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sure what effects they will need and everyone seems to have an opinion, except the director, who is really quiet and withdrawn.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...

Tags: India, General Nerdery

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.

Tags: India, General Nerdery

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)

Tags: After Effects, Cinema 4D, General Nerdery