subjectc.com

Just a few months ago when Planet Blender added subjectc.com to their feed, I was contacted by an individual who appreciated the work we are doing. This person runs or works at a service that provides quality compositing. Sadly, I have misplaced the email with this person’s contact info.

I’m posting this notice hoping that this person contacts me again. We have a need for some quality compositing. We are having trouble with a scene we call, “Benny’s Fuel and Repair” where two actors (live action) step out onto a virtual set that we created in Blender. It’s gorgeous except that the key we have isn’t good enough. We (Ian) has invested days and days to make it work, but we aren’t satisfied.

We’d like to find a compositing expert that can take our green screen footage and composite it with our virtual set and have it look natural and real. Are you a compositing expert? Would you be interested in working on this one scene? We will consider professional and volunteer inquiries by email to me, Phil McCoy. Volunteers, please check out and be sure the participation parameters on our Help Wanted! page fit before you contact me.

Thank you!

Phil McCoy
Executive Producer

We have an immediate need for a rotoscoper. The project involves masking character movement so we can insert a graphic into a shot. A portion of the work on this shot has already been completed by an artist who is unable to stay with the project. If you take over and finish the shot, there are some other opportunities that you may be interested in.

To get involved, please review the participation parameters on our Help Wanted! page. If you are available, interested and agree to our working conditions, please contact Ian Hubert via email. Please attach or include links to samples of your rotoscoping work. Thank you!

This is the week of awesome, and I’ve been snowed in for the past few days, so I’ve gotten some massive work done.

Dolf finished texturing the body of the Goose a couple days ago, and rigged up the whole thing beautifully. It renders like a dream (and pretty darn quickly, too!). I’m more than a little excited to start plugging this baby into the innumerable scenes it appears in.

Nate finished up an animation of the tankbots converting to “Wheeled-Mode” and rolling off, and it looks superb! I can’t wait to render it out.

See, the way it works is I render out shots over the course of the week, and then head over to the edit suite to do the compositing- but times like this, when I’m snowed in, I get a buildup of shots that need to be composited. I don’t really have a way to see shots over here after they render, short of frame by framing through the image preview (and the files are too large to play quickly anyway), so the anticipation of seeing how a shot came out after rendering is building.

Don’t worry, it’s not contageous.

Peace!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

This is the week of pain.

The week of figuring out why lots of things which should work decide not to work, for reasons which completely escape me.

I can’t wait for next week, which is scheduled as the “Week of Awesomeness where Everything Works™”.

Although I’m seeing Branson Saturday, so rock on!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

Thank you to everyone contributing their time and talent to the creation of Project London. We wish you and yours all the very best now and through the new year.
 
Jen, Ian, Nathan, Phil

Things are going Fist-Pumpingly well!

Literally! A mere 30 seconds ago I just pumped my fist in the air and yelled “Yeah!” (Actually, spelled phonetically, it was more like “Uh!”, but “Yeah!” conveys the inflection better)

You see, some darn fool  director decided it would be a good idea to have the protagonists wear sheer white tuxes. And so they did.

Funny thing about sheer white tuxes… they’re hard to light, hard to keep clean, and hard to key.

I’ve spent some time today working on a few long dreaded (Again, literally. I have been dreading keying this shot for a year and a half) full-body shots, with the protagonists running across our big, well-lit greenscreen stage. Why is this a problem? Well, when the light hits the green paint of the floor, the paint absorbs all of the visible light spectrum except for the green part, which it reflects back into the air. This is good. This is how we see. This is how not all light is converted into heat when it hits something. This is how life can exist in our Universe. Bravo, light!

What it also means is that there’s now a bunch of green light flying around our set, getting onto the actors, hitting their white tuxes (white, by the way, reflects all colors- which is why it’s white), and bouncing into the camera. Except that their tuxes now look green. This is called “green spill”, and it is nasty. Since green was the color I was going to have the computer automatically remove, leaving just the actors… it’s also going to remove their legs.

Normally this problem is easily avoided by lighting the greenscreen separately from the actors, but they’re running around on the darn thing! So yeah.

SO! How did I cope with such a difficulty? How did I overcome this insane odds?

I dunno… it just kinda worked. Really darn well. Surprisingly well. It wasn’t an issue.

Thus the fist pump.

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

I’ve continued mock-up work, albeit slowly this week.  I’ve had major school projects, and once those lift off of my plate, I’ll be able to put in some full work days on the novel.  I’m looking forward to laying down many pages and getting this project further down the road.

It is difficult to balance school projects and mock-up work, but I think it’s a good thing, because they enrich each other.  When I’m drawing the mock-up, my stylistic choices are influenced by what’s going on around me.  There are a lot of magic moments in the story that I can point to and say what I was influenced by at that point.  It brings good diversity and flavor to the book.

Branson Anderson
on behalf of Branson Anderson and Jonny McConnell