Doug Luberts

Every now and again I take a break from my normal rambling, only tangentially-related to any kind of theme, postage to comment on something really having nothing to do with whatever it is I normally blog about. Be forewarned, this is one of them. If you don’t know anything about Drum Corps, and just happened to come across this post, I used to define Drum Corps as something that inevitably gets described as “Sort of like a marching band, only different.”

That was in the past.

In order to keep pace with the evolution of the activity, it is now necessary to describe Drum Corps as “a summer marching music activity, hopelessly eclectic beyond all sense or reason, which used to be sort of like a marching band, only different, but is now virtually indistinguishable from a marching band except for the lack of woodwinds which will will inevitably come into use, at which point all distinctions between the two activities will be moot, and the need for the activity formerly known as Drum & Bugle Corps will also become moot … or mooter, as the case may be.” (Is mooter even a word? Whatever.)

Got it? Good … Now, if you’re still interested we can move on. This is an Un-Review of the DCI West show in Stanford.

What is an Un-Review? It’s a heavily-biased, possibly unfair, and quite possibly, inflammatory, narrative of my experiences attending aforementioned show that in no way represents objective reporting or journalism.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the addition of my almost-beloved Nikon D90 (okay, it’s not perfect, but … damn!), it’s time to part with my never-really-loved-it-too-much-until-camera-raw-became-friendly Nikon D70. It’s a wonderful camera. Look at some of the recent photos I’ve taken with it and you can see it does a great job, at 2005 megapixel rates (okay, cameras, like motorcycles, have become a metaphor for penis size for some [not me of course, but some people ]… I never thought I’d get caught up in megapixel envy until I saw some results from the D700. 2k good, 5k better.) It’s a great camera, but for someone else with a bit less than professional quality expectations for their work.

So what to do?

Well, eBay, of course!

Here’s a tip, for those of you who want to stay on the cutting-edge of imaging and video technology … Sell your stuff every 2 years. You’ll still have to pony-up some funds to stay on top of the game, but by not waiting for the bottom to drop out of the value on your current/old stuff, you can get peak trade-in value. Using eBay, that can take quite a bite out of upgrade costs.  I find this particularly true of computer hardware … I sell my MacBooks about every two years, and upgrade.  Not only do I get great return on the old model, but I can usually put those funds towards current models without a lot of additional out-of-pocket.  I’m never totally state-of-the-art, but I’m close enough to stay competitive, which is what the game is all about.

There, that’s my secret. Everyone who reads this and cashes in on my my knowledge please send me five bucks.  At the rate people read this blog, I will have at least $100 bucks within a year.

So … Anyway … One of the key things I’ve found out over the years about selling on eBay is that photos matter. Big time. Your photos look like crap, and, while your stuff might sell, you won’t get top dollar.

Right now I’m on the trading-up stage of building my equipment catalog … I don’t have much in the way of lighting equipment, but there’s still a lot I can do to make my eBay product look good.

I went to Home Depot a while back and purchased a bunch of clamp lights and shop lights, along with a bunch of daylight-balanced compact florescent bulbs. For my el-cheapo product setup, I threw these on a couple of Manfrotto stands that I had sitting around (you can’t have enough of these around the house, they come in handy for everything from photo lighting setups to impromptu coat racks, and only cost about $25 bucks a piece.) A quick trip over to the photo supply store, and I had a roll of seamless backdrop paper. At about $35, this was the most expensive part of this setup, but I’ll get a lot of use out of the roll.

Plug it all together with a $9.99 tray table from Bed, Bath & Beyond, and you’ve got something that looks like this:

My Ghetto Product Photography Setup

Oh, I probably forgot to mention the $5.00 Grey card that I bought … Even if your camera, like my D90, has great auto white-balance, buy one and use it.  Your stuffs will be muchly more betterer (thank you, Ansel Adams … while I know you’re rolling in your grave after that statement, digital cameras have turned your lifetime of work in developing the zone system into a bullet point.  Sorry, dude.)

