Bildfehler update
I finally managed to update my portfolio site at www.bildfehler.de with some stuff I did in the past 12 months. It’s in German but it’s got little text anyways. Check it out 🙂
Unfortunately I can’t show any imagery from my involvements on Ninja Assassin and Polanski’s Ghostwriter. Instead, there’s two new commercials, one for Mingr (posted previously on my blog) and a full CG car commercial for Infiniti:
And finally some frames from my main Shanghai project, a 10 minute motion ride for General Motor’s EXPO pavilion. It was shot on RED for the 4K horizontal resolution and featured lots of full-CG panoramas of a future version of Shanghai as well as lots of integration of greenscreen people into CG cars. I was involved in setting up the pipeline, leading an international comp team and developing the warm look of the CG scenes. Compositing was done in Nuke. It involved heavy use of projections to fit people into CG camera moves that went further and further away from what was shot. Also, mimicking real-life lens-flares was a fun task 🙂
Thanks to all people involved! One of our shading artists, Markus Graf, has posted a short reel of final as well as not-so-final scenes on YouTube:
Inception
In other news, I had this weird dream in which Mick Jagger broke into my house to reclaim a painting that I had previously stolen from him. Upon catching him in the act he asked me to do some VFX shots for the movie version of his heist which would have required a CGI replacement of his head except for his lower jaw which was to be shot in front of greenscreen.
I have difficulties piecing together the images that were mashed up by my subconciousness, but this awesome dialogue reminiscent of Clients From Hell probably played some part in it:
And if one day Mick Jagger is in a movie like this remember: you’ve read about the plot here first 🙂
Tron
The new TRON trailer is out, which brought back memories of a TV show from the 80s. AUTOMAN! Check out the opener. Pretty neat VFX for a TV show back then.
Will neon glow become the next best design element, superseding the Apple-style gloss effect? We’ll find out soon enough.
Here’s a music video that already does a good job at resurrecting a 30 year-old image of cyberspace: Mark Ronson – Bang Bang Bang
edit: great, youtube disabled embedding of the video. Go this way instead.
Mingr TV commercial
Here’s the video for the Chinese Mingr commercial I did at Pixomondo Shanghai last year.
Tasks: compositing lead, art direction, set supervision
Enjoy!
Short Films
Some animated short films I stumbled upon via this blog…
“Mars!” tells the tale of conquering a planet in an illustrated style. If you like it, check out this “old” music video with a similar simplistic vector-look. “Float (my electric stargirl)” by the Atomic Swindlers:
The next clip is a French animation using 2D and 3D techniques:
Although the fluid and distorted style is heavily inspired by Bill Plympton, it’s great to see such hand-drawn animation is still widespread in this age of 3D-CGI. If you have some spare time on your hands, watch Disney’s Princess and the Frog next to Ice Age. While the realism of CGI is improving rapidly it still feels dull in direct comparison. Wow, that probably makes me sound like a grumpy old guy 🙂
Anyway, one last example for mixing 3D and hand-drawn animation. Also from the French. La Main des Maîtres:
Tilt/Shift… Again
The effect is getting old now 🙂 But the addition of the old guy is a nice addition that reminds me of Toy Story.
Mega Piranha!
I’ll go on record saying that there are far too few movies out there with titles that have “mega” in them. Luckily, as of 2010, there is…. (cue drum roll)
MEGA PIRANHA!
Watch the trailer in all it’s B-movie glory:
Yes, it’s not a spoof. Check IMDB. The effects look like something that came on a free training DVD for After Effects (although the CGI piranhas are not that bad if you put them in perspective…). Reminds me of another great piece of art called “Shark in Venice” which just features stock footage of sharks, lots of continuity mistakes and Stephen Baldwin’s man boobs. Wait a second… He actually was diagnosed with breast cancer according to Wikipedia? I guess that makes that joke a bit tasteless. Oh, and he’s also a hard-core right-wing guy who  “threatened to move to Canada if Barack Obama was elected” (source: also Wikipedia)? Life is stranger than fiction.
Anyway, I’m digressing. This is a good opportunity to post a video clip that I had lying around on my hard disk for quite a while. It’s from a SciFi TV movie called “Heatstroke” and it’s exceptional in its goofiness. I think that’s a nice example of misguided CGI. A guy in a rubber suit would at least have given the impression that somebody cared about the movie. I pity the guys who had to work on this beach scene:
