Back to School

I have been enjoying this semester greatly. I have just finished doing the titles for Spring Show for the Academy of Art University. Many of my students have produced professional quality work, and I am awed by the time all of them put in.

I have switched departments - from New Media to VFX/Animation, and I have to say it has been a good transition, the two departments function as compare and contrast exercises in what's going on in computer graphics - style versus technical skill. New Media is all about style, multi-discipline, and perception, but I usually struggled through instructing even basic concepts in After Effects. VFX students are gearheads and like to read computer manuals for fun, do fluid simulations in their spare time, etc- however, typography and the world of design isn't much on their radars. So it's been a challenge, an interesting and exciting one, and my students put up with me using them as guinea pigs for Curricullum changes/evil experiments/ untold amounts of homework.

I will post links to a few of the students who have produced some really exceptional work- The highlight of the class had to be the final projects of two groups who had some connections to some martial artists who they filmed with a Red One (!) in the green screen studio here in the Academy. I remember filming my final project in studio for my Senior Project- to be the instructor on hand during this shoot made me excited for my students, and made me feel young and old at the same time. (Student work c/o Artur, Roger, Yasemin, Carlos, Christian, and Louis. You know who you are.)

Other Stuff

I also have been cranking away on projects at Cobra. Two new projects since YouTube- one for Suzuki (a basic dealer type spot) and one for a prominent tech brand that is re-branding and re-positioning itself to be competitive in this desert fiscal landscape of 2009. Also a few secret projects of self promotional value, and some co-lab work for Mekanism here in SF.

Final project- Getting VeloBrew launched, sold, and drank by the masses. This homebrew was sold as a fundraiser for my Aids Life Cycle ride which is happening in... oh... 2 weeks! Months of training and focusing is coming up to the ride here. I have done a lot of prepping, had an art auction with all of my friends (which... of course, I did not document with this amazing medium known as photography) and produced these nice homemade booklets and posters. I am proud of how this project turned out - the first time in a while I have been maybe 50% satisfied with something, rather then focusing on the flaws of the piece or comparing it to what else is out there. The blessing and the curse of seeing amazing work all day, every day, is that it can paralyze you into not doing anything. Well, to hell with that. I am getting as much done as I can in 2009 with the finite amount of energy and life available to me.

Coming up

More work at Cobra, including selling our broadcast motion graphics harder, a project with Alexander Tarrant for a short web film festival thingy, and trying to start composing nicer pics with my DSLR. I also have been learning some serious c4d this year, with a lot of Mograph module, Expresso, and Thinking Particles finally making sense to me, although the world of creating nice models with clean geometry, real character rigging with IK, and bodypaint is still out of my grasp a bit. I still don't understand every switch and dial in the program, but have started to become comfortable answering questions on forums and analyzing the work I see. Justin and I have been doing visuals as an excuse to learn the technicalities of the various modules, including a bang up show for Flying Lotus.

Finally

I developed a bunch of Holga shots from last year, and mixed in with the rolls was one roll from winter of 2005, in Colorado. A lot of light had leaked in and exposed the roll, resulting in haunting, washed out, wintery surreal images, with a young dude staring back at me through the print. I can see why some folks go Holga and never look back- the shock of not having unlimited control which in turn creates happy accidents is something I have lost in going so digital. My next project might just be a group of songs played on prepared piano with typewritten pages.

John Cage - o - vison.

The work I did for Youtube through Cobra Creative has gone live... This is a promotional campaign showcasing YouTube’s dominance of the eyeballs of the peoples of the internets and how it can be utilized for ad campaigns. I worked on most all of the c4d on these projects- The design was all done at Cobra and motion designer Jake Hawley also worked on 3d + composite.

I’m particularly happy with the way the “Media Ball” section came out on the Audience targeting section - basically a bunch of clones being pushed around by effectors in Cinema. I feel as though the communication is particularly visual and clear here; the customer can physically see how their concept or campaign gets filtered and specified in a pretty visual way. I think a lot of internet concepts are hard to distill to some sort of visual, we usually end up designing a globe for “international and global”, usually with lines crisscrossing the face to show “IT”, and a giant “icon cloud” to show a breadth of skill, products, and services or divisions. Are there better ways to visualize these common themes?

www.cobracreative.com
www.youtube.com/advertise

Notice this announcement is a bit dated already... In the style of the old site. Ah well. Where was I?

