Three Movie Posters

Playing catch-up; we did these ages since. Fairly cheap Photoshop jobs, but hey ho. They’re like the Total Recall and Commando ones. The ones we didn’t put up here, apparently. Hrm.

 

A-ha! Iron Man, in Irn-Bru colours. Hilarious. Done quite lazily and imperfectly – forget how, probably wand selection by colour, and don’t know if it was fannying about with the hue or using colour layers. Whatever. The logo was a piece of piss too, just removing an O and adding the hyphen, but hey, nice hyphen, right?

A-ha! Instead of the pic of Ceasar’s head, it’s the Monkey thing from off of those adverts and that. Very cheap, but quite nicely done, just cropping out the Monkey head and fannying about with some image adjustments, darkening or ‘burning’ some of it, and that’s it. Changed the tagline from ‘Evolution Becomes Revolution’, too, for some reason.

Ah, now this one, though, inordinately proud. Good joke! It’s the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy poster, but with Tinker the character off of Lovejoy! Golden. And done pretty fucking well, if we do say so. Go and have a look at the proper poster with Gary Oldman’s face, then look at this. It’s nicely done, innit?

Found best picture I could of Tinker, did a bit of cheap contrast and darkening stuff to make it stand out a bit better. Created a page full of numbers, with some Lovejoy words hidden in there (the actual posters do something like that – ATTENTION TO DETAIL.) Some sort of filter (can you tell we’ve forgotten the specifics) to pull out only the Tinker colours. Um, and a background gradient, with the same numbers, cut out and in opposite. And, cut out some of the bits in blocks so it sort of breaks up at the bottom.

Should have replaced Gary Oldman’s name, on reflection. Hey ho.

Moby – Be The One

So, this’ns a competition entry, for a Vimeo/BUG/Moby/Saatchi&Saatchi(erk) competition called ‘Hello, future.’  Wonder how it’ll do.

Cinema 4D, again.  MoGraph dynamics, again.  Some text, again.  Global Illumination again.

Was done in a few discrete bits, because my computer couldn’t handle it all together (starts struggling at the end of the first bit.)

Bit one – camera moves up, text dynamics switch on, a fracture object falls and lands on the one below it, light moving around is only acting on one section of text, but GI reflected light gives a nice gradient on the other stuff.

Bit two – static sections of text appearing, a light source each, then one for the lot.  (All light sources infinite.)

Bit three – dynamics being switched on again.  Global setting changed to make the gravity negative.  Else, same as bit one.

Bit four – a light source acting on everything, with a visible floor and, for the first time, sky.  Sky and light raised together at the beginning.  Text (as always, extend NURBS, these not in fracture objects) rising up.  At the end, light and sky falling together, and the final bit of text with its own light.

Camera just doing keyframed movements, and as with the lights, some points set linear some spline.  Bit of a cock-up between bits two and three meant they didn’t line up, so I rejigged the points there so they did.

Assembled the different exports (it took days to render in total) in FCP.  The only FCP noodling I did was a keyframed blur filter on the beginning and end of bit four (and ended up cutting short the very end of bit four.)

And hey, finally found out that to get FCP to allow you to play footage on the timeline without needing a render, you just have to set it to the same res and have SQUARE PIXELS.  Only taken years and years and years to stumble across that, but hey ho, here we are, and it’s good to know.

The final export I stuck slavishly to Vimeo’s recommended compression, H.264 and all, and HD, and it looks like compressed shit.  And took an hour to export, madly.  But hey, it got up there in time for the deadline, which is something.

Wonderful Things – Wonderful Things

Ooh, look, an embedded Vimeo vid!  Yep, we put this on there, because for once we don’t have to worry about any tedious copyright infringement stuff.

So, music made in NanoStudio.  Pretty simple – using three tracks, different loop on each, all using just the basic undefined synth for 8-bit sounding funtimes.

Forget what kicked off this idea (other than procrastination, obv.)  After Smashcube, did some more playing about with glass cubes and physics.  Lead to the idea of loads of them falling, from an emitter.  And then natch, that lead to the idea of pulling back to reveal the cubes being spat out of a massive Japanesey cute…  thing.

And then we’re here, all in white.  Cube’s just a cube.  The monster thing is a very simple edited sphere, given a bit of depth and then hyperNURBed, and arms and feet and eyes stuck on.  Texture applied to the body just to paint the interior black.

