FMX flags,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Usually I would have jumped into the conversation of the fellow fmx-attendees but my internal computer said “No!” because it runs on caffeine and was dangerously low on it. So as soon as I got downtown I went to Dr. Starbuck for my medicine before attending the day’s first lecture.

Peter Plantec dropped a few words about today’s special program on virtual humans, after all he had written a book on the topic. It’s almost safe to say that finally we have made our way out of the uncanny valley. Almost. There still are occasional outliers but Benjamin Button proved, that it could be done.

And Digital Domain was spearheading that development as Matthias Wittmann’s presentation Combining Ages — TRON Legacy showed where he talked about the development and realization of Jeff Bridges’ digital age transformation on screen.

Head of Development

So how do you start such an endeavor? First you make a physical life-cast of your actor which gets you a full cast of the head (also the back of the head), good detail of the wrinkles, a sense of the underlying bone-structure and position of the ear holes, all that won’t change over the years — as compared to sagging skin. The downside of this method is that the person has to sit still for half an hour. “And when you sit still for so long you relax and your jaw drops. Like in many of you right now, your teeth-rows aren’t touching. And that’s a problem when you want a perfect model.”

Another time Jeff’s face was reproduced, that time it was a LightStage scan of his face. “LightStage has a really high resolution but you have to sit perfectly still for five seconds and look into bright lights. So inevitably your eyebrows narrow and even very subtle movements during the scan distort the geometry a bit.” But they already had the brows right from the life cast, so the artists could combine it with the jaw from the LightStage scan and a modeler crafted a clean digital model in Mudbox with proper topology.

Now they had the old-Jeff head. This was needed because the solver of the tracked footage recorded from today’s Jeff Bridges with four head-cams on set would only deliver correct results if applied to the old-Jeff model which would drive the animation on the young-Jeff head.

This head was modeled after the scanned geometry and countless reference photos, movies and videos depicting a young Jeff Bridges. This young-Jeff model went through countless back-and-forth stages of “Are the wrinkles there too strong? Take them out” to “Now he looks too soft, put them back in!”. In the end the animation-model of the head had 23,088 polygons in the Maya viewport. The rendered model was composed of 369,408 polygons but was lacking displacement mapping of very fine details such as the pores, which got hand-sculpted, in the model as well. So in the end, with displacement mapping the model had 5,917,916 polygons.¹

And the work on the model was everything but over: For the animation-blendshapes Digital Domain used a FACS-based approach for which they needed to capture Jeff Bridges as he flexed single facial muscles as good as possible independently in front of a scanner. This performance got recorded live with a Mova Contour scanner that offered a realtime scan of up to 60 fps, although 30 fps were sufficient. The realtime scan was not as coarse as a LightStage scan, naturally, still the high-contrast make-up on the actor’s face provided the scanner with roughly 700 tracking points that were translated to vertices to drive the motion on the geometry, although lips and eyes were missing. The data was good enough to select on a per-frame basis the best “take” of single muscles that could be incorporated into the blendshape models. A talented modeler also took care of the transitions to areas the scans didn’t cover, such as ears when moving brows. In the end the animation-rig consisted of more than 200 blendshapes two modelers worked on for half a year. And almost as sophisticated as the rig was the GUI for the animators. “The rig is really well done, so you can’t break the model, no matter what blendshapes you mix and put on top of each other”. Still, that process was never finished and constantly new shapes needed to be added over the course of the production.

With the expressions now possible the young-Jeff head was posed to match various expressions of the photo and video-references of Jeff Bridges to see whether they would hold up. Only if it worked there, it was feasible to work on shots of the movie.

Approaching a shot

On the soundstage, Jeff Bridges’ facial performance was recorded with four cameras on mounted on a helmet that recorded his face with tracking markers from four different angles. Occasionally a witness cam filmed his performance from a fifth perspective, “although 90% of the time there was no room or time for a witness cam. When I suggested that, you know, even filming Jeff with a small handy-cam or cell-phone camera would suffice, the crew just shrugged that they couldn’t do that because they weren’t in the [cinematographer's] union. So we had to work with the head-cam footage most of the time,” Matthias recalled.

