Hasta La Motion!

An environmental activist has a plan against an international oil firm. Motovun Film Festival 2016 (Croatia) – BEST SHORTFILM Reykjavik International Film Festival 2015 (Iceland) Bern International Film Festival shnit 2015 (Switzerland) Valencia International Film Festival Cinema Jove 2015 (Spain) Innsbruck Nature Film Festival 2015 (Austria) Contis International Film Festival 2015 (France) Cornwall Film Festival 2015 (UK) Leiden International Film Festival 2015 (Netherlands) Purbeck Film Festival 2015 (England) Eindhovens Film Festival 2015 (Netherlands) Alter-Native Film Festival 2015 (Romania) Almería en corto 2015 (Spain) Talllin Black Nights / Sleepwalkers International Film Festival – Vitamin Pills 2015 (Estonia) Miami Independant Film Festival 2015 (USA) Blow-Up Chicago Arthouse International Film Festival 2015 (USA) Courts mais trash 2016 (Belgium) Un poing c’est court Vaux-en-Velain 2016 (France) Brussels Short Film Festival – Carte blanche (Belgium) Jaipur International Film Festival 2016 (India) Les Rencontres Audiovisuelles de Lille 2016 (France) Ascona Film Festival 2016 (Switzerland) San Francisco Independant Film Festival 2016 (USA) Les Rencontres de Bourg en Bresse – Les courts du vendredi soir 2016 (France) Shortcutz Amsterdam 2016 (The Netherlands) Taos Shortz Film Fest 2016 (USA) Dawson City International Film Festival 2016 (Canada) Athens International Film + Video Festival 2016 (USA) World Festival of Emerging Cinema 2016 (Trinidad and Tobago) Nashville Film Festival 2016 (USA) Tokyo Shorts Shorts & Asia – Save the Earth 2016 (Japan) Leiden International Short Film Experience 2016 (Netherlands) Plymouth Film Festival 2016 (UK) The WE film festival 2016 (Netherlands) Sembrando Cine 2016 (Peru) International Short Film Festival Detmold 2016 (Germany) Alliance Française Buenos Aires Shortfilms Exhibition 2016 (Argentina) Gässli Film Festival 2016 – Kino selection (Switzerland) Norrköping Filmfestival Flimmer 2016 (Sweden) Cyprus International Film Festival 2016 (Cyprus) Braunschweig International Film Festival 2016 (Germany) Festival Courts en Champagne 2016 (France) Lebanon International Short Films Festival 2016 (Lebanon) Tokyo Shorts Shorts & Asia – War and the Power to live 2017 (Japan) Public TV sales: Japan, Netherlands (VPRO/NPO3)

Introducing the “DRONE MACHINE”. With the brand new “Drone Machine” mode DM2 turns into an instant Ambient machine. All 9 tracks play continuously regardless of what the sequencer plays. Switch it on and drive a powerful Dream Machine at the tips of your fingers. Extremely versatile when used with a MIDI controller and MIDI Learn mode. Dark Ambient admirers, Space Rock lovers, Dream Music adorers, Minimal fetishist are welcome.

** NEW **
+ DRONE MACHINE : Introducing the “DRONE MACHINE”. With the DRONE MACHINE (see on page DRUMS) activated, all 9 tracks play continuously regardless of what the sequencer plays. Switch it on and turn DM2 into a powerful DRONE music machine. Very versatile when used with a MIDI controller and MIDI Learn mode.

** AMENDED**
+ AUDIO ENGINE : Improved CPU management when idle in the background
+ Faster loading time

** FIXED **
+ Minor Sequencer issue with solo mode
+ Some memory issues after a long use

“Vicinity and resonance come together to intensify a cinematic emotion that we find hard to name”. In Volume 2 of his Poetics of Cinema, Raúl Ruiz speculates on how every film often resembles other films: in obvious ways (such as genre), but also on the basis of more mysterious resonances or echoes. It is as if each work actualises some piece of what is possible or virtual in another work … This was certainly true of Ruiz’s own cinema: between City of Pirates in 1983 and Time Regained in 1999, there is a surrealistic ‘communicating vessel’ that explores sensations of memory, time and fluidity; and a mise en scène of bodies, voices and movements. © Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, August 2017

I recently spoke to visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston about his work at ILM on Death Becomes Her for the 25th anniversary of the film. The interview received some surprising attention; the film might not have been a hit but the practical make-up effects by ADI and ILM’s innovative ‘digital wizardry’ both continue to be fondly remembered.

Another ILMer on the show, Alex Seiden (who had worked on Terminator 2 and would go on to contribute to Jurassic Park), contacted me with a super-fun story about his last minute work on Death Becomes Her’s end scene – where Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn’s characters are at this point only their heads talking to each other, after they both take a major tumble down some stairs at a funeral. The shot was a long one – over 20 seconds – and was filmed as separate motion control passes that needed A LOT of hand roto in a very, very short space of time.

Below, Seiden relates how he helped make that possible. But first, watch the scene.

Alex Seiden: I wrote one piece of software for Death Becomes Her. It was the most productive two hours of my life. The last shot of the film shows Meryl and Goldie’s broken, disembodied heads talking to each other. Well, that was a late change to the film, shot as a pickup late in production only a few weeks before the film was going to be released. It was a pure comp shot, no 3D CG, but it was nearly 25 seconds long, and it needed hand-roto’d split mattes to combine several different motion control passes.

Everyone had pretty much wrapped on the film (we may have even already had the wrap party) so it was pretty much me and the roto artist working in an empty shop. So, the first day I’m getting my comp script together I go over to roto to see how long it’s gonna take to get the mattes done. And the answer I get was, ‘Well, it’s nearly 600 frames long, so two weeks.’ Which, uh, would not work with the schedule.

And I’m mystified, because we have some fancy expensive digital paint package that actually let you draw splines to do the rotoscoping (I think it was called ‘Amazon’). And since these didn’t need to be tight mattes, I just assumed we’d be doing it on 8’s or even 16’s and interpolating. But the #@#$%^&* thing didn’t interpolate! You could draw a spline, and move around the CVs, but you had to do it for every frame (and manually ‘render’ and save out the image for each frame too).

So, after picking my jaw up off the floor, and cursing, I went straight back to my desk. In about an hour, I had reverse-engineered their file format, and after another hour, had written a program that would interpolate any missing frames. (Plus, as a bonus, would write out a macro to automate the tedious process of rendering and saving the mattes.) And we had our mattes the next day!

We probably used that POS software for the next couple of years, and it without a doubt saved several thousand person-hours worth of work. So, I probably produced 6 figures worth of savings for each of those two hours I worked on that little ‘rotosplines’ program.

Essel World in Mumbai has come up with the country’s first ‘interactive bird park’. The promotion of the park is being done through an animated video produced by Mumbai based animation studio, Graphiti Multimedia.

The one minute video shows a kid in the animated version of the park replete with various kinds of birds. While he feeds and plays with a certain bunch of birds, numerous other flocks of birds can be seen flying about in the lush green park dotted by water bodies and more. The famous jingle from Essel World concludes the video.

The animation is nothing extra ordinary but given that the target would be kids, it is a good attempt in spreading the brand message. The colourful background compliments the theme of the park pretty well.

The post Graphiti Multimedia creates colourful promo video for Essel World’s Bird Park appeared first on AnimationXpress.