applied to the digital head. And because the show was a $ 150 million Fincher/Pitt movie there was no room for error. If you’d mess it up, they would mess you up.
To get all the muscles in Brad Pitt’s face right Preeg thought about CAT scanning him but his manager just told Steve to think of something different. And so he did. Initially Digital Domain got the guys from Mobile who had developed a volumetric capturing system and captured various key poses of Brad Pitts face as basis for the blend shapes in Maya. When everything was tested and worked on they needed to capture the actual performance by Brad for the digital head.
They had him watch the clips from the movie with the body actor so he knew what was going on around the him. During his performance his face was filmed from four different positions, his cues were given brad via in-ear monitoring. In fact, Digital Domain even tried Imagemetrics but the result was too ‘dead’ to them, however it helped much in timing the animation which was all done by hand. Thus it was guaranteed to keep the intent of the performance rather than applying it with strange results. “Sometimes is just a millimeter more or less on one of the eyelids between creepy and cute”.

What I have learned today:

• That Steve from Imagemetrics probably wouldn’t pass a Turing test.
• That you can capture the facial performance of actors during motion capture by having them wear head-mounted camera-rigs with a light source both pointed at their faces.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering the resolution of the buffers matters a lot (bigger = better).
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering you should keep the buffers separate, meaning that nothing that’s not part of the skin may cast shadows inside the skin.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering won’t let you have your precious raytracing. So nobody does it anymore.
• That you best take texture photographs of skin by having polarization filters on your lights and one (90° out of phase) on your camera. Thus you block out the specular highlights and only get the diffuse light. Still you need to paint out shadows. Use 6 soft lights when you don’t have the luxury of having a Light Stage.
• A big deal in believability in CG skin are oil layer and peach fuzz. If you can’t nail it down why something doesn’t feel right then it’s usually one of those things.
• That working on 64 bit machines with 16 gigs of RAM really saved Digital Domain’s ass in producing Benjamin Button.
• That the UV-Space in Nuke (if kept in the EXRs) can save much time for last minute changes on textures.

What surprised me today:

• That you can talk passionately about human emotion without showing any.
• That Image Metrics also use Eurostile as their house font. Like me. And they’re not the only ones so I really should think of a new font then…
• That relatively few people who want to work at Pixar are interested in lighting, shading, layouting, rendering, controlling, software engineering or cinematography. They all want to become animators, character designers or, cough, directors.
• That I used working with z-buffered renders a lot in the hey-days of the late 90′s. I feel old.
• That not a single CG spotlight was used for the lighting of Benjamin Button.
• That Brad Pitt’s teeth were too white to pass as a 70-year old. For the digital head Steve Preegs teeth-color was used. That’s why he quit smoking on the show.
• That it was the first time that I read ‘LOL’ in a presentation. It is 2009 and netspeak finally conquers offline-speech.

EDIT: See below for some new insights about the critical start-up bug. Why me?!

But what the hell? Every time I try to start the game it wants me to insert the original DVD first. It is the original DVD, damnit! Some smarty pants on the forums across the web suggested reinstalling the copy protection but I don’t know how to do that or even what the copy protection is.

The ironic twist of this is the fact that I am forced to use a no DVD crack in order to play my totally legal purchase. It is my strong belief that all this copy-protection hassle only made everything harder for the average gamers and that there are no less pirate copies as if there were no protection at all – period!

I was busy on some forums and those are the weirdest ways people keep telling me on how to run the game:

1- Put disk in drive.
2- Dont click anything – wait for the windows message – run or open folders msg.
3- Close the message – what means dont choose any of the options, just click the “x”.
4- Wait some seconds and double click the game’s desktop shortcut to run CS.

I made this happen by Starting the game up well over 10 times in a row, so on the processes list there were loads of instances of the xrengine.exe running.
i then had to wait, in turn to click “Ok” on EVERY SINGLE one of their “please insert the original DVD” error windows.

This took a very very very long time, and at the end of it the final instance of the xrengine.exe started the game up.

I did some research myself and that’s what I have found out about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear Sky‘s start-up bug:

• The European version uses the queer french Tagés copy-protection, the Russian version StarForce.
• This bug seems to happen often on Laptops with HD-DVD drives. My computer has a Toshiba HD-DVD drives, but with the lastest firmware.
• The Developers give a shit about the complaining community
• On GameCopyWorld are some No-DVD-cracks, however not for the latest patch, which seems to be critical because…
• …the game is said to be as buggy as a fresh copy of Windows ME

I’ll keep you up to date.