The two, 100w, compact florescents do a decent job of providing some, more-or-less, flat side lighting.  Throw in the built-in speedlight on the camera, and you’ve got about all that you will need (although I did have to shoot at an ISO of about 500 to work with decent shutter speeds.)  Here’s the result:

Magazine quality, no. Will it look good to an eBay customer? I think so.

The results aren’t bad … Not as flat as I’d like, and I should have straightened my backdrop a bit, but it will get the job done on eBay.  And by that, I mean my ad will probably get more attention from someone looking for used equipment than one from somebody who put a poorly-lit, existing light, shot in his ad.  Of course, I’ll ad close-ups of the camera and a bunch of alternate angles as well … This also helps you sell your product.

Total cost for for this? Probably about $75 bucks, but considering it’s all stuff that I’ll be reusing, and will probably result in uping my sale price for the equipment, I’d still say it meets my criteria for doing this on the cheap.

BTW, all this stuff will be on eBay tomorrow, and I’ll post the URL to the auctions.  This D70 is in cherry shape, and I think I’ve only used it on about 10 occasions.  Drop me an e if you’re interested.

P.S.: We’ll re-visit this topic, and may others, when I can get my order in for some Alien Bees studio lighting. And that, will be awesome!

Got my D90 today and, after a mad dash to Best Buy for an SDHC card, went out an took some shots during lunch. Thought I’d just run off some quick thoughts.

Nikon shaved a little bit off the left-hand side of the camera body on the D90.  It’s a bit smaller than the D70, which I don’t think is a plus. The smaller the camera, the less surface area to hold, the harder it is to keep it steady.  Not a major deal, but I’ll probably add the dual battery grip at some point, just to add something to the form factor.

At 12.5 Megapixels, the D90 takes gorgeous photos at a level of detail that makes me feel like I’m not missing anything by not shooting film.  The dynamic range captured by the camera’s DX sensor is amazing (I’m sticking a few photos from my Flickr account in here.  Put it all together with my already great collection of Nikon glass (my 24-120mm f3.5-5.6 AF-D zoom is my weapon of choice for general shooting, although I’ve got some primes, a long zoom, and will be adding 85mm f1.4 and 20mm f2.0 primes as my next purchases), Lightroom 2 and CS4 and all things are possible.

I did a test with the video capture mode at 720p 24. This is going to require some more research and testing, but in “auto everything” mode, the rolling shutter lag causes major skewing problems with ANY camera movement.  I get the feeling this is going to be for locked-down camera shooting only … but … It’s okay, I didn’t really buy this as a video camera.  Also, the fact that it captures AVI files isn’t a big plus either.

Regardless, this is a sweet, sweet, camera and will serve me well until I can get a model with a full-sized sensor.  I suspect both Canon and Nikon are just around the corner from developing new 24 Megapixel DSLRs with full-sized sensors that will also shoot great video (Note, I’m not including the over-hyped Canon 5D Mark II in this.  Good camera, but I think they can do better, both in the sensor department and the form factor … The Mark II is also too small for a pro camera, IMO.)

The DVD of Season 2 of “The Guild” was released this week exclusively on Amazon.com.  Amazon is also offering the Season 1 DVD as well.  As a bonus, when you buy either of “The Guild” DVDs, you get digital copies in both standard and Hi-Def in your Amazon Video-on-Demand Library, so you can watch them from your Roku box, or Computer. It’s a great deal.  Mean while, I thought I’d use the occasion to update this blog entry from last February, which talks about the creation of the final sequence in episode 12, “Fight”.

Right now is an exciting time to be involved with web video.  The new media space is changing on an almost daily basis providing creators with new, and higher quality, venues for telling their stories.  Producers are stepping up with increased production values and more polished offerings … It’s a great time for innovative story telling, and one of those innovative stories being told right now is Felicia Day’s hit webisodic comedy, “The Guild”.

I’ve been a fan of “The Guild”, since Season 1.  So much so that when I heard Felicia was working on Season 2, and looking for folks to help in various ways, I fired off an email to her and raised my hand.  That started a dialog ultimately resulting in the final sequence of the Season 2 finale of “The Guild”.

