DI

Happy Lunar New Year to all!

VFX is a new field for me, therefore many technical terms and concepts that are part and parcel of the industry still sound vaguely alien to my ears. As I'm slowly gaining knowledge about this new (for me) industry, I'm learning all sorts of interesting things. Today's keyword: DI.

It all started when I stumbled unintentionally across this little bit of news on Highend3D:
"Prime Focus facilities in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Goa handle pre-visualization, camera rental, HD dailies, visual effects, DI and deliverables."

What is DI? I've never come across the acronym in a VFX context before, and my initial guess was "Digital Imaging". A bit of googling later I realized that it means "Digital Intermediate". Now despite getting half the worlds right, I clearly missed the mark. More googling and a quick lookup of Wikipedia yielded an interesting article and some explanation about the DI process.

We all learn something new each day, and that's part of the fun of working in a field you are not familiar with.

Holy Bluescreens Batman

The polytechnics in Singapore had their Open House(s?) recently, and my poly is no exception. I had the privileged of being tasked to setup the booth to attract people to sign up for our new Digital VFX diploma.

My original idea was to setup a real-time chromakey display with a bluescreen and live video feed mixed with CG digital backdrops using some real-time software compositor. Imagine my dismay when I found that this not easy to setup, surprising given the maturity of bluescreen technology.

Lots of practical problems abound: the hassle of lighting the bluescreen sufficiently brightly and evenly, blue spill from lack of shooting space, the difficulty of extracting clean mattes from our cheap DV cameras, difficulty in matching pre-rendered CG to non-fixed camera angles.

I was almost ready to give up the idea of doing it in real-time and go for post-production, thereby losing the impact of a "live show". At the eleventh hour, a colleague forwarded me an industry contact which saved the day. My thanks go to the generosity of Shah from AV8 Media, whose sponsorship helped make the show possible.

The solution: Reflecmedia. Below are some photos from our setup. The rubber glove Godzilla puppet, keyed in real-time over a CG ocean backdrop, was a hit with the crowd, as was the Harry Potter's Cloak of Invisibility trick.

What happier way to start 2009...

...than a rundown of the top 50 movie special effects shots?

Happy New Year everyone! 2009 is a good year!