The first diffusion I go to time and time again, whether it is film or HD, is smoke. This is a very powerful tool. Having the patience to use the right smoke to get your levels consistent can infuse a mood, transport you back in time, create style, and a cream effect on a woman’s skin. One tool.
In a business where much of the deal-making and negotiations are verbal, your word and your reputation is EVERYTHING. The film industry is small. Everyone who is established can easily make contact with anyone else or can get the straight scoop by making a few calls. How much you are paid, your title on a project, how hard you work, how honest you are, how you treat people— there are no secrets.Read the entire post here, bookmark it, re-read it, commit it to memory, live it!
The idea is that the key light is placed behind the subject rather than in front (the way you would probably see it set up in most cinematography books).Read the rest of the article, which includes images from numerous blockbusters such as True Grit (above), here: http://evanerichards.com/2012/2463
You can never prepare too much before shooting a film. For instance, I just watched “Saving Private Ryan” for the umpteenth time and there it was: a mistake that I’d never noticed before. The translator has rounded up a group of Germans. One of the Germans mouths off and the translator shoots him, then tells the rest of the group to move off. We cut to a shot of the Germans marching off and there’s no dead German on the ground.Read the rest on Film Slate!
Someone made a mistake in breaking down the script and no one caught it.
One of the fundamental tools for an actor is their “objective.” This is a specific way of working with character “motivation.” Discovering a character’s objective begins with asking the question “what does this character really want or need during a particular scene?” This is not to be confused with what the character says in the dialogue. We are looking for the “subtext” or unspoken desires of a character that can be channeled into specific behavior.Read the rest over on nofilmschool.com!
Sound. It’s the most elusive element that seems to plague filmmakers so very often. We commonly hear filmmakers saying things like, “sound is 2/3 film” or “sound will make or break a production.” The list goes on. Yes, we have been able to get that “picture” quality to a “pseudo” Hollywood look, but sound is difficult. Or is it?The index of Harn's articles can be found here on the Zacuto site. Here's the current list:
All filmmakers are on a journey, and that journey is going to take you through many cameras. It’s dangerously easy to get swept up in advancing technologies, and all-too tempting to think that a new camera will slingshot your filmmaking forward.Read Stu's entire post for the run-down on the capabilities and pricing of the current crop of digital cameras, from the Red Epic M ($43,000) down to the Canon Rebel T3i ($659).
She says, not enough filmmakers these days take the time to study the technique editors used before the days of digital editing. "One of the things I find disturbing is when a film professor announces they're going to show a black and white, there's a groan in the room," she says.Read the rest of Schoonmaker's insights here: http://newenglandfilm.com/news/archives/2007/05/thelma.htm
Destruction pipelines today are key aspects of any major visual effects pipeline. Many current pipelines are based on Rigid Body Simulations (RBS) or otherwise referred to as Rigid Body Dynamics (RBD), but a new solution – Finite Element Analysis (FEA) – is beginning to emerge. In this ‘Art Of’ article, we talk to some of the major visual effects studios – ILM, Imageworks, MPC, Double Negative and Framestore – about how they approach their destruction toolsets.Read the whole article - featuring looks at Harry Potter, X-Men: First Class, 2012, and more - here!
After Effects is a professional tool by any measure, but it is designed for a broad user base. So an artist who plans to push it hard will want to tune the application accordingly.Read it, bookmark it, and start pimpin' out your After Effects today!
I know for certain that when you invent your own career, you consciously choose to leverage your own talents, your own skills, your own preferences – rather than contorting yourself to fit into a narrow job description of someone else’s design.Read the rest here. Great stuff.
Rotoscoping is the process of manually altering film or video footage one frame at a time. The frames can be painted on arbitrarily to create custom animated effects like lightning or lightsabres, or traced to create realistic traditional style animation or to produce hold-out mattes for compositing elements in a scene and, more recently, to produce depth maps for stereo conversion.
As a VFX artist, you are primarily creating motion graphics or visual effects. A thorough knowledge of rotoscoping and roto tools is vital to solving a vast amount of problem solving in VFX: rig removal, stereo conversion, greenscreen compositing, hold out mattes, split screens, and even object or feature-based color grading. It is perhaps one of the widely used tools in visual effects.It's a lengthy read, but well worth it. Bookmark it for future reference, too!
Nobody cares about your opinion unless they ask.
And even then, they might not really want to hear it.
On numerous occasions, I’ve watched newbies make the mistake of either sharing too many of their thoughts, sharing too little, or just plain saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.Read the rest over on The Black and Blue. And while you're at it read this article there too: "10 Ways to Guarantee You Never Work On Set Again." Don't be the newbie who shoots off his mouth on set and squashes his career before it even starts.
