Apr 30 09

Link Dump: Eclectic Edition

Well, here’s the finale in those “tons-of-stuff” brags I’ve been making the last few posts. There’s a bit of a mix in here, but mostly the usual categories of free stuff and tutorials, with a few random ones thrown in at the end just for the sake of it. Enjoy, and see you next week!
Gimme the goodies…

Apr 23 09

Link Dump: Tutorial Edition

As promised, here’s a pretty mondo list of tutorial and resource sites for your educational pleasure. I’ve organized the list, just like last week’s, into what made the most sense at the time. If you’ve got additions, suggestions, objections, or anything else, definitely feel free to comment on the post and let me know about more knowledge available for free on the ‘net. Yess…knowledge….

Gimme the goodies…

Apr 20 09

Showcase: Enter your shtuff!

I know I bragged about having massive amounts of links for you guys in the last post, but in my showcase section the list is puny. I’ve been on the rampage for learning, and slacked pretty majorly in watching. However, I do have some cool little opportunity-type links for you, and a portfolio to keep your eyes giddy whilst you await the next link dump post. Onward!

Gimme the goodies…

Apr 16 09

Link Dump: Free Stuff Edition

First off, welcome to the new blog! Yes, I know it’s awesome. I’m proud to say it’s my whole site collection hosted on one domain, inter-linked, organized and consolidated. Awesome. So now…on to the link dump.

I’ve got a massve…and I mean massive collection of links ready for ya. So massive, in fact, that I’m breaking it up into a multi-part series, because frankly, opening tons of links at once won’t be fun for you, and copying and pasting and reviewing what all of them are won’t be so fun for me. Not all at once, anyway. So next week, Link Dump: Tutorial Edition. But let’s get started with part 1.

Gimme the goodies…

Aug 07 08

Link Dump

Alrighty, here’s another installment of the Link Dump, which I’m thinking about making a weekly piece, along with the Showcase segment I’ve been doing. So, first up, I’ve mentioned my fondness of Robert Rodriguez, his life and work on this blog a few times, so naturally an article about him caught my eye last week, just after posting the last link dump. It’s an interesting interview: pretty brief, not too expressive, but interesting nonetheless. I actually spent about three hours this morning looking through VFX job listings in the US and Canada, just to scope out the field a bit, and had trouble finding any kind of listing or contact info for Troublemaker Studios. Their site was incomplete, but new, so maybe there will be something up soon. I’m not getting my hopes up about working there as a junior though, but eventually, it’d be a pretty sweet job.

Anyway… on to more new stuff… I discovered Action-Cut-Print!, home to The Director’s Chair Ezine, an online magazine for filmmakers and directors. I haven’t personally read any of the articles yet, but it looks like a good resource, maybe something to accompany Judith Weston’s Film Director’s Intuition I picked up a couple years back and haven’t gotten around to reading yet.

I found this article (and this one which I just found, while searching for the links) on the gorgeous Burma short that Shilo made, causing my whole VFX class to drool every time we watch it. It’s also got a nice specific case study/general principle feel to it, so you can read it from either perspective (or both) and appreciate what it has to say however you please.

In brief news, VideoCopilot wasn’t saying goodbye to the world, just to the old website, and ushering in a new age of tutorials, as many of us suspected, accompanied by a new short cuts episode that helps get After Effects even closer to a 3D simulation package, without any expressions. It’s a pretty obvious tip, but I hadn’t actually thought about how to do this until I saw the tutorial. Also, a post of the a possible next tutorial topic?

I also found a few more technical things to throw at you. In case you’re wanting to monitor your system while working, maybe to check a program’s workload or a rendering’s impact on system performance (or whatever other reason), this might come in handy. Also, Adobe’s open (as far as I know) platform AIR has a ton of applications coming out recently that seem like a mix between web-apps and desktop-apps… that all run on a desktop (meaning non-web-based) system. A lot of them are ways to integrate your web life with your desktop life, combining the two into one cohesive digital component of your life. So, this one seemed like a good idea, as a way to store and share files online and access them in a nice, simple-looking interface. It struck me as a great way to showcase daillies to distant clients, share project files with distant collaborators, etc. Another one that looked like it had potential was Klok, a time-management app that might help keep track of projects and manage your workloads with multiple projects going at once. Celtx is still my favorite for schedule film shoots, (though I haven’t tried out Klok yet), btu this seems like it has quite a bit of freelancing potential.