Instead of moving the skin according to the tracking markers on Jeff’s face, Digital Domain used a different approach: “Our solver tries to use the existing blendshapes to match the points as close as possible, so the animators can tweak, add and adjust the generated blendshapes,” although movement on eyes and lips is not recorded too well, so every shot is a lot of manual labor of a talented artist. Further, “there is no solver in the world that can correctly figure out what’s skin-motion and what’s bone-motion.”

The eyes proved to be a critical factor also in this production. The blendshape-controls around the eyes had to be refined and worked on by the two modelers with special care. Even simple blinking needed a proper deformation in the face. The eye-lines always came from John Reardon, Jeff Bridges’ body double on set, since it was John interacting with other actors and the environment.

John, the body double, would perform what he observed from the take with Jeff to reenact to the best of his abilities. His movements would get motion tracked so that the digital head could be popped on. Once the animation was done on the head, a preview was rendered with sub-surface-scattering so it could be evaluated how it would hold up with light and shadows; then with the hair simulation and if it looked right there, it would get rendered for the final shot, composited and color-graded.

But the animation was not just fixing what the solver couldn’t do, there was much more to it: For example the many “Jeffisms”, as Matthias called it, subtle expressions or looks, that the body double missed to reenact. “The problem is, that you can’t change the head motion much, since body and head are a unit and breaking their motions apart would look just wrong. This really opens your eyes on how much verbal communication happens through body language.” Still, sometimes the animators needed to add a little nod on a specific word in the head-animation or twist it differently.

Then there was the problem of a swimming or floating head. “We sent it back to tracking and what we got back still looked floating. We looked at the footage again and whereas Jeff was speaking his lines rather serious, his body-double played it much more casual and relaxed and his head just wobbled.” So the animators let the digital face smile a little more so that the lightness of John would be carried over. So sometimes you had to adapt the head to the body movement. “I can’t remember how often shot like this one”, he pointed at the bobble-head-shot looping on the screen behind him, “were sent to tracking back and forth and came back almost the same because the track wasn’t the problem.” In the lower left corner the version-number indicated that we were shown version 47 of it.

Occasionally the production team even rendered the head from the positions of the four motion-capture cameras with the same distortion they produced, “just to prove a point, since everything looks different when lit, moreover, Jeff’s lips look really big and different than from the shot perspective. This way the decision-makers could compare the original and the animated emotion one-to-one.”

Headworkers

Not that often, but still, the team encoutered the opposite problem, that there was too much movement in the face, or some “Jeffisms” were happening that a young guy just won’t do so that needed to be taken out. Something that did happen a bit more often was edited reference footage, so that Clu would deliver his line angrily, only to laugh in the end, such as with the line “Where are you now? Ha-ha!”. In those situations the animators had to manually blend the different expressions together as plausible and natural as they could.

During the animation an HDR image of the set was used for a quick lighting reference, but it also happened that the lighting changed drastically once the head was positioned in the scene. In one instance the head was not lit from above but from below. “A smile lit from above doesn’t need to be that big to have the same impression than when the face get lit from below like it was in this case.” Oftentimes it was not easy to tell whether the animation of the face was dead-on, so an intermediate rendering of a Lambert-shaded head with displacement was done, where the skin-details where much better to discern than with sub-surface scattering.

Lastly the sound and timing of the expressions needed to be edited occasionally as well. On one shot Matthias demonstrated the problem in the plate with the body-double: The first part of the dialogue he wasn’t looking quite in the right direction, in the second part his face was obstructed when he delivered his line. Again, the right transitions needed to be animated to get the timing right.

And also there were shots where there was little animation in the face going on from the beginning, like in a reaction-shot of Clu just listening. It always seemed too static and the director wanted a maximum of still plausible movement in the face, despite the freeze-frame-like appeal of Jeff Bridge’s reference from the shoot. “Sometimes people just don’t move!” Matthias said, adding “Still, you can’t ever totally stop animating a face, especially if it should look photoreal. This would give it away instantly.”

