Archive for the ‘special effects’ Category

New Year, new start, new projects, new prices!

What a great year 2010 could be. We’re quite excited here at EESB, knowing the projects that are on the roadmap for the short and long-term. We’ve got video pieces coming up, and we’ve go animation pieces coming up.

We’re also working on a brand new set of CD and DVD prices which are set to blow you away.

We’ll keep you posted as and when this becomes available. In the meantime, keep well!

Do any of you remember when we said this:

“Eight Eyed Sea Bass are very proud to announce the start of their grading work on a music video for the NYC artist Lisa Li-lund, for the dreamy yet haunting track ‘Bloodface’.?

The video uses miniature sets and puppets, wonderfully crafted by Billie Achilleos and David Curtis-Ring.

This new piece sees EESB once again working alongside Birmingham’s very talented Ben Lister (Intercom // Night Time // Because I can) who Directed the shoot, with Zac Nicholson (The Boat That Rocked // This is England // Dead Mans Shoes) drafted in as Director of Photography using the awesome RED Camera accompanied by a stonking set of prime lenses from Cooke.

The video is turning out just lovely so far, even if we do say so ourselves.

We’ll be showing you the finished article when it’s all polished off, wrapped up and ready for release - if you don’t mind, that is!”

Well, that time has arrived, and we are oh-so happy to show you the outcome of our grading work, on top of the hard graft put in by Ben, Zac, Billie, David and the rest of the crew of course.

The piece was shot in a mixture of 4K (4096 x 2304 pixels) and 2K (2048 x 1152 pixels) resolutions on the RED ONE.

EESB then used a mixture of REDcine, After Effects and Premiere Pro for the grading and visual effects. We kept a 16bit colour depth throughout our workflow with delivery as 2K resolution 10bit DPX files. We thought we’d put that in for the geeks out there…. you know who you are!

Here’s the complete piece, enjoy!

Lisa Li-Lund ‘Bloodface’ from ben Lister on Vimeo.

Inspired by traditional Greek folklore and mythology, this dark tale follows a jilted woman on her journey through love, betrayal, repentance and retribution.

Directed by Ben Lister
Produced by Victoria Emes
Set Design & Undead Puppets – David Curtis-Ring
Puppet Maker – Billie Achilleos assisted by Ashley Appaya
Scenic Painter – Andy Reid
DOP – Zac Nicholson
1st AC/Focus Puller – Benn Peacock
Gaffer – Chris Rhodes
Puppeteers – Jeremy Bidgood and Billie Achilleos
Runners – Tom Levigne, Oliver Nelson, Chole Sylvestre
antidote productions Ltd

Why not pop on over to http://www.vimeo.com/6404056 and leave a nice comment for Ben… we’re pretty sure that he and the rest of the crew would like that!

More soon, keep well all.

The very exciting happenings for us, is that our 30s Reaction to Litter piece (for Birmingham City Council) is on at various cinemas around Birmingham for now three weeks!

It was going to be two weeks originally, but the Council were lucky enough to get an extra week on the house.

Ace. Just hope we get time to go and see our handywork.

Having been commissioned much earlier in the year by Birmingham City Council to revisit the Reaction to Litter job, the piece finally got wrapped up very recently, and has been transferred to film to show in the cinema.

But first, the Council had managed to get the BBC interested, so the piece featuerd on BBC 1 on a number of occasions today – including on the local news programme, Midlands Today.

We’re glad the piece has been so well received!

Currently we’re working on some visual effects and animation for a short film. The film is supported by Screen West Midlands, and is one of this year’s Digishorts.

We can’t really reveal anything about it yet as it’s not our place to do so, but we’re excited and pleased to be doing this, for sure.

I think we’re going to be pretty busy working on this for the coming weeks along with other work, so we may be a bit quiet for the time being….

Hope the World is seeming brighter for all of you.

No, we’re not calling anyone names…. read on, and we’ll explain.

