Posts
Happy holidays, everyone! For all you broke filmmakers, writers, artists, and other people with more heart than money, here's a free way to spread good cheer to charities and start the new year right. CauseWorld is an iphone app where you direct sponsors like Citi and Kraft to donate money to the charity of your choice just by walking into a store. Here's a story on it. Pretty sweet, huh?
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Here are some sketches from last week completed whilst watching one son blow straw bubbles in his hot cocoa and the other son dancing to The Cure in his Hulk costume.
Check out the story of the guy who made a YouTube video for $300 and landed a $30M deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures. He put up the video on a Thursday and by Monday, he had a bidding war going for him. Pretty cool.
Here's the video:
1) He bought premade 3D models of a robot and a spaceship. You can buy this stuff for pretty cheap over various 3D model sources on the Internet. Actually, you can get a lot of this stuff for free--it just depends on whether you find the model that works for you. He then duplicated and animated them in a 3D program like Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, Lightwave, etc. If he's a desktop creator, he may have used a program like Adobe After Effects to combine the live video with the CGI. It may have cost him $300 to make the movie, but there's a good chance that he needed about $10k worth of gear to bring it all together. That's assuming it's all done on the cheap with a desktop or three (the render time has to be horrendous for something like this--he would need to work in parallel).
2) He bought a collection of premade explosions. This stuff can be cheap or expensive, depending on where you get it. The explosion that impressed me the most is the domed building. Either he bought one premade (you can sometimes buy a 3D model that comes premade with an animation of it exploding), or he had to make the model of the building (which you can do with the 3D programs listed above), then create an animation of it exploding. If those buildings are not actual models of the buildings in Montevideo, then I'm less impressed. But I'll bet it is.
That animation looks professional. What strikes me as odd is that the green screen of the kid with the robots behind him is not perfect, which tells me that maybe he doesn't do that kind of VFX for a living. But the 3D stuff was great. Getting that kind of smooth motion and explosion action takes some practice...unless he bought it premade. But $300 is not a lot, even in Uruguay, so I'm guessing he had to make at least some of that himself. Very nice work.
3) If he was using After Effects or some such program, he can duplicate actors into a crowd, or maybe he managed to get a lot of people to act for free with no food (feeding a crowd that size would eat his whole budget up in no time). He can also create fog.
The water splashing, and the dust puffing when the robots stamp their feet are nice touches, and probably not easy to do. The camera work is great too because it not only increases the tension, it doesn't let you look too closely at the CGI, which is very important for suspension of disbelief. He got a lot of things right beyond the technical stuff.
Overall, it's great, and he obviously put in a lot of work. Kudos to him. What's strange to me, though, is that so many studios would come to him and offer up so much money over a cool video that had...um...no story. Maybe 2012 did so well (biggest box office hit in the history of both India and China) that they figured stories are overrated (and so darn hard to get right!) so long as you have engaging destruction. Well, they may be right, up to a point.
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Random stuff. Watch in order. This is the original remastered version:
I’m getting paranoid importing from YouTube because of the tags they introduce, and tags might be one of the reasons it takes me hours to get a compose screen on Vox. However, this one came up on demand, which is a relief.
I showed this to my neighbourhood yesterday, but as the YouTube one is public, I have no problems sharing it more widely. It was my TV appearance last month on CTV, with Angela and Megan on Good Living. This was not networked, but it was very fun to do. The set reminded me a bit of the Good Morning one at Avalon, except I got one thing that I was promised but never got: a subtitle with both my and Lucire’s names.
Ah, remember the days when Chrysler rested on the words of another Italian guy, Chairman Lee?
Now it has gone all arty. Under Fiat control, it is adapting some commercials from the Italian company. Here’s one that’s being used by its Lancia brand:
Homer replies, puzzled, ‘I … don’t … know!’
We have a Chrysler 300 looking very dated in this commercial, even if I agree with the sentiment. I am not convinced it’ll hold Americans’ attention that this is a new Chrysler and a new beginning.
I realize Chrysler needs to shift product now before new products arrive, and the quality, apparently, has been improved since the Daimler and Cerberus days. That message, which is pretty important to buyers, doesn’t come across that strongly.
The aligning of Chrysler to Lancia is not a bad idea. About ten years ago, I wrote that Ford should reconceive Mercury as a sort of American Lancia, so it seems Fiat has a similar idea. It’s just that commercials need not be clones when American consumers have different tastes from European ones.