Alright. Well, that’s it. For this week. As I mentioned in last week’s post I’m going to be on hiatus for a week, I’ve got a week break from school and am only bringing my laptop along to check on some personal things every few days. However, I’m going to try to stay away from the computer as much as possible during my time off, so I can really have time off and take advantage of that fact. However, have no fear, I’m sure these links and whatever else they lead to will tide you over for two weeks, and I promise when I get back I’ll have more fun stuff to post about and continue the stream of resources. Enjoy, have a great two weeks, and I’ll see you all when I get back.

Jan 25 08

Showcase: Airsick

Sorry for the lack of an update Monday, but I was traveling from LA to Seattle that day and couldn’t find an open wireless connection in the airport (strange, huh?)  It was a busy day, so my apologies.  However, I’m in Seattle, with a connection, and soon to be in Vancouver (hopefully also with a connection in the apartment) and able to update on time.  So I’m moving, got a small video slideshow project of the move in progress and my other projects on hold, but I’ve been wandering around the city a little bit, exploring and discovering the joy of a tangible but relaxed lifestyle.  I’d like to post about that on my personal blog at some point, but I’ll get to that eventually.  There’s no rush .

Now, for the showcase of the week, I discovered this short video through a photography blog I subscribe to, and I was interested in the photography aspect of it, as well as the filmmaking side of putting together a bunch of images to create a video0like short film.  It was interesting to watch and of course, since it’s a controversial subject, inspiring to a degree.  I don’t have much to say about this video other than it’s worth watching, and it’s interesting and intriguing to watch how they even emulated some common video effects (rack focus, animated titles, time-lapse) using 20,000 individual photographs.  I remember watching a music video a long time ago done similarly to this, only this was more pointed in its subject, and that was more artsy in its execution.  Both are good, but this I think serves a more important purpose.  So enjoy the video, get inspired, and do something to help in your community.  Knowledge is power, and the internet is the end-all solution to not knowing.  So go browse and learn.  Enjoy, and best of luck.  Happy filmmaking!

Dec 30 07

Showcase: Coloc Strip

To be entirely honest, I’m not even sure if this is a music video or just something some fans made, but it’s pretty friggin’ cool.  From a visual effects standpoint, it’s awesome, I can think of how they might have done this, but it seems like tons of work to me.  It’s an awesome collection of a bunch of different shots from a few different places of people doing things.  That’s a super lame explanation, but here, check it out:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq6Fz32YeG0]

Check out it’s page here.

Dec 29 07

The Waiting Room…in the can!

The Waiting Room is finally completely shot and locked! I’m super excited to finally have this done. We fiddled with lighting more than usual on this shoot, and I liked it quite a lot. Direct light from my work light was too harsh, so we simply bounced it off a tinfoil-covered piece of cardboard sitting on the desk on the opposite wall, which gave a perfect soft back light from behind me. Next, we taped a piece of tin foil on the window in front of me, pointing the two track lights on the ceiling toward it, bouncing that light off the tin foil and onto my face, giving a nice soft glow that looked almost like it was coming from the paper I was writing on. It was a very nice effect, and perfect for the scene. Michelle really helped out on this shoot, being the cameraperson, the lighting technician and whatnot. It was fun to play with the lighting and get the shots I wanted to get in a relaxed, small-scale environment. Unfortunately, I only had the chance to take four pictures while shooting this stuff, but at least it demonstrates the lighting configurations I had set up. Take a peek at all of them here.

I think an awesome thing about low- and no-budget filmmaking is the ability to just improvise with what’s there at the time, with what you’ve got and what you know. I knew I had two little tin foil reflector type pieces (actually I just knew metal is reflective and I had some at the time), and I could use those to light up the scene in the way I needed and wanted. I’m excited now to relax tonight, and I have all day tomorrow to cut the thing together, start figuring out music, and finish up my school violence piece I’ve been not-so-diligently working on since last Spring.