Hasta La Motion!

VFX STUDENTS GET GORY AT SPECIAL EFFECTS WOUND WORKSHOP

As part of the pre-production process for the ghost project shoot at Lost Boys Learning, Ria Ambrose (Lost Boys’ Production Manager and owner of Colour FX Specialty Make-up) offered the students a one day Gelatin Wound Making Workshop.

The workshop was a new addition to the curriculum to inspire the students in conceptualizing the visuals for their ghost projects. During the day, the students were instructed on how to cast, apply and paint gelatin wounds. Ria also demonstrated some simplified techniques to create old age and zombie skin. The model that was used during the demonstration was also filmed over greenscreen to be later composited into one of the ghost projects (see final image below).

Ria Ambrose – Colour FX

"I so enjoyed seeing the enthusiasum of all the students once they began to apply the wounds on each other. It is amazing what a little fake blood can do to a room full of guys."

Marcelo Bassoli – Student

"The best thing about the Gelatin Make-up Workshop was that I could make things that I didn’t imagine that I could do. It was the first time that I made done anything like this this and I liked the results. It is always challenging when you have to try something for the first time. I was afraid to do something wrong or not finish it properly, but it wasn’t a problem. The workshop exceeded my expectations and I really enjoyed participating in it."

Kishor Joshi – Student

"When I started observing movies I had always wondered, how do they make wounds and blood? It makes me curious when they show a swollen/wounded eye in films, I know it’s make-up but how do they do it ? After attending this workshop, I at least know how they start, so for me and this was the best part of workshop.

As a visual effects artist this workshop should help me to get the basics right. While working on a ‘slit throat’ my focus was to blend it with (fellow student) Jason’s skin tone and to show fresh blood dripping. It was not the best looking but I think I was happy with my first attempt.

To sum up I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop. It was quite educational. One day I would like to do a swollen eye make-up. Let there be blood!"

Carlos Guzman – Student

"For me it was really interesting because I have never done makeup before. I think the class was awesome, but so fast, I would like to do more, maybe two or three more classes. I think we need more practice and would like to learn more about the techniques."

Lost Boys Learning: School of Visual Effects is an Accredited school offering training in VFX Production including pre-production, 3D for VFX and Compositing. For more information please visit our website at www.lostboys-learning.com or join us on Facebook www.facebook.com/lostboyslearning.

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On November 20th, 2010, the Vancouver Chapter of the Visual Effects Society hosted their 4th Annual Celebration of Animation and Visual Effects at the District 319 theatre and lounge in Vancouver, BC.

The evening began with a catered cocktail party, with guests flowing back and forth between the bar & lounge and the gallery room, which featured demos by sponsors Annex Pro and Lost Boys Learning: School of Visual Effects. After guests took their seats in the theatre, VES Vancouver Chair Nancy Mott welcomed everyone to celebrate yet another year of great achievements. The recently renovated heritage building, formerly an abandoned Asian movie house, features oversized chairs and spotlit sculptures of the Terracotta Army lining the walls.

Master of Ceremonies, Jon Cowley (Eclipse, District 9, Watchmen, Smallville) kicked off the evening with a positive commendation to all the artists and people involved in the Vancouver industry, noting that Vancouver has reached a "critical mass", with solid growth and first-run projects. He spoke of new companies coming to Vancouver in the past year, including Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Pixar and Microsoft Game Studios.

Jon also emphasized calibre and quality; as the Oscar nominations for District 9 confirmed what we already knew, there is no lack of talent in Vancouver. He welcomed artists, supervisors, producers, HR talent and more at every level from all over the world, thanking them for blending their knowledge with ours, and in return, we introduced them to snowboarding and apparently, the back room at the Morrissey Pub.

After watching the Houdini demo reel from event sponsor Side Effects Software, featuring shots from feature films, commercials, student projects and videogame cinematics, Jon introduced Harry Mukhopadhyay, Lead FX Technical Director at MPC Vancouver. Harry led us through the making of Hades, a giant 12 foot tall fire demon from Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

Once the concept work was translated into a 3D model, facial movement and expression became paramount. The team used the ‘Mova CONTOUR Reality Capture’ system and integrated the data into MPC’s in-house motion blending tools and motion clips manager. Harry explained that it was important to stay as true as possible to the performance of actor Steve Coogan.

