Archive for December, 2008

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.

Â

Â

Today is Dominic’s birthday. He has reached the ripe old age of 29. Well done Dom, you’ve survived another one!! Keep up the good work!

Once again, we see that the scope is wide and varied – but it could be a little bit like wanting a bar of chocolate, and walking into a shop that sells nothing but the widest selection of said confectionery. Too much choice!

Inventions considered for the challenge:

• Folding spade.
• Hypodermic needle.
• The motorcycle.
• Chewing gum.
• Burgers.
• Chuck Taylors Allstar Converse.
• Female contraceptive pill.
• Primula cheese in a tube.
• Beer.
• The universal joint.
• And of course, the electric light bulb.

Thinking that roughly 86.7% of people who entered, were going to submit an electric light bulb, we decided not to go that route.

Our thinking was of an efficient sub-patch [hyper-nurbs / mesh-smoothed to some of you] model; minimum visible geometry, maximum topological detail. The Primula tube would have been a good one in our opinion – but we thought it might be lost on a portion of the entrants.

We chose in the end, to go with the female contraceptive pill. The form of a blister-pack suits the sub-patch modelling method well, and some parts of the packaging are shiny…. even better!

You’ll have to forgive the name we chose for the brand, a cross between something from Mary Poppins and general naming conventions applied to most kinds of medicines these days – which seemingly go along the lines of “The more complex and unpronounceable we make it sound, the more important and high-follutin’ people will think it is”.

*Geek time*
Raytraced reflections, raytraced shadows, raytraced occlusion, raytraced transparency and raytraced refraction – all on. Ray recursion limit set to about 6. One HDR image for image based lighting and reflections, one set of cloned luminous polygons for the extra reflection hits, and just the one area light for the diffuse fill. Rendered with Monte Carlo flavoured radiosity.

Keep well all, more soon.

We at EESB are pleased to announce that the Open University recruitment video is now done and dusted.

This project is another example where our good friends @Warblefly Productions went and shot the footage for the end client, and handed us to rushes to process and edit.

So that is precisely what we did, submitting work-in-progress through the internet – as is our standard process – and then working on some colour correction throughout to lift the shots and make the piece warmer.

All parties involved were pleased with the outcome, which naturally is exactly what we like to hear.

More news soon.
Keep well everyone.