John Barry Memorial Concert

I went to the Royal Albert Hall to see the Royal Philharmonic play a memorial concert to John Barry. It was an incredible night, with a succesion of emotional moments of not only his music being played phenomenally but also a host of special guests including David Arnold and Michael Caine (via video since he was filming the new Batman film).

The tipping point however was when Shirley Bassey took to the stage to sing 'Diamonds are Forever' and 'Goldfinger'. I completely underestimated how much it would send me right back to being a kid again watching the movies on TV.

This is my favourite photo of John Barry, by David Bailey.  Cool, is the word I would use to describe it.

Mixing 7D and Red MX

Late last year we filmed a promo/teaser/trailer for a horror feature film that we have in development.  The purpose of the promo was to entice agents, actors, distributors and later financiers to come onboard the project.  It’s recently been doing a very successful job in Hollywood, which we’re all very excited about, but this post is about how well some of the 7D footage stood up against other shots filmed with a Red MX, when projected onto a 4 metre screen.

We have a whole bunch of shots in the promo that feature New York City at night.  These NYC shots were filmed from a moving car so it was decided that high speed would help smooth out the motion.  Filmed off speed at 720, later blown up to 1080, then blown up again due to extra stabilisation in post and since they were shot at night with only available light, they were of a noticeably lower quality than the Red footage.  That being said, at no point were they scattered in amongst other Red shots so they played okay in their own context.

There was however one shot in the promo which for me really tested its performance, not based off charts or numbers, but purely empirical.  We have a guy in an office and before we cut to him, there is a tight closeup of a pencil ticking off items on a list.  The tight CU was shot on a 7D (using a 24-70mm 2.8 L) and the following wider shot was Red MX (Cooke S4, not sure on focal length, but probably a 50mm) and the 7D shot stood up incredibly well.  I guess the main difference is that this time the 7D was shooting 1080, with no blow up, properly lit and I believe the type of shot, which was shallow focus, helped keep any aliasing at bay.

 
The workflow in post for the 7D footage was to convert it to a dpx sequence for grading in Resolve.  

There were a few vfx shots that I did for the promo which included adding numbers to a lift control panel and some signage changes to sell the UK based locations as the US, but I’ll probably talk about that in a future post.

Kill List vfx

A few weeks ago I picked up a handful of vfx shots for Ben Wheatley’s new film ‘Kill List’ which is premiering at the SXSW film festival in Austin Texas this weekend.  Ben was the director on ‘The Wrong Door’ and the shots were a giggle to work on.

Boxx Customer Story Article

The people at Boxxtech who make high end graphics workstations discovered in the First Look video that we’ve done for LVJ, that behind me, while I’m talking about the VFX was a Boxx machine.  This then led to a few back and forth emails which resulted in them writing a customer story about how we use one of their workstations as the main power house behind the visual effects in LVJ.

They’ve done a really good job at profiling how the computer fits into our post production pipeline and there’s also a mention of the BBC TV shows that I’ve worked on and how myself and the team also used Boxx computers to achieve some serious numbers in TV VFX.

Here’s a link to the article, it’s a downloadable pdf.

More behind the scene photos from Hounded

I've been pretty slack with updates on the Hounded front, so here's a bunch of behind the scenes photos from past eps and the one which airs this afternoon.