Mailroom transition - just about there

Here's that same shot on the verge of completion (below). Just need a bit of fake mail to fly around in the opening segment to give it some life. A nice touch towards the end is the red Russian style poster. Using an additive blend mode, I was able to keep Jon's shadow passing across it with no matting or masking. This shot has cuts in the middle of it, but it was easiest to work it through as one complete shot to get cutup later..

Transition for the mail room

Different shot here and below is the midpoint of work on it. This shows usually what things look like after the first batch of elements are thrown together in AfterEffects. There isn't too much to smoothing this one out. In the maya generated box tunnel, I'll be adding tracking dots that AfterEffects can then use to map the 3d move and push that opening footage off to the left automatically rather than by my doing it by hand - it would be a little difficult to do with the arcing movement. Then the tunnel will get a few more boxes thrown in to make it more claustrophobic and not so regular. The lighting gets tweaked to match the environments of the two shots and the ending will get slowed down a bit so that we ease into the room instead of launch in. A nice touch is the rack focus towards the end as focus goes from the boxes to the zoetrope - it really covers the seams of where the cg meets the real footage. And there is still plenty of filtering to give the zoetrope room the proper fantasy feel.

Complete mail station

So the compositing has finished and here's the original footage:


and the result:


Some of the seam lines between the real and cg footage are still noticeable if you look closely, but not too bad. The real leap forward with matching the digital still to the live action was to incorporate a few translucent filters that covered both, thus making the cutting line less noticeable - the neon glow down into the real box wall and the yellow glow down the right corridor.

Mail station facelift

This main tube drop station is getting an interesting treatment. What started as a simple static shot is now getting a moving jib camera treatment as well as a much larger digital matte painting. The first step was to matte out everything from the live action shot that didn't have actors moving. Then cg boxes were added to the foreground with a slow sweeping forward movement:

The color of each section is a bit off as well as the focus, but those are easily fixed. Below is the matte painting that needs to get flowed in behind the live action:

Once merged and filtered it should be relatively seamless.. results soon!

More of the tube station

Here's the shot sequence I've been working with lately. It's coming together, but still a bit clunky and the mattes on the shots before and after the cgi need some touchup. Once the timing is finalized, the two tube station shots at the end will get some extra mail flying around as well as some foreground boxes to block the lighting that is seen now. The shot that comes before this is the massive digital painting of the entire tube station. This is the centerpiece of effects work for the Mailman short, so it gets a good section of attention..

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Shoot the tube!

The new render machine has finally been completely configured and is now operational. It was a pain to duplicate the file system, but this latest version of the tube drop finished in less than a half hour (as opposed to rendering overnight) making it all very worthwhile. The quality is low, but those hundreds of boxes are all photoreal as are the markings on the envelope. Still need to lay in some mail that got stuck in side crevisses and also have a few others dropping by as secondary movement, but this is coming together nicely.

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Felix sees more smoke

Here's the beginning of Mailmen with the smoke shot and a really great wipe transition that really energizes the entrance of the firemen. I had thought that the seam between shots would need artificial touchup, but at a third of a second, it wipes too quickly to notice the hard edge.

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Felix sees smoke

A nice easy effect - added smoke to the opening of the Mailman's sequence. The smoke is stock footage that originally was shot against a black background. Using an additive compositing layer, the background disappeared nicely leaving a seamless effect. A slight blurring and 150% slow motion placed it just a bit better. On to the next..

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More with Franklin's room

As a followup, here's the sequence with slight retouches and starting to get into the audio work of reverberating the newscasters's voice and establish dimension..

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Art Direction for Franklin's room

This particular shot posed a few problems as it slows the pacing of the story right in the center. Two additions here in this low quality render. A nightlight in the back (which will be slowed down) keeps movement as Franklin comes in. In addition, after he turns on the tv, what used to be a dead zone is now covered with the plate sliding off the cover of the tv. This then match cuts to the view of the tv to cement the idea of it turning on.

Leverage clocking in at 12 minutes

There's been a slight change of pace as two older projects are heading out to festivals. For those of you who follow Leverage, here is the current work-in-progress. Just need to iron out some of those music cues. (NSFW for those of you at W!) And here's the better link to blip.tv's servers to watch it.

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Effects work continues!

I'm back and hungry to move forward with more post production work. A nice new speedy computer will be assisting with all of the rendering that will be starting in the next few days. A cavalcade of new posts will be hitting the presses shortly..

Going offline for a month

Hi all,
I'm heading off to Asia tomorrow for about a month. I plan to get some good writing, design work, and release strategy work done, but sadly, there will be no visual updates on effects since I won't have access to a cg capable machine. However, on my return, I'm cleared my schedule for the rest of the year and am planning on secluding myself in a snow bound cabin in Maine until the four are complete and polished. I'm looking at trying to bring them all in by New Years. The blog will be back up to speed and brimming with goodies well before that and I'll shoot an email to everyone when I'm back and there's stuff to look at. Hope all of you are doing well!
Wes

Mail tube - next pass

Here's the second version - needs to be slowed down a bit, but it's getting there. Textures for the pipes and piles of boxes for the gaps are next.

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Mail tube - rough animation

Hi all, it's been on again off again recently as I'm taking a few trips this summer, but I'll do what I can to post new stuff including this first phase animation of Hayley's letter sliding down a series of tubes to get to Philosopher Jon's mail sorting room. It's really dark at the moment since no lights have been set up, but you'll get the idea. Updated renders to follow..

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Tube Station updated

And here's the tube station with more box geometry added in. The lighting is still temporary for placing objects, but you'll see the real footage set into the background. In a few more passes, it should merge seamlessly..

Tube station geometry

In the Mailman short, there is a long shot of Hayley entering the tube station, the mail drop area. To keep the interest over such a long shot, I'm working on expanding the architecture of the room and digitally adding the shot into the center. Then, the completed shot will have a slow dolly in forward to set the scale of the chamber. The walls start as basic blocks, then once those are set, it becomes easy to drop in piles of digital boxes around them like veneer.

First color correction of Thieves

This is the first pass at color correcting the first half of Thieves. I'll need to check this on different monitors and projected, but it's moving towards the soft glow saturated look that I've been getting with the other footage. Sound is still just temporary and may in fact be messy - there is the camera recorded sound and the dat sound waiting to be mixed properly.. but enough:

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Minor blur test

Below is a short clip of boxes flattening themselves into the wall - the box highwaymen disappearing back into the wall. The original effect (shown first) was done as a frame by frame reshifting of the boxes. I was curious to see if cross dissolving over the single frames would simulate a motion blur (the second version). There's no real difference, though the second one is a bit softer and the one that's going into production. It's a little hard to tell with such a small screen, but if you go over to blip.tv's site (http://westerray.blip.tv/) you can see it as well as all the others at twice the size!

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First color correction for Mailman hallway

Here's the first minute of "Mailman" with color correction and filtering applied. It's considerably brighter and more defined than before - it's now at the point where extra art direction can be layered in on top of the footage to give the hallway a bit more life.

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Next steps are adding in reverb to the Factory Workers dialogue to sell the idea of a cavernous space as well as add in the temp cg for Mailman's Tube Station segment.

Large factory floor finished

So here it is:

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Later on, once the rest of the short is set, I'll add footage of a small supervisor working in the observation station and that should give it just the right amount of movement. This version has better lighting that still keeps it dark and gloomy, but at least picks out the chain at the end in the top foreground that really gives it depth. Not sure how good this small version looks, but the final is at full HD quality. To take a break from the factory, I'm color timing the opening hallway scene of Mailman with Hayley and Olsen.. coming soon.

Render test of the massive factory floor

Here are the results from the overnight render. It's too dramatic of a camera move, so it'll need to get slowed down over just the last part of the pull back and there is a problem with a chain hanging in the foreground at the end on the top right side. Easy fixes - should get finalized today.

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Factory sideshot complete

Here's the final composited sideshot of Bethann and the factory behind her. There were blinking red lights and a moving foreman up in the top observation box, but they tended to draw attention from Bethann's movement and make for a distraction, so this is pared down to a simpler background. The massive factory shot that goes after this is close to finishing and a test render is going to run through the night tonight..

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First color pass at Factory Workers

Here's an edit of Factory Workers that has the first set of color corrected shots. Some of them turned out great, others are off - too red, too light, too dark, etc. And that end tv sequence feels shaky without the sound design set into place. The initial groundwork is in place and now each piece gets updated until it flows smoothly:

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More color correction

Factory Workers in its entirety is exporting overnight with color corrected shots in place - this does two things - first, and most importantly, it zeroes in on a final edit, which once done allows sound design to move forward, and second it will show if the color correction is smooth across all shots. That gets posted in the morning. For now, here's a sample of Brent in the original footage and then after the correction process:

New background for the cashier

Considering how claustrophobic Factory Workers gets especially in the second half, I went ahead and blew out the back wall of the cashier's area to show another view of the factory floor. It's not meant to draw too much attention - it's just a background reminder of the volume of space around them. And a nice glowing sign to break up the monotony of the left wall..

New post! Opening of Mailmen

Hi, Everybody! After a long stretch of moving and traveling on the East Coast, new work is ready to be posted for you to look at. First off is a short detour from the Factory Workers - this is the opening to Mailmen that is finalized and color corrected. Of note is the intro shot that utilizes a fully computer generated light that moves through the box passageway - once Felix steps in from the right is where live action kicks back in. On a minor note, a slight oval vignetting of the second shot took care of some lighting issues and focused attention in on the fire.

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Behind the Scenes photos

These will get posted to the main BoxWorld site soon, but here they are right now:


The mill before we started production.


The mill from outside.


Sweating out the details at the local Bakehouse.


Hallway set for the mugging intro of Thieves.


Tom Ford after a night of getting a refrigerator box dropped on his head.. repeatedly.


The Head Surveyor between takes.


The Surveyor's assistants rehearsing.


Mark doing construction.


It's Miller time!

Moving...

For those of you who are following the post-prod progress, there's a bit of a delay as I am currently moving out of San Diego. Most of the packing will be done by the weekend and I hope to start posting then again. It's interesting to get my hands on a bunch of physical boxes again.

Ground level factory view

Two computed generated shots finish off the opening factory workers' scene. The large scale one is already posted below. The other comes right before it and is going to go behind a greenscreened BethAnn. Here's the basic geometry with lighting. This just needs a photoshop touchup for box details then it'll get dropped behind the live action footage.

Factory Floor sideshot complete

And here's the merged shot (10 seconds long) with color timing:

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For those of you who work with digital color, you can compare this version with the photo below in the last post. The look that I'm zeroing in on is two steps. One, boosting the overall gamma on the source footage and then compressing the shadows and highlights - end result, bringing out the midtones more. Second stage is duplicating the video on top of itself, blurring it substantially and then giving it a Soft Light overlay. That's the diffuse fantasy component right there. This still needs magic bullet digital noise removal, but that can wait until the very end.

Merged cg layout for Factory Workers

Here's a snapshot of a shot with cg added around it. It's not a perfectly natural blending, there would be too much touchup work to make the cg look photoreal, but with a little bit of foreground animation, there'll be enough to look at without fixating on the background detail. The live action version of this merge is coming very shortly..

Updated Factory Workers edit

Now that the basic cg backgrounds are roughed out, it was necessary to temporarily drop them back into the rough cut of the scene. The extra detail in the new shots can throw of the timing of the sequence, if for example, a detailed background requires a little bit more time for the viewer to process visually. Here's the new cut with the three major backgrounds added in (below). As you can see, it'll take some work to color match and tweak the lighting so that all the shots feel like they're in the same location, but the major work has been done. (And the green in the super wide shot is for green screen replacement - tiny supervisors will get added into that observation area)

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Factory Floor medium shot

So, in preparation for the massive long shot that appears a couple posts below, it was necessary to start orienting the viewer to the larger geography slowly by expanding one of the earlier shots - this side view of the factory line:



The basic geometry is there - all it needs is blurring on different layers to set depth, some color matching, some scuff on the boxes and some animated tombstones coming along the line and it'll all be ready to go!

Sanitized Leverage trailer

While this is veering off the main BoxWorld thread, I've been letting some Leverage stuff come to fruition while the Factory Floor set gets its last details. A sanitized trailer was needed for a wider publicity push. Babak pointed out a technique used by radio where audio is reversed in very short segments. Personally, I think it's hilarious.. see for yourself:

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The complete Leverage now online

The full version of Leverage has gone online at blip.tv. (For those you don't know, it's the short feature that was completed before BoxWorld started shooting.) It's pretty massive (250Meg), so it's not recommended for wireless connections. It's also in a large 720x480 format for fullscreen viewing. So if you watch in the smaller window, you'll see a swimming in the fine lines as the player tries to resize the image down on the fly. I need to recompress and re-encode at a smaller dimension for a smoother viewing experience.

Here's the link to see it at blip.tv where you can switch to full screen mode: http://blip.tv/file/224405/

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Movie website: http://www.tascfilms.com

Running time: 45 minutes

A failing technology company is on the verge of bankruptcy. Two desperate programmers and a receptionist take their chances and plunge headlong into a seedy world of corporate espionage and corruption.

Leverage is a short digital feature that pushes past the usual glossy office dramas found on television and into a grittier, more unflinching reality. Shot entirely in live, working office spaces, Leverage mixes the next generation of method actors with actual employees to achieve a unique documentary-style immersion into the story.

