Hasta La Motion!

We have also being doing a lot of new software development for our online learning system and are very excited to announce that these features make their debut with the courses starting April 19.

It seems that our idea of providing the best TD training available is beginning to catch on, and our students agree. Here are some quotes from some of our recent students:

"The whole TD-College experience has been absolutely amazing for me so far, even more than I imagined! I’ve learned a lot, done a lot and having a blast the whole time and I can’t wait to take on more courses. Even if my company wasn’t ready to pay for TDC, I would get a loan this instant and mortgage my right kidney if need be.
Congratulations on the amazingly done job to you and all your colleagues at TDC and I wish you all the best in the future. You are destined for success with this kind of selfless sharing of invaluable information and an inspiration for all those who seek knowledge." – Tarik Sabanovic.

"My TD college experience has been phenomenal. From the very first week I was learning to make scripts that were useful at my job. I am blown away by how much I was able to achieve in just six weeks. I feel that I have the tools now to make any MEL script I could possibly need. The level of instruction was fantastic. Kevin went above and beyond in answering my questions and making sure that I was grasping the concepts needed. He also provided a lot of insight into the production process that was invaluable." – Travis Barber.

"I had already read some books on python but TD-College’s python class really got me up and going. In the middle of the class I already began to use python at work for tools and inside Maya. Also having a look at how python is used Houdini was great as I would had never discovered it that fast on my own. Very motivating lectures straight
from production. Can’t wait for more classes on new topics." – Katrin Schmid.

NEW MENTORS:

We’re always scouting for talented professionals working for the top studios throughout the world. Over recent months, we’ve been able to welcome to our team a vast number of mentors who offer an incredible wealth of knowledge and experience. TD-College collects all of that experience and places it at your fingertips. Here is a list of the latest additions to our team of professional mentors:

Mark Story
Educator/Engineer/Artist – Digital Cinema Arts
General and Effects Mentor
Credits:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Tropic Thunder, Beowulf, Surf’s Up, Spiderman 3, The Ant Bully.

Kevin MacPhail
Pipeline Technical Director – Reel FX
General Mentor
Credits:
The Wild, Everyone’s Hero, Open Season 2.

Pablo Gimenez
FX Technical Director – Double Negative
FX Mentor
Credits:
GI JOSE: Rise of the Cobra

Rob O’Neill
Founder, Animation, Research & Development – Kickstand
Character Mentor
Credits:
Madagascar, Shrek 2, One Rat Short.

Stewart Jones
Character Technical Director – Animal Logic
Character Mentor
Credits:
Knowing, The Roboteers.


Tom Kluyskens
FX Lead – Imageworks
Effects Mentor
Credits:
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Ice Age Columbus: Who Were the First Americans, Valiant, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Surf’s Up,Beowulf, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

UPCOMING COURSES:

In these tough economic times, it’s more important than ever to invest in a new beginning – an education that will provide you with the newest, long-term and advanced technical skills sought after by employers today in the CG, games and visual effects industries. TD-College provides you with those skills by offering the most advanced courses available today and by pairing you up with VFX veterans. Our production oriented courses, developed by active professionals with at least 5 years of feature film experience, will definitely allow you to gain that added edge that employers drool over. Slotted to start April 19th, these are the newest releases in a growing library of interactive courses: .

Here is a list of upcoming courses:

Python Programming
Mentor: Matt Schnittker
Start Date: April 19th 2009
Cost: US $1200
Spots Open: 4

Procedural Effects with Houdini
Mentor: Mark Story
Start Date: April 19th 2009
Cost: US $1200
Spots Open: 6

MEL Programming
Mentor: Kevin Mannens
Start Date: April 19th 2009
Cost: US $1200
Spots Open: 6

To enroll in any of the courses mentioned above, students must first be admitted into the school by filling out the registration form.

We have several other courses in production, such as "Math For Technical Directors", "C++ Programming", "Introduction to RenderMan", "Introduction To RenderMan Shader Programming" and "Writing Character Deformer Plugins in Maya". We’ll let you know more about these courses as we get closer to their release dates.

Sincerely

The TDC Team

A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, “Watchmen” is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the "Doomsday Clock"—which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union—moves closer to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the outlawed but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach uncovers a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the Watchmen?

Frantic’s Vancouver office worked closely with VFX Supervisor John “DJ” DesJardin and Production Designer Alex McDowell. But because director Zack Snyder – who shot the movie entirely in Vancouver, allowing easy access to the Frantic visual effects team – was adamant about remaining as faithful to the story as possible, Frantic’s previz department found itself digitally storyboarding a hybrid of the graphic novel and Zack’s thumbnails, using the original source material as its “bible.”

