In a recent post on a video made to a remix of Jay-Z’s Hello Brooklyn, Screenfonts author Yves Peters noted that beyond the background on the precursor to Helvetica:
"What’s really interesting is that the author of the music promo also posted a Making Of… video, showing how still images were treated with the Vanishing Point feature in Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects, to create the illusion of motion and depth. The end result is very impressive."
"...watch The New York Times infographic animation How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters and learn about the differences between a 'fastball', a 'cutter' and a 'slider'. ...BP tries to inform the public about the technical details of its relief well drilling efforts, which also includes the exact video explanation BP uses internally for their own personnel currently present on their rigs. "
IA also posts favorite YouTube videos; here's one by Christobal Vila, who also did Ihsfahan (rig below), and shares tips and tutorials in Spanish on his work (Google Chrome translated automatically):
Chris Heuer shows a bit of 3D displacement in Metal Man, a convenient 1st chunk of a 3-part tutorial on Digieffects Freeform, which shipped with After Effects CS5.
Maybe Toolfarm will come up with a list of 3rd party plug-ins that support OpenGL or hardware acceleration, like the recent releases by GenArts. Anyway, here's Stefan's video (downloadable at AEtuts):
Mechanism Digital posted a press release about their use of face replacement in fictionalized "reenactments" (journalism itself can be a contradiction in terms) for an MSNBC documentary on Timothy McVeigh:
"On the set, Peacock shot thousands of high resolution photographs of recreated scenes, visual elements and a stand-in actor depicting McVeigh in action. Mechanism then built a CG 3D model of Timothy McVeigh’s face and replaced every frame of the actor’s face with it.
Mechanism’s unique approach to facial replacement had never been used in documentary filmmaking before which gave the compositor every possible frame of final rendered CGI in advance. In developing and refining this technique, multiple 3D models of McVeigh’s head were pre-rendered every two degrees of rotation on two axes. Two sequences of frames were a combination of 11 expressions and 11 eye positions. The number of images was then doubled by rendering two camera focal lengths to match the lenses used on set; totaling over half a million images and layers. These images were brought into After Effects with Mechanism’s custom expressions allowing the compositing artists to rotate McVeigh’s photo realistic head in real time within the program." See also Todd Kopriva's Face replacement with mocha from David Torno on tutorials on how Torno did tracking, compositing, and other post-production work for a music video. The cmiVFX training Nuke Facial Replacement Techniques looks interesting too.
Here's a little "making of" for the McVeigh piece (the embed code is buggy, but there's a fullscreen option):
And for an example of a different kind, check out this Spanish man, “Oscar,” the recipient of the first 100 percent face transplant. Previous transplants in France and the United States were only partial, but on the increase due to war wounds.
"Lola are arguably the world's leaders in human face and body manipulation. In The Social Network Lola completed a hundred or so shots, but a key 20 of those involved delicate face replacement to allow one actor to play two roles - the Winklevoss twins. We spoke in-depth with Lola's VFX supervisor Edson Williams about the technical process."
David Van Brink has made access to his free Omino AE Plugins (CS5 for Mac; CS3-CS4 Mac/Win) easier and via @daleBradshaw has posted another new Pixel Bender filter, Omino Stamp:
'The idea is pretty simple: draw a “stamp image” in a pattern which can be affected by the source image. It’s a little bit like a particle effect, but more mechanical.'
Motionworks tweeted about Screenfonts (from The Font Feed), a monthly commentary on the use of fonts in movie poster design, music video and more.
