Hasta La Motion!

I recently listened to this interview on BBC’s The Film Programme between host Francine Stock and Christopher Nolan on the director’s latest project, Dunkirk. It’s a great interview, in which Nolan discusses how he constructed the time-bending narrative in the film, how he used sound and score, and his thoughts on – and this is what interested me the most – shooting with photochemical film and the use of visual effects.

I loved Dunkirk. Everything about the way it is told and the way it was produced makes it such a fantastic cinema-going experience. I feel like I know a lot already about Nolan’s desire to keep using film, and to shoot things as practically as possible, even though of course his movies do rely on plenty of digital visual effects. But I’d never heard him talk about these desires quite like this, so I transcribed the relevant section below (apologies right now for any errors in my transcription).

I feel like there’s a slight conflation in the interview of the idea of shooting on film and the use of ‘CGI’ in filmmaking, but I absolutely get what Nolan is saying about the ‘feeling’ from what you see on screen. And in terms of visual effects, by shooting so much practically, any visual effects artist will have a very obvious target to match in anything that needs to be generated digitally, or composited from multiple plates, or cleaned-up with digital tools. In fact, that’s why the VFX in Nolan’s films are so seamless, I think. They have to match what was shot, or what’s the point of including them?

Anyway, have a listen to the interview, or read the transcript below, and tell me what you think in the comments.

Francine Stock: … How important was it for you to get that sense of everything being real?

Christopher Nolan: I really wanted to do as much as possible for real, and put as much reality in front of our cameras as possible. And put the actors into safe versions the physical circumstances of the real events. I’ve always had tremendous faith in the film medium, particularly photochemical film – the real thing. If you can record with that high resolution format, and we shot this entire film on large format photochemical film, with its analogue colour and depth of the image – it really, it’s the best analogy for the way the eye sees that’s being created technically.

It really allows the audience to really feel that they’re there in a way that with a greenscreen representation or computer graphics representation, or something more artificial – that has a different patina. It puts them in a different space.

Francine Stock: Because the brain is already clearly sophisticated in the way that it looks at computer images now, we can tell can’t we, at some level?

Christopher Nolan: We can absolutely tell. I think a lot of engineers and filmmakers that I talk to – they make the mistake of trying to gauge the effectiveness of a technique on how the audience can conscious parse something, and how they can explain their response to something. And that’s a completely false read. It’s really about how you feel watching something.

The best analogy I can make is about visual effects. When you watch a film from 20 years ago, and the visual effects are unconvincing, and sometimes laughable, and that’s to do with our changing perceptions over time. The eye is very sophisticated, it’s much more sophisticated than people who give it credit for, people in the engineering sphere and looking at this technology. There’s a lot going on that is poorly understood, and the audience is not capable of articulating, nor should they be asked to.

So when you put photochemical film in front of an audience and then you put a digital representation and say, ‘Can you tell the difference?’ Well if the answer is ‘No, therefore there is no difference,’ and that’s not the case. And what we’re finding increasingly in today’s world is people are now starting to value the analogue abilities of film, the way that it affects your eye differently than video imaging, differently than digital imaging.

I think there was a big thing of film versus digital ten years that’s finally begun to go away and we’ve started to respect those different media. I think a lot of that shift is based on an increasing recognition that digital is never going to be like film. It’s a different technology. It simply works different, and it affects the eye differently. And that’s fine. We’ve had different media in parallel forever. That’s what life is all about – you’ve got oil paints and you’ve got acrylics. It’s just different. I’m a big believer in photochemical film and I think it has a unique impact.

If you’re looking for more reading/listening regarding Dunkirk, especially in terms of the cinematography, check out these two pieces by Michael Goldman:

Dunkirk Post: Wrangling Two Large Formats – American Cinematographer 

First AC Bob Hall on the Camera and Lensing Challenges of Dunkirk – StudioDaily 

Indian game publishing company, Nazara Games, launched ‘Sportsie’, a digital social sports engagement platform for fans in partnership with Mastermind Sports. Now, the same platform has been declared winner of mBillionth South Asia Awards 2017.

According to Mastermind Sports founder Pratik Shah, “Our focus has been, to make Sportsie a one-stop social destination for fans, connecting people with similar passion for sports. Fans can follow latest updates, live scores, news reports of their favorite teams. It also provides up-to-minute off-field social content of players, experts, analysts and prominent fans to give an overall 360-degree view of the entire sporting world. For hardcore fans, there are games such as quiz, live real-time predictions and soon-to-launch Fantasy contests through which they socially compete against friends and other fans. This provides a really differentiated second screen experience compared to other social channels. The whole journey of fans is gamified through virtual coins. Fans complete challenges, compete to top the leaderboards and unlock achievements to progress through multiple levels. This award is a great recognition of the efforts we’re putting in.”

Sportsie is currently covers Cricket & Football. It supports localisation and is available in English, Hindi, Farsi (Persian), German and Russian. Sportsie is available through mobile-optimized webapp, Android & iOS apps on respective stores.

The platform employs a freemium model where fans get access to content and limited gaming options for free. For a weekly / monthly subscription – get exclusive access to all features. Subscription is also available through direct carrier-billing in partnership with Nazara Games & various telecom providers across the world.

Commenting on this award Nazara Games CEO Manish Agarwal said, “We at Nazara believe that second screen experience via mobile phones would convert a passive activity of watching TV into a highly interactive activity. With Sportsie, we enable users to make real-time predictions to earn coins and amplify the fun of watching matches with friends cutting across geographical constraints.”

The mBillionth Award South Asia organised by Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) is given as a recognition of excellence in mobile innovations for development. This year it was given in 10 categories. ‘Sportsie’ received the award under the category for ‘Media and Entertainment’.

The post Nazara wins for ‘Sportsie’ at mBillionth Awards appeared first on AnimationXpress.

The hall was well lit with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The camera was set and the projector was in place. The speakers and the audience were all charged up with high energy quotients. Animation Xpress in association with Adobe hosted “The Art of Motion Graphics & VFX” seminar on 9 August, 2017 at The Club, Andheri West, Mumbai from 10 am to 5 pm. Organised for the industry artists, the event was designed to address the need for fast pacing work and staying abreast with software and technology and at the same time, simplifying work with numerous customised options with the aid of Adobe software. The speakers lined up for the day were Adobe India digital media head (SMB) Gaurav Kanwal, Contiloe Pictures CEO Abhimanyu Singh and VFX supervisor Deepak SV, Adobe South Asia senior solution consultant Guru Vaidya, and Vaibhav Studios art director Ganesh Kotale and pre production artist Anand Babu. Animation Xpress founder CEO and editor in chief Anil Wanvari welcomed the speakers and the audience. He also thanked the Adobe team for associating with AnimationXpress to organise seminars for the industry.

Adobe India digital media head (SMB) Gaurav Kanwal

The first speaker Gaurav Kanwal started with questioning the audience about the phenomenon of videos going viral on social media. “This (videos going viral) puts the responsibility on the shoulders of video makers,” said Kanwal, highlighting how all clients want their videos to go viral. Understanding the plight of video makers, he introduced to them the latest and updated version of Adobe Creative Cloud and explained how stunning content can be created, stored and shared using it. “Giving your customers good experience in first go is better than doing damage control,” he said. Adobe India has a Facebook Live session every Thursday at 11:30 am, where users can resolve their issues and get their queries regarding the software answered. Creative Cloud’s one year subscription will give the user an opportunity to schedule one on one sessions too.

From left: VFX supervisor Deepak SV, Adobe India marketing manager Nanda Chawla, Contiloe Pictures CEO Abhimanyu Singh and AnimationXpress founder Anil Wanvari

Next up was Abhimanyu Singh’s talk on VFX in mythological and historical shows. While Singh explicated the creative and production process that goes into the creation of VFX-heavy TV shows, Deepak shared the challenges of churning out VFX content on a daily basis with tight deadlines. With shows like Chakravartin Ashoka Samrat, Maharana Pratap, Sankatmochan Mahabali Hanuman and now Vignaharta Ganesh, Contiloe Pictures is changing the face of VFX on small screens. The following session (or should we say the speaker!) was the one that the audience eagerly waited for. Guru Vaidya spoke about the new features and improvements that have been added to Adobe After Effects CC, explaining in detail about the latest add-ons and how to utilise them. He then spoke about using Cinema 4D lite for visual effects and motion graphics; elaborated on 360/VR workflows with Skybox; and also tracking with Mocha for Adobe After Effects.

Adobe South Asia senior solution consultant Guru Vaidya

Post lunch, Vaidya again took to the  a stage, this time to talk about Illustrator CC and working with 3D. Navigating effortlessly through the software, Vaidya demonstrated the creation of art that has both depth and dimension. The audience received insights on how leveraging Illustrator’s powerful tools to create 3D effects can help raise their work to the next level.After a nice hardcore session, Ganesh Kotale and Anand Babu from Vaibhav Studios showcased videos from their extremely famous series, Lamput, that sent the audience into fits of laughter. The 20 to 40 second videos that are gaining a wide appeal on Cartoon Network are created by a small team at Vaibhav Studios. Kotale and Babu narrated the journey of evolution of this show from pitch to final product. They mentioned how Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash and Adobe After Effects helps them create the animation from sketches to the final product.

Vaibhav Studios art director Ganesh Kotale and pre production artist Anand Babu

The event ended with the session, “Animating Characters Using Adobe Character Animator CC” by Vaidya. It was a session that turned out to be a favourite amongst the audience. They were quite impressed with the way Vaidya enthusiastically demonstrated the tricks and techniques to go about the software.Anil Wanvari felicitated the speakers with the book Creativity Inc. by Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull.

Freelance YouTube video creator Mangesh Morey won the one year subscription of Adobe Creative Cloud by a first lucky draw while motion graphics designer Aslam Hossen won the Creativity Inc. book from Animation Xpress in the second draw.Apart from learning the tricks and tools for creating exceptional visual effects, extraordinary motion graphics and exciting animation, the audience also got a chance to interact with the speakers and the peers at the event.With an overwhelmingly positive response from the attendees, AnimationXpress and Adobe look forward to more such events with the industry artists, with greater participation.

The whole team of Animation Xpress along with the Adobe team after the event

The post The Art of Motion Graphics & VFX in Mumbai was a grand success; industry artists craved for more! appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Superfried is 10 years old! This is a special milestone for me. Here are the highlights over the past decade.