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Being a VFX freelancer includes being able to judge the amount of work a task might take. Usually, that’s a thing artists loathe. After all, who knows how much nitpicking by the supervisor(s) and/or director there will be before a shot is approved as “final”?

There is, however, a simple way to train your judgment and get some experience for free: look at a shot you’ve finished a few weeks ago and pretend you’ve just been asked for the number of days you’d think you need to finish it. Then, compare this to the hours you’ve clocked in your studio’s attendance sheet or timekeeping system.

Pick appropriate shots.

Don’t pick the one you know turned into a nightmare because halfway through a simple rig removal the director didn’t like the dress of the actress anymore and requested a CG cloth simulation. Don’t pick the shot that was used to develop a CG character’s shading because that probably took way more time for reasons that had nothing to do with the shot itself.

Just judge your workload.

If you only did compositing, don’t make up numbers for matchmoving, lighting, shading and matte paintings. Except if you also did some of these tasks.

Don’t cheat.

This exercise assumes that you have no clue how many hours you’ve really worked on a shot. If you have only worked on shots one at a time and are completely aware of how many days it took you to finish each, it’s for the birds.

Add 50%.

I’m not kidding, just add 50% to whatever number you came up with.

Before VFX

With the vfx industry being shaken by high-profile post houses closing doors or filing for chapter 11 and Oscar winning directors being oblivious of the effort that went into their movie’s VFX, here’s a nice Tumblr of movie stills before vfx have been added. I’ve taken two of those images and went looking for trailers and promo pictures that showed the final scene as best as possible:

But even with such a comparison, one can hardly describe the amount of work, changes and revisions that went on in between. VFX isn’t like building a car where there’s a clear blueprint on how many wheels there should be and how many revolutions the engine needs to perform.

When a director thinks that VFX should be cheaper than they already are, he should have an assistant read to him the feedback he gave vfx artists who worked on his shots over the course of a year and imagine himself talking like this to his car dealer, barber or chef 🙂

Ninjas In The Sock Drawer

Corridor Digital have done it again: Awesome dubstep video – slash – VFX demo. And it’s got KITTENS!

AFAIK they’re still doing it all with AfterEffects. But camera angles of life action and green screen plates and lighting demonstrate that they’re really putting in a lot of thoughts into their videos before they start shooting.

That’s better than what I usually have to handle on German mainstream movies where directors and DOPs are stuck in the 90’s when it comes to pre-production planning of VFX (“Storyboards? Animatics? Blocking? Nah, we’ll just roll the camera in any way we like and you guys will figure it out later. It’s greenscreen after all, I could do it on my Avid! Hey, why doesn’t it look like Harry Potter? Sure we’ve only paid you 1% of its budget, but that movie was like a decade ago.”)

An article about bad VFX business practices

Scott Squires has written a very very lengthy article about “Bad Visual Effects Business Practices” which everybody should read despite it’s length.

Did I already mention that it’s long?

But I can relate to so many issues:

Too many layers of approvals
If a task requires approval by 5 different layers of managers, that’s a problem. Each manager will have a different idea of the results required and will likely produce 5 different and conflicting notes or corrections.

Not understanding overtime
Management and those typically looking at just the numbers think that 12 hours is producing 50% more than 8 hours work. They’re wrong. As the number of hours go up the productivity of workers is going down.

Some comments on Scott’s article also raise interesting points:

“The bidding model hails from the construction industry and is meant to come with a fixed blueprint. (…) That’s why they dropped it on the movie set. Camera teams were like, “you did not tell us you’d be doing 100 takes”. So time based pay was adopted with a plan and a budget…” – Dave Rand

Yet, VFX shots are still a fixed bid even though the directors nowadays want full control over how every piece of glass is flying away from an explosion that’ll be on screen for half a second. It’s ridiculous. The most fun I had as a VFX artist was for an advertising company on a project with enough budget and people who knew their trade. Most work for Hollywood movies on the other hand was endless change requests by the director about the tiniest specks of dust in the remotest corner of the screen, burning buckets full of time and money in the process.

Smoothing a Shaky Camera Move in Fusion

Inspired by the Shake “SmoothCam” tool or F_Steadiness in Nuke I’ve written a plugin for Fusion that allows you to automatically smooth or stabilize a shaky camera move. Fortunately I had found a public domain program by a Finn called Jarno Elonen that determines an image’s transformation (scale, translation, rotation) based on a variable number of points. Without knowing anything about “reduced echelon matrices“, “least square fitting” or the “Gauss-Jordan Elimination” (those Wikipedia pages give me the creeps!) I managed to translate the code to LUA and it worked perfectly.

The secret is to interpolate the motion vector image down to as little as 2×2 values. These can then be fed as points to the algorithm. Even my naive approach of using a garbage matte to simply zero vectors that have distracting motion seems to work.

There’s also a video on YouTube about it as well. It’s a demo of my beta version that has an outdated interface but the way of using the Fuse is mostly still the same.

I don’t know how robust it is to various kinds of shaky, jittery, wobbly footage and some GUI decisions might seem odd. But on more than one occasion I was limited by what Fuses can currently do. Still, I think it works well enough to publish it to the Fusion community.

Download the plugin here: SmoothCam_v1_0.Fuse or read the manual on Vfxpedia. Photo credits for icon: CC-BY Nayu Kim

The Hobbit – Yet Another Disappointment in 2012

I really would have wanted to end 2012 with a nice movie-going experience. I tried to ignore people lamenting about 48fps or stuff that wasn’t part of the book. I had never read the book.

