SixSibs

Some of the best VFX are the simple ones, the ones that trick your brain because it has never seen something like it in the “real world” before, so your brain interprets what it sees on-screen as something way more complex than what actually is going on. This trick is like that.

All we did was reverse the footage we shot, but it works quite effectively.

The only giveaway to this trick are the reversed sounds, which are opposite of real life- they fade up to a sharp ending rather than having a sharp beginning that fades out to nothingness. You could probably spend several hours flipping the sounds and matching them back to the movements they came from, but that would destroy some of the fun and usefulness of this quick-and-dirty effect.

I recently went to see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” in HFR 3D. It was very enjoyable, but not so much so that I would never watch a movie in anything but HFR 3D. (If I did say that, I’d be out of luck- “The Hobbit” is the only HFR 3D movie out there!)

Some people (especially film critics) didn’t like HFR, but that doesn’t mean that HFR is DOA. When sound movies came out some people didn’t like them. When color movies came out some people didn’t like them either.
I don’t really know of any movie that really benefits greatly from color, or even sound for that matter. Color and sound are just things that make movies more enjoyable to watch.

You might argue and say that sound is essential. It isn’t. Directors for  the first 30+ years got along fine without it, and didn’t think they were missing out on anything. The style of film now requires it, but that’s because people have exploited the benefits of sound. The same goes for color. It’s great to have- I don’t think “The Avengers” in B&W would have the same “coolness factor”- but it’s not essential.

“The Hobbit” is the first movie ever shot in HFR 3D, so I have no idea how HFR 3D as a film technique will eventually pan out. I personally thought that some HFR shots made parts of “The Hobbit” worse, since it made lighting errors more obvious, but the first movies in color weren’t that great either, so it’s hard to tell where 3D will go.  It’s either going to be a fad, or it’ll eventually be just like sound and color- normal.

You don’t here of anyone saying their movie is “in technicolor” anymore because its understood that all movies released today will be color. We’ll know that 3D is here to stay when its no longer advertised and hyped as “3D!”.

I said I’d post a tutorial on this, and I have!

Enjoy! Rachel and I filmed this video almost a month ago, and I just forgot to make it public.

One of the opening shots of our Star Wars movie will be a shot of Coruscant at night. I’ve been working on building it for quite a while, and have scrapped several versions of it, but I think I’ve finally gotten onto something.

The big black things in the picture are untextured buildings, and the smaller, textured ones were automatically made by the Suicidator City Generator plug-in for Blender. It’s not done, but it’s getting there!

Here’s a textured render of the droid that I posted about last week. It’s still not complete, but it’s getting there!

I just started working on a model for the Droid overseer this morning. It’s still pretty rough, and it isn’t textured, but I’ll keep working on it in the days to come. The proportions will stay roughly the same, but I’m going to do a lot more work on the head, which is’t that great looking at the moment, so it’ll look more like a Star Wars droid than a robot that came out of some 1930′s sci-fi movie. Stay tuned for more updates!

As all of those who have read our blog for a while know, we like cheese. This will be our second movie totally dedicated to it, and here’s how it started: We were sitting around with nothing to do this morning, and Rachel suggested that we make a short movie. I agreed, Rachel wrote a script, and we filmed it. The chroma-keying of the last shot was somewhat crazy, as all of the people that were in it were either wearing green or blue. That meant I had to switch my set-up around a few times, but it all worked out in the end. I hope it didn’t look too cheesy!

Hello everybody! The pre-production of our Star Wars movie is almost done, and I thought I’d show you some test renders of the models that I’ve made to use in this movie. They are all pretty basic, and need a good chunk of work, but I hope that you get a feel of the great (?) things that are to come!

I have been working on a Star Wars movie for about a month now, and have had the script finished for about 2 weeks. Now I am just working on making the many CG models that this movie will require, and recruiting actors, as this film will require more actors than are in our family. We probably won’t start doing any actual filming until the play is over, but stay tuned for more updates!

(P.S. I said in the title of this post that a movie was coming “soon”. That might not be quite true, but a movie is coming. Whether it goes public sooner or later remains to be seen!)

I’ve kicked around the idea of making tutorials for quite a while, and I finally decided that I should start making some. I decided to make my first one pretty simple, so I made one on how to create a static tv effect. I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll probably be making more soon!

Isaac, Paul and I did some filming a few weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time in between then and now editing and adding effects to the clips that we filmed. The effects weren’t any more extensive than in the Lightsaber movie we made last year, but it was, in ways, harder to do, since Isaac jumped around a lot more than John and I did, and made it a lot more challenging to rotoscope the lightsaber without making it look as if Isaac was being cut in half by his “lightsaber”. I think that it turned out well, and I hope that you enjoy watching it!

Here’s a totally un-staged picture of Paul:

And here’s the same picture with a little bit of editing: =)

Have no fear! Paul is here!

This is the second movie I’ve done that includes stop-motion animation, and also the second movie I’ve done entirely by myself. It was a challenge to try to film myself, but it was more along the lines of a good challenge than a bad one, if you know what I mean. I think it turned out a little better than Army Men, my first attempt at stop-motion, did, and I hope you enjoy this little project as much as I enjoyed making it!