Word to your comper.
BERG’s Timelapse Painting
This 3-D Typography experiment that the interface designers at BERG in London came up with is absolutely beautiful. I particularly like the pixelated style of the text, even though it’s getting a little over used. It just makes it feel like the sci-fi flicks I loved watching growing up in the 1980′s. Adding to it’s appeal is the simple technique that’s used to create the, as I’ll refer to it from now on, “magic transparent floaty text”.
The formula goes a little something like this. iPad + 3D to 2D image slices + persistance of vision = magic transparent floaty text. A simple movie, slice by slice frame by frame, is played on the screen of the iPad in front of a camera with it’s shutter open. And the result is a brand new take on the whole light writing phenomenon of the past year. But that’s only the first part of the process. They then repeat those steps over and over again until they get close to 3,000 frames which then makes up a shot in the video you’ll see below.
It’s total manual work too. Just a guy, holding an iPad, and moving it in front of the camera. But I wonder what type of effects could be achieved if you combine this with a high tech motion control rig. Or dare I say it…stereo cameras. Gasp!
Think about that as you watch the video below. Some really cool stuff.
P.S. On a site centric note, if anyone of my readers are in fact STILL reading this blog that is, I’m currently in the long stop and go process of redesigning this site. Once I finally sit down and just bang it out, this blog shall live again in a shiny new form. So if you are still reading this, one…thank you. And two, your patience will be rewarded.
Stay tuned!
“Coyote Falls” Gets Amazing Reviews!
The premiere weekend of the new Looney Tunes short, “Coyote Falls” in theaters has come and gone. And it’s left in it’s wake some really stellar reviews from critics and audiences a like! Now I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I am SO PROUD to have been apart of this creative team. The whole experience has just been a dream come true for everyone involved, so I wanted to give you all a consolidated list of all the reviews I’ve collected so far. The fruits of all the hard work everyone put in to make these as great as they are.
Now all that’s left to do is wait for the world to see the next two shorts. Which I’m so excited for, because each one is seriously better than the last!
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The Washington Post
The best part of “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore” happens before this derivative family film even begins. It’s the Looney Tunes animated short, “Coyote Falls,” that precedes the movie.
The 6-year-old next to me, like nearly every child in the theater, shrieked in delight and gasped in wonder as Wile E. Coyote was smashed, flattened, run over and blown up in an enormous fireball. (All in 3-D!) For kids raised on the nonviolent, chipper children’s entertainment of Nickelodeon and PBS Kids, the first Road Runner cartoon they’ve ever seen delivers genuine entertainment catharsis.
Tampa Bay Times
The sole reason to buy tickets — 3-D or otherwise — to Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore has absolutely nothing to do with the movie, which belongs in a pooper-scooper.
It’s a preceding, too-short subject that almost makes the investment worthwhile, starring Looney Tunes legends Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote in richer colors and more eye-popping depth than ever. Coyote Falls needs only those cartoon icons, a bungee cord, a bridge and heavy traffic on a desert highway to muster more enjoyment than the main event never matches.
Coyote Falls seems like a trial run for a possible Looney Tunes revival, retrofitted for the 3-D generation. That makes more sense in theory and now execution than most childhood retreads do in any format. The late animation genius Chuck Jones would be proud.
Box Office Magazine
In fact, Kitty Galore’s best laughs occur during the Looney Tunes pre-show cartoon Coyote Falls. Its 3D is fast and furious and the slapstick is clever. The cartoon short has everything Kitty Galore desperately needs. Too bad the Looney Tunes writers didn’t help out with the feature presentation.
Boston.com
Very much the best part of “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore’’ is the new “Road Runner’’ cartoon that precedes it. It’s in 3-D, of course, and Wile E. Coyote and his eternal avian nemesis have been rendered in fleshed-out, “realistic’’ shadings. I prefer the flat pop colors of yesteryear, but in all other respects, the short’s a scream: fast, funny, impeccably timed, and as brutally obedient to the laws of Looney Tunes physics as ever.
