This year for April Fools Day, Youtube decided they were going to celebrate their 100th anniversary. My office was tasked with promoting the momentous occasion as well as providing some of its highlighted content. My task was to produce the Top 5 Videos of 1911 (the year that youtube first started hosting videos on the internet). Here's what my team and I came up with.
Right about the time I started working on the Fun That's Good for You videos, Tori had just kicked off storyboarding out a video for software conglomerate Autodesk to raise awareness of their vast and diverse product line. The project was ambitious to say the least. It was to be a (roughly) 60 second spot featuring various models from companies who use Autodesk products.
For the bulk of the 3d production we worked with another SOMA company that we were refereed to by Autodesk, named Medized. They handled taking the various architectural and prototyping models and getting them into Maya and 3DSmax. They delivered passes directly to me and I assembled the final composites.
A lot of people put a lot of late nights into this, and I'm damn proud of it. Looking forward to the next Behemoth project like this one.
First big project of the new year was the first round of post-launch promotions we were doing for the Xbox: Kinect. The project was called "Fun That's Good for You" and it centered around a young woman playing the various Kinect titles. As she plays various elements from the games appear around her.
I've done this sort of thing before. There've been severalprojectsovertheyears I've worked on that involved people interacting with elements from Xbox titles. What made this one special was that I was tasked with handeling the project from pre-pro all the way through to final compositing and international localization. Almost instantly this went from "one more compositing job" to "Directorial Debut".
We shot the whole thing against white at Studio 1550 in the Dogpatch.
We used a RED ONE with the Mysterium censor and a set of Arriflex Primes from Chater Camera over in Berkeley (seen here with our DP Steve Condiotti).
After the shoot, I was all on my own for post production. I had a few days to get all five of the edits done and then about a week and a half for compositing and finishing. 3d was all done in Maya. Since most of the shots that involved direct contact with the objects were very brief, I matched the animation by hand. We used green sticks for placement reference which helped a lot for the javelin shot.
Everything not done in Maya was in After Effects. This included lots of tracked type and a generous helping of Particular.
Overall, I learned a lot from the experience. I learned that being able to point out flaws in a shot during post in no way makes you capable of avoiding them during production. I also learned just how helpful it can be to have an accurate camera report. And most importantly, I learned that I really enjoy directing. The day was hectic, but the fun kind of hectic, and I hope to get more opportunities like this in the coming months.
For now, you can check out the finished project here.
It's been a good long while since I last updated and I figure it's time for a quick update. I'm just now realizing that my last post was in June of last year and I can hardly believe it's been 9 months since. It feels like a few weeks.
So shortly after wrapping Alan Wake up, I was brought onto the Target account to help create a video that summed up their new "My Target Weekly" site. I spent a few days storyboarding this out, and then went straight into animation. My co-workers Jake and Tori helped out with some Cinema4d animation for the opening shot of the leaflet opening up.
I worked on the MTW demo video from August until the beginning September when yet again the Target team briefed me on the upcoming Target 2 Day shoot. This was a whole shoot built around promoting the countdown site for Target's 2 day holiday (The Blackest of Fridays) sale. For whatever reason most of the stuff we made never saw the light of day, but the shoot by far the most memorable I've ever been on. Here's a few of my favorite pics:
September ran right on into October, which was extremely busy for me cuz I got married, and then immediately went to New Zealand. Then I came back and immediately worked on 2 pitches (one of which we won!) over the next 3 weeks, until desperatly needing yet another week off. And my last official act of 2010 was to shoot my new Nephew's first christmas.
So that was the last quarter of 2010 for me, and while I thought that was as busy as I'd ever been, recent events suggest it was only the tip of the ice burg.
Back in February I was sent to Northern Oregon to shoot coverage of a series of short films being produced by Agency 215 to promote the game Alan Wake. I spent a week in the Mt. Hood area following around a crew of some 30 or so people with instructions to shoot absolutely everything in case we needed it as an asset while we were producing the accompanying experiential site Brightfalls.com
Basically I was turned loose in the great Northwest with some really nice gear, an expense account, and a really friendly film crew. I couldn't ask for a better set up!
Back in October I was approached by several of my co-workers with the notion of creating a video along the lines of the intro to the movie Contact or Powers of 10. The video was to become the intro to a portion of the McDonalds / Avatar online promotional efforts.
The intro tells the tale of the first mission to Pandora. You travel from Earth, past Polyphemus and several of it's moons to just above Pandora and see the first exploration rover descending towards the surface of the planet. Once the intro finishes you are given the opportunity to explore the jungles of Pandora.
I did all of the 3D and Comping work for this piece. The planets were done in maya using textures from planetpixelemporium.com. The piece was finished in After Effects using Knoll Light Factory for the stars, and Particular for the flames around the pod as it hits Pandora's atmosphere.
As with the movie, it took MANY people making contributions to pull this site together. I was a huge undertaking and for some on the team represents more than an year and a half of work to push this one out the door.
After the success of the Believe and Iris campaigns a few years back, along with Gears of War 2 last year, Xbox once again tasked my office with doing the online marketing for their next AAA title: Halo ODST. In this game you play as the rookie on a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (get it?) as you make your way through a myriad of levels killing aliens, saving humanity, and blah, blah, every first person shooter you've ever played.
While the game itself may play out like Halo 3.5, the site and production that went into it took our team marching into all sorts of brave new territories. The site revolves around an interface which allows the user to review interview footage of the 3 members of the ODST team you fight alongside in the game. During each interview, the soldiers are instructed to put a device on their head that allows you to see what they're thinking.
The interviews were shot on a sound stage in LA and were later matched up with b-roll, shot in both Budapest and SF. My role in all of this was to work alongside my co-worker and friend Jeremiah Wassom, and support his effort to assemble the video feeds of the thoughts / memories. Since he'd been brought into the project earlier and was on-set in Budapest his role was to ensure the interview questions matched up with the memories we'd planned on producing.
While he was laying out time lines and establishing timing, I took over the visual effects work for individual shots that would be part of these memories. initially we'd planned on having 4 shots, only 1 of which was anticipated to involve 3d motion tracking and animating game models.
By the end of the project we had 10 vfx shots, 5 of which involved some tricky matchmoving, and 3 of those included animating models from the game into the shots. In all of these cases, I tracked the shots using PFTrack, animated and textured some of the game assets in Maya, and composited it all together in After Effects.
Pelican
Tribute
Covenant Sky
Probably the most complicated of the shots I worked on was the Banshee Attack. While initially this shot seemed to be an easy track, it turned out to be an incredibly difficult shot. In fact, due to a crazy exposure shift and the smoke that felt it had the right to casually waft through the shot, I never actually tracked the entire shot in one continuous take. Instead the shot was broken into 2 parts, before and after the banshee explodes. The explosion was done using footage from Detonation Films, and the rocket and contrails were done using Trapcode Particular.
Banshee Attack
The shot was later cut down to accommodate client request (and cover up the fact we had nothing for him to be shooting at when the camera panned back down).
After individual shots were finished and placed into their respective timelines they were treated with a process that jeremiah came up with to scramble them up and add that digital noise that's so indicative of a scrambled digital signal.
the last step of the project was to animate the various EKG / Brain activity meters that needed to reflect the soldiers stress levels as related to their memories.
At the end of the day, this turned out to be the kind of project I love. I got my hands dirty doing things like shooting extra assets and making a bomb (turns out everything I know about explosives comes from the Die Hard Movies), I pulled just about every compositing trick I could think of out of my hat. and walked away with a whole bunch of work I'm really proud of.
