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Project Profile - 2015/2016 America's Cup Wolrd Series Titles

A comparison of an early animatic vs final delivery for the world feed titles for the 2015 - 2016 America's Cup World Series.

The animatic was created in Cinema 4D with the shots edited in After Effects. The animatic went through many revisions to adjust for things such as music changes as well as animated characters which had an effect on timing and composition.

Style frames created for the initial pitch process, as well as being a bit of RnD early on, served as the starting point for the animatic. I built my scenes to be animation ready.

The project involved elements created in Cinema 4D, Houdini and Maya. Alembic and FBX files were used to export camera and boat animations out of Cinema and into Houdini to create the water sims and Maya for character animation, texturing and lighting. The first two shots came out of Cinema as the boat forming was created with a PolyFX modifier. The Cup was also rendered out of Cinema. Everything else was rendered out of Maya. Everything was then composited in After Effects. You can watch the final results below.

Art in the Dark Promo

We embraced glitch for this projection promoting Art in the Dark here in Auckland. Art directed and designed Logan Bradley. This was a quick recording of the projection from an iPhone, hope to post a better quality clip soon.

Update - A proper edit of the projection;

Art in the Dark Promo Animation from Robert Brienza on Vimeo.

 

 

Video Glitch - Art In the Dark Promo Billboard from Brandspank on Vimeo.

 

PromaxBDA ANZ Sydney 2012

As part of the team over at Brandspank, I had the opportunity to work on the conference open and branding for PromaxBDA ANZ 2012 in Sydney. The origins for this sequence came from what we had done for the PromaxBDA New Zealand back in May of this year. This time we put less focus on a narrative and emphasize beautiful imagery. I personally worked on the 3D elements, including animation. I also got a chance to help out with some of the compositing but it was team effort to push this sequence as far as we could with the time available. Really happy with the results, especially with the audio which was done in-house by Nathan King. It was a cool project to work on, and it was great to head over to Sydney and check out the conference and attend some great keynotes.

This piece was created with Cinema 4D and After Effects.

PromaxBDA Conference and Awards, Sydney 2012 from Brandspank on Vimeo.

 

Emmy Award winner, I didn't even know I was nominated...

 

This week the 31st Annual Sports Emmy Awards were held in New York. Big Studios, the shop I work at was nominated for three Emmys this year and walked away with one for work done for the MLB Network's MLB Tonight show package.

This was the first big job I helped with after my one year sabbatical in Australia - my first all-nighter in a while but it seems it was worth it.  This is Big Studios 4th Emmy win, so kudos to the team on a job well done.

 

The Gift, by Carl Erik Rinsch

An interesting mix of film making and advertising, reminds me a bit of the shorts put out by BMW a few years ago (in terms of quality/production value). This was interesting enough that I will forgive the Philips TV product placement (they did pay for this so it seems fair). This is now in the process of being turned into a feature film, shocking.

This is one of five shorts that are part of a campaign called Parallel Lines, you can view the other film over at www.cinema.philips.com.

Canon 7D Video Test #1 - Subway

I recently made the jump and purchased a Canon 7D, upgrading from my first DSLR, a Sony Alpha a100. It's a very impressive camera, amazingly fast, very quiet and impressively built.

At the moment I've only got one lens, a Canon 50mm 1.4. Seeing how I use my Minlota 50mm 1.7 on my a100 about 90% of the time I figured this would be a good choice. At least until I can get a Canon 16mm - 35mm 2.8.

This is a little edit I put together of some test footage I took one day while heading home from work. Just random footage, all hand held to just learn how the camera deals with video. It's actually been pretty busy at work so I haven't had much chance to use the 7D. I'd like to record some full HD video at 24fps.

For this clip, as I mentioned the footage was recorded at 1280x720 at 60fps. I then did a rough edit in After Effects where I also did a general levels adjust and quickly stabilized a couple of shots. I then worked my way down to a 30fps QuickTime with Photo-JPEG compression at 50% at 960x540 which is the clip I've uploaded to Flickr.

MTV's New Look

With the help of UK studio Universal Everything MTV is launching a new look across it's 64 international channels...

MTV International / Sweetheart from Universal Everything.

 

MTV International / Chocolate Gold Sunset from Universal Everything.

 

MTV International / Mad Drummer from Universal Everything.

For more info and a few more clips check out the posting on the Creative Review blog.

Fun with time...

So I recently came across two very interesting pieces of video, both essentially created to advertise new products but both interesting to watch.

First up is a demo reel from I-Movix to showcase their SprintCam V3HD that was recently announced at NAB. This broadcast native HD camera can capture ultra-slow-motion solution offering frame rates of 500 to 1,000 fps with instant replay.

Next up is a really well executed piece for Philips to show case their new lince of ultra wide screen tvs. Check out the official site for the full experience but you can get a preview from the YouTube clip below.

So what will ILM do after everyone becomes VFX artisit?

I stumbled upon this video of Adobe's Dan Goldman showing off some R&D work.  As someone who took an intense VFX program learning how to do motion tracking, this makes me smile and feel a bit bad all at the same time.  So I'm not sure who gets more respect now, the compisitor using an Inferno machine or some one who can do the same task in a couple of minutes with a few clicks?

 

Any ways, watch and enjoy.


Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

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Timesculpture & Cats

Here are two ads that caught my eye. 

First up is a Toshiba's "bullet time" style ad made using 200 Toshiba Gigashot HD camcorders resulting in 20gb of footage.  Not my favorite ad to be honest but worth taking a look.

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Help me Obi-Wan Blitzer...

As if the 2008 US Presidential election wasn't exciting enough to watch, CNN went above and beyond charts and graphs in its coverage and brought us the future. I thought that using tech like Microsoft's Surface was cool but I guess that was so 6 months ago.

A lot of focus has been made about the so called holograms used when Wold Blitzer played out his Star Wars fantasy while interviewing a Jessica Yellin in Chicago. Now, this strikes me as equally cool technically as much as it does pointless in its use as it added nothing in regards to delivering news. Making use of 35 HD cameras and 20 computers to pull this off this really was CNN doing a "hey look at what we can do" moment.

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