Those of you who get the Hollywood Reporter may have seen Orphanage co-founder Jonathan Rothbart and I interviewed for their "Future of Entertainment" special issue. The article is now online, but the writer, Scott Kirsner, has a way cool blog called CinemaTech where he has posted the entire conversation.
Jon and I mouth off about visual effects, previs, filmmaking, distribution, and remix culture.
Anyone out there using Blender? I hadn't realized it contains a node-based compositing toolset, making it seem almost Houdini-like in that respect. The comping features don't seem to be all that well documented, but look very interesting.
3D/2D integradion is one of my favorite things about Fusion 5. It's quite powerful to be able render simple 3D objects right in your compositing app. I hope to show some examples of that one of these days.
Like, after I finish my book!
The DV Rebel's Guide is not going to be one of those books that suggests that guns have no place in indie films. On the contrary. In fact, I have such a pet peeve about badly-comped muzzle flashes that I am including a monster After Effects template project with the book. It works a lot like the old muzzle flash Fusion macro I made for DF4, in that all you have to do is paint some soft blobs in the rough areas where you want a muzzle flash and the comp does the rest. You have sliders to control the color, brightness, and heat distortion effects.
Plus, there's a full 3D particle system for the emission of spent shells. This is all rigged up with expressions so all you have to do is position a gun layer in After Effects 3D space and dial in the velocity, wind, and other settings.
All this for 25 bucks? Pre-order now so I get even more panicked calls from my publisher asking where my latest chapter is!
The new Orphanage Commercial Productions site is up, and my Director portfolio along with it. The Ruby Tuesday Minis spot, Navy SEALs Footprints, and my recent Toshiba HDDVD spot are available in HD! Better looking than YouTube by a long shot, except Footprints which is way too dark, but we're working on that. It's kind of a challenging spot for encoders.
The Minis spot is my Director's cut, which features more Hot Minis Action, so check it out!