“Sometimes… sometimes shots just clicked together from start to finish and went exactly as expected” Matthias concluded his lecture. There were not many questions and I tried to get to the “Raum Ulm” for the Adobe presentation as fast as possible. Unfortunately I still was trapped between two rather heavy guys and so I endet up as one among many waiting and pushing towards the room’s entrance. A few people squeezed themselves through the packed crowd from inside the room and the fmx hostess only let in as many people as had left. I was not among them but still waited in front of the door, eager to get in to Adobe’s D-SLR Workflow presentation. Then the presenter, Michael O’Neill, appeared from the back of the crows with a bowl of sweets. “Gee, you all wanna in?” — “Yeah!” the crowd replied. I have never seen so many Canon 5D’s and Rebel Ti’s in such close proximity. “Okay, then can we do another session during the lunch break? Yes?” The hostess shrugged. “Alright, then see you all in my break then!” and he slipped through the door. “Cool guy!” one girl uttered. And then the crowd slowly dispersed and I went across the Schloßplatz in the Holanka Bar, a bookstore-café to start this report on today’s lectures.

Upon leaving I had a little accident that resulted in a graze on my nasal bone that began emitting a small but steady current of blood. The fun part is that I wasn’t aware of it until half an hour later when people eyed me more suspiciously than usual.

Adobe-Schmoby

Adobe’s notebook,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I returned just in time to queue up once again in front of the Raum Ulm for an Adobe presentation titled Hollywood Visual Effects. Again masses of people were packed like sardines in a tin can and waited patiently in front of the door. But this time I picked a better place and was among the first that had been granted admittance by the hostess. As I walked past her I could feel the stirred crowd pushing into the room like a herd of kettle. I don’t know how but she managed to keep them back. Didn’t matter to me, I had a seat in the front row.

Michael O’Neill arrived after the Geisha VFX reel had finished and seemed a bit stressed but happy to see an eager crowd. A few minutes in his presentation he asked “Who has worked with Premiere?” Many hands were raised. “Who has worked with After Effects?” Almost all of them stayed up. “I love you!” Mike beamed enthusiastically. I bet if he would have asked “And how many have 100% legal versions of our products?” his smile would have vanished instantly.

What followed was the VFX reel of Shutter Island with rather basic comments on how to use masks and keying, and then he re-made a so-so crowd duplication in a shot of Gareth Edward’s Attila the Hun movie. A tremendous no-budget effort but with… how do I put this… obvious not-really-state-of-the-art VFX. So frankly I was a bit bored by the very basic VFX 101 which might have been totally new for some of the youngsters among the crowd. At least I got rewarded with some candy for making a smart-ass remark. Nobody likes smartasses like me, but what does Michael do? He encourages my behavior by feeding me candy! Still, I was hoping to learn something new. What really kinda blew me away was the VFX reel of Boardwalk Empire because as I saw those sequences I not once even considered them being so VFX laden when I saw them in the show.

And in that respect I was rewarded because the presentation turned out to be a clandestine marketing plug for bringing the Adobe CS 5.5 suite to our attention with some cool new features such as the “Refinement Plate” effect in After Effects (or something like that) which basically is the Roto-Brush as an effect. Further I really enjoyed seeing at least some of After Effects’ effects ready for 32-bit or at least 16-bit color depth.

Mike also presented the new Lens Blur which, according to his presentation, lets you set the focus-point anywhere in your live-action plate and have the rest blur physically correct. When it was Q&A-time I wanted to know how this worked, like After Effects triangulated the content and calculated a quick depth-pass. But, alas, Michael had a tendency to understand questions the wrong way (not only mine) and explained in detail to me how the lens correction profiles in Camera Raw worked. I knew this. He even boasted “We have made profiles for all lenses and cameras that there are!” I really forced myself not to talk back, because just a few days before I downloaded Adobe’s little lens profiling tool because they obviously missed quite a few lenses in their latest update. Still I wanted to know about the Lens Blur, so I pressed the issue: “Yeah, but that was not my question…” He cut me off and started explaining how a lens worked, what the aperture does and so on. Sure, he couldn’t know that I most certainly know better than him how that stuff worked, still I felt like he treated me like an idiot who had a Canon 5D set to full-auto. Frankly, I was pissed.

Still I remained at my seat although it was lunch break. Micheal had promised us the DSLR Workflow lecture and really stuck to his word, although it was obvious that he wanted to get through it as quickly as possible to enjoy at least 15 minutes of lunch time. Nothing really new here either, just a little Dynamic Linking here, a little Adobe Bride interaction and bouncing everything to Premiere or After Effects. I don’t know why so many people look down on Premiere because Michael demonstrated its USP extensively: The ability to work with native DSLR-footage (and even RED and Alexa raw footage!) in real-time without the hassles of converting everything to your intermediate codec as it is the case with Final Cut and Avid. Since Adobe got their hands on the RAW-color-specifications, even camera-raw for RED footage in Premiere and After Effects did not affect the speed and quality of the real-time playback thanks to their Mercury Playback Engine. That was the most impressive thing I’d seen in this year’s Adobe presentation. At least something.

VFX Politics

Jeff Okun presenting,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Today I had enough energy and motivation for trying something new and so I made my way across the street and into the other building for Jeffrey A. Okun’s²Politics of VFX. I was lucky and got a seat right in the front row so view and sound were excellent and allowed me to take some good photos of the speakers as well.

VES‘s executive director and FMX veteran Eric Roth introduced Jeff, chair of the VES, in very dear and complimenting words so the man got a big applause despite we, the audience, quite didn’t know why we applauded so enthusiastically. This blind and externally fueled enthusiasm should really give us to think. On the other hand, well, we didn’t applaud Hitler.

“Let’s talk about politics!” Jeff begun.

“I want everybody to raise their right hand and swear not to ruin my already rickety career because I am going to name names and expose people. Now do it and say ‘I swear’!” Yes, this was going to get juicy, I thought with a smile.

Jeff started a –god knows– overladen and ugly Power Point presentation. The first slide read “Visual Effects and Politics. Politics show up when you are: 1. Getting Hired” and I counted five different fonts, three different fade-ins and also three different colors. I was overwhelmed by this visual bravery. Jeff climbed the highest point of the stage, directly in front of the projection and lifted the veil on one myth: “You don’t get hired because of your skills. You get hired because people think you are an interesting person, like the way you are or because you have a good reputation. If you don’t really have a dynamic personality you won’t even get hired.” And Jeff went on telling anecdote after anecdote.

“How many of you are industry professionals? … Good. How many of you are students? … And how many of you don’t know why they’re here but thought this was a good way to spend some time?” I already liked Jeff, whose polarizing character and appearance could be compared to being the VFX industry’s Julian Assange.

“Everybody on a movie has an agenda. And creating the best result on screen is usually never makes it to the top-ten of their priorities. On top are promotions, family, friends, future plans, etc. And this can lead to the strangest and most wacky decisions during the making of a film”, like when the whole movie gets shot in a certain location just because the girlfriend of the director, who happens also to be the lead actress, wants to visit Malta. Or that, for example, the production designer hates the VFX team because it threatens his job and so he sabotages their efforts in as many ways as possible on set. Jeff also told how on the set of Last Samurai Tom Cruise (whose high-fives were vicious to the point that you would duck away to escape them) was ordered to be shot in front of a blue screen — in a navy blue suit. “This was not because they didn’t know any better. This was because of proving a point, that the VFX crew follows the orders of the director and not vice versa.” It sounded painful. “When you’re not Digital Domain or ILM you don’t have much to say on the set and are under constant pressure to just get what you need.”

“Cinefex always presents the same old making-of story over and over again: We met with the director, developed the look, made some tests, he loved it, we shot it and produced the VFX and everybody loved it… Raise your hands, who of you has ever been in such an ideal production where everything worked from start to finish?”. Silence. I thought back about past and also present productions I took part in which where tattered and torn by the interplay of individual agendas. And in the audience not a single hand was raised as far as I could tell.

The next set of slides with sickening word-by-word-transitions materialized on the projection. As we all waited for it to finally finish, Jeff added with a charming childish smile “I had so much fun doing that!” The slides essentially said that all politics come from a certain point of view and that “your brain sees what it is expecting, not what is there”, a statement underlined with photos of optical illusion graffiti like these in Toronto “by a group of people who just do this, they say, to mess with drunks”. That got a huge laugh. Jeff then continued showing blivets, impossible objects. “Trying to get the right perspective hurts your brain like watching a bad 3D-movie” he spoke, not missing to make a small remark about the stereo-conversion of Clash of the Titans. “A blivet is to perspective what reality is to your brain” was prominently placed across a slide in a stinging yellow color. “Can you really trust your brain?” Jeff asked rhetorically “No. That’s the point.”

“Some politics are good politics, some politics are bad politics and some politics are just crazy politics. These crazy politics get propagated by crazy people, and artists are oftentimes crazy people. And where do you have a bunch of artists together? In a movie production. So 90% of the politics you get are crazy politics.” Jeff deduced. Was it really that simple? Well, it made sense though. “The thing is, that politics affect the story. The Story… this is the altar before we bow.” Jeff paused for a moment. “And, by the way, the thing that killed 3D three times now is not bad technology, it’s bad stories. Now look at today: The big studios are dependent on flat stories about super heroes. Soon we will have super hero TV shows and commercials. The thing is, studios make movies for business, we do it because we love doing it.”

Jeff then talked extensively about the issues on Red Planet, how the story sucked, how the leading actor pissed everyone off and sabotaged the whole shoot so “that you were lucky to get two shots a day.” The VFX Producer quit, there was no VFX supervisor and Jeff only stayed on the set because he was promised work on the newest Harry Potter movie if Red Planet was thgouh. Things heated up further, so that the two remaining lead actors (the story had killed the others one by one before) filed restraining orders against each other and the only way to finish the movie was by shooting them one at a time and compositing them together. All that sounded dreadful! And this was just one of many productions that were going down the toilet during production. “You can tell how bad things are going when you look at the versions of a shot.” One had the version number of v1156.

“VFX is another word for not being able to say no”

The problem of all this is that the costs increase and the VFX department gets blamed for “getting crazy”. According to Jeff, the budgeting usually works like this: “Some 21-year-old one reads scripts all day at a studio and evaluates them, like The VFX on this movie will be $ 800,000! Then I read the script and say: That will cost you $ 25 million! Then the studio panics and asks us to cut costs. With some trickery we figure we can do it for $ 19 million which still is too much for the studio. Maybe you should order a re-write of the script? I suggest and then the rewritten version comes back with a new scene of an army marching though a city to the harbor and I say: Phew, with all that we are around $ 28 million and the studio will reply in lack of understanding: Why the heck is it now even more expensive?!”
On every film Jeff (and I for that matter) ever worked on, the final number of VFX shots went up, and so did the costs.

“What only matters is what ends up on the screen. Nobody will ask you whether everybody had a great time or you barely made it out alive.” If the movie is a success, so are you. If not, and you’re the VFX Supervisor or Producer, it’s your fault. “But always be aware of the agendas and politics of the people around you.” That was heavy. But hey, somebody needed to say it.

Pioneering for future legacies

After a few minutes’ break Eric Roth once again made the audience tingle with excitement as he was announcing another industry veteran, Bill Kroyer, who talked about the making of TRON from 1980 to 1982 in How Classical Animation boosted CG.

Bill Kroyer, then and now,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Bill started with a short history lesson and with what it was like when he begun at Walt Disney Animation and got trained under the tutelage of the Nine Old Men. In the 1970′s the animation studio was the same as it had been for decades, Disney was very reluctant (if not avoiding) to adopt new technology back in the day. To get this point across Bill threw up a slide reading “The only technology in the studio not available on Snow White…,” the picture below showed an old electric pencil sharpener. You couldn’t start much lower on technology than that.

Around the end of the 1970′s Steven Lisberger became intrigued with video games and wanted to make a film in that aesthetic of glowing colored lines. Out of that idea he initially envisioned TRON as a fully 2d-animated feature in mentioned aesthetic, but the project grew bigger and so did the ambitions of him becoming writer and director creating TRON. He recruited a couple of animators and flirted with state-of-the-art technology in bringing the vision to life: by modeling the world and the vehicles in the three-dimensional computer-space to create “Simulated Images” as it was called back then. This was where the training as a Disney animator really set them on course because at Disney “you always think spatially, you create the illusion of depth,” Bill explained as he showed a character-board of Jiminy Cricket, drawn from any angle with the underlying three-dimensional primitives sketched in. This board was over 70 years old!

As for the look they got design legend Syd Mead work on the “evil” architecture and vehicles (such was the famous light cycles) and French comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius, to work on the “good” designs like the Solar Sailer. Moebius also was one of the first artists to rely in his storyboards only on outlines and different shades of gray markers. When the storyboards were finished and the few artists on the project knew exactly what they wanted it to look like, the hard part begun. For that matter each story board panel had two numbers on the bottom, the first one indicating shot order, the second one defining the exact length in frames.