It was a tremendous experience to be a part of the show, and I thought I’d write a bit about the process we went through, and some of the things we did along the way.  Not so much for VFX/techie types, but for folks out there who may be thinking about incorporating VFX into their own web content, or are just generally interested in how a VFX artist will take an idea and work with a director to incorporate it into a finished effects sequence.

Some time before Thanksgiving, Felicia emailed to say she’d written an effects sequence into the final episode of season 2, and was wondering if I was still interested in helping out.

Hell yeah, I was!

Naturally, like any web producer on a budget, Felicia was concerned about being able to achieve her vision for the episode while staying within a very tight budget.  In the end, I think we managed to realize both goals due in large part to having a great crew with a really clear, consistent, idea of the kind of effect we were going for.

Felicia described the scene: “Basically I am standing and looking at something traumatic and then, akin to WOW, my “ghost” leaves my body and starts running away.  Ending shot is close on my “ghost face” running.”

Shortest VFX concept development discussion ever!

I think just about everyone on “The Guild” crew is into WoW on some level … Some of us on a deep, ongoing, and quite possibly pathological, level.  Whatever the association, or level of obsession with the game, when Felicia threw down with that concept everybody knew exactly what she was talking about and what we were trying to achieve.  This is a big break, as these kinds of conversations can sometimes take weeks, or even months on larger productions, and involve extensive, and costly, pre-visualization work.  We were already way ahead of ourselves.

The discussion went on to things about just how far into the WoW paradigm we wanted to take this.  I went into WoW, got my main killed, and spent some time breaking down all of the elements in terms of look (Having  spent more hours with a dead character in Warcraft than I’d probably own up to, the bulk of my research was already done … Who said playing WoW was unproductive? At this point I think it might even qualify as a tax deduction.)

There is a lot going on when a character dies in World of Warcraft.  The world goes monochrome, the character is lit independently of the scene with a kind of Bela Lugosi vampire light from below.  They become semi-transparent.  There is smoke emanating from the character’s “ghost”, and, if you’re outside, there is this huge glowing vortex overhead that creates membranes that flow over the sky down to the horizons.  Lighting sources are kind of blown out, and everything is a bit grainy.

I shared my notes with the rest of the production team, and that generated enough feedback to really give me a clear idea of the scope of the effort and the look we were going for, as well as a basic approach to how the sequence should be shot.  We were going to go for kind of a hybrid-look, and not looking to match the Warcraft paradigm in every detail.  Codex wasn’t really dead (which would make a potential Season 3 difficult, though not impossible), but having an out-of-body experience, so the idea was we would put her “ghost” in the Warcraft look, but keep the world around her looking normal.

Okay, so we had a concept, so how do we do that, get what we’re looking for, and not spend a whole lotta’ money to do it?

In order to keep costs down, and keep the scope of the VFX work manageable, I suggested we go with an almost all 2D approach using an available green screen stage to shoot Felicia/Codex.  To save time, and eliminate the need to do a lot of tracking/matchoving, we’d work with a locked-off camera, shooting the background plates first, and then use a real-time software chroma keyer on set so that director Sean Becker could line up shots/camera angles on the green screen stage to match the backgrounds.

As far as the green screen shoot itself, the show was lucky enough to have a very experienced Director of Photography, John Schmidt, and Gaffer, Jared Hoy, with professional experience in doing green screen shots (Both of these dudes do lighting for Network TV and other shows and really know their stuff.)  They knew exactly what to do, and more importantly, what NOT to do when lighting a green screen shoot (Some DPs tend to over light the green/blue screen, producing a lot of color spill wrapping around the actor’s face which is a big time-waster to deal with.  Not the case here.)

Just as an aside, one of the things that added so much to this effort, and to the production of “The Guild” in general, is that Felicia Day has managed to pull together an extremely talented crew of working industry professionals, most of whom, like myself, started out as fans of the show.  I believe that combination of professional expertise, plus personal involvement/vested interest in the show, plays a large role in what has made “The Guild” so successful.

