Brian stopped by the filming of our video shoot for Bed of Stars - The spell. and stayed for the 2nd music video we filmed the same day.
Bchizzle does a great job at his vlogs and is super fun to work with too. Be sure to subscribe.
Our first fully CG projects. When the director (Andy) Tin Pak Lau approached me he had the vision for this spot fully formed in his head. Throughout the development cycle Andy has stayed true to his vision with themes of time dilation, style and cyclical trends showing that the Ursus brand of streetwear is something fresh but also nostalgic.
You can almost hear the Theremin now
We wanted a 80's style look of the flying through space and took inspiration of old Doctor Who openings. There was the option to push the VHS quality to levels much higher (or lower as it were), or play out the large CRT pixels, however the slight over saturation we feel plays a nicer and more traditional look without hitting you in the face.
The CG was created by local artist Pascal Polic who did a simple 3D cylinder in Maya and applied painted star fields. We used a few different star layers to create depth and speed.
Simple is better
Simple techniques can be applied to create nice looking effects. The most common way to do this shot would have been to suspend him on wires with a harness, light a greenscreen cove and shoot. Our budget didn't allow for that. So it was parking lot, apple boxes, a greenscreen on the ground and a jib arm. Easy as pie, just make sure your actor has strong abs.
So there you have it, easy and cheap but looks effective.
We completed the music video project in which I was the VFX Supervisor at the start of March. In early December Artino Ahmadi approached me to see if I would be interested in doing a music video which had some VFX in it. I liked the story and song from the start, and then he mentioned that it would need a CG dragon. Based on the budget ($0) and the time scale approx 1 months of post I told him no way!
Sure there are plenty of artists who can do it, but most of those don't work for free. After toying around with some ideas of shooting around it, or replacing it with a shadow we both decided that a CG dragon was going to be the only real solution.
My concerns were many, but it was the animation that was hanging over my head. We already had a 3D modeler on board, Dallas Harvey who was doing the prosthetic of the unicorn horn and he is also a 3D sculpturist in CG and IRL. Having a 3D was great but I wanted to have a more complete solution to the project.
I looked around and found many 3D dragon models, but few were rigged, and even less had any canned animations. Then I found Mixamo.com. Luckily they had some dragon models I liked, and had a selection different animations that would work perfectly for the story. The nice thing is you can string together animations and have you model run through the series of animations without having to do them all by hand, this is a huge time saver. I contact the nice people a Mixamo and begged for some freebies to help with the video. They were nice enough to offer a generous discount, that helped a lot.
Dallas was able to touch up the skins on the models to make them look more professional and by this point we were ready to shoot the video.
Bridge Studios
VFX Supervision was done over 2 days. The first was shooting the bedroom interior stuff for the shadows on the blanket wall, this was done in studio.
The 2nd day of shooting was at the end of January in the snow near Pemberton, BC. This is when we realized that the white bridle that would hold the Horn on the horse wasn't going to blend as well as we hoped., what with the horse being grey and all.
That is not a white horse
We did our best to shoot around the bridle or trying to frame out the horse wrangler. By the end of the day, (into the darkness) we got everything VFX was going to need for the video and I got to go home, while everyone else stayed to film the rest of it.
I had amassed (through favors, friends, word of mouth, and begging) a decent team of artists. Some new and some ready to try something different.
My lead artists Robin Dutta was coming of animated feature work, we wanted to get some experience doing live action VFX so this was a perfect gig to put some cool stuff on the reel. We took on the roll of implementing the dragon model, animations and lighting. He did a great job using Maya.
We did over 50 VFX shots for this 4 minutes video. Maybe I'll do a blog post about our post process, pipeline and delivery.
This is the first installment of the VFX we did on season 8 of Supernatural. We managed to 23 episodes, with over 1200 VFX shots with only 8 artists. Pretty crazy season.
I was the On-Set Coordinator for this season and helped plan and shoot all of these scenes.
Wow, what a great season. Working directly for production was a blast. I developed so many good relationships with people and departments and learned so much about the film making process. I racked up over 1200 hours on-set this year alone. I worked closley with some incredible and inspiring directors and , got to hang with some of the writers/show runners and even got my own little following of SPN fangirls.
Here is to next season
Spy vs Guy from Red Giant on Vimeo.
We did all the 3D Underwater shots and Submarines for this movie when I worked for Stargate Studios. The guys did a really nice job on it. I think there are only two shots of subs underwater that are models. The rest are CG.
From now till the end of time, every time I close my eyes I'll be seeing bubbles and caustics
