IF (get it? Thats a big if, hence the capitalization? no? okay bad joke) you have ever accidentally somehow come across this blog you know I collect movie posters. Not the lame ones in the video below but soem really awesome ones from some bad ass artists like Ken Taylor or Tyler Stout. I would have to agree with this 100% with the exception of this poster I have on my wall pictured below.
The Visual Effects of "Star Trek Into Darkness"
Updated:
Favorite Prints/Posters of 2013
Here are my top 10 prints of 2013. Not all will be Mondo releases but a lot will. Also no particular order unless stated. Ok There Will be Blood Variant might be my favorite.
ILM Long Ranger VFXs
I'm a sucker for ILM breakdown videos.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Just scored these two bad ass prints by Aaron Horkey today!
Mondo Mystery Movie 11 (MMM XI)
This past weekend I went to LA for the Mondo Mystery Movie! The movie was Die Hard which people had been guess since day one. The artist was Laurent Durieux and here is the poster! I got the metal version which looks more amazing every time I look at it.
When entering the theater they said to take your shoes off to respect the historical theater. When entering to get to your seats they had spread glass in the aisles. Looked really cool and a great way to add some showman ship!
Obama Visits Dreamworks Animation - Full Speech
Seems kind of sad that he thinks there are so many jobs in the US for VFX artists. Hopefully he has been mad aware of the subsidies that are killing the visual effects industry. I hope the protest was successful today! If you are interested in the VFX war against subsidies go to VFX Soldier.
Currently working on Space Station 76!
Go here and like the projected I am currently working on!
Reynold Brown, amazing poster designer
I bid on this amazing poster by Reynold Brown but did not win.
Reynold Brown is probably one of my favorite poster artist. Reynold's worked in a time when his posters where almost always better/bigger than the movie. The monsters where never as big or gruesome as the posters depicted. You probably have never heard of him, but you definitely have seen his work. I've posted a few of his posters below.
The Brain that Wouldn't Die is a pretty good flick. I'm not sure if I was just in the right mood but I really enjoyed the movie. Yes her body is under the table with a hole for her head but its still a good movie.
Its not a Reynold Brown but I do own this gem from Mondo done by Francesco Francavilla
Stephen Fishler
If/when I win the lottery I will be hassling this guy to sell his Frankenstein 6 sheet! Rarest of all movie posters! Stephen Fishler fell ass backwards into it. Jealous!
Cool little story of how the most rare movie poster was discovered.
Pacific Rim
I was lucky enough to be invited to a VES event this summer where John Knoll was speaking about Pacific Rim. He went over and "easy" shot (showed us and everyone laught at the thought of that particular shot being easy) which involved Gypsy Danger walking through the ocean. Some intense ocean sims which could not have been "easy" at all. Then he went over the hard shot. He stepped through the Hong Kong battles scen which I believe was about 20 min! After he was talking about the thirtieth different render pass he stopped saying something to the effect of "that was about half of the passes." I would love to see some of those Nuke scripts! Bad picture of the event below.
I posted some VFX breakdown and behind the scene videos below. First video is a 30+ min from FXPHD.
Eric White
One of my favorit paitners had a new gallery oppening this past weekend in LA. I really wanted to go but I the 49ers where calling me.
Eric White | All Of This Has Not Occurred | Opening November 9th from 6 - 9 PM. Going to the Mondo Mystery Movie Dec 14th so I am going t0 try ans stop by then.
Would love to own an original White one day, but for now this is what I got!
Game of Thrones Season 3 Breakdowns!
****Spoilers*****
I love Game of Thrones even though I need cliff notes when I watch.
Nuke Curve Tool
The curve tool is great for a few things. I am going to show you how to use the autocrop feature of the curve tool.
The curve tool is under the very first tab in the nodes panel in the image section. You can always hit Tab and type curves and it will come up.
What the autocrop feature does is it looks for an alpha then crops your bounding box to fit the alpha channel. This can save some time in render and just over all workflow.
Below is the same image but its alpha channel and bounding box.
I hook up the curve tool to the node I want it to analyze and under the curve type I change it to auto crop then click go!
Once it is done analyze you will get a data set under the AutoCropData tab.
Now all you have to do is add a crop node and hold command/ctl and click the animation menu from the curves animation menu to the crop animation menu.
Here is our new bounding box! Now instead of reading a 4k or 2k plate for the whole image it will only update what is in the bounding box!
Here is what my end result nodes look like.
This trick can save you a lot of time when using large images. Sometime it can also take a while to analyze so you have to figure out if the analyze wait is worth the end result.
Ballpoint Pen!
Saw these on 411posters.com. I am always amazed at what people can do with ballpoint pen! These are done by James Mylne Print goes on sale Nov 5th. Will be hard to pass up.
After trolling the internet I found a few more on Mashable
Nuke relink
I have seen a few gizmos that relink your read nodes in nuke. I prefer to use a StickyNote, that way I don't have to rely on anything being installed if I switch to a new computer.
Create a StickyNote and in the name field type filepath . In the label field type your file path to your project mine is: volumes/SSD_Video/FISK/Fruitvale. My computer is a mac so I have volumes/. If you have a windows machine this could be D:
As a work flow I usually create a couple of StickyNotes and copy and paste the text from one to the main StickyNote. So I have my home computer which the label is work/work/ and I have my work computer /SSD_video/Fisk. When Im at home I paste the work/work/ in the main StickyNote and vise versa when I go to work I paste /SSD_video/Fisk.
Now all you need to do is and some text into each read node you bring in.
In the read node add [knob filepath.label]. This path is a continuation from the StickyNote so really your path is split in half. First half on the StickyNote then the read node picks up the other half. So [knob filepath.label] is taking the place of volumes/SSD_Video/FISK/Fruitvale and files it in from the StickyNote.
Hulk, Bear!
Comic book men did one great thing this week for me. Reminded me of this great episode where the Hulk fights a bear!
Banksy Better out Than in.
Man I would have loved to have come across this stand and by some original banksy's. Guy who bought for probably just set himself up a nice retirement.
Mary Blair
I was on some of my favorite auction sites the other day looking for art when I came across Mary Blair's work. Blair worked on one of my all time favorite Disney animation movies, Alice in Wonderland.
Mary Blair was a concept artist for Disney from around the 1940's till she quit around 1953 after working on Peter Pan. She then went on to do freelance work. The simplicity of Blair's style and her use of colors seems to draw me to her work. She uses the right palette to tell the story every time. Blair's work also seems to have some sort of innocence to it while still giving the sense of great technique. Some of her work below.
I hope in the near future I can be lucky enough to own one of Blair's original concept art from Alice in Wonderland. It would be a great addition to my small art collections.
Check out this 14 min documentary about the trip that changed Blair's style and in turn Disney's
Final Destination 5 VFX
The Final Destination series are so over the top and cheesy and thats why love them. Great death scenes that are so ridiculous and gory. Seems like it would be a fun job to come up with ways to kill people for these movies.
Found this on the you tubes. Its kinda nice that there is a side-by-side but can be distracting too.