Eight Eyed Sea Bass are very proud to announce the start of their grading work on a music video for the NYC artist Lisa Li-lund, for the dreamy yet haunting track ‘Bloodface’.

The video uses miniature sets and puppets, wonderfully crafted by Billie Achilleos and David Curtis-Ring.

This new piece sees EESB once again working alongside Birmingham’s very talented Ben Lister (Intercom // Night Time // Because I can) who Directed the shoot, with Zac Nicholson (The Boat That Rocked // This is England // Dead Mans Shoes) drafted in as Director of Photography using the awesome RED Camera accompanied by a stonking set of prime lenses from Cooke.

The video is turning out just lovely so far, even if we do say so ourselves.

We’ll be showing you the finished article when it’s all polished off, wrapped up and ready for release - if you don’t mind, that is!

Until then, keep well all.
More soon.

• joint 4th place – ‘The Healer’ and ‘ Bang Olufson’
• 3rd place – TJ Singh
• 2nd place – ‘Olivia’
• 1st place – Philip Stewart VFX.

Actually, Dom was corrected by the winner regarding him name (apparently it wasn’t what we’d been supplied) but other than that, we think a good night was had by all.

I’ll have the lightly slated popcorn please….

The piece of work previously created for Birmingham City Council by EESB in conjunction with @Warblefly Productions; Reaction To Litter, has been (re-?)commissioned, for Cinema.

Birmingham City Council have aksed us to re-work the piece into a thirty second ad, to run at a select number of Cinemas in the region in the near future.

More news to follow on this one.

Keep well all.

This, we here at EESB think, deserves a very big !w00t!

!w00t!

This week, the people who make our 3D software of choice; NewTek, announced version 10 of their OSCAR and EMMY winning modelling, animation and rendering package ‘LightWave’.

Version 10 is named “CORE” (Centralised Object Reference Engine), and the few details that they have decided to pass along to us humble user-folk at this pre-release stage have got us pretty excited…

The option of operating under a single unified application, instead of the two discrete parts that the programme currently is. A native scripting language of Python, with SWIG support.
Instancing, modifier and history stack, interactive deformation modifiers with handles and customisable user-interface.

With two years of development so far, written from the ground up in C++ in order to keep the application as efficient as possible and the SDK completely transparent and open to third parties. It is fully multi-threaded, multi-processor and GPU aware. In NewTeks’ own words: It works great in 32-bit, and is a monster in 64-bit. “~ is a monster in 64-bit.” Music to our ears!

“Yay”, we hear you say “Sounds wonderful, but what exactly does that techno-babble you’ve just spouted up there actually mean to us?”

Oh. Errrrm. I’m thinking, one moment please.
*cue lift music*

What this does mean, is a faster, more stable, robust and versatile application that enables us to do what we do best; be freely creative in producing the things that make up your projects.

We believe that NewTek will be rolling out the final release version 1.0 in the last quarter of this year; so there is still a fair amount of time to wait, but we’re already excited. Hopefully we will beta-testing the new tool starting from a few weeks time until release. As they say: “Bring on the trumpets.”

To see the list of features, straight from the horses mouth, have a wibble here, here and for the tech-spec details, here.

The future has a CORE.

More soon, keep well all.

So Michael visited us with his brief, describing what he wanted. There was to be photos through which the camera moves, with layers of parallax, and lots of picture-in-picture work – literally – where interviewees would be holding a frame containing a green shape. These would be tracked and images placed on to them, and to allow the virtual camera to move in and out from these frames. Oh, and the whole piece would be shot in HD against a greenscreen.

“Can you do it?!” he excitedly asked [if he wasn't so professional he probably would have been wriggling in his seat too]
“Of course we can!” we reassured him.

Then after a little more to-ing and fro-ing, we were able to crack on with the post-production for him. It looked something like the images below:

Ace.

Unfortunately we don’t have clearance to show the video here, but you can look out for snippets of it on our next showreel, sometime in early 2009.

Keep well all, and have an excellent Christmas.

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