"Whisky with Wodka" - Team Premiere

The hard core from left to right: Julia Smola, Me, Thomas "Lauti" Lautenbach and Guo Feng Tang - did an awesome job on 26 VFX shots for "Whisky with Wodka" (see "The Learnings";). Still missing Thomas "TK" Kaufmann, Robert Zeltsch, René Jakob, Juliane Schaloske and of course Olaf Skrzcipzyk. Had a long night at the movies, the restaurant and the bars nor got family, so it's ok ;)

Yesterday me and a part of my "WMW" team went to the team premiere of Andreas Dresen's newest movie "Whisky with Wodka", which will be released September this year. It's one of the few movies you enjoy when reading the book and being simply blown away when you see it finally in theatre. When you see all the power and love it got from the actors, the DOP and other filmmakers. It's rare that a movie feels like a big one piece at the end and gets much much bigger than in the book. So need to say it again: Congratulations Andi, Höfi, Peter and Wolfgang (we didn't met yet, just read your books ;) for this really fantastic movie.

PS: Nearly forgot it - a special congratulation for Henry Hübchen. It was a brilliant cast, but what Henry did with the bottle is outstanding. I bet it will be my favourite scene for 2009! So Henry, I didn't got to you on the premiere. I loved that scene. I saw it at least 20 times while doing post for it and I still roar with laughter, as I saw it on the big screen.

"Whisky with Wodka" - The Learnings / mask channels for grading... kill the key

Every project has its own learnings. For "Whisky with Wodka" we delivered mask channels for the further DI and grading workflow at ARRI Schwarzfilm in Berlin. In theory it's a brilliant idea. We just pipe out the mask channels we created for our comps (matte painting, sky / sea extraction, etc. - we have to create them anyway) and provide it for the DI guys. You can deliver up to four channels within one TGA file (simply written into red, green, blue and alpha channel). Lustre can easily read them (as far as they aren't compressed). After that you got exact masks for all CG elements - a wonderful idea.

In practice it meant more work on the delivery side of us (simply because of logistic). You need to check five times more data (RGB + four mask channels), before go out with it. I must admit that we had some shots in return because at the very beginning we simply didn't understood, what it means for our quality control. On the other hand there is a huge limitation of that idea, which we hardly noticed. So if you want to use mask channels for your grading session take care of the following aspect:

Mask channels are fine for detailed, hard seperation of things. Just one example: seperate the sky from the sea. Seperate the matte painting from the original image. This just works fine. You deliver hard edged alpha mattes. Perhaps the colourist blurs them a bit. Everything will be fine. BUT don't load in greenscreen key mattes for grading. We got into a trap there. The movie isn't released yet so I can't provide in production examples. But just try to get this: we prepared a window with greenscreen to replace it with a view over the Baltic Sea (so funny, cause they got money from Saxony so the exterior shots we're shot in Binz, while the interior shots we're shot in Saxony). Markus Hering crosses it with his fine scrubby hairs. The DOP wanted us to make the Baltic Sea (exterior) darker than we would deliver it in a final comp, so he can bring it as close as possible to overexposure in his grading session. By using mask channels it should be no problem. But what we all didn't got is that a key isn't simply a black and white mask channel. You often blend parts of the background into the edges, to bring it more together. Moreover in this case you got very fine shades of transparency in the alpha because of the fine hairs. Now if you take this alpha from the keyer into grading and boost the brightness a big bunch up the composite simply breaks apart. The keyer blends the dark (wrong) exterior into the fine hairs. Let's say tranparency is 10% at this point. Now you lift brightness up by using the alpha channel. Make it simple and say it'll be 10 units up. The Baltic Sea is 100% visible so the alpha is white. The brightness shift will be 10 units as wished. But the hair is only 10% visible. So it will be only lifted 1 unit. In result you will see, that his (well keyed) hairs are simply far too dark and the whole composite blows apart.

I'll try to add some pictures if the movie is released. But this learning costed me and Thomas Kaufmann one night of our lives (an me as a lead a bunch of nerves too). So just remember: mask channels can be useful but are tricky. Keep in mind that your VFX vendor will need a lot more time for quality check. They won't work for complex keys and composites and should never be used for bringing the parts of the composite together in grading. The adjustment has to be done in compositing. Your range in grading is 10%. If you exceed it you run the risk of breaking your composite into pieces.

Manifxto - Emerging Cinema Needs New Rules

A bit outdated for VFX artists, but I think still important (and true) for all cinematographers out there. Kevin Tod Haug has written a manifest for the new VFX industry I can just fully endorse. Read it here or download the PDF version here.

Prologue

A good novel outlines the whole story within the first page. The journey is compressed into a single event at the beginning. In life there are events, so small you won't notice them, when they happen. Later you will see, that these pieces brought you there, where you are.

I saw Jurassic Parc at the age of 13. It was in the refurbished cinema one of the Zoo Palast in Berlin - an original place to watch movies. With 16 years I was ready for a train to western Germany, to pick up nine floppy discs with the first version of Softimage|3D for NT. It was a sunny friday. Unfortunately I've noticed, I'll need a graphics card, which costs 20.000 DM (that's 10K Euros today) for running it. So, no 20K, no train, no discs.

Cut

Today. I hate CGI. I hate it, because if I notice them, it blows me away from the story. The acting, emotions - all gone. Pfsssssst... gone. Unrecoverable. But I don't mean visually bad or not accurate VFX work. Cause there are so many really, really good VFX, which are plain and simply visible. Everybody sees them, even the worst noob. But they serve the story. And that's what's all about.

Good bye mouse clicking, welcome to film making. Some examples: I love "Amelie" (haha, everybody loves that movie, but read on). Did you see the CG work there? Of course! All the small pieces. The clouds, the lamp character and so on. That's the characters world. But did you notice, that all graffitis were removed from the movie? There is no tag or poststicker in whole paris. So important for the movie, but impossible to shot. Or let me get another one: "Panic Room". The never ending camera moves (driven to the cutting edge at "War of the Worlds - the Spielberg one). Fantastic! That's what I love about CG. When it comes a part of story telling. A tool to serve the directors vision.

Computography. CGI contains "Imagery". That's not rendering or comping layers. It's creating pictures. Pictures have statements, express feelings. If you take 24 of them in a second they can be part of a story. That's what I call "Computography". Can you feel the grain on that idea? I do. But cinematographers and computographers don't speak the same language yet. Visions are getting lost, cause of a lack of knowlodge. Stories become unsharp and part of a "can't do it this way" chain. That needs to be changed. Visions need more power - again. That's what this will be all about.