Looks like I am transforming to a grumpy nerd, because I have to be so angry and pissed all the time about a variety of topics. If you don’t like it: I hate you one and all — damn your eyes!

Finally I had some time this weekend playing the new Alone in the Dark, with the same name as the original from 1992, which was done by Infogrames (now Atari) and taught me how three polygons scare the bejesus out of a nine-year old. Good times… But this new game left me with mixed feelings and an uncomfortable nausea.

one shouldn’t write a review of a game when he hasn’t even finished with the first chapter of a total of eight, but what the hell.

Installing game that’s just shy of occupying 8 gigs on your hard disk took so long that I had enough time to write my one page of this week’s report for the university. When I finally started it, everything looked very promising and the look was great, the atmosphere dense and the voice acting quite good.

The first odd thing was having a key to blink your digital eyes which was necessary because your view kept blurring. And it happened, just as in real life, that when something interesting was about to happen you were busy blinking your eyes, including half a second of refocusing again. Tedious!

The Product Features on Alone in the Dark at Amazon.com read: In-Game movement has been designed to allow players to do almost anything that is physically possible in the real world. A big *LOL* here because in the real world I don’t have any troubles going through a door, facing into the right direction. Don’t get fooled by this buzzline, I wish it was more like Half-Life² mated with F.E.A.R. and spawned this game with a spring-solver for ropes and cloth.

On the plus side the game tries to teach you its interface while you play it, which I always like better than a never ending table with keyboard commands or a useless tutorial-mission. On the down side the game doesn’t discern between first person and third person view when prompting messages like “to spray [Button 0]“. I was using “Button 0″, which turned out to be the left mouse button, over and over again but Edward, the avatar, only kept attacking an invisible enemy with the fire extinguisher before stepping into the fire. Yes, Ed advances a step when he’s swinging furniture. it wasn’t the first time that I fell off a ledge. So to extinguish a fire in Alone in the Dark with “Button 0″ means switching to first person mode and pressing the left mouse button.

That switch between first person and third person is an interesting idea but it acts more as a tool for showing you stuff to interact with by a third person camera on Edward and his surroundings. The camera and the controls react oddly in third person but it is nearly impossible to play only in first person, because the game switches back and forth, swivels the camera around until I feel really nauseous in front of my 24″ HD-screen. Anytime you want to know what you are doing, you switch to 1st person, only to get switched back to very cinematic and very uncontrollable 3rd person.

In once instance you have to fight your first “real” zombie which was so terrible that I quit the game angrily at that point at first: She attacks you while you walk around as if going for a walk, looking for something, anything, to whack her. Until you finally pick up a chair and start to strike back, your almost dead. But if you really succeed at punching the zombie to the ground she’ll get up again after a while! Like fuckin’ Silent Hill 4 ¹! I hate that! The only way to kill her for good, the game tells you, is to drag her numb corpse into some fire. But when you haven’t played that scene over and over again, you don’t know where there’s fire. She comes at you again and so on and so on.

As one reviewer on Amazon.com pointed out: This isn’t a run-and-gun-game, it’s more like a walk-walk-walk-and-then-search-in-a-panic-through-your-inventory-while-fire-is-all-around-you-and-monsters-are-coming-game.

Oh, and the inventory or the way to treat wounds: Atari says its an innovative new system, in practice it’s a bitch in the middle of a fight: Hitting I, selecting your weapon via mouse and then closing the inventory by hitting, get a grip, Î ², that’s an I with a brow (haha!). The only way of producing an Î is by hitting the circumflex ^ first and then the letter I — in the middle of a fight! Gah! Just as bad as letting go of a rope, hitting Alt Gr, the German right Alt key. And if you are wondering: Yes, it means letting go of the mouse for a second — that’s a sin in most modern games (no, text adventures aren’t modern games)!

The graphic is up to today’s standards, sometimes it looks really good, sometimes there’s just a little too much bump-mapping, but I can understand the artists: Once it finally works you want everybody to show how well it does. And occasionally there’s heavy clipping, collision misdetection or some other atmosphere killers.
The in-game cinematics are executed quite well, defocusing, different angles, nice cinematography, but the characters seem so unnatural despite all the efforts taken by the designers with bump-mapping and blend-shaping. They could at least have made their mouth-cavities darker! And don’t get me started on buggy cloth-solvers that kill the atmosphere at an instant.

I haven’t played far yet to tell enough about the story but I don’t like it, when all the time people you just met keep dying in various ways. So far in the story only one or two survived. Out of seven characters!

I would really love to love this game, but after all Half-Life² still is god to me and I haven’t played a game with such a good balance of an interesting story, fun gameplay, intuitive controls and pacing since four years. Maybe a patch will save it all. Or maybe I’ll become so brainwashed while trying to beat that sucker that I really enjoy it. That reminds me: I have to finish F.E.A.R. Fahrenheit and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. too…

I was plotting and scheming how I could convert a HFS+ file system into a platform friendly FAT32 but the easiest way is usually the one which takes you the longest. I copied every single file to the Mac’s hard drive, reformatted the disk to FAT32 and currently I am waiting as the files are transferred back onto the external hard drive.

Effectively this whole process ate up about one hour of my time. One hour I could have been working on the data instead of moving it around. But it wasn’t over already.

I remember requesting the files as, quote, “MXF files, straight from the P2 card” from my source but I haven’t paid attention to the fact that I won’t be supplied with dailies rather than excerpts from an edit. So I got the strangest files I’ve encountered so far: MXF.DV-QuickTimes that won’t play back on my PC – thanks to DVCPRO-HD compression. I strolled the web to get hold of the codec for QuickTime. To cut a long story short: For Windows users there aren’t any. So I spent the rest of the evening in the lab on a Mac with Final Cut Pro installed which read and played back the files no problemo re-encoding and reading some gaming magazine.

So it was recoding time – from HDVCPRO HD to QuickTime JPEG with about twice the file size that made me fondly remember the days back when I purchased my notebook — when 40 gigs meant a real big hard drive.

And now?

Now I’m reformatting the QuickTime files to TIF image sequences because Nuke doesn’t like JPEG QuickTime files. Time lost today: About 7.5 hrs — and counting.

What I have learned today:

• That sometimes it’s the cable, not the device.
• That you can access a Mac’s Disk Manager under Applications > Utilities.
• That this Mac can read NTFS disks — but not move data onto them.
• That I really can’t stand a Mac mouse’s acceleration and behavior.
• That there’s no way to read a DVCPRO HD QuickTime file on a PC.
• That a Mac has to have Final Cut Pro installed to play back a DVCPRO HD QuickTime file.
• That QuickTime exports the video files in the resolution currently displayed.
• That JPEG-QuickTimes (maximum quality) are twice as big as eqivalent DVCPRO HD QuickTime files.
• That Nuke doesn’t like QuickTimes with JPEG compression.
• That I should communicate better what files I need in what format and on what file system.

While I was spending the night cleaning up and UV layouting a scene in Maya I felt a the urge to check my mail. So I logged on Yahoo! to check whether I got some more r*0*l*e*x and v14gr4 spam mails to get rid off, usually no more than 2 or 4. but today it was different. When you have suddenly 68 new emails from one day to another in your inbox then either something great or something terrible has happened to you.

Luckily for me, it was something great. One of my videos I uploaded to YouTube more than a year had gained stardom by getting featured on the German YouTube main page — top rank and seven thousand new views within a day — I was breathless. And it really made me think about producing an English version, at least with subtitles, so that people all over the world may enjoy the magic and beauty of the History of Typography, made within four days from the first spark of the idea to the final mastering on DVD.

So thanks to all of you who have watched and enjoyed it, I really appreciate every comment (well, apart from the derogatory bullshitty ones). If you don’t know it, you feel like watching some infotainment about typography and are not scared off by a German voice over feel free to hit the play button!

Another convention report, my apologies! I haven’t thought that I would be on so many (= two) conventions in the field of digital film in such a short span of time. But attending the Digitale Cinematographie convention this Thursday in Munich was something way out of the ordinary because a little dream never dreamed came true: Seeing my work on the grandeur of a real IMAX theater silver screen.

Till,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I have to yell out a big thanks to the head of the video department at the FH Salzburg, Till Fuhrmeister right here in the beginning. Thanks to his good connections he managed to squeeze four of my class’ video productions into the screening at the Digitale Cinematografie. And it wasn’t just a “normal” screening on a standard video beamer in some cheesy seminar room, not it was a HDCAM tape screened onto a huge screen in a former IMAX theater. Impressive!

