Several popular films seem to share a common influence, in a certain way at least. Cineleet uses plot *spoilers* to explain how Carnival of Souls, Jacob’s Ladder, Brazil, Donnie Darko, Stay, and other Films were Inspired by 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge', a short story by Ambrose Bierceoriginally printed in William Randolph Hearst'sThe San Francisco Examiner in 1890.
The Wikipedia entry for the story lists other more direct and indirect adaptations, including one from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The adaptation below by director Robert Enrico won the 1963 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and appeared as one of the last episodes of The Twilight Zone in 1964.
Cinemetrics, a Bachelors project from Frederic Brodbeck, 'is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.' (via FilmmakerIQ)
He's got pieces of his Python code available, and some nice pictures, but no working demo.
For a discussion of movies and attentional blindspots, see What You See Is What You Get at the New York Times, which explores ideas that circulated in February from David Bordwell who now adds comments on fast pop movies and slow festival films. Bordwell was mentioned here on AEP previously on these and related matters.
From Muybridge and Farnsworth through the 20th century, Fog City Mavericks explores Bay Area filmmaking. It's a bit repetitive for some but free on Hulu:
Vimeo Video School provides bite-sized spoonfuls on video-making topics, organized in categories. Tutorials come from the staff and members of Vimeo; the discussions of Timelapse are good and come from familiar sources.
The latest fxpodcast from FXGuide is a broad discussion with Gareth Edwards about his film Monsters, with a few details on the use of AE:
"Like Atilla [which drew from for his Fxphd course], Edwards did all of the vfx and cgi work on Monsters in Adobe’s Creative Suite (including Premiere) and 3ds Max. The film included over 200 visual effects shots. He also served as director and DOP, shooting the movie with a Sony EX3 over several weeks in Central America and Mexico with a crew of four."
Edwards managed to put together the movie for thousands instead of millions (budget rumored$15,000 to the very low six-figures). Here's more from behind the scenes:
There's a video on the Adobe site with director David Fincher and crew talking about the use of Production Premium during post-production on his latest film, The Social Network. The film was edited in Final Cut and sent to Premiere via EDL for conforming with After Effects, echoing The DV Rebel's Guide (see also Prolost's What Should Adobe Do With Premiere Pro?).
"The Social Network was shot on the Red One using the Mysterium-X chip set mostly at 4K 2:1 4096x2048 Redcode 42 and released as a 2K digital intermediate. Additional high-speed photography was shot 4K 2.169 4096x1888 at RedCode 36.
As lead data wrangler, Nelson first had the R3D files transcoded to ProRes 422 LT for offline editing in Final Cut Pro using the Red Rocket card and RocketCine-X. He used FileMaker Pro to keep track of all the footage, files and visual effects in a master database. He wrote a script in Filemaker that took the Final Cut Pro EDL and sent it through RedLine in Red Alert to generate mostly 2K DPX files from the original Red footage for visual effects and final conform.
The Social Network was conformed for digital intermediate in After Effects CS5. Nelson imported the DPX sequences as a multiple layered composition in After Effects and lined that up frame accurate to a QuickTime reference movie exported from the offline edit and imported into the layer above the DPX files.
“I used Premiere as a stepping stone to get my EDL from Final Cut talking to After Effects,” describes Nelson. “Because Premiere and After Effects talk to each other, I was able to bring an offline into Premiere and open that same file in After Effects. This made all of my edits in Final Cut Pro and my layers in After Effects match. The tool that I wrote is the secret behind having my DPX frames match up to my offline edit.”
The movie contains nearly 1,000 visual effects shots that were handled by Lola VFX, Savage Visual Effects, Outback Post, Eden FX and Ollin Studio VFX. Nelson provided mainly 2K DPX plates to the vendors depending on the quality of the image. There were some night scenes that were rendered at 4K and then processed by Lowry Digital for noise reduction and sharpening. Having the final conform in After Effects enabled Nelson to do additional effects work. “So if anything needed to be painted, anything needed to be comped, additional repositioning, stabilization whatever needed to be done [we could do it].” At least 150 effects shots were done in-house using After Effects, SynthEyes and a plug-in called Immigration that was used to help auto relink offline layers to DPX image sequences."
Update: these seem like the movies, now on Adobe TV. There's also a PDF.
Filmmaker IQ has collected a bunch of "10-minute film school" videos by Robert Rodriguez from YouTube which are normally found on DVD. Here's a sample:
While the Apple iPad is disappointing to many (on DRM, Flash, etc.), potential uses are also imagined. Here's a few articles looking at possible impacts:
Update: Oliver Peters has a big well-illustrated post Easy Canon 5D post – Round II, his second summarizing a number of opinions and workflow tips from several 5D projects.
Update 2: Prolost adds Color Correcting Canon 7D Footage, with some tips (similar to those found in greater detail in The DV Rebel’s Guide) -- Shoot flat, Chose white balance wisely, Expose to the right, Do denoise, Work at high bit-depths, Sharpen last.
The Adobe commercial on products used in the movie Avataris now on AdobeTV; the After Effects angle is its use on the set to evaluate the composite of live action elements with CG elements.
It seems like they might have used something like Frischluft Lensfeed, which shows live camera feed inside of AE, and something like PictureReady, which offers the ability to record a QuickTime movie which is available immediately, during capture. It would be fun to find out the actual specifics.
