« April 2010 | Main | June 2010 »
May 28, 2010
Eclipse: Event TV Spot
More of our wolves in this one... and one of my shots found it's way in it, shot of Seth wolf jumping at camera from a snow bank, if you blink, you'll miss it :) For the record, there are 2 shots in there of wolves chasing curly red Victoria, those are NOT our wolves, but all the rest are.
Watch it all in fancy HD/720 right here though!
Posted by dschnee at 8:58 AM
May 27, 2010
Tippett Studio Panel @ Ex'pression College
Looking forward to this event next week, should be fun.
Ex'pert Series, June 3, 2010
Animation & Visual Effects - Tippett Studio Panel
Discussion covering work for the Twilight Series
Thursday, June 3rd @ Ex'pression College
4:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
East End Lecture area
Kent Schoberle | Character Set-up
Kent Schoberle is currently a Character Set-up Artist at Tippett Studio. He graduated from Ex'pression College in October 2006 and landed a job as Production Assistant at San Francisco based The Orphanage. There he spent months carefully mastering the art of sandwich ordering and balancing trays of coffee in his rickety jeep wrangler. After his stint as Production Assistant, he was given the opportunity to begin rigging on the film Ironman. Two years later he accepted a job at Tippett Studio and began learning the work flow of an advanced character studio and has completed Character set-up tasks on Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. When he's not building rigs and wrangling animator requests, he can be found volunteering at farms, foraging for wild mushrooms, and raising backyard chickens.
Randy Link | Lead Animator
Randy Link started working in 1991 at Olive Jar Studios doing mainly stop motion clay animation. He moved to San Francisco in 1993 and got a job working for Danger Studios doing stop motion animation for Bump in the Night, a Saturday morning TV show. In 1996, Randy made the leap to feature film animating using the award-winning Digital Input Device for Starship Troopers at Tippett Studio. He spent five more years at Tippett animating on films like Virus, My Favorite Martian, Komodo, and Blade 2. He proceeded to Los Angeles to work on Matrix Revolutions and Cursed at Sony Imageworks and then went to Weta in 2005 to work on Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong. Randy has now returned to Tippett and recently completed animation on The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Eclipse.
Howard Campbell | Lighting Supervisor
Howard Campbell first began working with computers at his Uncle's computer shop in the early 80s. After college in the mid 90s, he became a system's engineer for a large computer consulting company. In 2000, Howard left the IT industry to attend Ex'pression College and pursue a career in visual effects. He joined Tippett Studio in 2003 to work on Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation as a Lighting TD. Now he has credits on fourteen features with some of the more recent films including Cloverfield, The Golden Compass, The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Eclipse.
David Schnee | Compositing Supervisor
David Schnee graduated from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2002. While at school, he specialized in compositing and effects animation, working in Combustion, After Effects, and Houdini. Four months after graduation, he was hired by Tippett Studio to become part of a guerrilla style team consisting of many young artists hired right out of school to work on Phil Tippett's Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation - the super low budget sequel to the original cult hit. Thrown into the fire of a production environment, he quickly learned to composite using Shake. His feature credits now include Constantine, King Kong, Cloverfield, Drag Me To Hell, and most recently with The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Eclipse.
Presented by Ex'pression College ICS
Ex'pression College for Digital Arts
Posted by dschnee at 6:32 PM
May 21, 2010
Hollywood's VFX Shops: Trouble in Boom Times
Wait, they said "Hollywood's VFX Shops" so were OK right? :(
A few paragraphs from the recent article from Time by Rebecca Keegan, you can read the full article here.
If you want to see the names driving Hollywood's growth, you have to stay for the movie's credits. The very end of the credits. After the actors and electricians — sometimes even after the people who serve the tacos on set — come the visual-effects artists. These are the people who make superheroes fly and cities fall into the ocean, and the effects-reliant films they work on, like Avatar and the Harry Potter franchise, are Hollywood's biggest moneymakers.
Their place in the credits says something about visual effects (VFX) artists' place in the Hollywood pecking order. Ironically, just as they are peaking in creativity and propelling box-office hits, VFX companies are facing a crisis years in the making. Thanks to fierce global competition, the hangover from Hollywood labor unrest and a lack of negotiating power with studios, many VFX firms are closing up shop or outsourcing to stay afloat.
The VFX business should be thriving. Nine of the 10 highest-grossing movies worldwide in 2009 relied heavily on special effects, making the industry more central to Hollywood's business model than movie stars are. As much as a third of the budget of the $200 million — to — $300 million movies that are the foundation of Hollywood studios' earnings are devoted to special effects. "It's no longer about Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise," says Ross. "It's about flooding New York or creating blue people."
