Book Report 2: Guns are Fun

The DV Rebel's Guide is not going to be one of those books that suggests that guns have no place in indie films. On the contrary. In fact, I have such a pet peeve about badly-comped muzzle flashes that I am including a monster After Effects template project with the book. It works a lot like the old muzzle flash Fusion macro I made for DF4, in that all you have to do is paint some soft blobs in the rough areas where you want a muzzle flash and the comp does the rest. You have sliders to control the color, brightness, and heat distortion effects.

Plus, there's a full 3D particle system for the emission of spent shells. This is all rigged up with expressions so all you have to do is position a gun layer in After Effects 3D space and dial in the velocity, wind, and other settings.

All this for 25 bucks? Pre-order now so I get even more panicked calls from my publisher asking where my latest chapter is!

Navy, Minis, Toshiba Spots in HD

The new Orphanage Commercial Productions site is up, and my Director portfolio along with it. The Ruby Tuesday Minis spot, Navy SEALs Footprints, and my recent Toshiba HDDVD spot are available in HD! Better looking than YouTube by a long shot, except Footprints which is way too dark, but we're working on that. It's kind of a challenging spot for encoders.

The Minis spot is my Director's cut, which features more Hot Minis Action, so check it out!

Living proof that shallow DOF is everything

One Minute Too Long, an entry in the One Minute Film & Video Festival.

Via DVXuser.com.

US Navy "Footprints"

Well, the quality's not great, but someone posted my Navy SEALS spot on YouTube:

This was shot on one not-so-grueling day on an LA beach. We shot HD (Varicam) so we could roll and roll to get just the right waves. We filled ten 60-minute tapes. Four PAs stood in the surf, wearing US Navy-approved booties and awaiting their cue from my first AD. They'd run in and we'd all pray that the right wave would come through. Although we shot until dusk, the take we wound up selecting was made before lunch! Orphanage VFX Supe Ryan Tudhope supervised the compositing, which consisted of day-for-nighting the shot and simulating the lighting change in 32-bit float using After Effects 7.0. Ryan only barely enhanced the footprints, making one of the simpler post jobs we've ever done.