“A lot of graph paper”

The Light Cycle,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

There was no unified software for creating computer graphics at the time, there weren’t even unified computers, “the companies even built their own computers.” Four of these companies were tasked to recreate the designs of Syd and Moebius in 3D space with combinations of primitives, in the case of the light cycle it was MAGI/Synthavision in New York, a company that was founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman, “the guy who also invented the MRI,” Bill added.

“At that time there was software for creating and describing stuff in 3d, displaying stuff in 3d, even lighting stuff in 3d but nobody ever thought of software for animating stuff in 3d” Bill explained. So “animating” became a completely different endeavor than in traditional animation:

322,200 values,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

First, the animators needed to specify how the models would move in the digital world. For example, what the turn radius of a light cycle was, how it would tilt according to what curve angle and all that — not approximately but exactly, in values and degrees. The same route needed to be taken for the scene geometry: Everything hat to be drawn and outlined in the right proportions with numbers and curves on graph-paper; yet it didn’t end there: Animations of vehicles and the camera needed to be put into numbers and the classical exposure sheet now had 7 columns for each object: XYZ position, XYZ rotation (yaw, pitch & roll) and frame number — for each frame³.

“That means 144 values for one second of animation” Bill’s slide read. The next continued with “TRON had 15 minutes of computer-generated animation. That’s 900 seconds of footage. With an average of two vehicles and a moving camera in each shot, the animation required 322,200 hand-recorded values!” Heavy.

But Wait!,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

“But wait!” Bill continued like a TV salesman, “there was one computer on the Disney lot in 1980.” It was the computer that was controlling the intricate moving panes which were used for pans and other intricate effects in Disney animation movies. And this computer could even calculate and interpolate soft Bezièr-splines, something your average curve editor does without bragging nowadays. So Bill would sneak into the animation department with the computer during their down-times (usually at night) and enter the start and end values. With the tap of a button the machine would compute and display the inbetweens. “But it didn’t have a printer, so you needed to record the values per hand,” Bill reminisced with a smile. And the operators at MAGI took these exposure sheets with manually recorded values and their people, Chris Wedge among them, typed them up for use in their software. That’s how early computer animation was done.

Bill talks about the Chromatix 9000,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

“The first time we would see any objects in motion was in 70mm projected on the stage,” another slide emphasized. Because creating, calculating, positioning, rendering and outputting the animation was such an enormous feat there were no second takes, everything needed to be dead-on the first time. “Occasionally you got the chance to tweak a bit. So we had to know and envision each shot exactly and completely before getting to work, something that has changed with increased computation power over the decades” Bill subtly nudged the audience verbally towards the “think before you animate!” concept that gets so often left behind.

Luckily for the small team, new technology was available to them during the production in the shape of the Chromatix 9000 computer with a big screen, that could calculate and display shots in a rough wireframe, although not in motion. The transfer from 3d-workstation to the Chromatix was in fact via a phone modem and one screen refresh would take about ten minutes. “People in the studio would just drop by to watch that, shouting with glee how amazing it was.”

Optical Compositing

For some it audience the cumbersome post-production process of TRON was new and even for those who knew, the recognition was palpable: For the crisp and digital look of the movie, the soundstage needed to be filmed with a large depth of field which, naturally, required a big amount of light, even more so for 70mm footage⁴. Each frame of the black-and-white footage then got transferred multiple times to 11″ by 17″ film and boards on which various portions got masked out manually in the end by Taiwanese artists with paintbrushes and ink. These single masks then were then used for various different exposures that got optically composed back together which meant an insane amount of film-transparencies, masks and compositing-layers. Not even the color glow was out-of-the-box, instead it required thousands of wedges to get the right amount of glow intensity for each character in each shot.

And then there was the problem of flickering blacks, its origin in the pipeline the team could not pin down for a while until the varying black-densities of the Kodalith lith-film could be identified as the source, as Bill explains in the video below.

“You should get the BluRay of the old TRON it has been restored beautifully,” Bill plugged the movie, adding with a serious expression “but it if hadn’t been preserved on film, it would have been gone.” Bill was talking in the last minutes of his presentation about what he coined Digital Nitrate.