With Zorica “Zoki” Vilotic, director and co-director of two of the screened productions, I drove fairly early to Munich and arrived perfectly in time at the convention center. Till was already there as was Sebastian Prittwitz, classmate and director of “Zugzwang” with his cinematographer of choice, Kaspar Kaven. After getting our name tags and stocking up on various giveaways Zoki and I headed for the FH’s desk which was on the floor below ground level, riding the escalator felt a little like descending into a parking garage.

Between the countless and immeasurable expensive digital cameras there was a small tables with an iBook and two seats, representing the Fachhochschule Salzburg. While Till and Sebastian were gone getting registered at the front desk, something they totally forgot about, Zoki and I took seat and represented the FH which nobody was interested in.

Zoki and me,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Nobody? Well, that’s not quite correct: One man, a little out of breath, desperately looking for something, skimmed the stands reading the various FH majors such as orthoptics, forest products & timber constructions or midwifery, then took a glimpse at the FH logo. He turned to us and asked with hope in his voice

Zoki and I both pointed at the brightly lit cubicle on the other side of the floor with plasma screens and red carpet and replied uni sono

He smiled, thanked us and off he went. The FH-logo doesn’t look that much like the RED logo, though…

It turned 10:35, ten minutes to go for our grand premiere so Till packed his Notebook and we entered the IMAX theater, getting comfortable while students from the HFF Munich where talking about their previously shown film, shot of 35mm film stock.

Things that hurt

We remembered what Till told us after he came back from mastering our short films on HDCAM: They were all too grainy, they weren’t color graded well and they wouldn’t stand against real 35mm film in a theater. I should point out that none of our productions was natively shot in real 1920 by 1280 full HD:

Visit Zugzwang

Sebastian “Basti” Prittwitz’ short film Zugzwang, which had cashed in quite a lot of awards, was shot on HDV but it really did well competing with big movies shot on film. Basti was very lucky having Kaspar Kaven as a director of photography who lifted an above-average student film to an even higher level. The trailer carried a wide range of emotions and scenes, more like the trailer to a full length feature film.

RADO commercial

We claimed that Jonny Hennebichler’s big commercial for Rado (which consisted solely of tricky chroma keying shots, multiplied to on countless layers in After Effecs) was shot in HDV. The truth is, that the crazy folks shot it in DV PAL! I don’t know how the managed to do it but it looked even better than HDV! And Andi Leitner’s music really gets close to you and grips your subconscience with a catchy melody.

Wii Monastery at YouTube.

Zoki’s Wii commercial was shot on DVCPRO HD, yes, but because of the format of half HD (1280 by 720) I cropped nearly every shot in the post production to this format, mostly because of the heavy motion stabilization that was necessary. For the presentation I had to blow up the whole thing to 1920 by 1080 and, hell, it was blurry! To compensate for the loss in detail I added some more grain to it, so that the noise was in fact the only thing that really was full HD. If asked about the terrible grain I would state that it was the artistic desicion of the director to achieve a 16mm look.
Only my matte painting was executed in full HD but in comparison it looked way too crisp. So to match the bluriness of the blown up live-action footage I had to blur the matte painting, which really hurt, until it blended together well. The additional grain I had to add hurt even more.

The Instant 36 film festival opener, titled “Motel 36″, directed by Zoki and Peter “Pepe” Pflaum, on the other hand was shot and produced in full HD ¹ and looked gorgeous on my screen during the post. For the film festival it had to be scaled down to PAL, even PAL 4:3 letterboxed which also hurt. The Digitale Cinematographie convention provided the one and only chance to show the trailer like it was meant to be presented: In a theater on a real big screen in its native resolution. I don’t have to add that I am really proud of how well it turned out and how well it conveyed the fifties film-noir look, do I?
Fun fact: Kerschy and Max (the guys I was in the Windshield team with) didn’t believe that we really shot the scenes but took them from some old movie. I think Max still isn’t convinced that we really shot it totally ourselves. Although it wasn’t meant to be one, I took that as a huge compliment for my skills in cinematography, editing and compositing. Thanks to you, all you doubters!

15 minutes of fame

Till & Su Turhan,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Presenter Su Turhan announced the next fifteen minute block featuring projects from the FH Salzburg, asked Till down, who apologized for the bad visual quality of the upcoming shorts. Then the lights went out and my heart was pounding: There it was, the instant 36 trailer many of us had worked so long on on the real big screen with real good sound, followed by Rado (which was but a little blurry but posed otherwise no evidence of its DV heritage), then Wii and rounded off well by the Zugzwang trailer. Till was mistaken: Our projects didn’t look like the crappy pixely digital video we all were terrified of to anticipate.

