June 15, 2010
CGI & Rendering, Compositing, Lectures, Quotes, Reports, Technology, films, on set
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On the second day we all got late to the first lecture and missed “The VFX of Iron Man” and instead enjoyed the breakfast at our value-priced hotel whose every room was kept in shape for the whole place looked like a museum of 1970′s rustic dwelling. Mrs. Zheng apologized for not having boiled eggs and I downed every bit of orange juice that was left on the buffet because I almost died of thirst the night before. Mrs. Zheng didn’t like seeing me drinking eagerly directly out of the jar but left it at a sullen glance this time. Then we drove off to the Haus der Wirtschaft once again.
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On the second day we all got late to the first lecture and missed "The VFX of Iron Man" and instead enjoyed the breakfast at our value-priced hotel whose every room was kept in shape for the whole place looked like a museum of 1970's rustic dwelling. Mrs. Zheng apologized for not having boiled eggs and I downed every bit of orange juice that was left on the buffet because I almost died of thirst the night before. Mrs. Zheng didn't like seeing me drinking eagerly directly out of the jar but left it at a sullen glance this time. Then we drove off to the Haus der Wirtschaft once again.
Post is Prep
My Access Pass, originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.
Still a bit drowsy I planted my ass in the front row of the König-Karl Halle and knew I wouldn't be getting up for a long time, not even for Pixar's Career Gears (they don't need compositors, I got the message last years). So at 11 a.m. "The Role of Visualization in th
May 17, 2010
Animation, CGI & Rendering, Compositing, Lectures, Quotes, Reports, Technology, films, people
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I awoke after a terrible night of too little sleep (thank you, insane entertainment-industry sleep-cycle!) and was greeted suspiciously by Mrs. Zheng, the hotel manager, on my way to the hotel’s breakfast premises where the ongoing conversations ebbed as I entered. Too much eyeliner, I thought. But I had other things on my mind. In fact, I was so excited that I ran a red light on my way to the conference.
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I awoke after a terrible night of too little sleep (thank you, insane entertainment-industry sleep-cycle!) and was greeted suspiciously by Mrs. Zheng, the hotel manager, on my way to the hotel's breakfast premises where the ongoing conversations ebbed as I entered. Too much eyeliner, I thought. But I had other things on my mind. In fact, I was so excited that I ran a red light on my way to the conference.
Haus der Wirtschaft, originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.
I was eager to first see The Foundry's presentations on Mari, their programming approach and a tech demonstration of the recently acquired Katana, I was so excited about last year in Sony's presentation, but had no exact clue what it really was.
Paint that dinosaur!
Once arrived I got me a seat pretty close up front and was ready for their presentations to begin. Jack Greasley, who worked at Weta Digital on King Kong and Avatar and Zoe Lord, Senior Texture Artist on Avat
May 4, 2010
Reports
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As the years before I’m going to blog about the ongoing FMX convention in Stuttgart also this year, starting with day zero, the day of my arrival. I am one of those guys who plan and prepare for everything, sacrificing some vital sleep for the event just to get my dyed hair freshed up for three hours prior to departure. It was in the Europark mall where I picked up Donsch Gröstlinger.
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As the years before I'm going to blog about the ongoing FMX convention in Stuttgart also this year, starting with day zero, the day of my arrival. I am one of those guys who plan and prepare for everything, sacrificing some vital sleep for the event just to get my dyed hair freshed up for three hours prior to departure. It was in the Europark mall where I picked up Donsch Gröstlinger.
Donsch had been hauling his luggage-caddy for four hours before I picked him up and we put the thing in my car. Then we picked up Paul Baaske in Salzburg downtown and off we went. That was around 4 p.m. so already quite late in the day. And it got worse: Thanks to some unfortunate truck blocking my view somewhere on the German autobahn I took a wrong turn and we lost about an hour while Steffi, my GPS-navi, guided us back on track.
The sun had reappeared on the cloudy sky again, this time below the clouds, rendering the whole land into an almost cheesy orange/purple concept painting as we finally entered the city-lim
January 30, 2010
Compositing, Computing, Dear Diary, Tutorial
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Wassup, y’all? I’m back! Back from the vault, back from grinding merrily away 20 to 30 hrs a day on my diploma thesis and back from LaTeX formatting hell. Through my veins still runs a little amount of blood among all that caffeine and so I’m announcing my new credo for 2010: Make Something Creative Every Day Week!
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Wassup, y'all? I'm back! Back from the vault, back from grinding merrily away 20 to 30 hrs a day on my diploma thesis and back from LaTeX formatting hell. Through my veins still runs a little amount of blood among all that caffeine and so I'm announcing my new credo for 2010: Make Something Creative Every Day Week!
