Freekstorm VFX Blog

Does anyone remember Part 1 of the Great Garage Experiment from a few weeks ago? No we hadn't forgotten about this gripping VFX project, but the day-job work has been hampering our efforts somewhat, so it has taken Rich slightly longer than usual to complete his experiment.

This time the objective was to matchmove the 3D model of the garage (which we prepared last time, if you recall) into the real world - and to do it convincingly. Alas we never did manage to get any decent footage of a real road (weather and moaning kids did not permit) so...erm...we used footage of our very own table tennis table. Yeah, yeah, I know you don't see too many real garages located on ping-pong tables, but the proof of concept is the same - combining real world and CG so that you can't tell the difference.



The process for aligning the garage on the table was to photograph an HDRI globe (big shiny silver ball – purchased from local garden centre - no expense spared) so that we could capture the environmental lighting of the table and then use image-based lighting for the render. This was so that the lighting and colouring of the render matched the table. The next stage was to put some tracking markers (in this case ping-pong balls) and shoot the video that we wanted to use with a camera on a dolly.



Next we loaded the footage from the camera into SynthEyes and we tracked the ping pong balls so that we obtained a virtual camera which matched the real one. The output of Syntheyes was then loaded into Softimage so that we had a virtual camera in Softimage that matched movement of the camera in the real world. We then loaded in the garage model and positioned it appropriately on the virtual table. We created two render passes, one image based lighting (IBL) and one ambient occlusion (AO). This completed the rendering portion of the experiment.

We then moved to Adobe After Effects CS4 for the compositing stage and we loaded the original camera footage and our two render passes. This gave us three layers. At the bottom we had the original camera footage, overlaid on that was the IBL pass which contained the colour and shadows, and finally on top of all of that was the AO which contained the overall brightness and darkness of parts of the model. After adjusting the various levels of each layer and adding a noise overlay, it was ready for final output:






Personally, I think the result is pretty darn realistic, don't you? Now what would be really cool is if the little toy car on the left there (which is real) would drive itself up into the garage and park itself. The resident visual effects artiste tells me that he is working on it. Stay tuned...

Labels: matchmoving, visual effects

About a week ago we received a notification from Blogger that they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26th of this year. They blamed the decision on "too many engineering resources" required to support FTP sites and said "We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users."

Now there's the understatement of the year!

For most folks who use Blogger, this will not affect them at all. Unfortunately for our little Freekstorm blog, we host our blog on our own servers, but we use the freely-available Blogger code for the blog publishing part, which allows anyone with a Blogger account to leave comments if they wish (not that we're exactly snowed under with them, mind you - in fact if we actually do get a rare and precious comment then it's a real "break out the bubbly" moment!) Anyway, the idea is that not only can we remain part of the thriving Blogger community, but by publishing the blog via FTP this means that all our precious artwork, videos and tutorials are kept on our own servers, not Google's. Plus we can design our own groovy blog graphics, instead of Blogger's grotty standard templates.

Basically Google doesn't have any control over what we can publish or how we publish it. We really like it that way. And I quote our resident VFX artiste: "Hell will freeze over before I host our blog on Google servers. No ruddy way! I'd rather close our blog first!"

So we have until 26th March to decide what to do.

Perhaps it's time to put our resident computer geek to work on designing our own blogging code?

(Poor chap! As if he doesn't have enough to do already!)

Labels: blogging

It’s been a long, soggy weekend. Horrible drizzling rain combined with thick damp fog makes February feel interminable at times. The kids had too much homework for us to be able to go out anywhere, so we thought we’d do something productive - like spending some time converting our old photographic studio into the cool groovy new cyc studio that we’ve planned. So first thing yesterday morning we bounded up there, ready to begin.

Oh dear.


Great Scott! How on earth did we manage to amass so much “stuff”? Clearly we have a long way to go before we have the green-screen studio of our dreams.

Time to hire a really large skip and be utterly ruthless...

Labels: studio

It’s been a helluva week. Too many poorly kids at home from school and not enough work and filmmaking being done. The movie highlight of my week was curling up on the sofa and watching Twilight again....yeah, yeah, I know, the special effects were a bit cringe-worthy and the story was entirely predictable. However there is a reason that this, the first movie of the series, was a phenomenon and it had nothing to do with girl-next-door-meets-hunky-vampire and definitely nothing to do with Robert Patterson. (Sorry Robert!) In fact the entire success of this movie hinged on one thing: the cinematography. Oh yes, make no mistake – it was all down to what went on behind the lens, specifically those ultra-cool camera angles and lighting effects.

Elliot Davis, the Director of Photography in the film, is a genius. He really knew how to use the camera to capture the mood and feel of the vampire genre. (Of course, Catherine Hardwicke might have had something to do with it too.) Heck, some of that heavily-desaturated-almost-black-and-white lighting was so darn good that my great old hairy Aunt Hilda would look like sex on a stalk with those effects. It would be difficult for anyone to look bad with that lighting. So cool, so sexy, so atmospheric!



It wasn't just about lighting pretty actors either. Most of the film was visually stunning. The gorgeous mountain landscape helped enormously of course, but there was also very clever use of colour. Remember when a heavily desaturated Edward flipped up a bright red apple with his foot and caught it – how’s that for a snow white/poison apple/forbidden-fruit metaphor? No wonder teenage girls all over the world swooned en-masse. Or remember the scene where Edward and Bella were lying in a sunlit meadow of vibrant green? Such clever use of selective colour and framing techniques! Yep, the framing was very nicely done. Elliot certainly knows his stuff.

But what really made me love the film was the way the camera was used to enhance the characters of Bella and Edward. For example, remember the way the camera shook slightly at the start of the film when Bella first appeared, emphasising Bella’s awkwardness and insecurity at starting at a new school? The lighting at this stage was very middle-of-the-road ordinary, nothing special, just like our heroine. But then when the audience glimpsed Edward....mmm...Edward....now that’s when the really clever stuff began. The camerawork became steadier, the camera angles became more interesting, the shots were more tightly framed and the lighting on Edward’s face became so heavily desaturated that it was almost monochrome in places. Combine this with a great deal of slow-mo, clever make-up and sultry looks and hey presto! Our hero was transformed into every teenage girl’s ultimate fantasy.



Yes indeedy, all ordinary girls like you and I can be seduced by a mysterious and sultry young vampire – all we need is clever lighting and groovy camera angles. So forget Robert Patterson. I mean, I’m sure he’s really nice and terribly sexy and all that, but the guy who really blew my socks off was behind the camera, not in front of it.

Elliot Davis’s attention to detail is the sexiest thing about Twilight. He put a huge amount of time and effort into cinematography and editing - and it shows. He turned a distinctly average teen romance flick into a well choreographed and visually beautiful piece of artwork which was both charming and edgy in equal amounts.

Labels: cinematography, reviews

Labels: filmmaking, industry news