He also demonstrated the making of the layers of high resolution photo-realistic fire simulations that envelop the character. The team used Scanline’s Flowline software to simulate the fire, and then plugged into MPC’s rendering system to generate accurate illumination onto the character.

Next at the podium were Tom Cowland & Nigel Denton-Howes from Image Engine, leading us through their research and development process for the propietary Fur and Hair systems that were developed for the wolves and the character Victoria in Twilight: Eclipse. As their timeline permitted, they decided to design their own fur system to maintain more control and ability for modifications in the pipeline at any stage during production.

Tom and Nigel introduced us to their Cortex Project, an open source set of high quality C++ libraries and Python modules tailored for software development in the visual effects industry, available at http://code.google.com/p/cortex-vfx/. Image Engine uses many open source projects as part of their research and development efforts and in return are pleased to be releasing key components of their internal toolset back to the community.

One of the biggest changes in pipeline in visual effects over the past few years has been the re-emergence of stereoscopic presentation and the development of a number of different processes to work with live action and animation, on-set and in post. Project Manager for Stereoscopic Conversion Sean Konrad demonstrated the configurations for stereoscopic production used by Prime Focus on shows such as Clash of the Titans.

When Warner Brothers challenged Prime Focus to convert the feature to 3D in just eight weeks, they were quick to accept the challenge and set up a system using Fusion-io Drives and their propietary View-D process. Sean explained, “With typical VFX projects, we complete about 20-30 shots per day. The ioDrives scaled our data load capabilities by about twenty times. This improved our productivity about 2-4x."

In Vancouver there is a strong triad of the three sectors of visual effects, animation and videogames, and with such a tight community, many friends and associates across the board. Invited to join the Celebration from the animation sector was director Wilson Tang from Rainmaker Entertainment, presenting their short film for the Shanghai Expo, Cooper and Zinka. Although the project was produced with a commercial client (Teck) and various stakeholders from industry and government, Wilson succeeded in creating a visually stunning story using multiple animation techniques. He emphasized the creativity and teamwork in problem solving and look development, and demonstrated the use of practical elements such as cotton ball clouds and tin foil prairies to create a very Canadian landscape for the film.

Wrapping up the presentations was Paul Amer, Head of Art from BigPark (Microsoft Game Studios). Paul’s humorous presentation took us through the making of the interactive tiger character in Xbox 360’s new release Kinectimals. The game invites the player to build a friendship with some of the world’s most exotic creatures, such as the tiger cub in the demo. Paul showed a blooper reel of trial renders and their various errors to commands such as “jump,” “roll over” and “play dead”. Microsoft acquired Yaletown’s BigPark last year to focus on Xbox 360 and Kinect controller-free games.

More information about the Visual Effects Society and how to become a member is available on their website.

Sponsors for the 4th Annual Event included: Side Effects Software, Autodesk, Annex Pro, Compugen, Microsoft Game Studios, MPC, Image Engine, Prime Focus, Rainmaker, Digital Domain, Vidcom, Oceana, CIS Vancouver, Lost Boys Learning, DGC, EdgeCeptional Catering and BC Film Commission.

Hi Guys,

To create this comp it was necessary to make a 3D tracker in Boujou. I modeled some hot air balloons using displacement mapping; created some 2D balloons in Photoshop and applied them in cards; and combined all the elements in MAYA. Then color corrected, lens flares and final comp was done in NUKE.

Any comment or feedback is so welcome,

Thanks,
🙂

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LBL-004_BALLOONS_RODRIGUEZ.mov (15.68 MB)

Hey Guys,

My UFO Project was based on a classic saucer disc combined with sweeping lights.
During this project I tried to be more focused on composting stuff like color correction, reflections, CG integration and create elements like particles and energy.

Thanks,
🙂

Sorry for the low resolution 🙁

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LBL-004_UFO_RODRIGUEZ.mov (16.05 MB)

Lost Boys Learning | School of Visual Effects

Class 4 – Ghost Project Showcase

Just in time for Halloween, the third project at Lost Boys Learning is the popular Ghost project. In order to create a ghostly apparition that is subtle and believable, students worked entirely within our compositing software NUKE, as well as shooting individual live action background plates, black-screen character plates in our studio and a group cloud-tank elements shoot. Blending together the three live action elements, the students strive to create volume and cohesion between the different 2D elements – and a scary ghost.

Creating abstract, amorphous VFX can be a very challenging experience. Unlike recreating practical or physical objects the students design a look that requires subtlety and creative vision. In a real production experience, the client or supervisor will have difficulty explaining exactly what they are looking for, so it is up to the artist to analyze all their references and design a look that can be effectively sold to the client. The artist might hear “that’s not quite what I’m looking for…but I’ll know when I see it” or ”more oily-smoky, brighter but more subtle, etc.".

The Ghost project is designed to demonstrate the power of leveraging practical elements (physical effects filmed in studio) to achieve very organic looking effects in a short period of time. In our studio, we shot a variety of substances on our high definition video camera including fluorescent ink, egg whites, cream and sparkles in our "cloud-tank" – a repurposed fish tank set up with a black light.

Our students have four weeks from start to finish, including finding relevant film reference, designing their idea and scouting locations. This year, we shot in the village of Cumberland, including the museum mine shaft display, the Japanese cemetary and an abandoned mine; and at the old dairy ruins in Merville.

Lost Boys Learning is located in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island – a community with a huge variety of accessible, free locations, including urban, rural, seaside, old-growth forest, ruins and mountains. For this shoot, we used guerrilla-style filming with our portable generator, fog machine, lighting kit and occasionally a bit of fire starter in hand.

JongJun "Danny" An

"I spent a lot of time shooting for this project because I’m interested in making movies. My story is one of an explorer who finds the abandoned "1913" building, a former research facility. He discovers an old movie camera, which triggers a "flashback" sequence, showing a scary surgical experiment that happened a long time ago on that site. The flashback reveals the true story to the explorer just before the ghost of the surgeon attempts to kill him. We filmed all of the flashback sequence in studio with costumes and props, including a juicy raw steak. The most difficult thing was making fog and matching it with the ghost."

Monica Rodriguez

"My Ghost Project was inspired by the effects in the movie "Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix". My character is the ghost of a bride; her unexplained murder has left her angry and she remains in this world. In order to integrate this idea with a real background I choose a Japanese shrine close to Cumberland. The hardest part in this project for me was to integrate the fog which was a practical element filmed in a cloud tank. The element was high resolution and required both time warping and mesh warping which challenged my compositing considerably."

John Lipskie

"A local museum has a coal mine exhibit which made a great location to film this project and set the scene. Many Chinese and Japanese miners worked, and perished, in the local mines. I focused mostly on integrating the black screen ghost into the cloud element but spent a lot of time rotoscoping the miner to separate him from the ghost in the background."

Clifford Green

"For the ghost project, I was inspired by the film "Gothika" starring Halle Berry – particularly the scene where a truck runs over a ghost child. My story is about a young girl (Mindy) from the Comox Valley; in 1940 she went missing and was found dead years later. Her spirit roams the area, hunting for her killer. She only comes out at night, when she can be seen walking with her teddy bear in her hand. The project covers areas such as cinematography, composition, rendering and lighting. Lighting the scene was a challenge, as filming was done at night."

Daniel Jackson

"Not surprisingly, my inspiration for the Ghost project was "dark and creepy", so I chose an abandoned concrete ruin in the forest as a location. The ghost character was a follower of the dark arts and the religious people in town burnt him alive – now he haunts the town’s church ruins. I was inspired by movies like Saw, 13 Ghosts, Silent Hill and One Missed Call. The make-up and wardrobe for my ghost were inspired by the lead character in the game Prototype. We filmed at night with practical fire, candles and fog. The hardest part of the project was painting out the pyrotechnician (igniting the fire) from the scene."

For more behind the scenes photos visit our gallery. Watch for further project posts of our Product Shot and UFO project coming in the next few weeks.

Cheers,

Mark

Lost Boys Learning is North America’s only dedicated accredited visual effects school with world-class training in photo-realistic 3D for VFX and compositing for film and television. Boasting a 94% placement rate Lost Boys Learning offers a specialized 1 year Visual Effects Diploma on Vancouver Island, Canada. Our students work with the award winning VFX Supervisor and experienced mentor, Mark Benard, in a project-based learning environment, covering VFX pre-production and shooting, 3D for VFX and compositing. We are now accepting applications for our new intake starting in January or May of 2009. Please visit our website and/or email us for further information.

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