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..