The National Post
In fact, the only thing that got the kids riled up was a new Road Runner short that preceded the feature. Although it lasted only five minutes, the dialogue-free, gleefully wacky toon scored more laughs than any wise-cracking pooch, no matter how famous the voice actor. Out of the mouths of babes indeed.
What Up Doc?
Wanna see what my wife Jess and I have been working on for the past 4 months? And also the reason I haven’t posted diddly on this blog either? Well then check out this shot of Wile E. that Jess lit / comp’d that was featured in the New York freakin’ Times!
LINK: New York Times – What’s Up, Doc? New Looneys
Meanwhile, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote are going back to work in movie theaters in a series of 3-D shorts. The first of these shorts — Warner has approved three, and three more are in development — will play ahead of the movie “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” which arrives in theaters July 30.
And the fan response over at Cartoon Brew is pretty awesome too. Fans really seem to be getting excited for the CG shorts! Here are some of my favorite comments…
Rafa says:
The road runner shot looks amazing!
the bugs & daffy, not so much…_______________________________________
lampshade says:
auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh
hey, the CGI shot doesn’t look so bad though
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Fooksie says:
I agree, Rafa. Wile E Coyote looks fantastic.
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erlab says:
I was seriously SCARED of Daffy’s welcoming expression! Now that I know Bugs WILL look like that, I will just have to live with it or ignore the show.
CN is still running the original cartoons in the morning right?
That CG Road Runner series has potential to be really good.
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A.J. says:
The cgi coyote looks pretty nifty!
But Bugs is having a serious tude problem…and his feet and face..wtf?_______________________________________
Taber Dunipace says:
Why is Daffey made of thistles? I hope that Coyote shot is going to be as good as it looks now!
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coyote says:
“The short will be in theatres? That’s great! The shorts were made in India? That’s really unfortunate.”
Don’t worry, the shorts aren’t being made in India. They’re being done by Reel FX in Dallas.
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tgentry says:
I guess I’m just restating what many others have already said, but the genericized, Flash-happy Bugs and Daffy make me incredibly sad. It’s odd that the 3D coyote looks much more organic and cartoon-like than the more trendy and souless look of Bugs and Daffy. Looking forward to the updated Roadrunners.
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mrscriblam says:
i like the coyote cgi shot
looks almost like stop-motion, which is a style i think would work very well for that sketch
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vfx says:
The real fun will be when everyone gets to frame-by-frame through the CG animation to see just how spot on it is to the classic stuff.
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The comments just go on and on. So I’ll let you thumb through them at your own pace.
But I will end with this. To all the fans who love the original Wile E Coyote and Road Runner shorts, the CG shorts will not disappoint. I dare say, you’re going to love them! I’m so proud to be a part of this project, as is every other single person on the team. And we’re putting in the hard work and long hours to do justice to what Chuck Jones brought to life all those years ago.
This is most certainly not all folks 
Just you wait.
Weapons of Mass Pixelation
Using wonderful special effects and combining the upbeat music, Patrick has made a wonderful nostalgic video that features the old style and pixel look into a realistic suburban city with the Pixels taking over. With so much color, sound and things happening at the same time, I really could not attempt to explain what is going on and just urge you to press play and really soak in this amazing creation.
The cool concept aside, this short has some really superb lighting and compositing going on. And I really love the marriage between the 8bit modeling style, and the really high res particle simulations. The shot of the Tetris blocks collapsing the building? Fantastic.
I would love to see a making of!
Please, Patrick…pleaseeeee?
Nuit Blanche
I’ve got a great award winning short film for you all today called “Nuit Blanche”. It comes to us by way of Spy Films, and was directed by Arev Manoukian. After seeing the video below, I doubt you’ll be surprised to find out that Spy Films is the directing troupe that Neill Blomkamp calls home as well.