Now that I’m staff at Cobra, I realized my site didn’t exactly have to be a professional advertisement for me anymore. This is kind of nice. I can Blog, post personal links if I feel it, and generally relax with movecraft.com. I also have switched over entirely to Rapidweaver for my development. This means, I will never have to hand code anymore. All my knowledge was painfully outdated anyway, and this way I hopefully will be encouraged to frequently update with such an easy to use platform. Anyone can build a website with this here new-fangled software.

Other new stuff... You’ll notice I am still building the Boards section out slowly. I haven’t decided if it should just be motion boards or other graphic design. Also, dang, I don’t have much of either. I have been focusing for so long on learning C4D and AE that I kept getting paid to be a technical guy instead of an artist. This is rough because I don’t know if I will ever compete with the truly technical guys. I think that personally, I would love to focus once again on what brought me here in the first place – you know. Art. Pretty pictures. Maybe the Boards section will have photography too. Maybe I just renamed that section right here in this blog post.

I also have a Source Files section. I keep posting files to message boards and the like. It occurred to me that they might be useful actually posted somewhere. I also have been instructing at the Academy of Art University, and this semester have been putting together a Special Topics: Motion Graphics class for compositors. I keep referencing files, and, bandwidth permitting, could post some source file from that course. It’s turning into a monster- I have some dedicated and awesome students. I might require all of us to use Vimeo. I have set up a profile there. Working at an interactive firm is already making me realize how behind the curve I am in general web knowledge.

Finally, I am riding in AIDS Life Cycle this year. I have set up a page for everyone to donate, buy beer, and check out the cause.

Colin

I am starting to get the hang of modeling/texturing/rendering...
Here's some Donuts for a site.

Here it is. A bit of hand-lettering design for a very special home brew. Beer making is almost as time consuming as motion graphics.

Concepts:















Final Implementation:






















Harmony Fest t-shirt (I did the whole campaign, but it never really looked that "*good" -*Technical Design Term):



Earthdance. I did the "Turtle" Design:



Yoga Moods Cd cover:

I went and saw a swath of mangroves near me that have been preserved. Unsurprisingly, the upper class neighborhoods and complexes are near these last bits of green, while you are in the area you can feel the proximity of marginally less stale air, it's like sleeping with your head next to an air conditioner. I found construction here- a bridge being built at the edge of the mangroves here, some shacks slowly making inlets there.

Although supposedly entirely protected, local government is corrupt enough that enough rupees in the right palms will get you a golf course in the middle of the mangroves, and this exact scenario happened with the Lackawanda mangroves I visited today. Of course, several examples of this could be demonstrated in the states, and all over the world, (I haven't even been to China yet, which I hear makes Mumbai look like Walden Pond) but being in a city of this scale puts the enormity of the problem in perspective. I can't help but feel that 100 years in the future, Bombay will be more like cities in the US with marginally improved city services, and cities in America will be more like what they already live with here: choking pollution, exhausting heat, overpopulation.

Plus side: Smog makes for great sunsets. Click here for a bigger version of the sunset. This is taken from the roof of my apartment complex. Want another panorama? click here.

4. They are still bombing the shit out of each other.

What makes an Indian? This question is amorphous, leading, strange, counter-intuitive, and political. Indians are not bridged by a common language (in fact they have about 20 major recognized ones, that number variable on who you talk to) and more variety of religion then one could think possible. Hinduism, the major religion of india, has no centralized authority, practices, and, seemingly entirely necessary for a major religion, no universal dogma. I have been reading Shashi Tharoor's excellent collection of essays, The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cellphone, which comments on geopolitical and social implications of India's 21 century boom, and who helped make it happen. While Tharoor is undoubtedly an Indian nationalist, he is not without a helping amount of scorn for what he sees as black marks on India's new place in the world. In particular, the fact that religious and political bombings still are common place here. I like a particular passage where he talks about India's box of crayola populous-

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Indians are used to multiple identities and multiple loyalties, all coming together in allegiance to a larger idea of India, an India which safeguards the common space available to each identity.

That idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, conviction, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom, and still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is about the simple idea that in a democracy you don't really need to agree-except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.


Of course, the ground rules on how certain extremes choose to disagree is a constant shifting and sometimes deadly plate tectonics. There were political/religious bombings in Utter Pradish (UP) while I was here, and I wonder if the families of the 15 indians killed while doing their business about the courthouses in three major cities two fridays ago will hold the democratic torch of embracing many, or instead seek vengeance on those who took their loved ones away.

3. They've adapted all of the bad values of the West.

From TGIFridays, to McDonalds, western values have arrived here in a big way. I am not so much irritated by seeing American odious corporate overlord McCulture dominate different societies as I am by seeing the culture slurp at it with glee. I find myself always more interested in meeting the lower castes here, those who can't afford Levi's or GAP. I see a genuine curiosity and friendliness in these skinny young men, and sari clad women that is missing in the confident and brash western style indians. The idea of an alternate culture, or a people who choose to educate themselves yet consume less, is completely foreign. And materialism gets pushed to extremes. Rich, educated, Indian women, with freedoms that their mothers never had, embrace slutty, Juicy Couture, Paris Hilton looks and lifestyles, while the men embrace motorcycles, hair gel, and big biceps. (Or alternately, the Silicon Valley buzzword and money/productivity deification) I know I am in the L.A. congruent portion of the country (Bollywood) and the industry in Hollywood is just as bad, but again, I hope that not everyone views our gift of Lyndsey Lohan as embraceable kindred spirit or western morale she-witch destroying civilization. I want to convince them to view her as I do, utterly inane.

2. Only a small percentage of women have freedoms to live good lives.

This is without a doubt a male dominated culture. It's also a marriage obsessed culture. Many men are allowed transgressions while women are ostracized if they stray in their forced unions. Although of course, in Mumbai, I see very little of this, with the fast paced city life and westernized ideals. What I do see is a city of men, men everywhere, fixing things, building things, making business, and going to school. It's officially an 8 to 10 ratio of women to men, but from the ground, the ratio feel much higher then that. Sexual Harassment is freakishly called "eve teasing" and it is common enough to have a sign telling you not to do it.

Melissa, my roommate, is particularly stared at, commented on, and made to feel awkward in public. Women universally make less money here, however, being an American, it's hard for this kettle to call into question the color of the pot.

1. And to completely be a chauvinist contrarian to the above comment...

All the cute indian chicks in this city have boyfriends.

The pieces are in place, the culture is obsessed with films and the market here actually, astonishingly, outpaces hollywood in terms of general output (900 plus films a year) and audience (4 billion or so compared to the 3 and a half billion estimated for hollywood films). Of course the only thing that American films far outpace Indian cinema is price per picture (by multitudes). One of the dirty little secrets of Hollywood is that they are gambling huge amounts of money on their pictures, and that they are insanely expensive to make. I think soon most post production will be sent here much to the chagrin of many in my industry and my friends, but hey, welcome to globalism. 

At the Divalli party talking with Rafique, who is a head of production here (and one hell of a character), we discussed a lot of things (over whiskey) and one of his main points regarding the state of the industry was my very existence in front of him at the party. "Never in a million years would I have imagined bringing in a top American Visual Effects Supervisor to do one of my pictures", of course, he was fishing, he wanted me to confirm that I was a top visual effects supervisor, which of course I am not. Don't get me wrong, for the effects they are looking for and the scope of the picture, what they really want is a motion graphics artist and I am confident that I can fumble my way through the shoot enough to get the footage that I need for post, where I can set up a post production pipeline, which will be far within my comfort zone.  However, his main point was not lost on me, that the industry was changing, the world was changing, and the Indian market will soon not be seen as a second rate ghetto for film for much longer. The firm we are possibly using for our DI (digital intermediate) is called Prasad EFX magic, and on a recent VFX heavy indian film they brought in a Hong Kong Director and an all american post supe and VFX supe. 


