Especially for cost-effective VFX shots RED is from now on my choice. Indeed a really geeky thing what RED throw on the market and for sure not everyone’s thing to take over the ‘colorist’s’ job as it necessitates more than just pushing buttons and a deeper understanding of the whole post-work-flow down the road, but for people who love ‘total control’ a heavenly dream came true.įor me for sure not the last time and we are hopefully soon going to shoot everything from TV-commercials to TV-movies and maybe act as second unit for feature films. but once you get the concept of RAW it is pretty simple to get the a ‘look’ out of the box. I was a little bit puzzled first to be able to change basically everything from sensitivity (ISO/ASA) to White Balance, Tint, Temperature, etc. We shot 4K 2:1 to down sample to 2K 2:1 and after a simple one-light treatment in Cine Red (which is BTW impressive too) exported as DPX sequence to further do the final comp in Shake. This one is special for me… i shot the first time with RED and even there are voices against that it can’t hold up to Genesis, F23 or others, i must say i am seriously impressed with the 4K resolution (i know just 3,2) and its nearly grain-free appearance. For a 1,5 min long trailer a pretty tight schedule… But hey, it wouldn’t be us if it would be easy !! The overall timeframe is 3 month from conceptual design to delivery.
We’ve adopted the Open EXR standard for rendering and compositing and are pretty happy not to run into significant problemsuntil now.īelow you can see some production stills from the shooting with RED One and our ‘garage’ studio setup. Our pipeline consists of Mental Ray for preview renders, Renderman Studio for final renders, Nuke for compositing, Maya for modeling and animation, Z-Brush for texturing, 3DSMax (Fume FX) for Particles and Houdini for FX animation. The production and the conceptual stage are running in parallel which means a logistical nightmare for the pipeline as models, animations, textures have to be constantly tweaked to address the wishes of our client and to ensure that the fan community will get what they would expect from a comic (Manga) adaptation. We have been brought in at the conceptual stage where the actual designs and the transition from 2D to 3D and further to real characters were not even decided. Since time is short, resources limited we had to very careful explore all the options available in letting this to become a reality. Now the Japanese copyright owners decided to make a feature film adaptation and try to sell the whole package at the Cannes Film festival this year.
Bubble Gum Crisis is a successful Manga TV series which has been airing worldwide for the last 20 years. Would have been much easier with a Smoke but there was no budget for this.Īt this moment we are dead busy with a trailer for Cannes. Anyway FCP as onliner not really an option, but with some workarounds doable. Since i didn’t have Gluetools to import the DPX sequence in FCP, i rendered with an uncompressed 10bit RGB Kona3 codec to preserve the latitude. The really cool thing though is that the TOD (Time of Day) could be preserved throughout the compositing stage which meant that i was able to do a quick confirm with the EDL from FCP in Color. After staging (framing) animating the Maya camera, exported the cam data with a Mel script to Nuke and built a Pan & Tile for the skydome, tweaked the 3DMoblur with the provided velocity data out of the scanline renderer, smudged up and de-saturated everything, put grain on and rendered out. Some roto to remove rigs and some paint fixes for the wire removal, but nothing dramatic. The comp was pretty much straight forward, just the keying needed a bit of love, but with a combination of the new IBK Keyer and of course my all time favorite the Primatte and Keylight (hard and soft method).