It’s not easy to make 0′s and 1′s emotionally moving, but that’s exactly what the VFX artists have done here. Really impressive work.
Making Of:
ProFORMA
Check out this amazing piece of software coming out of Cambridge, that turns your little old web cam into a surprisingly accurate 3D scanner. It’s called ProFORMA for short, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition for long, and it works by generating a point cloud through a Delaunay tetrahedralization process. Which means it uses 2D XY vertices to generate 3D polygonal triangles, forming the mesh of the object you’re scanning. Man that sounded smart, but in truth I just Googled it and found this paper, ha.
The Delaunay tetrahedralization from Delaunay triangulated surfaces
Given a surface mesh F in R 3 with vertex set S and consisting of Delaunay triangles, we want to construct the Delaunay tetrahedralization of S.We present an algorithm which constructs the Delaunay tetrahedralization of S given a bounded degree spanning subgraph T of F. It accelerates the incremental Delaunay triangulation construction by exploiting the connectivity of the points on the surface. If the expected size of the Delaunay triangulation is linear, we prove that our algorithm runs in O(n log* n) expected time, speeding up the standard randomized incremental Delaunay triangulation algorithm, which is O(nlog n) expected time in this case.We discuss how to find a bounded degree spanning subgraph T from surface mesh F and give a linear time algorithm which obtains a spanning subgraph from any triangulated surface with genus g with maximum degree at most 12g for g>0 or three for g=0.
Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner
It works by generating a 3D point cloud from the image coming through the camera and then uses some clever math to both ignore the occasional occlusion of the model by a hand and to work out where the surfaces are. Then things go over my head, involving a process called Delaunay tetrahedralisation to turn the 2D surfaces into a 3D model.
Meet Steve Johnson
You’ve probably never heard of Houston native Steve Johnson, but I know you’ve heard of his work. Predator, The Abyss, Ghostbusters, Spider-Man 2, Where the Wild Things Are, and so on and so on. The point is that he’s had a very long and successful career in practical make-up fx. Now he’s nearing retirement but instead of writing his memoirs or shopping for a comfy rocking chair, he’s decided to start up a new channel on YouTube to share with the world a ton of never before seen behind the scenes footage of the films he worked the last 30+ years on. The coolest thing though is that he’s also bringing back the artists responsible for the work his shop did on those films to talk about it themselves!
I’m so glad to see such a seasoned and talented artist pulling back the curtain, and I want all of you who read this blog to go to his channel and subscribe to his videos. Let’s keep this ball of transparency rolling and hopefully encourage more of the greats to follow in Steve’s footsteps!
LINK: Steve Johnson FX (YouTube)
Take a behind the scenes look at some of your favorite movies with the people who actually MADE them! Hosted by Hollywood special effects legend Steve Johnson, the effects artist behind Ghostbusters, Big Trouble in Little China, The Abyss, Blade II, Species, Spiderman II, Where the Wild Things Are, and hundreds more!
All the footage you see here was shot in Steve’s own studio, with his cameras, his crew and on his dime.
An Impossible Short
For those of you who couldn’t make it to this years Siggraph Computer Animation Festival, I’ve got some good news for you. Lucas Martell’s animated film, “Pigeon: Impossible”, has finally been released for all to see on YouTube!
It’s a really charming short, expertly done, and is honestly just as good as anything Pixar has to offer. Big words I know, but watch the video below and I think you’ll agree. Especially when you get to the credits and realize only a handful of artists we responsible for creating it! Also, if you haven’t already, check out his video podcast series he did awhile back too. He takes you step by step from story development, to animation, to rendering, to final edit. I’ve featured it on this blog before, but I’ve relinked it below the featured video just in case you all want to check it out again! Just like “Pigeon: Impossible”, it’s a really high quality series and I think we can all learn a lot from it.
Great work Lucas! I really loved it.
The Short
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The Vlog
Ghostbusters II Bluescreened
OMG…never before seen Ghostbusters II Behind the Scenes footage!