Bill during Q&A,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I was sitting in the first row and took a photo of that slide as Bill looked at me and pointed at my D-SLR. “Did you know that photographers at the Academy Awards carry two cameras, one being digital and the other analog? Because currently we have no way of reliably preserving anything digital⁶.” The last words also appeared on his final slide, erupted into Keynote-fire and vanished to ashes.

Instead of a grim ending like this one, Bill hurried to a more uplifting finish, mainly directed at the students among the audience, many of them eager for a job as animator — the sooner, the better. “People hire always the artist and not the technician,” Bill told them, “Visualize and communicate, independent of your software to become a better artist. Skill in a classical sense transfers to new technologies, so no matter what tools you use, stay focused on honing your skills.”

Applause. Then Q&A followed, some of it in the video just below. And a fun fact: Rendering all the CG-sequences in TRON together took less rendering time than a single frame of TRON Legacy. Amused chuckles in the audience.

Bye-bye

Unfortunately that was day two for me. I didn’t stay for the VFX of “The King’s Speech” and had by god no intentions for another round of Adobe’s presentations. In fact, my head was as tilt as any good pinball machine after a hearty bump so I left with the would on my nose for a bite to eat, a dose of caffeine and a smooth ride to the hotel.

Feel free to check it out yourself here, where you can also see the sneak peek of it. Now I gotta get some some sleep, just came back from holding a live tutorial on the FH Salzburg. Exhausting, but fun!

But I can’t change that fact and don’t get your hopes up, I won’t post the video here for free. I just want to get that point straight. It was a lot of work and I spent days polishing it.

I want the next tutorial to be really worth your money, so as soon as I have some more time on my hands I’m happy to post a new one. One that makes you feel really good about investing $9/month in the tuts+ service.

So feel free to post your ideas and suggestions right here. What’s cool? What do you want to see? Drop some inspiration on me, folks, and write me some comments!

1. Locate your User directory of After Effects:
   • C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\8.0
2. Now delete your preferences and workspaces. I don’t know what files exactly you have to delete, but be aware that your saved templates, workspaces and other user files will be reset. I know this hurts, but you want AE running again, don’t ya?
   • Adobe After Effects 8.0 Prefs.txt
   • Adobe After Effects 8.0 Shortcuts.txt
   • AfterFX8.ini
   • Workspaces.xml

That’s it. On the next start-up After Effects will create these files again with default settings. Good Luck!

You ask “What’s new? What’s cool?” and I tell you: A lot: I’ve been in the trenches with Nuke and fought After Effects so there’s a lot of stuff I want to show and tell what I’ve learned in the past weeks, not only about VFX.

I recorded a couple of tracks for my upcoming album (release: summer 2009). The Samson G-Track is a sweet piece of hardware, it combines a condenser microphone and an USB-soundcard. Finally I am able to record my acoustic guitar and piano work without the “help” of my 5€-headset whose microphone buzzes worse than the wasp hive in Donkey Kong Country 2 and rumbles more than my PS2′s Dualshock 2 controller that surrendered yesterday to material fatigue after nearly nine years of heavy duty service. Got me a new one today.

Between all my private creative work I am tackling 87 effect shots for our student short film “MOSKAU” and have only 4 weeks more to go. Luckily I am not alone with that truckload of effects still many shots end up on my todo-list. I am really honing my skills with Nuke right now. One year ago I only considered After Effects as the way to go and even was surprised that neither Double Negative nor Dreamworks ever came back to me after my enthusiastic applications at the fmx/08 conference.

That reminds me: If I was you (and I am 80% certain that I am not) I would keep an eye on this blog because I’ll be covering the fmx/09 in Stuttgart in detail on this very blog, complete with pictures and serious grammatical errors. So if you won’t be able to see it all in Stuttgart yourself, come back on the 5th of April 2009.

That’s all for now folks. I gotta get some sleep before the weekly meeting tomorrow. Which means I am shredding some Guitar Hero songs on extreme. Yes, you read correctly: I am publicly admitting that I am good at that game. On the upside: I got better on a real bass guitar as well.

So it all boils down to that simple phrase for me at the moment: Practice makes less imperfect.

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.

Oh, if you ever stumble across the following error message (and you will stumble across it)

Just insert an unaltered Color Correction (HLS) effect on top of your effects stack in question and it’ll be good. According to other bloggers and Creative Cow there’s nothing else you can do. As if it was your fault anyway…