Very polite applause as Till and the moderator asked us down for a couple of questions, like what format we shot on, whether we even think well of traditional film and so on. Then it was over and when leaving the theater all of us wore big smiles, talked too loud and too fast to eachother and were just so very happy that we had the onetime chance of seeing our works in such a magnificent way.

Ship of interns

The following hour we roamed around the exhibition space, collected giveaways, tried out cameras no one of us will ever be able to afford in the near future and talked about how shitty 3D looks in live broadcast.

a man with glasses said who came out of the presentation space of the cubicle of dvc. It was Jürgen Firsching, managing director. We chatted a bit about stereoscopy and compositing, that Nuke 5 is finally able to handle stereo footage and where I come from.

He mentioned some names, unfamiliar to me, what they did within the company and he gave me his card along with a DVD titled “The compositor’s Introduction to Nuke”. I already knew that the tasks at dve don’t interest me much but I told him that I will think about it nevertheless. And I am really happy about the DVD because the sooner I switch from After Effects to some real compositing tool the better. And Nuke has always been on my radar.

In fact, that was the day. To round it off I bought myself four comfy cotton t-shirts at American Apparel and a venti caramel macchiato at Starbucks. Then Zoki and I went back to Salzburg at around noon.

What I have learned today:

Giveaways,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

• That the FH logo looks a tiny little bit like the logo of the RED cam.
• That the best delivery format for a HDCAM mastering is providing a Targa image sequence with uncompressed audio in 48khz.
• That stereoscopy still poses a problem for live broadcast or sport — and especially for live sports casts.
• That conventions combine both the sophisticated nature of man (gaining wisdom) as well as the archaic (hunting down/collecting giveaways).
• That I am close to having a matching keychain for any of my hawaii shirts.

This Saturday was a big day for me: My first Visual Effects supervision job apart from anything related to my education. Magic Movie hired me for the visual effects to their documentary for national TV which will be aired some time in fall. I can’t tell you about the story (because I’ve signed a non-disclosure contract) but I can tell you about my day.

The day started by missing the first train thanks to a couple of old ladies who were totally inapt when trying to purchase a train ticket from one of the ÖBB vending machines on the ramp. After they somehow managed to get a ticket they got onto the next train to Salzburg city, but I missed my connection and had another hour in the morning to get ready for the day.

Usually I avoid riding in trains but when money is tight there’s not much you can take. On the plus side you have six hours of time for disposal when you’re not the one driving. Luckily there weren’t many passengers traveling to Vienna that day except that one guy who sat across me and nearly finished “Hector’s Journey” by some French author by the time we reached Vienna. I was plugged into my iriver the whole train ride and enjoyed the three hours I had by napping for two of them, the other hour was filled with listening to Calexico ¹, reading the IHT, preparing for my upcoming tutorial-class and, most important, reading and pondering the storyboards for today’s shoot.

I arrived at the studio at around 1pm as the crew just had finished painting the white background to blue. It still smelled of wet paint while I was offered a strong espresso. I didn’t even notice that there was no sugar in it for I was so eager for some java. It was the first time I went to Vienna without paying good old Starbucks a visit.

When the actor arrived too and got his special-effects makeup applied by no less than director Michael Satzinger himself I set up the blue screen for VFX with Christoph Skofic, now a very talented and passionate cameraman and cinematograher I know from school. Luckily he already knows much about working with visual effects so I could spare everybody the explanation what exactly tracking marks are and why I need them so badly. On some DVD commentary track I’ve once heard somebody say “Why did we need a visual effects supervisor anyway? Last time the VFX came out well without one”! I say: That might me true, but it would’ve been much cheaper and faster with having a VFX supervisor. Not to mention the thousands of curses from the guys in VFX…

My last train back to Salzburg was leaving at 8:40pm so we had to carry out the most important and most difficult dolly shots in the beginning – the dolly shots. Usually everybody on set hates a Visual Effects Supervisor but I felt fine with that team: They gave me the time needed to mount the tracking marks on the background, on stand-ins and to perform the tedious measurements of everything and the camera’s gamma-mode. You can’t be too thorough when recording what’s happening on set, especially when you do the post-production of the shots yourself. But this crew was very relaxed and gave me the time I needed which I appreciate much.

