Makin' the Wiz (Page 1 of 2)

Yes sir, I did. CG and comps.

<edit> Actually not on that still, though.

Last edited by drewjmore (2012-08-18 23:22:02)

Cool, you have any specific shots from the trailer you worked on? (Although I can't imagine the crew was huge for this kind of production?)

On the first clip I just modeled, textured, rigged, and animated the Tin Woodman, contributed a few small bits to the environment. On the second clip I modeled, textured, and rendered the environment, and did the compositing (with a matchmove assist from Mr. drewjmore). As far as not effects work, I also directed and edited both of them. Your assumptions about crew size are totally spot on. 

Tell me about the shakycam. SynthEyes about killed me with all that.

Driving the bus are at least three obsessive mofos spread out over the eastern US, plus everyone they can rope into spending their weekends shooting, sewing, carpentering or vfx...er...ing.

...and it's a garage.

A. Awesome, see the work, etc..

B. I'll bite. What the fuck am I looking at with this. Who's she, what's going on, why. Huh?

But, little girl? Doesn't seem to be an actress? Who... what... *Calvin squinchy confused face*

First, thanks for the nice words. Always room for those.

Weirdly, Dorothy is actually ADR'd, and we recorded her audio and the Scarecrow's audio in the same location with the same microphone. I'm not sure what would lead to the effect you described, I've unfortunately had to do the sound work myself thus far and I'm afraid it's not something I have much talent for.

Alright...so since this is DiF...and you did ask for it. My initial thoughts were not all positive, although only you will be able to determine whether it was a director thing or a you guys thing.

-So the first shot just completely threw me off the scent of logic for a second. The camera is bizarrely shaky, but every element sort of moves at a different rate and shake than every other element, so the entire scene feels like it's floating and warping while underwater (And then it doesn't stop doing that for the entire scene...except when it does for some unknown reason)
-The scarecrow puppet is highly un-cohesive in it's movement from shot to shot. In the first and second shot he's pretty much moving like a normal dude, you could almost mistake him for a guy in a costume. But then in the third shot he completely defies any laws of gravity and basically turns into Christmas at Whoville. And it jumps back and and forth between those two for the rest of his time onscreen
-And then suddenly the whole shacky/floaty/background wobbling thing stops and it's pure lockoff....gah...bah...wha? Okay?

-I don't know the shot number but it's the one looking through tinmans arm at scarecrow. The entire FG (Tinman is vibrating and shaking around super hardcore, while scarecrow is just kinda chilling there. It's INCREDIBLY distracting)
-Zarban already mentioned scarecrows voice, but his didn't throw me off nearly as much as Tinman's did. First time watching it I was all "Yes god?" when he first spoke.
-Again with the shaky cam, but when we are looking up at Tinman, the shking gets so bad that he basically disappears out of the bottom of the frame for a bit, and then decides to come back. Extremely distracting, especially in a closeup.
-And then there's just a lot of really weird editorial choices, like all of a sudden we're watching scarecrow and Tinman from up in the tree... and then back to a closeup. It's all over the place.
-But on the positive, the oil can sequence is pretty good (Aside from the very CG-ness of it all, but such is the way for these projects, so I can't fault you there)

-Thank fully by the time we get to the Witch scene the cameras redbull has worn off and we get some really nice angles and general direction.
-The witches makeup is actually really nicely done, so good job to whoever did that

So in closing, I really hope more of the movie is like the witch scene and less like the Tinman scene. I may just vomit in the aisles from seasickness if the whole movie is like the first scene.

I get that it's super low budget and doing extreme stylisation can work to make the most of it...but this was missing a lot of somethings to get it to that point.

Cheers,
-a slightly blunt but honest BDA.

EDIT:

In my defence his exact words were:

It's not hard to imagine one could be asking "Who is that girl (in the movie)" and "What's going on (in the movie)" Not a word about the actress or general reason for the movies existence.

