At my high school all the seniors were required to do either 40 hours of community service or do 80 hours at an internship. I chose the latter. I interned at Brainstorm Digital, a VFX house based in NYC that has worked on films such as Boardwalk Empire, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Wolf Of Wall Street. I learned more about the visual effects industry in the short time that I interned there than I had in my entire life up to that point.
Not only did I learn about the industry, but I also learned about what each shot took to make.
The program that they use there as their main compositor is something called Nuke, short for New Compositor. Nuke is node based, which means that it works as a series of inputs and outputs, as opposed to the traditional layers.
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:
This video created by Stian Halvorsen is a great example of compositing and a few other really cool effects. To create the avalanche the artist imported the 3D solving and tracking points into Houdini to create the geometry of the mountain. Stian then added a birth particle simulation to give the avalanche the moving effect. Additional layers of particles were then added to give the avalanche detail, the final rendering was done in Mantra. Nuke was used for the compositing and after all said and done it took a total of 8 weeks to complete the final project. The second project featured was the Oscar which has an intricate feather explosion produced by using Houdini to create the feathers. After this the artist used a particle system to simulate the feathers to fly and roto shaped the person in Nuke and then projected it in Houdini. This project was also not a small feat and thus took a total of 7 weeks to complete. The second to last project was composited in Nuke, altered in Photoshop and also was created in Realflow and Maya. Although thats all the information that I could gather about this specific grouping of projects I am owerwhelmed with attention to detail and the overall appearance of the artists work. Additionally it is inspiring to see an artist use so many different applications and programs in sync to get one final product.
Steve Viola is a creative director, title designer and head of Method Design (formerly Rok!t Studio), located in Santa Monica, California. Viola has some elite title sequences working as both creative director and or title designer including The Avengers, Captain America: The First Avenger, Madea's Big Happy Family, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. One of his latest title sequences Captain America: The First Avenger began when Rok!t's EP David Garber collaborated with the director of The Wolfman, Joe Johnston,to generate ideas and eventually pitch the idea to Marvel. The idea behind the title sequence is a spin on the black and white Nazi propaganda films. The really cool part about this sequence is how the production team of Rok!t Studio's took existing Nazi propaganda to create the stereoscopic effect. While this might be a little advanced for our class an animation with depth like this one should be something to strive for in the future. The team created the title sequence by using Adobe Photoshop, After effects, Illustrator, 3D was done in Autodesk Maya and all 2D /3D composting was done in Nuke. Viola stated, "As a team we took a lot from Joe himself. From a concept perspective we tried to take inspiration from the WWII period and abstract/environment-based titles like the Bond title sequences and Thank You for Smoking." Here is the Captain America: The First Avenger title sequence, Enjoy!
Here is The Wolfman intro title sequence created in Adobe After Effects by Joe Johnston and his team, Johnston again was the director of the title sequence for Captain America: The First Avenger.
