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.

Hold your breath: the making of Carousel (Philips 21:9 webspot)

It's out. Stink Digital made it and it's amazing, that they did it so straight forward. Sounds like the VFX classics: ropes, wires a precise motion control, some cgi extras and a very rock solid preproduction before. But what I still doesn't got is how they made them so perfectly breathless. Must have been tons of painting (perhaps with lots of 3D camera projections?).

Anyway, amazing work and amazing to see, how straight forward that was.

PS: The only thing, that didn't sound film production like for me was "3 days of shooting"... ;)

by Kui

Amazing architectural work

Have a look at these fantastic renderings by Alessandro Prodan at CGSociety. It's all CGI. No photographic material. Amazing how far you can get by using off the shelf tools, in this case Maya paint effects for all the plants and Mental Ray for the rendering. The shader were based on the standard MIA material delivered with Mental Ray.

Interesting if I'm thinking about movie workflow for this: he used a standard quadcore intel (Q9550) with 4GB of RAM, which isn't that amazing anymore. The rendering took 2-3 hours per image at 1.4K image resulution. So looking forward in probably five years we will be able to get this picture quality in 10 minutes. On the other hand you'll need a talented artist like Alessandro of course. That's a thing, that'll never change! So, thumbs up and to say it clear and again: Great work Alessandro :D

Here's some more inspiration btw:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=132&t=737188

by Zap

"Realtime" Landscape Rendering

The director's vision dictates the way you work. Following this credo, Norman and me did aerial plate shooting over Brandenburg Germany to acquire landscape and cloud structures for "Doctor's Diary" (Polyphon). It was one of these days, when you're happy to be in film and doing visual effects. We felt a bit like Howard Hughes waiting for the perfect clouds. And we were so lucky to really get awesome images, when the rain clouds of the last days were just disappearing to let the sun come out. I'll post some images as soon as I've finished my private move. Many props to Tyler Kehl here for organising this and Jerry C. Gordon our "Cessna" Operator ;)