But in the past 15 months, companies including Disney's ImageMovers Digital in Novato, Calif.; C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures in Toronto; and the Orphanage in San Francisco have shuttered. "It's pretty much an open secret in the business that you do feature-film visual effects for prestige — to get a great reel, to keep your artists happy — but they don't make money," says David Cohen, an associate features editor at Variety who covers the VFX industry. "If you're lucky, you break even on them. If you're not lucky, you're out of business."
Again, I encourage you to read the complete spread in Hollywood's VFX Shops: Trouble in Boom Times over at Time.com
Posted by dschnee at 5:07 PM
May 18, 2010
Priest
Started work on Scott Stewart's Priest today... Scott who? Who get's to comp some creepy vampires of a different sort? Substitute sparkly rocky bits for bloody gory drips and that's my new work day, gottah love that action.
Posted by dschnee at 10:31 AM
May 13, 2010
King Kong ship meets watery grave...
I found this article about the sinking of The Venture II from King Kong, I had a few shots that took place on this boat in the film so it brought back some memories (It's been almost 5 years now!?!) along with this photo we took on it with most of the comp team on Kong. I count 59 of us there, we ended up with around 100 of us by the end... it was a little crazy town :) (Cheers to Mark & Colin for hooking me back up with this photo)
The Venture II, aka Manuia, which was used for Sir Peter Jackson's King Kong film, was scuppered in Cook Strait on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010. This video, shot by Marco Zeeman, shows the listing ship taking on water and sinking.
The boat that featured in Peter Jackson's blockbuster film King Kong has been sent to Davy Jones' Locker after being left to rot at a Wellington wharf for the last five years.
The Venture II was scuttled in the ammunition dumping ground in Cook Strait today under the supervision of Wellington Harbourmaster Captain Mike Pryce.
Its watery grave was 1.7km deep and 37 nautical miles from Miramar Wharf, where the boat had been moored since 2005.
"After we towed it there we disconnected the tow line, put a couple of people on board, opened the scuttling valves and then watched it fill up and sink," Capt Pryce said.
The process took exactly one hour.
There had been calls for the boat to be used as a dive attraction in shallow water off Wellington's south coast, but the proper resource consents were not approved.
The Venture II joins two trawlers from Nelson, a barge from Picton and plenty of old ammunition, Capt Pryce said.
There was no commemoration when the old boat disappeared below the waves.
"It's been there too long for a ceremony."
Once the King Kong movie props had been stripped from the ship it looked like a "wreck", he said.
"If it had been the original King Kong ship that might have been a bit more touristy."
Wellington ratepayers are footing the bill for the sinking, an estimated $30,000.
Posted by dschnee at 8:45 AM
Eclipse is a Wrap!
DONE, Done, & done! Our final shot was approved yesterday! (ended up being one of mine that dragged on for a little while... :)
Below is some new clip from the movie, no wolves, just Dakota Fanning looking like Emperor Palpatine using her Jedi vampire mind tricks... again this silly thing will be released to the screaming masses of teenage girls and 40'something women on June 30th, 2010 in theaters and IMAX. OH-JOY!
Posted by dschnee at 12:27 AM
May 6, 2010
The Sun is emerging from the Eclipse
We polished off and shipped out our final remaining visual effects shot on Eclipse tonight... it's off to Summit, Slade, and Co for approval in tomorrow's review. Tomorrow is also our official wrap date on Eclipse and it feels damn good to finish up, catch my breath, move onto new things, and take a break before another possible trip into the Twilight Zone. It's damn close to one year since I started working in the Twilight zone... crazy. (and once again, the wolves are going to look even bettah! :)
Ok breath...
One of two things will occupy my time here in the near future, one looks like this, and the other like that. Which do you like? I'd like a little of this and a little of that, but if not this, then that's where it's at.
And Kudos to the Tippett crew who pulled 'that' off, which was completing 8 shots in 8 days for the Piranha 3D trailer. (our fishies being the better looking ones) Awesome.
We then may be Breaking Dawn... directed by Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls)
Summit Entertainment has also announced a release date, it will open in the U.S. on Nov. 18, 2011.
Something to chew on until then, and why this will be the best one to work on... THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: WHY BREAKING DAWN MUST BE MADE INTO A MOVIE courtesy of Chud.com
Back to the Eclipse
The first two movies in the "Twilight" series took in a combined $1.1 billion but the second, last November's "New Moon," took its knocks from fans for being a bit too slow and moody. "Eclipse," directed by horror moviemaker David Slade, promises to be dark and action-packed.
For cuss's sake let's hope so...
Posted by dschnee at 11:11 PM