That night, at the Divalli party, was the second Cricket match in a series between India and Pakistan. Pakistan won in a nail biter that night (within 1 pitch), and the reaction at the party was quite interesting to me. "Let them have it", they said. The context was clear. Let them have this, we are superior as Indians. Rafique also made it quite clear to me as to where my and his place was within Indian society, i.e., we are on the top of society. He asked me if this situation would happen at the states often, A bunch of friends getting together during a holiday party having drinks and playing cards and getting hammered. "It's quite simaler, however, we wouldn't have the servants in the kitchen", I replied. I also made some sort of half-assed reference to the fact that my parties in San Francisco would be a bit more diverse with friends of Asian decent, gay people, etc. I was mainly thinking of my goodbye pancake feed before I left the city, and this was in fact, pretty true, although I don't know how true it would be as a generalization.

I know now how insensitive and grossly ignorant a statement this was for me to make. "Imagine my country, where when you go from state to state, everyone has a different language. Also, they have a different religion.", he responded. "How do you keep from letting it dissolve into unrest like they do in so much of the rest of this area of the word?", I asked. "Well, we don't!", he exclaimed, "We have social and religious unrest all of the time!".


Part of what makes India such a unique democracy is that certain different groups are afforded different kinds of rights according to their backgrounds under the SAME constitution. A lot of this can be attributed to the genius of Dr. Ambedakar, and his drawing up of what is regarded as one of the most airtight constitutions ever written, on par with Mandela's South African one. Of course, the constitution succeeds in keeping the country together, but as a modern document, it does provide less rights for different groups. Largely unknown in the west, Dr. Amedakar represented the Dalits, the lowest caste in indian society, and combined the academia of Martin Luther King with the rage of Malcom X. He also instituted the most massive shift of a group of people to a different religion (willingly) in the history of human kind, as the Dalits were afforded far more rights as Budhists. Tomas, my roommate and producer here, has been working on a documentary for the BBC (Which is now out of funding half way through production) about Dr. Ambedakar's life, and it is fascinating, sad, and beautiful. I will help with post and titles on it once we are done with the paying gigs. One of the reasons Ambedakar will be lost to history in the west was his antagonism toward Ghandi, who has since been forever martyrized. 

This leads me easily into the caste system of India itself. I never felt in the people at the party a sense of guilt or responsibility to their fellow impoverished Mumbaikars, something that weighs on me heavily while I am here. It is mainly because that there is a huge sense of keeping the status quo of the caste system. Talking with Rafique, he told me that most of the segregation happens mainly by class rather then race. I think it might be the opposite in the states, where racism is still a large problem but you can't really get a sense of classism the way it is here.

The monsoon season is during our summer. I probably won't see any rain the whole time I am here, unless I travel to the rain forest type areas. Massive flooding is a huge health problem here, as garbage and sewage are in the open, and the rains make the city a giant floating cess pool. While it is a relief from the heat, many of the educated Indians recognize the insane health problems with dirty water and only the very beginnings of the beginnings of the stirring of ecology are being realized here. 

This hits me a lot while I am here as well... There is no sense of human's impact on the environment. Indians throw garbage everywhere, and what would be beautiful beaches and vistas are public dumps. Plastic is everywhere. With almost a billion people, and due to double with mainly an undereducated, poor, populace, I feel as though humans as a species are kind of fucked. 

There is a lot of beauty here, particularly in the culture of the positive way other Indians treat each other and the focus on the family, which is paramount here. Everyone is friendly and helpful, and everyone is genuinely excited to see Americans. Something else I have noticed is that the Indian sense of humor is robust and pretty close to our own.

The city is mainly an out of control, brakes off, roller coaster explosion of activity and economic boom, consequences be damned. The stock market closed down (bear) last week for the first time in ten years. Think of ten years of uncontrolled double digit economic growth. The city has between 13 and 20 million busy Indians, each every day, getting their slice of the pie, even in the ghetto. I haven't toured Dharavi yet, Asia's largest ghetto and a mini city within a city. An estimated one million people live in a giant maze of corrugated metal and shacks, with limited running water and electricity. However, even there, the estimated export capital from the tiny shops and factories is 650 million dollars. 

