Preorder, like, only the best book on compositing ever

Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen

Mark has created a truly practical guide to film effects compsiting in the least-expensive and arguably most feature-packed compositing application available. Yours Truly contributed a chapter on training your eye.

There are books that will learn you After Effects, and there are books that claim to learn you film compositing. If you put them all in a blender and let the juices ferment under the heat of a thousand suns, you would have a snifter full of Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques.

Preorder now before rabid fans tear my chapter out of all existing copies like the Britney Spears photo spread in Rolling Stone that one time.

Sin City

Some news stories about The Orphanage's work on Sin City:

Hollywood Reporter (syndicated to Yahoo)
VFXworld (free registration required)
VFXblog

Some nice comparisons of our shots to Miller's original artwork here.

Three new books for the clicking and the buying

Passengers on the right side of the tram will notice three new books topping the recommended reading list.

OK, The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook has been mentioned here before, but now it's o'r yonder where it belongs.

Sin City is about to take theaters by storm, and after working on it with Robert Rodriguez I am reminded of how inspiring and educational his book Rebel Without a Crew is. Sin City is based on three graphic novels by Frank Miller — Sin City, The Big Fat Kill, and That Yellow Bastard.

If earning $7000 by subjecting yourself to medical testing is a little much for you, try the entertaining kick in the pants that goes by the title How to Make an Action Movie for $99. I'm not kidding, and neither is the author. It's as provocatively titled and darn near as useful as the excellent How to Write Movie in 21 Days.

I'm here to vipe the vindows

Enough comping nerdistry — time for some digital filmmaking!

Last week I directed some spots for the most excellent site gamefly.com (I have been a customer since they launched — think netflix for games). We shot with the Viper FilmStream™ camera, recording directly to HDCAMSR tape.

Here's me (center) with my badass DP Ketil Dietrichson (left). Photo by Mark Chiolis.

The Viper shoots 10-bit log, uncompressed 4:4:4 1920x1080 24p. In other words, word. It's not ideal to shoot to tape, as even SR has some subsampling. But we have an SR deck and, hey, it's a TV commercial.

More to come as I figure out how to post this sucker.