Update, October 2012

I have been here in Istanbul, Turkey  from early last month to work on a Kazakhstan  Sci-Fi feature film "Phantom Hunt" at Ida Pictures as a Compositor / Matte painter. It's been pretty busy so far working mostly on comps shots and on some matte painting shots as well.

Istanbul is really beautiful, historical and scenic place and I been really enjoying my stay here so far though my work schedule keeps me at the studio mostly. But anyways, I am still managed to explore the city  quite a bit with my foreigners friends at work. I guess things are going to be more exciting by next month since it will be getting to the wrap up stage of this project...

Are you Purpose motive or Profit motive?

Well, the answer is quite easy as we need  both purpose and profit to motive us but I think the interesting fact here is that innovations happen only when we have a larger than life purpose in our lives. Sadly this concept of purpose motive is generally lacking mostly in our economy and society. I think only very few successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs gets it, after all money is not everything...

Enjoy the video :)

Mystic Valley, DMP

I am quite happy to finish this personal DMP work because it is after a long time I am getting enough time to focus on my personal work and I hope to do one more by end of this month if I don't get too busy with my freelance job.

This was inspired by the beautiful composition of actual photography so many thanks to person who took this pic as I grabbed it randomly from Internet. The structures were basically castle outposts but at the same I wanted the viewer to keep guessing as there is some ritual going on or the hero structure is still under construction. Anyways I hope you guys like it and I owe a lot to Alex, Faisal and Jamie Jasso at mattepainting.org and cgtalk.com for their valuable inputs to finish off this work.

DMP

 Original Plate

Thanks for taking a look.
Rahul

Update April 2012

I couldn't post anything last month due to my busy schedule, so here it goes. Well, I moved to Sofia, Bulgaria early this month to join as a Matte painter /  compositor at Worldwide FX on a 3 months contract to work on the film "The Expendables 2".

First of all, I am really enjoying the work and weather here. So far I been mostly working on matte paintings but hope to do some complex camera projections set up as well by the end of the deadline. I must say I am really privileged to work under veteran  matte painting supervisor Metin Gungor and to work alongside with bunch of talented & hard working fellow matte painters. It's been great experience so far and I hope to learn much more during my time here.

Another update back in India is the trailer release of much awaited film Eega, in which I  played important roles as a on-set VFX coordinator, Senior compositor and Matte painter. It is good to see that couple of environment shots and a comp shots that I worked  made into the trailer. The movie looks really promising for the local industry and I am wishing good luck to all my friends back in Makuta VFX to see this movie through its final lap of post production.

Photoshop film LOG / HDR workflow

If someone was following this blog then they would have definitely came across my rand on how much pain and hassle one have to go through while trying keep all the superwhites in a matte painting while working in a film pipeline.

Finally someone have took the effort to find a stable and solid workflow. Thanks a bunch to Zach Mandt for his LayersLayers tool.

   

Douglas Trumbull & Miniatures Vs CG

A lot of movies made a few years ago don't look good today. They would never pass muster. But movies I've worked on using miniatures look good and don't age. If I did Blade Runner 2 today, I would use miniatures, even though I would use digital compositing and other digital effects far superior to optical printing.

Here is a two part interview at Creative Cow  where Trumbull discuss what keeps him busy these days. I quite well agree with his above statement and I believe above miniature in Blade Runner is one of the best sci-fi spectacle I have seen in films to date.

I truly hope and wish Trumbull will shift direction of VFX industry once again in near future. 

Classic multi plane matte shot

I came across another great post at Matte Shot - a tribute to Golden Era special fx and this photograph really made my day so I thought it would be worth putting here as reminder for myself.

This is kind of shot I do on day to day basis and it's great feeling to see people were doing this techniques of 2.5d or camera projection decades before computers were introduced to visual effects.

link to the blog post