Lest this post becomes overly academic, here a few pictures from my 27th birthday. We went halfway a through the city to find "The Ghetto" a rock club with pool tables and such, only to find out it was a dry day. (no booze in the whole city!) We eventually found a bar that would serve us, but it was in the Hyatt and they served us as westerners. I got one beer in before they closed up.Twan and I had a great time while he was here. The last night (also thanksgiving) we had a few drinks at a local place and I convinced the Djays to let us have some mic time at closing time and Twan flowed over the beats. They loved it and asked for his autograph, etc etc. Mad MC skillz in India. Also, If there are any fine art reps out there, I can only say www.anthonykurtz.com.

Whether you in Mumbai or Cali.

Twanwski and C-Bass

I moved into my apartment here. the address is

Building B1 Apartment #202, Serenity Towers complex, Andheri (West), Oshiwara, Mumbai, India, 400 053

My Cell in Mumbai is:

Country Code--->(011) 91 981 930 4870

but to have anything sent please send to the Studio,

Colin Sebestyen c/o Empire House, 1st floor, 10, Shah Indl. Estate, Veera Desai Road, Andheri (W), Mumbai, India 400 053

Cheers
C

Jump in a Rickshaw with Tomas, producer, and Melissa, Art department from S.F. If I feel out of place here, I think Melissa has me beat henna palms down as she is 6'2" and definitely has a south side chicago accent. We meet with the production company for their Bollywood romantic comedy. Over the course of a few meetings, I get a real sense of chaos from the production... The meetings are still in the brainstorm stage, they aren't sure what effects they will need and everyone seems to have an opinion, except the director, who is really quiet and withdrawn. This should be interesting. The worse part for me was trying to remember everyones name, which I am bad at anyway, but was compounded by the Indian names.

Went to a Divalli party with the production company and etc. Divalli is the celebration of lights in India. For Hindus, it is the celebration of Laxmi, goddess of wealth and prosperity. It's roughly a combination of the Fourth of July, Christmas, and New Years all rolled into one. Kids run around the city lighting off firecrackers and huge exploding bottle rockets. (for a week!) Riding around the city in the rickshaws was interesting- as firecrackers would literally be exploding underneath you like a mindfield as you bumped through the city. Compound that with the fact that rickshaws usually don't know where they are going, and confusion and chaos seem to rule the holiday season.

I haven't had much time to explore the city yet, but we did go location scouting yesterday and I got to see a lot of the city through the window of our mini-van as we drove around. As if I haven't driven home the point yet, the disparity between affluence and crippling poverty is so astounding and on such a grand scale here that I have trouble coming up with any kind of metaphor to describe it. Pictures may do more then words.

That segways nicely into me talking about my good friend and excellent photographer Anthony Kurtz, who is in India right now and should role through Mumbai in about a week. I am looking forward to seeing him and he should have a multitude of beautiful pics of the country and perhaps I will be able to post some here with permission, although I am sure he will post to his own site as well. I have been taking some pictures with the iphone and the xl1, but I am realizing my limited DP abilities.

Speaking of DP (director of photography or cinematographer) - On this feature I am working on he is formally british trained and very smart. I am glad I read the book on visual effects cinematography so I can at least speak his language. I know this is all stuff I should know to do my job here, so some of the research is paying off but my head is swimming with all of the new information ("circle of confusion" - technical term describing the size of boke blur in an image, or state of my mind right now?) and I am not sure technically how I am going to pull off everything.

We are trying to create a comic book like effect for when the characters of the film go into dream/ fantasy sequences, although the metaphor keeps changing, sometimes they want to add it for effect, sometimes as a transition, and sometimes as device. I am going to film all of the talent on location with green screen scrims behind them. I am getting nervous of on-location green screening, because i think it will be hard to get even lighting, etc. I am also realizing what a dark art lighting is and how little I know about it, despite lighting things for years inside the computer. However, since the elements don't need to be "real compositing" just a vector treatment ala MK12's work, I am hoping I can get away with chewy mattes and less then perfect alphas.

There are also going to be some shots with a lot of roto-ing needed, 3d tracking (of which my software, PFHoe pro only goes up to HD resolution, and the film is being scanned at 2K ((which is 2048 by 1556 resolution!)), and I don't know if I can afford PFTrack) and some 3D modeling/animation elements. I am hoping it doesn't get too.... ambitious... to complete in 2 months when I come back in February. I have 60 days allotted for post production and I am thinking I might need every second.

