Loving Vincent

There's a new movie coming out called Loving Vincent, which documents the life of Vincent Van Gogh through moving paintings.  It is said to be the first feature length painted film.  The film was made by a team of 100 painters who designed each frame to resemble the style of Van Gogh.  For each second of film there are 12 oil paintings.

Tracking in Mocha with Mary Poplin

So for my green screen project, I have a few shots where I need to use tracking in order to sell the effect that I am trying to pull off. But for some reason I've been getting very strange results when I track in Mocha. Some of the tracking ends up looking a bit jittery, which wont translate very well when trying to pull of my visual effects.

I've recently been watching videos about using mocha and how to get the best results with difficult shots. I've found that if you want to learn more about mocha tracking, a good resource is from someone who actually works for Imagineers Systems (creators of mocha): Mary Poplin.

Mary is a pro VFX artist/tracker/roto painter. I've watched 2 videos so far where she goes through how to get a good track in Mocha to get good clean results in order to roto paint onto a clip of a couple short films. I found her through the Film Riot community because she has worked with them on 2 short films both of which involve rotoscoping and painting things out of shots by using Mocha. She does go through the shots pretty quickly in her tutorials, but You can still learn a lot from her.

So now I'm going to see how I can use what I learned from her and apply it to my tracking in my green screen project and see if I can get any better results then before.

If you want to check 2 of her videos, they post right below:

Awesome Matte Painting

I had heard about Matte Painting before, but never really took time to see how it really worked before watching this video. This is an awesome breakdown of an artist's process of creating one of his fictitious worlds, and the amount of work he seems to have put into it is quite amazing. I thought it would be a good idea to post this here because it was put together using - amongst a few others softwares - Photoshop, After Effects, and Maya, and it shows a bit of what those tools can do.

Here's the video:
Breakdown | - HORIZON - from Mickaël Forrett (MEO) on Vimeo.

Interactive Starry Night

So Francine's project reminded me of this cool video I saw where Starry Night gets animated.

The concept is very similar, making the painting move. I think Starry Night really lends itself to being animated because of the brush strokes. The painting already has these swirling, and twirling type patterns that make you think of movement. The main difference in this video is that the whole painting is moving. Not only do they animate the whole painting, they then make it interactive. By touching the screen the animation changes. What really impressed me is how fluid it seems. As the hand drags across the painting the sky follows. A great work of art like Starry Night already has life but animating it gives the painting a whole new feeling.