So while Sean, John and Jared went off to do some tests (and finish shooting the rest of the season), I started playing around with some images trying to come up with a look for the sequence.

The key things to creating a Warcraft-like ghost look would be desaturating the green screen images of Codex, rendering her monochrome, and making her somewhat translucent, layering that image with a wave of smoke that would emanate from her body.  I used Apple’s Shake for 98% of the compositing, painting, and rotoscoping work, while relying on Apple’s Motion for the smoke particle simulations.

The look was coming along, but I didn’t feel that the ghost was really standing out against a colored background image, so I decided to diverge from the WoW look a bit, and created a simple halo, or aura, around codex.  This was done by using the matte of Codex’s image coming out of the green screen extraction to mask a simple white color card.  I scaled that up a bit larger than Codex, creating a white outline around her, and then keyframe animated the brightness value of the aura to make it “breath”.  The result was a pulsating white halo that helped pull separate Codex from the background and add to the supernatural look.

Next smoke was composited behind, and in front of, Codex.  The result created somewhat of a volumetric lighting look that, while relatively easy to achieve, really carried a clear impression of the game look that we were shooting for.

The weekend before Christmas, Director/Editor Sean Becker sent me a hard drive with all of the background and green screen shots, as well as a Final Cut Pro project with his mock-ups (temp comps) of the shots in a cut sequence to serve as my visual and timing reference.

Sean and I would be getting together for lunch the following Monday to discuss the sequence and hammer-out any remaining details before I got to work on things.  Getting the footage ahead of this gave me a chance to put additional questions together and analyze the footage for any potential issues (of which there were none.)  In preparation for this, I took the first shot of the Codex ghost emerging from her body and put together a temp comp using the look that I’d been developing.  This would give Sean and I a chance to see just how close, or not, we were to having the look nailed down.  As it turned out, we were pretty close.  Sean loved the look.

While all of the review work and discussion done over the following few weeks took place in emails and on the phone, I can’t stress how important this meeting was in terms of setting the overall working relationship for the project.  While we all tend to live by emails, tweets, and other forms of electronic communication these days, nothing can take the place on one-on-one time when establishing a creative partnership, and you really get a much better idea of how someone communicates.

The business part of the discussion was actually quite brief.  Sean liked the look, and wanted to move forward with it.  I had all the info and materials that were needed at that point, so it was time to get to work for real.

I can’t say that the work itself was either complex or difficult … It wasn’t.  Although the finished sequence contained a little bit of every kind of 2D magic … Roto and paint work, wire/rig removal, green screen extraction and compositing, it was all pretty easy stuff as compositing projects go … A big part of that owing to good pre-production planning.  But to clarify, when I say easy I mean that while it was quite time-intensive, probably over a hundred hours or so, the fact that the plates and gs materials were shot so well made it that much easier to put the elements together.  Also the Director/Editor provided me with such great reference materials and access when there were questions, and that made the whole process come off without any major glitches.

Along the way, a couple of “what if”/experimental shots resulted in a “Hey, would you mind rendering me a final of that, I think I can use it …” from Sean Becker, so what started out as a 5-6 shot sequence wound up being more like a 10-shot sequence, which is pretty much par for the course.

I wound up delivering the final shots, on schedule, just as Sean was cutting the episode together.

It was a great experience, and even better yet, an opportunity to work with an up-and-coming crew on a show that folks are going to be talking about for years to come.

So if you’re producing a show for the web, or some other low-budget venue, and you’d like to add some vfx into your story, don’t be afraid to try.  Find an artist who understands both your strengths and limitations, and can work with you to get your vision on the screen.  Don’t be afraid to solicit some help from someone who works in the field, even if it’s a low/no pay gig.  Odds are, if they have the time, and are into what you’re trying to do, they’ll probably help you out.  Feature film VFX today tends to be done in large scale environments where each artist plays a small, highly-compartmentalized, role in the overall project.  The opportunity to take on a small project and handle all aspects of the effects work, in a way that it becomes personal, is something a lot of folks will jump at.

Felicia Day, Kim Evey, and all the folks at “The Guild” keep pushing the limits of web video and changing the game with each season of the show.  It will be very interesting to see where the show goes next in Season 3.  In the meantime, I’m very happy that I was able to add a little bit of VFX icing to their Season 2 cake.

All images Copyright © 2009 RobotKittenGigglebus Productions, All Rights Reserved.  Used by permission.

One of the side effects of working on my CS4 skills is delving into Lightroom 2.  From getting a grip on Photoshop CS4, I started getting into Lightroom, which lead to picking up a scanner to work on my old negs and slides, which lead to a complete renewal of my interest into still photography, and the digital darkroom. Kind of strange for an Editor/VFX guy to admit, but my interests in still work waned years ago, after my initial 20-years or so of photography had lead to other avenues of interest … film, theater and video, directing, designing, editing, compositing, and all that jazz. But no longer.

I’ve been out shooting with my D70, and just ordered a Nikon D90 body to quell my raging megapixel envy (although I liked it when you could own a camera for 25 years, like my old Nikon FM, and still keep taking kick-ass photos without a biennial upgrade for new tech), and am going to start doing more work on a regular, if not daily, basis.

My results so far have been posted to flicker, and can be seen in the viewer below.  I’ll keep adding to the collection.

I’ve had a funny relationship with photoshop over the last 10 years, or so.  I’ve never really used it for photography.  It’s mainly been a tool for creating graphics, and elements for motion composites or editing projects.  Most of the work I’ve “Photoshopped” (I hate using Photoshop as a verb, no matter what Adobe says) has been done with Apple Shake.  Yeah, it’s kind of overkill for compositing still images, like the one of ICM’s George Ruiz (see below) that I did for his Twitter avatar last Christmas. It’s just that I’ve been really comfortable with the tools Shake has to offer, especially the color correction set, which is the most important part of doing any convincing composite. This has been standing in the way of my broader artistic education and, more importantly, a deeper understanding of what Photoshop can do for me.

ICM Agent George Ruiz asked for someone on Twitter to "Santa Hat him" last Christmas. Using Shake I was able to do it in about 20 minutes ... Overkill? Yeah, but there is someting to be said with the comfort factor of using a tool you know well.

Well, that’s changing, as I upgrade my toolset … I’m working with Nuke more on the compositing side, as well as After Effects for Webisode-type work.  Getting out there with my camera and using Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom to “develop” the work, will keep my skills growing in that area as well.  I’m looking forward to also sharing a lot of work that I’ve done over the years that have been in my treasure boxes waiting to be seen.

Original photo of George

I’m really intrigued by HDR (High Dynamic Range) images … Taking a bracketed set of exposures, each capturing the correct exposure for a part of the image, and then combining them together into one photograph with the entire dynamic range of the scene correctly captured.  What took Ansel Adams a lifetime of work to figure out in traditional photography, is becoming fairly easy in the digital darkroom.  The above photo is a WIP that I’m working on with “Poor Man’s HDR”, a technique where you put different exposures of an image into Photoshop as layers (Lightroom does that automagically) and then use layer masks and paint techniques to develop the composite image. The results can be quite stunning.  In this case, I’m using 3 different exposures for the foreground, the interior of the palace, and the sky and trees in the background.  A bit more paint work and this will be done.  The use of paint tools and brushes brings something painterly to photography that I rather enjoy.

I’ve played around a bit with Photoshop’s HDR assemble tool, which will put the exposures together for you … I’ve read some criticisms of the HDR tool, but I’m also not totally clear on how best to use it, so the layered technique is providing better results for me right now.

Palace of Fine Arts - Final version

In the final shot I wound up dumping the paint work for a more procedural technique using Photoshop Layer blending options. The paint work was taking forever, and not looking as uniform, or real, as I’ve hoped. There’s still some subtle paint work in blending the foreground and background architecture, but this worked out to be easier and better looking.

Time to start coming up with a new web show, tentative title: “I don’t suck at Photoshop nearly as much as I used to.” :p