I am lucky to have Melissa here, as she will create all of the production art and has been creating storyboards non-stop. Having someone to board out effects sequences is beyond useful. It makes me realize how important boards are and how it is worth it to take the time to get them absolutely detailed before you move with production if you have the luxury.

The shoot is being pushed back, (principal starts on the 22nd now) so my whole schedule may be re-arranged. I am going to try and complete every effects shot I can before I leave for home on the 22nd of december. Then I go back to SF in January and then wait for them to finish editing on the feature, however, they are still shooting in January! (the climactic shaadi (wedding) scene too, which I will be bummed to miss) Then they lock their edit and then get Melissa started on production art and then I come out and set up a mini post facility thing-y. I was supposed to go back for one month in Feb, but I think it might be more like two months starting in March. Information on this project has been really hard to come by.

Finally, I would still like some time to see a bit of the country. I know I will at least make it down south to Colaba in the next few days, that is the colonial/British part of the city to the south. While in Juhu Beach there are a few westerners but once we move, for the most part, I am living amongst the populist...

Waiting to go into a production meeting that never came, instead I sat and observed dailies from a current production. Through a run down office (chipping paint, faded posters on the wall) with a 50 year old brass sign that says "Mixing" we walk through a door and into a state of the art, air conditioned, 5.1 dolby sound mixing studio as large and current as anything I saw at Skywalker.

Sitting on the couch and being brought strong coffee, I watched them review the sound of the latest marginally taboo sex farce/music video/ beautiful people/escapist fantasy/Bollywood Epic.

Back to the hotel. sleep.

I was about to write that it takes a long time to get to the other side of the world, however, even with layovers and stops in Seoul and Singapore, it will take less then two days. I don't know how I feel about it... There is an intense amount of energy expenditure everyday scuttling us humans around the world in record time never before comprehended. The two days with little sleep doesn't exactly help me from appreciating the miracle of this fact. The singapore airport is vast and modern. Once again, just vast amounts of energy pumping out acres of channel stores, movie theaters, A/C, MAC cosmetics, musak, Burger Kings, even Seranto Coffee! Thomas Friedman is right, the world is flat when I drink a San Francisco chain coffee double latte in Singapore. But despite all that it was good to be locked in a fixed position with no internet access and a few text books.

I read Mark Sawliski's Filming the Fantastic while on the plane and annotated and highlighted the greasy hairy bits that I didn't know, particularly lighting specifics, 35 mm film stock formats, and lens look up charts. This is all stuff you learn in 101 film school but a lot of it is going to be relatively new to me, and its important I sling the jargon like some sort of half assed expert. It's hilarious though- Sawliski is an old school optical compositor and he spends chapters of his book describing the optical compositing process and then ends each chapter - "Well, they don't really do it this way anymore, or ever again." He includes information on digital but everything is all about "mapping to polygons". Apparently all modern visual effects are accomplished by "polygons". Gotta get me some of them.

I started reading Digital Intermediates for Film and Television but I have the feeling that setting up this workflow is going to be far down the line after the shoot. I am a lot more comfortable with setting up After Effects pipelines anyway, so the I think this will be less of a knowledge shock then actually dictating what lights will be used, platforms built, etc. My mind is a blank slate till I touch down and get in that first production meeting.

I also have absolutely no idea what to expect otherwise, from, you know.. not the job and stuff. Like what "life" will be like. I know all the american crew is crashing in one apartment, but I don't know what hood it is in yet. This has the makings of what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. The Real world. Bombay.

So this blog is going to stay industry oriented and still serve as a feed for motion graphics and effects compositing, however, it may take a few swings into the personal arena as I travel to Mumbai to work on a feature. Don't be surprised if you see some personal photos and notes on here along with some posts of me fumbling my way through a full 35 mm project with Digital Intermediate! I am very excited to work on this project as VFX supervisor and as lead Compositor/Designer.

Stay tuned from India!

