Here’s a 10 minute tutorial that teaches you how to speed up video editing within Adobe After Effects CS3 or CS4.
Click here to watch the tutorial.
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The Holy Grail of computer animation has long been to create a computer generated human character that fools the viewer into thinking they are watching a real person. I’ve been an animation and visual effects professional for about twenty years, I’ve seen David Fincher’s film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and I’ll tell you this; the effects team at Digital Domain did it.
They get the Grail and they earned their Academy Award.
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Even though special effects provide a crowd-pleasing “wow” factor for most blockbusters, the artists responsible for such wizardry don’t get much respect in Hollywood, according to Visual Effects Society Chairman Jeffrey Okun.
“Visual-effects artists in general are treated like interchangeable parts,” he says, “and are not regarded as an equal to the cinematographer, the editor, the writer or the production designer.”
Okun, whose credits include “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “Fantastic Four,” hopes to change that with the upcoming VES-sponsored conference Production Summit ‘09.
“This conference is about the fact that visual effects are skewing out of control,” Okun said of the October event. “Schedules for creating effects are getting shorter, and lots of visual-effects companies are going under. When the studio doesn’t like one company’s answer they get rid of them and call in somebody else until they get to whoever will go ‘Yeah, we can do that’ at the price they want.’ ”
And listen to my recent interview with Jeff Okun on FX Mogul Radio…
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Absolutely great advice all around
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Want a BIG secret about getting your resume to stand out? Want people to call you for work? Want to earn great money and have career security?
I put together this twenty minute lesson on the one of the strategies that has worked for me and most of the my friends who work in the entertainment industry. Put some of this stuff into practice and it will work for you, too.
I’d love to hear your thoughts – enjoy the video.
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Another quick video tutorial about the real secret to building your career; hopefully if will get you thinking in a new way.
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This is the first lesson in the Dream Career Workshop – a ‘roadmap’ that lays out the broad outline of the program. It’s intended for students who have signed up for the program but it also serves as a good introduction to some of the ideas the program is based on.
If you’d like to apply to be part of the Dream Career Workshop, please email Lee Stranahan.
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So many applications that I use on a day to day basis are becoming ‘web apps’. For example, I never used Microsoft Word or even OpenOffice anymore for word processing or spreadsheets; I’ve moved onto Google Docs for almost everything.
So I’ve been waiting to see when visual effects software would start to make the transition.
I guess the wait is over – Mixamo is the first real web based 3D animation software I’ve seen.
What is it?
"Our vision is to simplify 3D character animation into a process that is easy and affordable enough for any professional game developer, filmmaker, architect, or 3D designer to use efficiently," says Stefano Corazza, co-founder and CTO of Mixamo. "Mixamo drastically condenses the animation process by combining the realism of motion capture with the customization options offered by keyframing. This creates an entirely new approach that enables professionals to develop production-ready character animations quickly. Over time, our goal is to continue to refine this process and extend this service to an even wider market."
Mixamo allows highly complex customization of animations through the simple use of slider-based controls. From the intuitive interface, animators can easily browse through Mixamo’s extensive collection of high-quality 3D character motions. Developed from actual motion capture data, the Mixamo motion collection consists of clean, natural 3D character motions such as: combat motions, sports motions and dancing motions. After selecting a desired animation, users may customize and apply directly to their character rig in real-time. Upon completion, the animation is downloaded for seamless integration into any 3D application or game development pipeline.
It will be interesting to see how this develops…it’s just a matter of time before more apps are web based. What do you think?
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“About The Artist”
Do you choke up when you have to type that part?
A lot of people do. I have. But of course – you can’t. About YOU is the most important thing on your blog or website when you think about it.
So I loved this article : 40 “About The Author” Examples
Lots of good ideas..check it out. It’s got me thinking already.
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Here’s Lesson 2 : Probably not much of interest here if you aren’t signed up for the Dream Career Workshop program but I couldn’t think of a good reason to keep it private.
If you’re not a student at the Dream Career Workshop and you’re ready to get serious about getting your career going in visual effects, computer graphics or filmmaking please contact me at the email listed in the video – Lee@Stranahan.com
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