Two scenes in particular required substantial orchestration to achieve. For one pivotal sequence, Dr. Manhattan teleports to Mars and builds a glass palace – a massive crystalline structure comprised of interlocking spiked rings that rotate and function like a clock.

“Each of these rings represented a measurement of time, completing one rotation every second, minute, hour, day, year, and so on, so one of our biggest challenges was making sure the rings were rotating without intercepting,” said Aaron Weldon, Visual Effects Supervisor, Frantic Films VFX. “We broke down several ways to set up the glass palace movements, including removing large chunks so they didn’t come crashing into each other, but that sort of took away some of the visual power. So working closely with DJ and Alex, we experimented with subtly shifting the rotating rings apart from each other and then shifting them back to their original axis so they didn’t collide. DJ and Alex were very happy with the result, and this was the solution you see in the movie. It turned out to be one of the film’s most visually arresting scenes.”

Interestingly, the most challenging shot for Frantic Films to map out was actually a 10-second clip that appears in the opening title sequence. The haunting titles tell the backstory of the Watchmen from the 1940s to present day and is interspersed with key moments in U.S. history such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“Because the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination is such iconic material and so recognizable, our goal was to make sure we mapped out this entire sequence as closely to the original footage as possible,” added Weldon. “There’s a ton of documentation about this footage online and countless conspiracy theories, with everyone breaking it down and analyzing it frame-by-frame, so we couldn’t get away with anything less than perfect. Additionally, the production considered four different set locations before they finally settled on a parking lot on which a partial practical set – a small hill and fence built up on stilts – was constructed to mimic the Dealey Plaza environment (the rest was added digitally in post). For each of the possible set locations, our artists had to recalculate the scene to ensure that the exact speed, grade and proper distance was represented in these less-than-ideal shooting locations.”

Frantic’s software toolkit for the pre-viz work included Autodesk 3ds Max for modeling and animation, eyeon Fusion for compositing, Adobe Photoshop for adding details and textures and Adobe Premiere for editing.

About Frantic Films VFX
Headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada, with offices in Vancouver and Los Angeles, Calif., Frantic Films VFX has been operating divisions that provide visual effects for film and television, and VFX software development since 1997. Frantic Films’ VFX award-winning visual effects teams have worked on films including Watchmen, Dragonball Evolution, Red Cliff, W., Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, Grindhouse, Superman Returns, X-Men 3, Poseidon and many others. The company’s software tools were developed to solve complex production challenges on in-house feature effects projects, and are also in use at many leading 3D animation and effects facilities worldwide. In November of 2007 Frantic Films VFX became a division of international post and VFX leader Prime Focus Group. For more information, visit http://www.franticfilms.com.

About “Watchmen”
“Watchmen” is directed by Zack Snyder from a screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons, published by DC Comics. The film is produced by Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin, and Deborah Snyder. Herbert W. Gains and Thomas Tull are the executive producers, with Wes Coller serving as co-producer. The film stars Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson.

Warner Bros. Pictures and Paramount Pictures present, in Association with Legendary Pictures, a Lawrence Gordon/Lloyd Levin Production, a Zack Snyder Film, “Watchmen,” being distributed domestically by Warner Bros. Pictures and internationally by Paramount Pictures.

www.watchmenmovie.com

SANTA MONICA, Calif., March 30 /PRNewswire/ — For all those job-hunters in creative fields who need a strategic edge in the salary negotiation process — or who simply could benefit from the motivation salary knowledge can provide, Industry Wages Inc. has delivered a powerful new tool. The company has launched the website VFXWages.com (http://www.vfxwages.com) as a free way for these professionals and students to determine the latest information on salaries and hourly wages in their market. Currently VFXWages.com provides pay information for individuals in the visual effects industry, particularly film and television visual effects, gaming, motion graphics, and animation.

"We’ve created a necessary tool for the pursuit of salary equality in this ever-changing job environment," says Aruna Inversin, president of Industry Wages Incorporated and founder of VFXWages.com. "In creating VFXWages.com, we strive to give the community a streamlined way to identify an appropriate wage to expect or ask for in salary negotiations."

VFXWages.com is a global tool that will help job-seekers see how they rate among other artists with similar skills and experiences in a particular location. Using the special Wages system, users can graphically compare wages and salaries around the world by typing in a city, state or zip code. Registrants can also obtain information about employment based on job title, company, start date and length of time the position will last.