So here it is, the Art project of the Summer for the event of the Fall (Imagine that in my move trailer voice). Shaun Roberts of Triplewide, who produced the most excellent documentary, The RunUp for Upperplayground got contacted by those fine peeps & by Aesop Rock to produce an all original, all new visual set to accompany his new album as he takes it out on tour.

Shaun lept on his producing duties with gusto and hired four Motion Graphics badasses/designers/animators/friends (/models). Working with Aesop + his MC in crime, Rob Sonic, on super tight deadlines and budgets, we all divied up the work and came out on the other side with nearly 85 minutes of original content that synced with the Fall tour.

Basic pre-production was simple. Aes and Rob would upload the instrumentals of their tracks to our secure server, and then post the lyrics, a brief description of the track and the kind of imagery they saw in their heads. From then on we had carte blanche to go nuts, drawing on whatever tools we could imagine so long as we could fill the content time. While the project was a huge collaboration between Alexander Tarrant, Buddy Giguerre, Shaun Roberts, and Justin Metros, we all chose certain tracks to direct. I directed "Citronella" (with tons of collab with Justin Metros), "Coffee", a medeley of older tracks ("Fast cars/Nickel/Famous"), and I co-directed "Catacomb Kids" with Alexander. Excerpts for all of the tracks are up on tourvisuals.com, and the main area of movecraft.com, along with a demo reel of the whole project.

Citronella was my biggest undertaking. The concept revolving around this track was a future dystopia with rich 1984/brave new world/ blade runner type imagery. Aes' lyrics were crazy evocative and set up a twitchy, paranoid future ("Nothing says charm/like taking the clone farm 'tards/to the arms bizarre") and the chorus ("When the radio stars/climbed up out of the floors/to murder the medium/that shot 'em 30 years before/ they said "Kill your television"). I researched old vaccum tube tvs and used them as references for modelling in c4d. These became the "Propaganda tubes" Then I modeled a simple draconian skyscraper for the "ministry of information", and used the citygen plugin to fill in the surrounding cityscape. From there, I fired up the dynamics module in c4d and threw the tvs over the building, bumping and colliding on the way down. I parented the camera to the falling tvs and set my render settings to 90 fps. Next, I set up some simple explosions, breaking apart the geometry with mograph module and the good old simple explode. I set up some multipass renders seperating the city models from the tubes with object buffers. I rendered the tubes with Ambient Occlusion but made sure to get my sample settings real low and crappy so that I would get all the flickering and noise that you usually try and avoid using AO, because I wanted the look to be dirty and artifact-y.

While all this was going on, Justin Metros was sourcing all kinds of crazy footage from the Prelinger Archives, a free public domain collection of media on the web. Justin is a MAX/MSP guru and he built out some custom patches to create a custom time remapper/noise effect dubbed "The ScrubFucker". After Scrub-fucking all his footage, he sent it to me, and I set to compositing the footage on my tubes in After Effects using c4d's external compositing tags for 3d tracking (I also stole graymachine's backface culling script, which was wicked usefull)

Then I composited the whole thing in After Effects with tons of noise overlays, solids on various blending modes, tons of time remapping using trapcode's soundkeys, and liberal abuse of the 3D glasses effect.

The coolest thing is that all this stuff got burned to DVD's as instrumentals,DJ Big Wiz, Aes's super tech and super tallented DJ, would scratch and beat juggle live, with the live visuals going nuts back behind him on screen. Very rad.

Catacomb Kids was basically all After Effects madness. This track is about bombs being planted in the lockers when Aes was in school, and general messing around in high school. Alex and I built out a bunch of lockers in AE, and then went through and keyframed the camera to the beat. (I was on his couch, drinking beer, screaming, "and then the camera will move like THIS!!!", and bopping my hand to the beat. Glad he trusted me to make something cool based on that stellar pitch:)

Alex made some cool simulations of explosions in particular and overlaying practical footage from stock (lots of explosions in this project). And then we extended the whole thing out with cinematic pans of fronts of high schools, school clocks animating in After Effects, and other various school violence imagery. I think the final result is powerful, cathartic, and not a bad party anthem/ background to boot.

