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.

Felicia Day running down the "stairs" on the green screen stage

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.

Codex running down the stairs in the final composited shot.

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.

I felt the Aura around Codex helped pull her out of the "reality" of the scene.

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.

Felicia Day as Codex flees from the party, leaving her body behind, in the Season 2 Finale of "The Guild".

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.

It looks like a valuable day of discussions and information of great benefit to anyone interested in New Media and Web Content Production.  Early bird registration has already sold out, so tickets with be $595 for the day.

Oh, and don’t look for me there … I’ll be at work.  $595 is more than the current production budget for BooWorld, and I’m about to go over that figure.

As was pointed out to me in a tweet from Tim Street, New Media is a contact sport … All about getting out and making friends.  Maybe I can hang out at the Starbucks near the event and make some new New Media buddies over a cuppa’ joe.  I’m all for networking, especially of the social variety, but these New Media events seem to be popping up one-a-week in NY, LA and San Francisco, and they are all charging pretty big coin (for a micro-budget community) to get in.

Look, I don’t have a problem with people making money, in fact some of the folks at NewTeeVee Live are folks whose work I respect and successes I’d like to emulate.  But I’m not willing to pay those kinds of entry-fees to get proximity to folks who really don’t need the contact from a newbie, unless you’ve met them along the way already.  The folks who already have deals, who have been working in the New Media medium for a couple of years are largely interested in networking-up to the next level.

These events remind me of the IFP Markets and other events.  They promised great access to Indie Film professionals and dealmakers, but by the time it got big enough, the dealmakers there were already looking to deal with folks who were already capable of doing festival-level productions.  In short, they weren’t interested in talking to folks looking for financing or deals.

We do need New Media networking events, and yeah it would be great to have folks there who’ve already have weathered the storms through some successes and failures, but these events need to be at a more grass roots level that are big on interaction and low on cost.

Hmmnnnn … Sounds like an idea waiting to happen?

This week’s episode of GTMS is definitely their most ambitious to date, with an extended animation sequence that sends up the Power Rangers in style. Check it out … GMTS Season 2, Episode 7 on Crackle.

Here’s another great video referred to us by 1 Tim Street.  Mark Rotblat from TubeMogul talks about tag and URL placement as key items in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) when submitting your videos.

TubeMogul is a useful and innovative service that allows content producers to submit their video to the TubeMogul service, where it is distributed to all of the major video sites.  TubeMogul further adds value by providing one-stop consolidating reporting on viewage at these sites.  If you’re in TubMogul’s top 40, you’re doing well.

As it turns out I had the opportunity to hear Scott talk about the book a couple of weeks ago, and finally got around to reading it this week.

There’s a lot of familiar ground here … Anyone who has studied the history of the Film business has heard the same basic stories about Thomas Edison, the Lumiere Brothers, the Warner Bros., etc., but with Inventing the Movies, Scott Kirsner takes a departure from the standard telling of the tales to look at Cinema History from the perspectives of technologies that have driven the industry, along with the individuals who have done their best to discourage, or even defeat, the adoption of new tech.

Using this framework, the book follows the history of Cinema from the Edison’s Kinetoscope to the rise of YouTube and the Hollywood Studio’s struggle to come to grips with a future where viewers will have their choice of when, where, and on what platform they will view and listen to media.

It’s a well-written book, an absolute must-read for anyone who loves film and has an interest in the burgeoning field of mobile media and content development.

What’s the best way to make money in online video?  Acquisition.

Great interview from an exec over at CBS interactive who’s fledgeling production company got bought up by Black Rock.

Oh, I should only be so lucky …

On the BooWorld front, the site has come a long way.  I really didn’t intend to focus on coding mechanics, but rather on content over the last two days … Circumstances dictated otherwise.  I’m really happy with the Wordpress theme I found, but, it is free.  I’ve been fixing bugs in the templates that came from none-compliant xhtml calls.  Okay folks, I can code, but I’d rather note when I don’t have to.  Anyway, it’s much better now.

