Archive for June, 2009
Oceansize
Another animation from students of Supinfocom, the CG school whose students brought us From the hoop. It is no surprise that this school was ranked number one worldwide by the American magazine 3D World, and this short film is another example of the attention to detail and fast, action-packed cut scenes that they teach.
Created in ten months by Romain Jouandeau, Adrien Chartie, Gilles Mazières and Fabien Thareau, it boasts matte painting on a grand scale (03:25) and a moving soundtrack to accompany it. The underwater lighting does well to create murky and mysterious waters beneath the oil rig (02:58) with the floating particles adding to the realism. Once the action gets started the audience is hit with fast cut scenes that document the disaster unfolding from different angles, using the shaky-cam and quick zoom techniques (05:48) most familiar in the TV series BattleStar Galactica.
Escape From City 17 – Part 1 (Half Life Film)
Those who are fans of the Half Life games by Valve will be blown away by this, and others will be blown away at the quality of production with hardly any budget.
Directed by the Purchase Brothers, who have no connection with Valve at all, it is the first in a short film series adapted from the Half Life 2 story and based around some side characters rather than the famous Gordon Freeman and friends. It was originally envisioned as a project to test out numerous post production techniques, as well as being a spec commercial, it ballooned into a multi part series. It was filmed guerrilla style with almost no money, no time, no crew, no script- the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of $500.
Apparently, Valve flew the brothers out to Seattle last year as they were amazed at the outcome of their hard work. In the first three days after being posted on YouTube it gained 1.5million views. Part 2 is on its way.
From the hoop
The From the hoop team created this amazing animation in memory of Earl Manigault.
Story of From the hoop is inspired by Earl Manigault’s life. Earl Manigault was one of the greatest basketball players of his generation. Mentored by Holcombe Rucker through his youth he became the star of his high school team. As a universitary champion, he seemed destined to shine in NBA. But before the transition, he fell into drugs and lead his life far away from the basket. After dark years made of jail, drugs and friend’s death, he gave up this world to return in the right way to Harlem. He started the “Walk Away From Drugs” tournament for kids in Harlem. He died in 1998 from a heart failure.
This piece is full of both emotion and confusion. The main character, Earl, is taunted by his fears and paranoia, and they take the form of basketball opponents. The pace of the editing does a great job in building suspense and the animation is brilliant, especially the shift of focus from foreground to background while the fence’s links grow longer (01:59). Special attention was made to making good use of both ambient and principle sound to top off a great production. See making of information here.
Kephart Ln by Jeremy Hildebrant
Posted by Shareef in music, photography, shortfilm on June 12th, 2009
A video shot spur of the moment after being inspired by some music. Jeremy gives a great insight into the life of his friend, his busy moments but also his intimate moments on the webcam (01:10) and his creative moments making music (01:27).
Pixar’s Up- creating the balloons
Exactly a week after the release of Up it has jumped to 15th 16th place in the IMDB top films of all time, an incredible feat for an animated film, and has a rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. It looks as though Pixar have continued their success into the 10th feature film to come from the animation gurus.
With many of their films they produce groundbreaking technologies to create the realism they strive for each time- Monsters Inc. had them experimenting with fur rendering, Finding Nemo involved underwater light and particle movement, and in Up a new physics engine was developed to animate the 10,000 balloons needed to lift a house. CNET news talked to Pixar about the procedural animation.
There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen. [...] May said that the animation department at Pixar never even considered hand-animating the balloons. But even standard computer animation wouldn’t be up to the task, because of the N-squared complexity involved in the thousands of interdependent balloons. Instead, the studio’s computer whizzes figured out a way to turn the problem over to a programmed physical simulator, which, employing Newtonian physics, was able to address the animation problem.
Wired magazine have calculated if lifting a house with balloons is even possible.
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