Coffee was a slower, less, intense track. Shaun, Alex, and I were staying up near Tahoe. "Coffee" is all about getting out of the city, hole-ing up away from civilization. Shaun is an awesome photographer/Filmographer and he went out at dawn to take some rad nature footage with the GL1 and still photos. We also took a bunch of photos of the textures of that cabin we stayed in and I went and filmed some of the creek behind the place. I wanted the whole thing to have a psychedelic, kalidescopic feel and CC Kalieda served my purposes well. I was especially blown away by the new Motion Blur in CS3, as it actually interpeted the translation moves in-plugin of Kalieda and calculated the motion blur correctly, something I hadn't seen before unless this was built in the plugin like particular's Motion Blur (anyone know?). I also built a nice long hallway with the cabin textures and cut out old windows from old cabin stock, and composited our imagery in the frames. Then I took some Jeremy Fish artwork (a frequent colaborator of Aes, he was nice enough to send us source files of his artwork:) and animated them, and threw 'em in z space on a blending mode. I mapped the z movement of the camera to the beat using time(); and had it randomly wiggle(); to the hihat using good ole soundkeys. I color corrected all the nature footage and had it cut back and forth between symmetrical hallway and mirrored nature footage.

Overall it was totally awesome experience. Especially cool was going to the Fillmore with all my friends and seeing Aesop perform with our visuals 30 feet tall. "Props" go out to Ordinary Kids for producing the title track "None Shall Pass" as a music video and that traveled the tour as the visuals for that track. Also, Jeremy Fish had a timelapse video of him painting out a custom mural, that we weren't involved with that. Lisa Klipsic manages Aesop and helped the whole thing transpire. DJ BigWiz's lady friend has been posting youtube video of all of the performances, check them out going crazy in NYC! Thanks to all involved.

Aesop's Fall tour is ongoing, check out dates at his website.
Rob's new album just dropped. Buddy did most of Rob's tracks.
Justin's site (justinmetros.com)
Alex's site (tarrant.tv)
Shaun's site (Triplewide)

Two updates from two of my good friends and fellow art collective/ compadres/ artists extrodinairez: Carl Nolting (aka AM Overtone) and Justin Metros. Carl has a distinct and soulful style that mixes well with his music background, and Justin is just a plain crazy smart and talented guy (custom video application coding and compiling using jitter at 3am after drinking a bottle of whiskey kinda smart). The three of us have been loosely performing as veejays around the Bay Area, with diverse shows, locals, and associated fame of the djs. Justin and I played a killer show with The Orb a few months ago and it was very cool to make some art with such a legend! As a result of all this activity, Justin is building us out a space on the web for us to share all of the video goodness. So, the insta-action video collective is still in its infancy, but check out insta-action.com soon.

AM Overtone Update
Justin Metros Update

So, The work I did with GB on Grouper.com which is now known as Crackle has gone live. Strangely enough, Buddy and I also worked on a pitch for the Crackle identity intro animation as a separate job, which I might post here if I can show it to y'alls...Some cool styleframes for the brand. We had a wicked cool Katamari Damci type concept but no one went for it. Guess everyone has done Katamari. Sony owns Crackle and their deali-o is to provide inroads to all of Sony's traditional media empire for web based peoples/ film students/ etc. Will this branding and positioning differentiate this video sharing site from the other one billion video sharing sites out there right now? I have absolutely no idea. Maybe they should have called it Crckl, cause all web 2.0 sites come from the future, where they have no vowels.

So we just finished some graphic/post production spot for this PSA. I worked with Buddy Giguerre (Maya Generalist), Bill Philbin (director), and Zachary Greenbaum (producer), to help bring this story to life. One nice thing about creating video game type graphics is that you can have your render times relatively low with no anti-aliasing or GI and such and stock models from turbosquid are actually preferrable!

I like doing this kind of effects work. It's a lot less about graphics and more about the puzzle of achieving believable composites. It's wierd though. I feel like the whole motion graphics industry is moving towards the effects pipeline model with specialists doing individual jobs. I mean, Psyop is basically a VFX house. The problem with the FX model though for us lowly mographers or freelancers is that it's freaking expensive, so your clients have to be paying big bucks!

Check out the final project on William's Page (top video)