Very interesting, I still love 3D, even without the ability to see 3D at home, and a wife who gets violently ill from 3D. Can’t wait until they get 3D without glasses, especially for a glasses wearer!
I have loved Zoic’s work for years, so found this very interesting.
Another great interview from an awesome site.
From No Film School, an interesting sponsored article. I am surprised that they did this in Premiere Pro and After Effects.
So after all the bad press around this one, and the whole Covid thing we stayed away from the theaters for this one. And besides I can wait 45 days to see a movie on a streaming service that I already have, still this would have been fun in the theater, honestly I really enjoyed the film. Sure it was really silly, but I enjoyed, even if Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher needed more screen time, and I honestly could have seen a full film with fat Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy.
What I really want to talk about though, is a couple of things from the behind the scenes.
The first is the blue screen. It looks like they did all blue screen instead of green screen (the norm for digital, but it reflects less light for spill), but what really blew me away was not just how inconsistent the screen was, with many layers and edges. And even more so was the fact that Thor’s army had blue elements, and they shot it on a blue screen! Now I have seen that done with the blue changed to another color so it can be changed in post, but with the blue on blue and an inconsistent blue screen they must be rotoscoping every frame? ARE THEY INSANE? I mean this be part of the whole Marvel Mistreating VFX artists. Why not use Green Screen, or change the color of the blue?
I wish that CINEFEX still existed!
The next thing was the sequence on the small Asteroid in the shadow realm, with the crazy lighting from it going around it’s sun so quickly. They used this tech PlateLight, which allows for multiple lighting setups to be shot at the same time.
I would love to see an explanation of how this is working. I am assuming it is a special camera and sensor, but how does it then match with other footage (maybe fine because of the B&W nature of this scene).
This really hits home for me as I am a non-union editor, who recently got screwed in California with AB5 making my 1099 work basically illegal, and losing all the tax benefits of a Schedule C. And it is what I wanted to do coming out of USC, I wanted to go intern at ILM, but it was unpaid and you had to move to Marin county so only rich kids had the opportunity.
Basically VFX Artists have been unable to unionize, and because of how the industry is panning out, if a VFX house was to unionize they would not be able to underbid non-union effects houses, and so would close. And with Marvel ruling VFX, and with a methodology that may be good for them but screws the artists and companies that do the work. They don’t plan beforehand or lock things down to the end, which means redoing completed shots, without more money to do so. It just like the film LIFE OF PI which won Rythym & Hues, which won them the oscar, but broke them, when Ang Lee made a change to the Tiger late in the film, forcing them to make changes to all their already completed shots.
And that fact that as contract players, and jobs transitory it is impossible to really take a union vote, which takes time.
Honestly since companions can’t afford to go union because they would then not be able to underbid non-union houses, the only thing that would help would be to make laws protect artists. Of course Republicans and even most Democrats would never agree to the necessary changes. That would be to force companies to pay overtime after 40 hours, mandate 5 or at most 6 day weeks (with time and a half for the 6th day and double for overtime on the 6th day). And for this to work, there would have to be taxes on companies taking work overseas, or to cheaper states. Also they would need to get rid of the tax breaks for working in remote locations, as these tax breaks, make work cheaper in those states and undercut the ability to get paid your rate wherever you are.
The fact that not only are the artists having to work 7 day 70+ hour work weeks (I have done that, and you can only do it so long before you mentally break down) and the companies making single digital profits at best, this is only going to get worse until all the effects houses go out of business, as they just won’t be able to make a profit. Sure this will mean moving overseas for VFX work, which is already happening (the article talks about artists having to move to Canada for work), but it will make work harder being all overseas remote, and we will lose the talent that is able to the shots.
I can’t believe I hadn’t posted about this before, as this is a dream story, it really is.
IndieWire is reporting that Lucasfilm has hired YouTube Deepfake expert Shamook to work at Industrial Light and Magic after he was able to so successfully improve on the Luke Skywalker Cameo in the Mandalorian!
This guy has dome some absolutely stunning Deepfake work on his YouTube page, so this is absolutely amazing! I couldn’t love this story more!
I shot some test footage with 3 of my cameras, my DJI OSMO+ my Canon 60D and my iPhone 6S. I color corrected the footage using DaVinci Resolve 12.5 and did the Visual Effects in Adobe After Effects.
The visual effects include adding the gun shots, light flashes, and color correcting the orange tip of my gun so it is gray.
I was trying to show my ability to color match the footage from such different 3 cameras, as well as add the visual effects to make an interesting little sequence.
Let me know what you think!
