Inter-College 48 Hour Film Challenge Kicks Off This Friday!

Our good friends at Grand Canyon University are once again hosting this event. Let's keep the UAT / GCU rivalry alive! We've beat them twice and they are out for vengeance! Event kicks off on Friday November 4th at 6pm at the Ethington Theatre on the GCU campus (33rd Avenue and Camelback).

See your DV instructor for more details. Ask about earning Extra Credit for participating!

FALLOUT now available on Vimeo!

Now that our year-long film festival run is over - it began on October 15th 2010 at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe AZ and ended last night at the Terror Film Festival in Philadelphia PA - it's time to finally share our epic sci-fi action thriller "Fallout" publicly on the web. Enjoy and pass it on please!
Here's the complete list of festivals and awards from our amazing year-long run

2011 Adobe Design Achievement Awards
- Semifinalist, Innovation in Motion and Video in Education

2011 Phoenix Film Festival
- Best Arizona Short

2011 Los Angeles Reel Film Festival
- Student Film category - 3rd Place, Best Editing, and Best Digital Effects

2011 Los Angeles Movie Awards
- Award of Excellence, Best Editing, Best Special Effects

2011 Los Angeles Film & Script Festival
- Honorable Mention, Narrative Shorts Category

2011 Action on Film International Film Festival
- Runner Up, Best Visual Effects (Short)

OFFICIAL SELECTIONS:
2010 International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival (Tempe, AZ)
2011 Phoenix Film Festival
2011 Los Angeles Film & Script Festival
2011 Los Angeles Movie Awards
2011 NewFilmmakers LA
2011 Los Angeles Reel Film Festival
2011 Action on Film International Film Festival
2011 HollyShorts Film Festival
2011 Renovation World Sci-Fi Convention Independent Fan Film Festival (Reno, NV)
2011 Atlanta Horror Film Festival
2011 Terror Film Festival (Philadelphia, PA)

fxguide: 'The Art of Roto: 2011'

fxguide recently published this outstanding roundup of state-of-the-art rotoscoping tools and techniques - which all beginning visual effects artists need to be familiar with.

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!

The Black and Blue: 'How to Share Your Opinion on a Film Set (If Asked)'

Ahhh, here's a vital article that all film students need to commit to memory. It'll help you every day that you're on set or in the editing room with peers, professors, and later, employers:

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.

Crew Call: 'Kerry and Angie'

DV Students - looking for some on-set experience? Longtime friend of the DV Program Amanda Melby is crewing up for a short film she is directing, titled "Kerry and Angie." The cinematographer for the shoot? None other than UAT adjunct professor Webb Pickersgill. Here are the details: 

Shooting Dates
Tuesday, October 18 from 7 am - 7 pm in downtown Glendale (53rd Drive)
Wednesday, October 19 from 7 am - 7 pm in downtown Glendale (same location), followed by company move(s) to North Central Phoenix (7th Street/Dunlap) 

For crew, they are in need of:
2nd AD
Still photographer (with or without camera)
Set decorator/props master (they have everything, just need someone in charge of it).
Grip
PA (2)

Interested? Email Professor Paul DeNigris at pdenigri@uat.edu.

Article: After Issuance of VES “Bill of Rights,” VFX Industry Considers Options

The Studio Daily blog has been following this story for some time, and it's something that should be on the radar of our many students considering a career in visual effects. The issue of unionizing visual effects artists is not going to be resolved any time soon.

After Issuance of VES "Bill of Rights," VFX Industry Considers Options
http://www.studiodaily.com/blog/?p=7649

Submitting Works for Student Showcase: Due Oct. 7

The time has come for submissions for the upcoming Fall 2011 edition of Showcase 2011. We are looking for entries and submissions from students, both resident and online, and alumni that reflect ALL disciplines at UAT.

Students of all majors are encouraged to submit work for UAT's Student Showcase, a collection of pieces that display the academic and artistic talents of the University's learners. Drawings and digital art/interactive share space with programming code and software demonstrations on the University campus.

We hope that the submissions will bring in a wider variety of designs - including technologically-based pieces. Items like data visualization programs, executable files, code, etc.

Please note that there is a selection process in place that will ensure that only the best work will be showcased, that will represent our talented students and alumni in the best light at UAT.

Submission Process:
Submit your work via email, showcase@uat.edu, and attach your completed submission form.

DOWNLOAD SUBMISSION FORM

NOTE: Images must be a minimum of 200 dpi: it is my goal to display the best artwork in a big format (29x19) min. If you submit digital work at a lower resolution, 72dpi, with a small size, and if the piece is selected, I still may not be able to display it.

Feel free to  e-mail Vesna  Dragojlov (vdragojlov@uat.edu), Student Showcase Curator,  if you have any question regarding the showcase.

Vimeo's New 'Music Store'

Press release from Vimeo:

As many of you know, finding music for your videos can be somewhat… well, painful. Licensing music on your own can be confusing and finding good free music can take forever. Many of us here at Vimeo are video creators or filmmakers as well and we experience these frustrations on a regular basis. So, we decided to do something about it.

Introducing Vimeo Music Store!

Vimeo Music Store is your one-stop-shop for finding, discovering and licensing high quality music for your videos. We’ve built a simple and intuitive interface for you to easily search for music using a variety of different music criteria, and then purchase and/or download the tracks you want. Search mood, genre, tempo, themes, instrumentations and then use the advanced search to whittle down the results even further.

As of now, Music Store offers over 45,000 curated tracks with a three different license options for you to choose from. Here’s the skinny:

Creative Commons-licensed music is curated and provided by Free Music Archive, one of the most-respected curators of Creative Commons-licensed music. There are many different Creative Commons licenses available, so make sure to learn more about Creative Commons and how to use them in our FAQ.

Paid music tracks are provided by Audiosocket, a music and media company that curates its content to deliver up-and-coming talent to the marketplace. Audiosocket’s catalog includes over 33,000 songs from more than 1900 emerging bands, composers and record labels from around the world. Audiosocket’s catalog offers both personal, non-commercial licenses for $1.99 per track and commercial licenses for $98 per track.

As a a token of our appreciation, we’re offering all Plus and PRO members one FREE, personal license track (a $1.99 value). This offer is only available for one week starting today, so make sure to head over to Music Store and cash in!

We’re very excited about this first phase of Vimeo Music Store and we hope you like it. Look for more features, more partners and more options for bands and musicians in the future!

Love,
Vimeo

Slo Dive: '250 Awesome Grunge Textures'

Grunge is awesome. Grunge rules. Grunge is useful for VFX artists, motion graphics artists, texture artists, and more. Everyone needs more grunge. Need I say more?

Get busy downloading!

Philip Bloom: 'Canon DSLRs: some of the best picture profiles out there'

Filmmaker and DSLR aficionado Philip Bloom continues his tradition of posting the latest info on the emerging trend of the DSLR "picture profile." On cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark II, the picture profile editor can allow a user to dial in just the right set of parameters to make color grading easier and more impactful.

For all projects that I am producing, I always shoot the flattest image I can get. However, when shooting for others, if the turn around time does not allow for colour timing/correction, I will shoot less flat (typically neutral).

Now you ask, why is a flat profile important? Well, when you bake-in the color/contrast settings into an image (pre-set PP’s), you are unable to retrieve information that would be available if you had shot flat. Say your sky is blown out, but you wish you could see some of the clouds that were there on the day. With a baked-in image style, you are not able to recover it. With a flat image, you have a much better chance of recovering the clouds — OR if you under or over-expose something, you have a better chance to recover information that would otherwise be lost.

Read the rest here!