It is always interesting when you take a diversion from concentrating on “visual effects” and go see what other people are doing with graphics technology. In many ways, the SIGGRAPH conference is a yearly fix of all things interesting, but you have to stop working to get there, and residing outside of the US doesn’t make it any easier. The alternative time-sucking solution, is web surfing.
Sometimes you come across something which really gives you a jolt. The work Robert Hodgin does is clever and beautiful:
He uses Processing, an open-source programming environment for graphics and audio. See their exhibition space for more examples of what can be done. Robert Hodgin has a bit of his stuff on that page too, and great explanations of how the software was used (Birds/Flocking).
I’ve become quite interested in procedural animation of late, and have been wondering what we can do with Massive (and a bit of time) to create some visualisations. We’ve done a bit of stuff on films using Massive to create things other than crowds (like traffic, pedestrians, etc); so another logical step would be to use it with some input data to drive different aspects of it… hmmm… music clip anyone? With the right input data, I am sure you could make something quite special.
RED announced the following new cameras, which I am sure will be dissected and analysed (and changed) over the next year or so. Release in 2009:
SCARLET - 3k resolution, supposedly under $3000; 2/3 sensor; fixed lens 8x T2.8 zoom. http://www.red.com/nab/scarlet. More information here. And a off the floor video via Videomaker:
May we all see like insects: light fields and plenoptic lenses. There could well be an interesting shift in specialised photography where extracting 3D data from digital images shot with either special lenses or sensors (and with a lot of post-processing/number crunching) become useful tools for VFX practitioners.
(Full disclosure: like most people, I’ve had a lenticular […]
I was wondering when this would happen, while there have already been a few, this auction is for a “soon to ship” RED One body (the idea being you can skip the waiting list… a bit like those people that stand in line for you at Disneyland!) Check it out here. One day to go…
Kubrick — via Bagelturf — shooting in candlelight using a modified Zeiss f/0.7 lens originally intended for spy satellites. I don’t think I saw the f/0.7, but I am pretty sure the f/1 Zeiss he had modified to mount onto a Mitchell camera was at the Kubrick exhibition in the ACMI […]