Leverage premiered at the Golden Lion Film Festival in Swaziland, Africa in 2006. Note: Due to the large file size (the file is 250 Meg), your computer may have trouble playing the video smoothly. If you would like a higher quality version, please go to http://www.westerray.com/mainsite/contact.html to contact us for dvd availablitiy. Thanks for watching and enjoy!

Revised Factory Floor

The last post with the Factory background was okay, but this isn't Box Street or Boxtown, it's BoxWorld! There needs to be a large scope at certain turns. At the end of the opening factory scene, a full panorama is needed to set a certain geography. here's a new shot of the factory floor. Video footage will get composited to add the workers down on the line as well as supervisors up in the hanging observation tower (where the red lights are signaling the end of the shift). Also, there will be a decent amount of conveyor belt propelled boxes shifting around down there to give it some life. The digital set gets revealed is a succession of three increasing larger scope shots. That, in addition to adding echo to the actors voices in the scene will acclimitize the viewer slowly rather than hit them over the head by dropping this shot in without any preparation. How long would it have taken to assemble this set (approx. 10k boxes)

New Factory Floor Built

I have a new digital background prepared that I'm considering for use in the one wide angle greenscreen shot of the factory floor. Below is the image with the live action action composited on top. The background started as a Maya render and then moved into Photoshop to get dirtied up and some irregularites added in to make it less symmetric. The background isn't detailed enough to hold up to a careful eye, but the shot is only five seconds and animated crates moving along the ceiling should create enough movement to keep the eye engaged.

First full edit of the TV system

Below is the complete rough cut of the TV tube system that finishes the Factory Workers segment. The sound is still rough and cuts out at points. Now that the effects shots have been added in, the timing has been thrown off. And some of the effects need to be revamped (such as the slide in after the prism shot). But this will serve for now - the emphasis goes to the factory floor in the first half. Once that's ready, sound design comes next and then it'll be possible to zero in on just the right tempo for this end section.

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Image Tracking Finalized for TV Mirror Shot

And here's the final shot with all the elements composited. The entire sequence should be ready in the next day or two.

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Image Tracking for TV tubes

Well, things have shifted gears finally. Forgoing Shake for After Effects, this latest shot isn't much to look at, but means everything. There is multi-plane compositing with the foreground mirror effect laid over top of the base footage. A traveling matte (not easily seen here, but it puts the tubes in front of the green screen mirrors) and finally, automatic image tracking and stabilization - those green screen mirrors match the shot footage in scale and position all done by computer. This is really going to clean up some of the shaky dolly shots later on. And then I can't wait to run Magic Bullet across all of this to wipe out the digital artifacting in the low light (this footage doesn't have it yet).

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Factory Floor Greenscreen work

One of the extensive cg effects for Factory Workers is to drop in a background for a wide-angle background behind Bethann. Here's the original, sketched plan, then initial cg blocking. The perspective and lighting need to get fixed and then more detailed cg boxes as well as the animation of an overhead conveyor belt will get added to polish it off. (Click for a larger image)

Flash bulbs for Marv the Lifter

The shot of Marv lifting the stack of boxes just got an overhaul (see below). The background was matted out, lights with flare dropped in over top, then flash bulbs going off for the lift. The flash bulb effect isn't complete - it still needs a full screen washing out at points to solidify the illusion. There's something satisfying about seeing the bulbs really go off right when he's at the apex of the lift.

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Hitch in the 3INV feature encoding

I attempted encoding the full 74 minutes of Three Investigators into the Flash video format for posting to blip.tv. While successful to a degree, the square versus CCIR-601 horizontal pixel mismatched shapes "gotcha" hit again. If you notice, the BoxWorld preview is squished slightly due to pixel standards between DV footage and web delivery being different.

Of interest is that the 74 minutes compressed to 500 Meg as a Flash video, but the quality, even at highest settings is unacceptable. I'm going to try again with the 3INV and Leverage trailers using MPEG4 or H.264.

Initial Rough cuts posted

These aren't the most up-to-date edits, but they're in the ballpark in terms of story structure. No cg placeholders are set in these. Thieves especially needs an animatic dropped in to make sense of the ending when they spring the trap.

Thieves:

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Mailman:

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Factory Workers:

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Surveyors:

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TV tubes - test cg

Here's a work in progress on the Factory Workers TV tube effect:

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It turns out that FCP doesn't handle zoom compositing all that well. The long zoom on the triad of images has a tendency to float. Shake should solve that. The second effect after he falls asleep is incomplete - need to match cut onto the mirror clicking into place for the lifter..

Preview online

The BoxWorld preview is now online:

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This was rather hastily assembled with the existing footage and very little of the effects work was included - all of the fx shots are in various stages of completion. So a more polished version is in the works down the road..