Difficult VFX shots are always a compromise between what you can force on set to decrease the workload in the post-production, and what you can’t do on the set which results in hours of clean-up in the post. Working as a VFX supervisor means balancing these two positions. It also means being imaginative enough to tell whether a shot works or not by just seeing two people walking around a blue studio. And it also means that it looks like you’re the only one without a “real” task like grip.

Bewteen two shots our director was asked by Lukas, another old classmate of me and grip/lighter/sound in this team
  “Hey Michi, why aren’t you into commercials at all?”
Michael replied boldly that
  “I am not making films to make money!”, directly followed by a comment from technical director and co-founder of Magic Movie, Jörg Steger,
  “Well that’s exactly the problem!”
Jörg spent about 100 € that afternoon for purchasing 30 liters of buttermilk among other edible props for upcoming scenes the next day. “Nobody drink the wine or eat the prosciutto!” – pause – “It’s poisoned!”.

New Horizons

Time flew by and I could assist on three shots before I had to leave for one interesting train ride home. First, I nearly ended up in a train car to Venice (Italy) but finally found a seat in a cabin with only three older ladies and an older man reading a thick book. I thought that they wouldn’t be trouble when I was trying to sleep. Big mistake. Except for the man with the book (who got off after 15 minutes) they were all drunk. Majorly. Plus their husbands where only one cabin apart — just as drunk and also with an open door towards the aisle. One of them paid cheesy visits and babbled something about “how I love you, Hildegard” and “how I hate you, Hildegard”. Somehow I still managed to sleep a one and a half hour in total, waken up every ten minutes by a high-pitched sharp laugh. When the old men started singing again on the aisle I woke up and harshly shut the door which irritated the old drunks but I couldn’t care less.

In Linz they finally got off and I was alone — at last! I switched seats and just when I had fallen asleep again three young black hip-hoppers with two local R’n'B-styled lower-Austrian girls hopped in and started babbling, partly in French, and insulting each other so bad that I wasn’t sure if they really belonged to the same clique. Half asleep I learned that one of the girls, Kathi, was pregnant and always concerned that her folks would stare at her belly while she was insulting Foma all the time that
  “Africa stinks of all the cows and I’m gonna sue you because you ain’t Austrian.”
Foma kept laughing
  “It’s the corruption that’s so terrible don’t you go to school?”
Kathi growled angrily. Foma looked at me
  “Sorry, man, she just keeps talking and talking and talking.”
He laughed tipsily and one of his “brothers” leaped in and gave him a 2-liter plastic bottle of whine of which he took a big gulp.

Half an hour later their peers found a cabin they had for their own, one without a creepy sleepy blond guy, and went off. Before he left Foma looked at me.
  “Everything alright? You want me to turn off the lights so you can sleep?”
  “Thanks, man. I’m fine. But keep them on, I don’t wanna fall asleep again and miss my station!”
He nodded, smiled and left, keeping the door open, but I didn’t mind. Still after another thirty minutes I got a terrible headache, dimmed the lights and decided to order my thoughts while blankly staring into the dark, ever changing landscape outside as Foma and his folks were merrily goofing around in the aisles. Suddenly one of them looked into my dark cabin, assumed that I was sleeping and silently closed the door before he went back to his friends.

In Salzburg I got off, paid the exorbitant amount of 5.20 € for a pair of hot wieners and went to my train due campus Urstein that wasn’t leaving for half an hour and so I waited more or less alone and more or less awake for it to start moving. I was tired and exhausted and felt as if I was the only one awake around. But I was mistaken. Two stops before I had to get off a goth girly all in black, of course, tumbled in, nearly tipped over her enormous boots and cranked up the volume of her white iPod Nano to the max listening to an old Evanescence track. She opened her bag and dug into it for something. As she finally found a tiny lip-gloss she let out a sigh of relief while applying it. I could tell from the intense smell that it had some very fruity flavor. And I am not sure but I think she even ate some of it.

When I got off at my station there was cold silent fog everywhere. It carried away some of my dizziness as I made my way towards the campus building. As I was making my way to the backside I noticed that it was full moon and with the floating fog around and with the already turned-off garden lamps the place looked nearly magical. Behind many blinds the rooms were lit, probably with awake people inside them, working, talking, still I was certain there was nobody else awake. I was so sleepy that it was enough for the whole campus that night.