Update: there's a few more tidbits on AE and "simulCAM" in an article linked by Michael Coleman, and and more from Adobe's Serge Jespers,
"AFTER EFFECTS had a multitude of uses as you can probably imagine:
In the early stages of production, AE was used to place flowing camera moves on still artwork for concept art reels.
On the live and mocap sets, AE was used to quickly create test composites to see if the live-action and “simulcam” green screen shots were lining up with the virtual animation and backgrounds. Within a few minutes of each take being shot, artists were able to mock-up composites for James Cameron to look at and approve or re-shoot.
Automated rough comping of the video of the facial performances of the actors (recorded head via mounted miniature video cameras) into CG character face textures for the previs portion of the production. This allowed Jim a quick and easy way to know if the actor’s facial performances were going to be OK or if a take needed re-shooting.
AE is being used by some of the vendors hired for VFX work to create 3D stereo composites for finished shots, to create complex motion graphics for use in the 3D holographic screens in the various control room scenes, and to create “heads-up” displays for various high-tech vehicles in the film.
Adobe provides documentation to write complex procedural scripts for AE, and the AVATAR artists took full advantage of this. They created an automated rendering pipeline for comping the previs shots using AE’s scripting capability.
Each time Jim Cameron does a review/critique of VFX work, an HD recording is made of the session. Premiere Pro is used to take the edited recording and format into various packages for digital distribution. The process is automated, with typically 8 hours or more a day of reviews that need to be processed.
Premiere Pro was used extensively on set in combination with AE to check rough composites in playback context with animated sequences. A/B comparisons of VFX vendor work are easily set up and reviewed.
Although the creative editing for AVATAR is done using an AVID based system, Premiere Pro is able to read in cut-lists and other important metadata using its built-in AVID “AAF” import feature. Rather than bog down AVID editors with having to render out updated sequences for the animation department, the AVID editor can export the virtual “recipe” for the new cut to a small file that Premiere Pro then uses to automatically assemble the cut to match the AVID. Digital video files of the shots that are online in the master shot database are sourced as clips by Premiere Pro."
Update 2: a few other articles briefly mentioned a role of After Effects in creating "kabuki masks" -- Third Floor Aids Avatar in an article in AWN and comments from Jon Landau from Adobe MAX in Workflow: Avatar, New Cameron Movie. Here's a little more from Landau at Adobe MAX 2009:
Update 3: not for AE info, but fxguide's January 15 podcast for which interviews John Knoll, who goes into specifics, including a discussion of stereo 3D techniques. Also this,
from Francois Tarlier: "I was pretty happy when I learned that James Cameron ask for developing a new kind of 3d camera where both ocular are looking to the focal point and not to the infinite [parallel]. So far I couldn’t explain better my self than this video..."
A friend got one and it seems Boing-Boing is right, Livescribe Pulse Smartpen: It's a Keeper. It's a great idea that lets you keep track of story ideas or even generate information & training videos, and seems to open up all kinds of possibilities when combined with other new and future tech. Here's a bit how it works:
This is interesting if you recently caught the 1957 movie directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd, which should show again on cable (TCM) January 12.
Over on PVC, Mark Christiansen is profiling two online post-production management tool alternatives to manipulating Basecamp templates that are in beta and already used in production environments, Shotgun and ShotRunner. His first review is Online Post-Production Management with ShotRunner.
Rubin has more on the same line, including early home movies of ILM from former ILMer and SFSU/MSP AE instructor Dave Berry (catch his life-affirming video Laugh if you can). Rubin also noted a web version of George Lucas: Maker of Films, a 1971 PBS piece with an interview of Lucas by film theorist Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema. There's additional background from source Binary Bonsai, who also noted the Raiders 125-page story conference transcript.
Youngblood's book itself is also available as a PDF download, if you're interested in expanded or synaesthetic cinema, an idea that includes visual music, experimental animation, and motion graphics. For more see the AEP post Visual music and motion graphics, which includes a 'making of' on Larry Cuba's computer graphics in the first Star Wars movie.
PrepShootPost has a nice post on the Screen Actor's Guild vote involving the protection of residuals, pay, and benefits for media released and monetized on the Internet. Here's a clip from the post Showtime gets it, let's hope SAG does too:
The latest fxpodcast from FXGuide is a broad discussion with Gareth Edwards about his film Monsters, with a few details on the use of AE:
There's a video on the Adobe site with director David Fincher and crew talking about the use of Production Premium during post-production on his latest film, The Social Network. The film was edited in Final Cut and sent to Premiere via EDL for conforming with After Effects, echoing The DV Rebel's Guide (see also Prolost's What Should Adobe Do With Premiere Pro?).
Lloyd Alvarez and 5tu just noted Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness by Todd Miro on his blog Into the Abyss.
While the Apple iPad is disappointing to many (on DRM, Flash, etc.), potential uses are also imagined. Here's a few articles looking at possible impacts:
Movie Maker magazine posted their list of 50 Best Blogs for Moviemakers. You'll have to be a subscriber or go to a newsstand for the full article:
Update: Oliver Peters has a big well-illustrated post Easy Canon 5D post – Round II, his second summarizing a number of opinions and workflow tips from several 5D projects.
Over on PVC, Mark Christiansen is profiling two online post-production management tool alternatives to manipulating Basecamp templates that are in beta and already used in production environments, Shotgun and ShotRunner. His first review is Online Post-Production Management with ShotRunner.