Before the movie started there was a trailer for the new World of Warcraft update called “Mists of Pandaria”. And it had Kung-Fu-Pandas in it, fighting orcs. It was the most ridiculous thing I had seen in recent months. Little did I know that this was foreshadowing the movie I was about to watch.

‘The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey’ is basically the same thing but roughly 3 hours longer. It’s an attempt to blow up a tiny story to not only 9 hours but to Lord of the Rings epic-ness while making it look like a video game cinematic. The term cinematic is actually quite ironic. While video games have tried to look more and more like movies (by their themes, camera angles, animated or life action cut scenes and the use of machinima) it seems like the future of blockbuster movies is to look more and more like video games:

Level 1 is the Shire. Go on a journey, battle some foes, meet some allies… until you reach Level 6 – The Goblin Cave! Press A to swing your sword and B for a special move to decapitate your enemies. The Level Boss is the Goblin King himself! Attack his vulnerable spot and when your energy level drops low, press Up-Down-Up-Down to make Gandalf appear and save your ass.

Sorry, Bilbo, the princess is in another castle. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 – available next year.

For a movie essentially geared at a young audience who might not even have seen LoTR the movie is an astonishing mix of childish themes, brutal (yet blood-less) hacking and slashing and dialog scenes that drag on for way too long.

The movie’s first 15 minutes are filled with shots of dwarfs eating cheese, juggling plates and two musical numbers.

After two thirds of the movie I had to accept that nobody’s going to get injured or die even after falling downhill for hundreds of meters. I accepted that one of the dwarfs and the goblin king looked like “Fat Bastard” from Austin Powers. I was no longer surprised when Gandalf just showed up and saved everybody at the last moment using his magic powers again and again – this happened at least three times during the movie.

And the HFR thing?

For a movie that is so intend on selling an experience and showcasing new technology (instead of, you know, making you feel sympathy for fictional characters on screen) “The Hobbit” actually tries hard to make you loathe it. The high frame rate irritated me every other minute with its “sped up” effect that you might have heard about. It’s an optical illusion and my fellow movie-goers didn’t notice it but to me it felt like watching a TV documentary about the movie, not the movie itself.

The 3D felt forced as well. I might be from a dying generation of movie-goers but it still irritates me when there are elements in front of the screen while being cropped at the edges. Fast-moving sparks, butterflies or gold coins still are a flickery mess to me even at 48fps. And landscape shots still have that miniature look to them because directors and DOPs insist on using an exaggerated interocular distance.

In a way it’s comforting to know that even huge productions like this suffer from that shit that James Cameron successfully avoided in Avatar. But that’s probably because one disappointed moron in the target audience of 16 year-olds (“omg the 3D was non-existing I could have left my glasses off”) weighs heavier to any producer than somebody who is pulled out of the movie by miniature landscapes.

All of this overshadows the fact that the VFX are of course top notch. Except for one or two scenes you never think about the fact that Gandalf and the dwarfs are composited together for their difference in size. Closeups of wargs and eagles are great and the level of detail in the dwarf city or goblin lair is breathtaking.

In hindsight I should have watched the 24fps 2D version to apprechiate all of this.

6/10

“Damn Damn Good:” Movie Bob’s positive review of “The Hobbit”

“I hope the worst is behind us”: Red Letter Media’s more negative review of “The Hobbit”

Hänsel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

HO – LY – SHIT. That one looks like it’s gonna be fun 🙂

Or… it could suck like all the other movies of that genre that try to re-invent fairy tale characters in a world tainted by the Twilight saga (“Red Riding Hood” comes to mind but also “Van Helsing” although it predated this decade’s vampire craze). But at least “Hansel & Gretel” looks like it’s going to be honest: no hollow claims of answering questions about the origin of life (“Prometheus”) or re-inventing time travel (“Looper”).

Just “this is what Hansel & Gretel would look like in a steam-punk movie for teenage boys. Hell yeah!” *

Who knows if it’s gonna be good. Maybe it’s witty like “Brothers Grimm”, maybe it’s trashy like “Underworld” or “Resident Evil”. But with stills like these, it’s definitely on my watchlist even though this mentality has led to disappointment most of the time 🙂

The VFX look much much better than in Resident Evil though. That hero shot at the bottom looks really well done. Light is engulfing the actors quite nicely and although a real explosion would be even brighter the actors are underexposed enough to sell the shot.

Compare this to a shot from the Resident Evil trailer I’ve criticized in the past where the integration of explosion and environment is abysmal.

For people who are not so much aware of what constitutes effects shots nowadays (and why movies get more expensive all the time…): I’m pretty sure the fog in the topmost screenshot was added later on in postproduction. Even if there was such a forest with the right kind of humidity at the right time of day to produce a suitable fog, no sane producer would allow a shot of the main actors to be restricted by such unreliable weather conditions. Doing the fog in post also allows the director creative freedom to add details like those godrays. All it takes is a matchmoving artist, a bunch of roto slaves and a 4-digit amount of dollars. If the director requests half a dozen versions until he’s satisfied with the color and density of the fog, the VFX company probably won’t break even. That’s the state of the industry.

*) yeah, I’m using the term “steam-punk” loosely. But any movie that mixes gatling guns with 18th century German timber-frame construction qualifies as steam-punk to me.