Two light sources, one blue, one pink.  Don’t show as specular, and a non-light-casting white for the specular in the eyes.  Artificial, but looks nicer.

We were thinking of using the white infinite light, but wasn’t necessary.  We have a white floor and sky, Global Illumination, and a white environment with fog.

Emitter inside the mouth for the particles, and MoGraph tags on the particle source, which seems to do just what we wanted.  Only problem was it seems pretty much impossible (on a little bit of trying) to bake the particles, because you’ve got a particle emitter emitting MoGraph instances…  Couldn’t find a way to do it that didn’t switch off the particles or fuck the physics, but then we’re no experts.

Not sure we didn’t fuck the physics slightly, as inititally don’t think there were any rebounds, whereas now you can see a few going back into the mouth.  We put a MoGraph tag on the body to make sure no cubes were flying through the body, and rebounds are better than that, but we thought we’d tested it and sorted the emitter’s spread so it avoided the edges enough.  But maybe the cubes are colliding as soon as they’re generated, and rebounding, and so being a bit unpredictable and uncontrollable.  Anyway, it’s fine.

Did fancy it showing a continuous build up of cubes, but this proved too intensive.  To get a decent number falling and to look good coming out of the mouth, it’s at something like 100 per second.  Those soon add up and grind render times to a halt if it’s preparing collisions of hundreds of objects.  So instead we’re just in each shot showing the same period of time (give or take, as the shots are prepared all the same length from Cinema 4D, but then cut down and edited in Final Cut Pro.)

And the motion of the colliding cubes was bloody fast on normal settings – they would whizz past at ludicrous speed.  It just looked a bit crap.  The bounceyness was taken (we think) just the same settings as we’d found worked nicely in the glass smashing vids, perhaps with less friction on the floor.  But noodling around with various settings didn’t help slow things down, it always looked really fast and therefore small and inconsequential – we wanted it to be like these cubes are big and smashing down on the ground, falling from a huge height.  Solution we used was to arrange the stage at 25FPS, but render it all at 100FPS.

Not sure we fully achieved the sense of size we were going for – in some shots better than others.  As well as the fog environment, we also used for the first time depth of field – same setting on every camera, to just give focused foreground going into a blurry background.  Does some nice things when you have objects like the cubes falling from the background into focus.  And in a bunch of shots kept the camera low, sort of half way up a cube’s height, looking up.

Edited in FCP, early on thinking of doing long shots to coincide with the first music loop, then shorter shots for the more complex instrumentation (i.e. two loops) and slowing again when the third loop comes in…  But we found ourselves not wanting to cut down, or intercut, these nice long tracking shots we’d prepared.  So stuck to the full 4 bar length until the end, where we go a bit clip-show and recap a few shots.  There’s not much of a shift in action, but starting with just the cubes, then revealing the source, then static shots for the change in the music, then recapping shots when the music recaps…  It’s only that recapping that is the especially lazy bit.

So, we first did a bunch of angles and camera movements.  Exported quick hardware renders.  Did a quick edit.  Then exported 640×360 full renders, which took 5+ hours for most because of the GI and shadows and everything.  Then subbed those in to FCP, and then worked out what other few sorts of angles and movements we needed, then prepared and rendered those.

All in all – with the mad render times, leaving the computer rendering when we went out and stuff to get them done – it took a week.  Or just over.  Started previous weekend, made everything and set it up.  The week was rendering.  Then last weekend finishing up.

But all in all, pretty good, right?  Feels like a proper thing, doesn’t it?  We think so.

Smashcube

It’s a cube.  That smashes.

Not vastly dissimilar to Exploding With Light, it’s…  Well, it’s the same thing, innit.  But with a cube.  ‘Edited’ within Cinema 4D this time – the complete cube becoming invisible and the fracture cube becoming visible the frame after, then exploding.

Nowt more exciting than that.  Took a whole fucking day to render this, at 640×480.  But, you know, it does look rather swish.

Given the right bit of music, we reckon this could be used quite nicely, with the smashed bits being swept away, or the surface turning so they fall away, and…  Dunno, some other things smashing.  It’s simple, but it looks pretty swish, right?  Yeah, it does.

Tony Huxtable’s Sunday Setlist

http://tonyhuxtable.wordpress.com/

More ways to waste our lives.  Adding to the empire of nothing, it’s a simple ‘blog’ of Spotify playlists, for your listening pleasure.  Or displeasure, whatever.