Jus sayin.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2012-08-20 18:00:49)

Ugh, yeah, I know the joy of tracking footage without trackers, tons of fun. But the thing that irked me so much about the first little sequence of shots (Well all of them really, but the lock-offs don't count...so yeah...), is that just based on the Live action footage I can see of Alice, there isn't a lot of movement going on with the camera, and everything else in frame is fake (I'm assuming the puppet was comped in later yes? And wasn't an on-set thing?), so I'm wondering why you didn't just say screw the exact track, take what it gave you, strip out the up and down information, smooth out the rest of it, and just hand animate the rest. The most dramatic move I saw in that first little bit (With Alice in it) was a tiny bit of a dolly back and then a pan to the left. Or if you really wanted to strip it down, just take the Alice footage, stabilize it to get rid of the shake, and then just hand animate the camera to Alice for all the CG stuff.

It seems relatively simple enough looking at it from this end, but obviously I don't have the actual footage, so there might have been other limiting factors. But that's why I'm so confused as to why you stuck with the SUPERSHAKICAM9000. Was it a director thing, did he like the supershakicam9000 (I'm sticking with this, just roll with it) or was it something else on a technical level at the back end?

Oh... and I just noticed. There's one shot (Around the 1:26 mark) of just the scarecrow and the tinman, but it still has SUPERSHAKICAM9000 applied. Was that to try and tie it together? Because the scarecrow isn't actually moving with the camera, the tinman and the background are just sort of floating around in the background for some reason. And that's probably the best example of what I was talking about where all the different elements seem to be living in their own little world.

EDIT: I think my entire post can be summed up nicely by our favorite little engineer: "You confound me some is all."

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2012-08-20 19:36:44)

*Tilts hat* I do what I can.

Alright so.... I can understand what you're saying, I might not agree with it, but I can understand it. What I mean by that is, personally I wouldn't be focusing so hard on retaining that in camera data (For the movement), but more on trying to unify the scene as a whole. And there's definitly a lot of tricks you could do if you had the time (Which, I mean yeah, that always bites us in the ass). Looking at it again, I think a lot of my problems with the shackicam come in the close-ups, and those first couple wide shots. I don't know about anyone else, but I can really feel the tracking noise in the camera motion, instead of just feeling the camera motion. There's a certain mechanical jerkiness to it that is really distracting, also it's really high frequency so it adds a lot of unnecassary motion to it. (For example, compare the shot at :19, with the one at 1:06, with the one at  1:25. The first has a nice smooth motion to it, that still feels handheld with out the really shaky effect (Probably closer to a steadicam shot). The second one is more of an extreme example but it stills feels like handheld. While the third has a TON of unnessacary motion underneath the handheld feel that proves to be quite distracting.) I really think that if you can manage too (And if your scenes are set up for it), just run a blur over your tracking data for the really bad ones. It should clear most of that up. Or maybe just go in and add just a little bit of float to your lock offs, it would sync them together with the rest of the scene a bit better, instead of just a jarring extreme steadicam to lock off cut. IDK, I might be alone on this but having it be so varied from shot to shot really pulls me out of the scene and kinda forces you to think about the technical aspects of what's happening instead of the story.

But I get it, I mean I really do. If you can't go back into it, at least you can keep it in mind for next time

As for the voice, it's not so much the deep voice or the echo (I actually did catch on to the whole ringing in the tin suit idea.) But it's actually the same issue Teague has with Bane in TDKR oddly enough, the rest of the scene feels like a bunch of people talking in a field, and then there's this one guy sitting right in your ear (Hence the Hello God). There's no directionality to it, no sense of where it's actually coming from, and considering he doesn't move...at all..for the bit where we meet him, that just adds to the confusion, it takes a couple seconds to reorient yourself. I think if you just pushed him a little further back and down in the mix it would solve most of it.

But again, if you don't have time, you don't have time.

Heh, that's fair enough, I mean hell, that's half the reason most of do this. It's not really that bad, there's just a couple of edits that felt a little off to my filmmaking brain, but I'm sure 90 percent of that can be pegged on style differences between us.

Sheeeet son. Congratz.