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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have my new reel and it comprises mostly of feature work I did this year in Makuta VFX, so many thanks to guys & girls there for all the support and help.
Here are couple of screen shots and a detailed breakdown can be downloaded from here. Hope you enjoyed the new reel and I would really like to hear all your comments.
Well, I got myself a new Android phone couple of weeks back and I was hovering over the net to find any good apps which will help me on location while shoots or in front of workstation and here are few interesting ones I came across.
This one comes with a nifty film calculator which calculates how much amount of film is need for given time and film format. The depth of field calculator which does exactly what it says and awesome Film/Video Glossary which gives you instant offline access to definition of all the industry standard terminologies.
I feel this is must have app for anyone in film/video industry as the glossary feature invaluable at any time. Also it features online help from Kodak support personal and their online resources.
CamCalc is another free goody I came across, apart from Depth of Field, Focal Length Equivalents, Flash Calculation and other cinematography calculators I found Field of View and Miniature Calculator extremely useful for VFX folks as FOV calculator can be used while matching moving camera or aligning a camera in 3D scene. And Miniature Calculator will always comes in handy during on set VFX supervision to determine frame rates, distances and speed for a given scale.
As the name suggests this is multi-function app with the following features, Ruler, Protractor, Flashlight, Compass, Gradienter, Wall picture, Vertical andTelemeasurement.
I think among the above features, Ruler, Vertical and Telemeasurement can be used in set. Vertical can be easily used to check whether items are vertical and showing the angle of deviation through help the phone camera. I am haven't personally used Telemesuremnt but according to the app decscription it uses simple 3 steps to measure the distance around any object and its height with help phone camera. This again can be used while on location but I doubt how accurate this could be but still time saver for those approx measurements.
Alarm Clock Plus
Last but not the least, this is the best alarm clock for Android out there so never be late for early morning call time for shoots ;)
PS: I think there could be still lot of good film/vfx centric apps out there which I may haven't discovered yet so I will try to update this post if I find any or if you know any app please do drop a comment here.