Still, does this mean that some day we will see the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, sell Chryslers?
Vox bug note: the compose window still took a quarter-hour to open. The editing window took one hour.
Whoa, doggies. So much snow here in Flagstaff. 26" last count. That means loads of shoveling and lots of toasty beverages.
I am considering entering the Mail Me Art competition (http://mailmeart.com/going-postal/submit-mail-art/), so I've been dabbling again in (EEK) acrylics. Been a long time since I've tried that medium. What's interesting is that my hand is applying watercolor techniques with acrylics... and I'm digging it. We'll see what happens. It's all school to me - all the foibles and weird experiments are so much fun, and since I can't be in college right now - THIS is my college. Or, maybe this is my built-in excuse for making a lot of tragic painting mistakes, the ones that I can't even stand to look at. Haha.
~C
Here I am. House smells of stir fry and so do my clothes. I'm jonesing for some rice tea. I've had a crazy fixation on hot sauce lately and consumed one two bottles of Tamazula this week all by myself. Not sure why. My little boy was super wild today and I'm not sure why that is either. I'm about to start a sci-fi book called The Child Garden. I hear my little town will be covered in a couple feet of snow tomorrow. Wheeeee! There's a good chance I will be sledding on Tuesday. I wish for more time than I have. I don't hardly ever wish a day will go by fast. Not even the bad ones. Well, maybe the really bad ones.
I've had a lot of characters flitting about upstairs in my mind. Here are just a few.
The one above is for Illustration Friday's topic: Crunchy. Funny, huh?
I just watched The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner, again this week. Saw it when I was a teenager. Still one of the most wonderful films and utterly quotable! IF per chance you've never seen it... then add it to your Netflix cue or whatever. You'll love it. You can even see it with the kiddies.
There’s still no rhyme or reason on when Vox allows me to access my blog here. This morning, I got in a private post, but clicking ‘Create’ again, nothing happened for the next hour.
I wanted to share this opening title from Bullitt, after posting another one from Pablo Ferro on my Tumblr blog. This remains my favourite Ferro design. Though set in Chicago, only the skyline scene was shot there; the rest was in San Francisco.
I see ’68 as a positive year for a lot of design there, while ’69 began to look garish, particularly in fashion and hairstyles.
There's no way around it, for me.
If I'm going to write a scene that contains an argument, I have to literally be both Jeckyll and Hyde. And sometimes, that takes a long time.
And God, is it ever exhausting.
Last night, already feeling somewhat emotionally compromised from the events of my day, I sat down to write. ('Cuz I'm masochistic like that, 'yo.) I've become rather fond of using StoryMill software, which is simply a neat n' tidy file cabinet and thought organizer for scatterbrained wanna be authors. Like me.
I clicked on the little tab that contains all my "to-do" notes for my novel, and there it was, clear and emotionless:
This is a reality scene for us underdogs, everywhere.
Are you the nice person in your office, your school, your family? You know, the doormat? The one that works, slaves, pours out passion, only to be undervalued, misunderstood, or seen as the dutiful, well-oiled cog that you are?
Then buy my novel when it's published. You'll relate to every page.
But that's beside the point.
The point, dear Polly Purebreds, is that the Dali Lama is so right: The most natural state of the human being is happiness.
Argumentativeness is hard. Really hard. It burns like way too many calories. Negativity, like erosion, takes years to develop, but once you've realized what peacefulness is really like, you're amazed at how twangy and tense those shoulder muscles have been all this time.
I was channeling Lydia and Jacqueline last night in a wild do-si-do that wiped my already emotional mind into a sopping gravy of a mess. Maybe that's because I was also thinking of what it might be like to be a participant in a cat-fight, and wow. No thanks. I'll keep my extra y chromasome, thank you, and all that it packs with it.
I would have one antagonist fire a passive-aggressive volley, only to have to readjust my chi to have the other dodge, parry, adjust, and refire, only after carefully posturing herself for maximum impact.
Truly, I'm a lovable little fuzzball. I have been my whole life. My industry doesn't cater to us dust bunnies. Too much time in the political crucible will start to take all those soft edges and rough 'em up somethin' terrible. I know this from decades of experience.
And now, I've decided to write about it, no...I've decided to be that on the page, through various voices.
What am I, nuts?
But the dialogue must go on...