There's quite a bit I have planned for in 2010. First and foremost I'll get busy on some new AEtuts+ video tutorials introducing Nuke to the After Effectors among you all and something I have in mind for quite a while now, working title: "The Art and Science of Rotoscoping". (Everything's "art" and "science" in visual effects, if you read the books.)
There's a new series for flickr that I have in mind by the name of "Austrian Details". There are so many things I encounter that are so typically Austrian in some way and that people from other places probably wonder about when they see it. When it launches I'll tell you here.
I'll also be holding Tutorials on the Salzburg University of Ap
May 10, 2009
Animation, CGI & Rendering, Lectures, Reports, Technology, games, people
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Traditionally the last day of every fmx is the games day and this year I was prepared for it: Yes, I was wearing my Half-Life² t-shirt proudly in any Electronic Arts lecture I could get in. “They save the best for last”, as AIAS president Joseph Olin put it in the beginning. Yes, there was a lot to come. As always I just wish I had slept more.
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Traditionally the last day of every fmx is the games day and this year I was prepared for it: Yes, I was wearing my Half-Life² t-shirt proudly in any Electronic Arts lecture I could get in. "They save the best for last", as AIAS president Joseph Olin put it in the beginning. Yes, there was a lot to come. As always I just wish I had slept more.
Pipelines of War
Greg Mitchell , originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.
The day started even louder than the fat guy jumping down the stairs above my room at 6:45am: With Gears of War 2 (GoW2) and how Epic Games thought up streamlined their production pipeline for those. Greg Mitchell a big guy, well presenter and Cinematics Director at Epic worked twelve years in television before he switched gears (pun intended) and went into the game industry. He already worked on the cinematics of the first Gears of War (GoW) but wasn't quite 100% happy with the outcome: Not all was motion captured and so
May 8, 2009
Animation, CGI & Rendering, Compositing, Lectures, Random Thoughts, Reports, Technology, filmmaking, games, people, photography, ranting, retro, video
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7:30 am and somebody walks downstairs. Good morning to me. My program for today was mostly about tracking and motion capturing and heavy duty compositing. You might have guessed: It was the day of Benjamin Button.
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7:30 am and somebody walks downstairs. Good morning to me. My program for today was mostly about tracking and motion capturing and heavy duty compositing. You might have guessed: It was the day of Benjamin Button.
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. ...that consists so far of one Ratatouille-themeded teapot.]. 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 Faci
May 6, 2009
Animation, CGI & Rendering, Compositing, Computing, Lectures, Reports, Technology, films, on set, people
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I woke up early. Too early. My room is located under the stairs to the third floor so it’s needless to say that it’s noisy. The day started off rather cloudy. But it got better along the way. The last two conventions where as sunny as California in any orange-juice commercial so it was okay this year that the weather took leak a break.
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I woke up early. Too early. My room is located under the stairs to the third floor so it's needless to say that it's noisy. The day started off rather cloudy. But it got better along the way. The last two conventions where as sunny as California in any orange-juice commercial so it was okay this year that the weather took leak a break.
Hotel Hottmann, originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.
When roaming the Stuttgart streets again it didn't feel as nice as last year. It was cold, it was foggy and some drunk junk was shouting profanities and bugging people on the Schloßplatz. A sharp turn took me to Starbucks where a friendly caramel macchiato was waiting for me and where I decided today's program amidst men in fancy suits and a flock of girls skipping school.
I was among the first few visitors who showed up at 9:30 to view the introductory selection of short films from the Filmakademie Ludwigsburg featuring Urs, Some
May 4, 2009
Dear Diary
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Finally. I arrived in my hotel in Stuttgart, eagerly anticipating the fmx launch tomorrow. The ride from Salzburg didn’t feel really long mostly because of the lovely company on the way, a wonderful sunset and some good music.
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Finally. I arrived in my hotel in Stuttgart, eagerly anticipating the fmx launch tomorrow. The ride from Salzburg didn't feel really long mostly because of the lovely company on the way, a wonderful sunset and some good music.
Room 212, originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.
Currently I am in my bed at the Hotel Hottmann in southern Stuttgart. This year I got the room above the one I was in last year, unfortunately it is a bit smaller, still comfy. Most important to me is the radiator next to my bed because I freeze easily and the room was really cold. Even colder than the hallway. So I turned it all the way up and spend my time waiting for the WLAN to transmit data-packets, one at a time at about 25 baud. Every 5 min I have to attempt reconnecting for another ten to thirty minutes, so it's quite tedious. But not as tedious as driving around for 20 minutes looking for a space to park the car -- Stuttgart's jammed!
I
April 22, 2009
Compositing, Dear Diary, Reports, Seph Carissa / texx sound, filmmaking
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It’s been quite a while since my last blog entry. In fact it has been so long, that I had to think twice to recall my password for this sweet blog o’ mine.
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.
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It's been quite a while since my last blog entry. In fact it has been so long, that I had to think twice to recall my password for this sweet blog o' mine.
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