"We use the anonymity of the web with the power of a community to give you the information you need," says Inversin. "This tool allows you to compare yourself to others in your field around the world."

The database of wages is normalized to a 260-day year or 40-hour workweek, based on the pay options available for that job. VFXWages.com uses this method because it is the most common way to aggregate wage information among the different methods that film and television studios use to pay their artists.

There are three different types of accounts for users. Professional and freelancer accounts feature jobs with salary or hourly paid wages for those particular individuals. Student accounts are perfect for those currently attending any post-secondary schools, or have recently graduated and are looking for work. Company accounts are for recruiters and managers or company owners that wish to take advantage of VFXWages.com’s special services to search for and recruit talent.

VFXWages.com is cross-browser and cross-platform compatible. Industry Wages Inc. strives to maintain and deliver a high-quality product; the company spent several months privately testing the VFXWages.com site in beta to make sure the website would guarantee customer satisfaction. Clients can find out about recent upgrades and the latest happenings on the "Latest News" section of the website.

About Industry Wages Incorporated and VFXWages.com

VFXWages.com was created by visual effects professionals based in Los Angeles who were disappointed with how secretive wages and salaries were in the creative arts industry.

Industry Wages is looking to expand its services to other vital industries around the world. For more information about this company or the new website, visit http://www.vfxwages.com.

Working from Yale town, Vancouver, MPC’s VFX Supervisor Jess Norman oversaw a team of 35 VFX artists. Key members, including CG supervisor Max Wood were brought over from London to join the team. MPC Vancouver utilises the same pipeline and tools as MPC London, which allowed the team to successfully achieve the full gamut of visual effects challenges. Autodesk Maya is complemented with a suite of proprietary tools written in-house by the MPC R&D department. Shots were rendered in RenderMan and MentalRay, and composited using Shake.

MPC’s invisible effects work appears in many scenes, and starts with the high impact opening sequence ‘Blake’s Demise;’ a fast-paced, hand-to-hand combat scene taking place in a high-rise condo. To add to the adrenalin fuelled atmosphere, the team created the completely digital cityscape seen outside the smashing window. Blake aka The Comedian gets thrown out of the window. As well as adding crashing glass and doing a digital double takeover MPC added a CG version of the iconic smiley pin following Blake down to his dead on the street.

During one of the key flashback sequences; ‘Riot Control,’ the superheroes deal with the civil unrest of the tumultuous 1970’s. MPC modelled and animated the CG Owl Ship, called in reinforcements under the guise of digital doubles, added CG crowds, extended the sets and enhanced the turbulent environment with smoke and light beams.

In a dramatic nightmare scene two of the main characters get atomised by a nuclear blast after ripping each others skin off to reveal their superhero costumes. With the characters shot on green screen, everything else was created digitally. The Owl ship with digital doubles also appear in the tenement fire scene, alongside CG smoke and fire elements added to enhance the fire on a miniature roof top. The surrounding environment was created using projected digital matte paintings.

For the climatic Karnak sequence the team created a realistic Antarctic environment with ice, water and snow effects. Almost not making it over a vast ice cliff, the owl ship crashes into the snow surface, spraying snow and ice everywhere. Several of the shots in the scene were fully digital and required full understanding of the way that environmental factors interact.

Watchmen goes on international release 6th March 2009.

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Monday, February 23, 2009
By: Thomas J. Mclean

Autodesk has launched Softimage 7.5, adding features such as UV unfolding technology and an integrated mental ray renderer into the popular game creation and visual effects application.
This release sees a name change for the software, which was formerly known as Softimage|XSI and was acquired by Autodesk from Avid Technology.
"It has been three months since we acquired substantially all of the assets of Softimage and its integration into Autodesk is going extremely well, says Marc Petit, Autodesk Media & Entertainment senior VP. “The team has kept Softimage 7.5 on plan and it has shipped without delay. We remain committed to delivering solid future releases of the software."
The UV Unfolding Technology enables artists to unwrap polygon models with just a few clicks. The package also provides UV editing tools that assist in the creation and editing of UV maps.
Softimage 7.5 also includes a Multithreaded Syflex Cloth Simulator, enabling artists to use the cores on their machine to iterate faster. Also, scenes saved in Softimage 7.5 will load into Softimage 7.0. :radar::cool::rolleyes::tasty::twisted::niceone: