| POST-PRODUCTION SCREENSHOT OF THE WEEK GALLERY |
| Posted on: March 6 2006 | |
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| One of the reasons I've been missing posts is I've been catching up on a lot of editorial and sound design work. A key chunk of story development, the first half of Act III (in which we are introduced to the Lyn-Shi character for the first time) is nearly finished. And I mean *completely finished*. If involves one major chase and blaster-battle sequence which required me to tackle various missing sound effects for the first time, such as blasts hitting trees. But it's all done now, and aside from a few lingering cleanup shots (we caught a tripod bag in frame during a key stunt) and music scoring, a our first major chunk of movie will be in the can soon - for good. | |
| Posted on: March 6 2006 | |
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| Earlier this year Matt finished off the virtual squib effects for an complex firefight at the end of Act III. Many shots involved tracking effects to fast-moving props and continuing blasts over multiple angles, and Matt rose to the occasion as always. | |
| Posted on: March 6 2006 | |
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| Matt helped me make a small screen insert which I tracked into this shot, a rare glimpse of the "Researce Location Technology (TM)" in action. If you're wondering what that means, so are we... ;) | |
| Posted on: March 6 2006 | |
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| Although I've been slacking on the gallery here, we've been pulling more stuff together in post. This split comp had to be finished in full resolution. A temp was made many years ago using footage captured in Cinestream. Boy, those are some bad memories. | |
| Posted on: November 15 2005 | |
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| Peter is out in Washington DC this week, probably performing feats of science, leaving me to do whatever I want! BWAHAHAH! Ok, well that's mostly what I do anyways...this week I helped Jamie work on a 4-minute clip of prison bars and the lovable action figure BORRSK. I also came across a few more stormtrooper-dublication shots such as the one above. And meanwhile, Matt continues to grind on the ambush sequence where he and Jek are pinned... | |
| Posted on: November 8 2005 | |
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| Jek and Matt pinned by some Imperials. This sequence involves 3 angles of continuous blasters and virtual squibs. The first few shots are in and looking nice, but there's some more complicated masking down the road so this one may be in the machine for a while... | |
| Posted on: November 8 2005 | |
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| Lieutenant Breena's shuttle makes a landing to investigate a crashed X-Wing...which brings to a short series of 3 wide shot composites. The CG shuttle has been dropped in and shadowed, and many of the actors needed to be replicated. We originally shot with an officer, 3 fleet troopers, and one stormtrooper, as much as our costume arsenal allowed at the time. The number of characters on screen in the final shots is double that. | |
| Posted on: October 31 2005 | |
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| Last week we put to rest the design questions on Jek's blaster, settling on a more golden hue to separate it from the rebs and imps...and adding a "smoking barrel" effect for character. | |
| Posted on: October 18 2005 | |
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| Regular meetings have resumed and we've sent Matt a new blaster shot for discussion. This time we're dealing with Jek Delba's blaster, a non-standard design Matt custom-built for the movie, so it's going to need a slightly different effect. We should have that locked down next week. In the meantime, I recovered some assets that were presumed lost and reworked the composite above, initially started way back in 2002 at Marquette. I re-rendered the shuttle interlaced and replaced the cheesy Bryce sky with a real sky. | |
| Posted on: October 18 2005 | |
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| Sorry for the delay in posting...had some issues with our hosting company. They made some system "upgrades" that broke my posting scripts. Anyways, the first week in October Matt was able to finish his thesis and move on to collecting materials from the Air Force museum that we can use for textures in our various virtual sets. Jamie, Peter and myself began work on a training video which bring some more help to the project. I came up with some settings which allow us to create the prison bar effect using some Combustion keying and matte tricks. This should save considerable time as they no longer need to be tracked or rotoscoped manually in Photoshop. | |
| Posted on: September 28 2005 | |
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As Matt finishes his thesis, Peter and I are working towards consensus on the various edits that surround our recent effects work. Act III is dialogue-heavy to flesh out the Lyn Shi character, and there were some rough shoots very early in our production schedule that we're carefully smoothing over in post. After various starts-and-stops over the last years, we finally arrived at an edit for the sequence where Matt meets Lyn that we're both happy with, and incorporates much of Chico's insight. As promised, our progress of locking things down in the Avid so far has amounted to 6.5 minutes and 22 effects shots. |
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| Posted on: September 20 2005 | |
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| Matt has successfully completed the the sequence where Matt duels with a pair of Stormtoopers (which is really a single trooper split-screened together). It was our smoothest turnaround yet, with motion blur and interlacing functioning properly. No shot for him this week as he finishes up his thesis, and Peter and I have a lot of editing to do to finish inserting our finished work. Next Monday we're going to post our current finished run-time and a count of effects shots. | |
| Posted on: September 20 2005 | |
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| Sorry for the gap, I was in South Carolina last week isolated from das interweb. Peter was been fleshing out one of the Act III hologram sequences featuring Melina, as well as more space-battle animatics. Before I left I sent Matt a new blaster sequence which deals with Stormtroopers for the first time. | |
| Posted on: August 31 2005 | |
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| We've almost got the Mark B shootout finished, and you can see a shot here from the conclusion. There are some lingering motion blur issues due to the fast movement of the camera and particles in some shots, but those should be resolved today. This paves the way for another 10-15 minutes of edited footage to be completed. | |
| Posted on: August 24 2005 | |
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| It's been a pretty wild week, with most of the team traveling to Indianapolis for GenCon (and the heavy drinking that entails). However, we did manage to discuss the shootout with Mark B and approve the edit and blaster timings, and do some long term planning to schedule some difficult CGI work and train additional blaster artists. Also, takes have been selected for a short appearance by the Emperor, and despite some very non-hollywood makeup techniques, we're pleased to report that the scene will probably work out and remain in the film. | |
| Posted on: August 16 2005 | |
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| We refined our interlaced space-rendering technique a bit. There seems to be a limitation in certain 3ds max lens effects that only render in one field per frame, which produces an unwanted flicker when viewed on an interlace monitor. So rather than interlacing in max, we're rendering at 60 fps progressive to get the same motion data (well, more actually) and then interlacing in combustion when the shot is finished. One of the more fast-paced intercut shootouts of Act III (featuring Mark B!) was reloaded into the Avid and a final, slightly longer cut was approved by Peter and sent off to Matt squib effects. And finally, some of the virtual-set scenes at the very end of the film have received rough visualization comps (see above). | |
| Posted on: August 8 2005 | |
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| Back this week with more Act III content from Matt. This is the first time we've dealt with actual people getting shot (as opposed to trees and dirt), so the masking is a little more complex, but he pulled it off. Excellent, self-sacrificing performances by the troopers (Brian V. and Belasco) really helps the shot too. | |
| Posted on: 1 August 2005 | |
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| The technical issues of working with Matt long-distance have been resolved, using FTP to transfer footage in the native format. The Avid DV codec has shown no degradation/generation loss after Matt's effects are edited back into the sequence, so I've been able to edit a nearly 5 minute sequence from Act III that was previously being held up by effects. In addition to dubbing more source tapes, and capturing more footage, Peter has put together some excellent animatics for us to refine a difficult sequence in Act II which combines traditional models, Bryce, and 3ds max all at once. | |
| Posted on: 25 July 2005 | |
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| We've learned a lot, but are still tweaking the process slightly. We revised melissa's slalom sequence with improved smoke translucency, and most importantly, we have worked out a way to properly interlace our entire workflow. This has been the bane of my existence for quite some time. My inclination has always been to render the 3D CGI progressively to look more like the original film, but now that we are editing and reviewing on an interlaced monitor (and all our photography was shot interlaced), the imagery clashes in an awkward manner. In addition, tracking progressively rendered Combustion smoke and particles over interlaced footage produces poor composites. Fortunately, Combustion contains operators for laying the two fields of NTSC video out sequentially, and we've been able to reproduced both forest sequences in a manner that looks decent on a traditional TV. This also works for pure 3ds max CG output rendered at 60 fields per second, so we're finally doing everything the same way. | |
| Posted on: 18 July 2005 | |
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| Matt's new Combustion Particle squibs are put to the test in a close up shot with photographed debris mixed in. The spark components ultimately have to be refined, and we run a few variations to work out motion blur settings. | |
| Posted on: 11 July 2005 | |
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| Having acheived acceptable promising results using Combustion to simulate blaster shots flying through the forest, I turn over a fairly basic shot from the Act I space battle to see if Matt can add blasters after it is rendered (which simplifies my 3ds max scene files significantly). This may not always be practical, depending on the complexity of the camera moves and the number of masked objects, but results are promising nonetheless. Options are swell! | |
| Posted on: 4 July 2005 | |
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| As we are digitizing footage into the new Avid in nearly the same order we shot it (at least for now), Act III forest stuff is most plentiful. As Lyn-Shi attempts to escape some fleet troopers, she comes under fire. Ultimately the sequence has 6 blasts covered from 2 angles. | |
| Posted on: 27 June 2005 | |
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| And the grind to finish Pulgari Trap begins. Over the past few weeks, the 3 executive producers have been able to get together and come up with a new plan to get the Pulgari Post machine back up to speed. As the first major step, Matt is coming back into the fold, and learning Combustion. By sending my old copy of Combustion 2 down, he can now contribute to post on such tasks as rotoscoping lightsabers, adding blaster fire, CG squib smoke and particle debris, motion tracking, and masking. This initial test shot from Act III includes a little bit of everything and ensures that we're ready to kick it up a notch. | |