The Fu King Productions

Met the crazy, innovative and somehow mad filmmakers "The Fu King Productions" here on the Bremer Stadtmusikanten set. Watched their short "Glint" yesterday on their website. Cool made guys!

More on "www.fu-king.com"

Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization

Nice to see new technologies coming up. Have a look at this really cool piece of software research by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They refined 3D image stabilization techniques to nearly get dolly like camera movements out of handheld video. Of course there are several questions like what's about a heavy depth of field, very usual for production shot on film. Or what's about focus pulling.

Beside that technical aspect I really liked the unperfect effekt the deshaker produced on the harbour shot in their video. It was on the left side in the ocean, like a subtile warp in the water. But it was based on the camera movement, so it doesn't looked digitally for me. Imagine this imperfection as stylistic device. A new vertigo, born in the 2000s?

On Set: Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten

GeoTagged, [N52.57739, W10.14876]

Actually on set for "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten", produced by Bremedia. For director Dirk Regel and me it's our third project after making two twins movies before. And it's really awesome to work with DOP Philipp Timme again on our second project.

Tim Burtons Alice in Wonderland

Comingsoon.net published the first images and artwork from Tim Burtons newest project "Alice in Wonderland". What for a cool style. Love it!

More here.

Kameramann

I nearly missed it, but the very popular German magazine "Der Kameramann" printed an article by me about digital weather effects using our "Aurora" workflow. Grab your copy at your local newspaper kiosk or read the article as an PDF here.

Thoughts on future film workflow

I can just agree with some thoughts of mikes at fhpd about future film workflow. For me film ist still an excellent material for acquiring images and I won't miss the over 100 years of experience with it. On the other hand I just got a 1TB harddisk in an electronic market nearby for 65 Euros. For me this means, in one or two years everyone can have his own digital lab storage for his movie. So, it's true, why don't change the lab workflow to simply scan the film stock on 16-Bit OpenEXR and create Quicktime or DNxHD proxies for editing? You don't need to handle the film stock anymore. You'll always have full access to your material shot and tune your movie until the last moments before the release. With future improvements in data bandwith, labs would turn into on-demand infrastructure providers, where you can simply dock in your projects.



Read mikes thoughts here.

Interview with Mark Breakspear about effects work on "Illuminati"

Got this interesting interview with Mark Brealspear about the environment effects work on "Illuminati". Impressive how the movie played in cities and known places, where they never went shooting.