Michael and I have been going back-and-forth over the theme for the show.  I’m fairly adamant about wanting to go with a big,  ’60s-style, Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” approach for the main theme.  Boo wants to do concert band, because that’s what he does.

Here’s where the weekend got interesting.

We’re still working out the communications on how this thing should sound … Email is not the medium for doing it, but you work with what you got.  In this case it resulted in a “Woodwind Choir” version of the theme, which got sent over as an mp3 out of Sibelius.

Mike’s a composer, not a production guy.  Most of his stuff either gets performed by an orchestra or band, or published … So he hasn’t built much of a production skillset or software tools set.  The resulting mp3 was synthesized with a very rudimentary set of synths … Mike says he hears what the piece will sound like in real life.  Doug hears a really bad synth track with every voice at one volume level.

Now, I’ve got a bit of an audio background, and enough musical skills to make me dangerous.  Add in tools like GarageBand (which I love for so many reasons) and Logic Studio, which is probably the most comprehensive package around for the independent music composer/producer, and you’ve got the ability to do some pretty cool things with midi tracks.

I took Mike’s tracks and threw them into GarageBand, thinking I’d just hook the tracks up to my sampled instrument selection and see what it sounded like.  A happy accident was that Apple screwed me over on the orchestra Jam Pack (add-in instrument packs which sound very good for about $99 a piece, considering most “professional” sampled instrument collections run upwards of $400 or more) which has a picture of a sax on the box, but everything except saxes inside.

Mike wrote for saxes. 

What to do … what to do?

I started substitution of lower string instruments … Viola’s, cellos (celli), along with a tuba for the bottom end.  It sounded better.  By this evening, I had replaced about half of the voices with string instruments so the piece is woodwinds and strings … Piccolos, flutes, clarinets, oboe, violins, violas, cellos (or celli, whatever), and upright bass (no cowbell, sorry.)  You can here both versions here.

Todays version is somewhat more mixed … I didn’t get crazy with automation on levels, but overall I’m happy with the balance, and it turns out I’m actually starting to like this.  At the very least, it’s an additional bit of content for the folks following the show’s progress to listen to, and, in the end, it’s all about providing content.

Since we launched the new BooWorld-centric site, and doubled-up on our promotion efforts on Drum Corps Planet, we’ve seen a steady rise in traffic … We got over 500 people in the first week.  Again I emphasize the small size of the target audience for this.  It’s pretty decent all things considered.

This week I’m going to lay down some tracks on my guitar to send to Mike as guide tracks for the pop version.  My Line 6 Pod 2.0 is going to come in handy.  I’m also thinking about picking up their new guitar recorder, the Backtrack.

I also picked up a $50 software drum machine called iDrum from iZotope Software that I’m really happy with … This is going to make my life a lot easier.  There’s nothing more irritating that trying to sequence drum kits with a keyboard, and I’m not quite ready to plunk down the coin for M-Audio’s Trigger Finger pad.

So this week’s lessons learned, aside from having to give up sweat-equity in exchange for a “free” WordPress theme, is that Mike can compose away, send me the midi tracks, and I can pretty much arrange that composition into whatever works best for the particular needs of the show, using GarageBand, Logic, SoundTrack and other tools.

The thing that folks putting video on to the ‘net don’t understand, in a lot of cases, is that while audiences will accept compressed, less than pristine video, if the audio sucks you loose a customer instantly.  And in most cases they won’t come back.  It looks like that’s one potential mistake we’ve got covered, so there are only about 500,000,000 other things we need to look at.

Buford - The Saga of a Modern Frontier Town

I’m working on a new short called “Buford” that should be out in a couple of weeks.  It could be the next Rick Roll video.  I shot it on my way cross country in 2001 on way to Portland … I think it was in Wyoming. The sign reads “Welcome to Buford, Pop. 2″, and there’s a house and gas station.

The film will be epic.  (As in the Titanic was a disaster of epic proportions. :p)

I’m having more fun with just doing the compositing and color work on this than anything else.  It was shot in DV on a Sony VX1000 … Which wasn’t a bad camera in 2001, but this ain’t 2001.  It was shot on a bright, but cloudy day, so there was a lot of blue sky and puffy clouds.

I decided to go for a bleach-bypass look, based on a recipe that Steve Bowen, one of the great colorists at EFILM, told me about.  I’m doing it in Shake, but it will work in just about any compositing tool (Steve talks about the “adding silver” in a fall 2003 edition of “American Cinematographer.”

Buford - from the original footage

First I transcoded the DV footage over to ProRes 4:2:2 with Compressor 3

To add silver, you desaturate the image by comping a B&W (totally desaturated) version of the image over itself with a mult … This also diffuses the image (see “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself” (2003) for a look at how this plays out on film … Steve Bowen was the colorist) and pumps up film grain a bit.  Naturally I didn’t have any film grain to start, but we’ll get to that.

You can desat the footage to almost no color (it will also pump up the contrast quite a bit), but I settled for taking the sky down to an ominous gray, and leaving some color in the ground and buildings.

Next, I did some color correction and added some blue back in to chill the scene down and give the sky a really ominous look.

Finally, I added some film grain to it, and that’s the look.  Almost, but not quite, nuclear winter.  This is basically the same technique they use to get the punched up you’ve seen in all of those Ridley Scott flicks like “Gladiator” and “Black Hawk Down”.  Only I’m doing it with a $499 compositing package instead of a Discreet/Autodesk dedicated hardware/software solution that goes for upwards of $80K (without the storage.)

The final nagging problem is that I had this great Sinclair gas station sign as a dominant part of the landscape and, even though this film is a satire, I wasn’t sure it qualified as fair use … So I turned the Sinclair Dinosaur into a turtle and the company name to “Noxxon”, in honor of Writer/Producer Marti Noxon who looked stunning as the news co-anchor in “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog” … David Fury, well, not so much.  That involved a little Photoshop magic to create a replacement overlay for the sign, which you can see in the photo.  Now I just have to work out some of the kinks in the match-move and I’ll be done with the look.  Don’t know if I’ll keep the graphic as is, but it’s easy enough to swap when I get the tracking done.

I should be letting “Buford” loose on the YouTube community by the end of the month.

Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco

The HF100 is smaller than it’s older siblings … Such as the HV30.  That’s due to the absence of any tape drive mechanism.  The first thing I noticed is that you want to hold it at chest-to-waist level, but the record start-stop button is placed to be convenient for holding the camera at eye-level and using your thumb on the back of the camera … Which is kind of weird because there is no view finder, just a very nice view screen that folds out from the left side of the unit.  (Heh, heh … I said “unit.” <$1 to Beavis & Butthead>)

I would have probably opted for using the space reclaimed from the tape drive to provide a viewfinder and a little more surface area for ergonomics.  Also a start/stop button on top of the camera would be nice.

Edwaerd Muybridge - Grandfather of Motion Pictures and the Original O.J.

One thing to keep in mind … I’m not trying to do full-on production with this camera, although it will be used for some of my Web content.  The purpose of looking at this camera is to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of AVCHD with the intent of buying a Prosumer-level camera down the road.  This little baby will be my pocket pal and high-quality webcam.

I shot the footage using the Cine look, which applies a film-like Gamma to the footage, and in 30PF mode … 30pfs progressive frames.  Canon says this mode was intended specifically for providing progressive frame footage for web applications.

Right off the view screen you can see the footage is spectacular for a camera of this size and price range.  One minor irritant is that using the full-auto exposure controls can give you some pretty obvious color shift when panning and zooming on an image … in my case, with this footage taken on a partially cloudy day in San Francisco, this mean the sky would shift from blue to gray depending on what the overall content of the framed image was.  There are exposure overrides on the camera, but, again, for a little camcorder not intended for pro use, I can live with it.  Especially since I’ll be shooting with it indoors with fixed lighting and little or no zooming.

The HF100 records beautiful color saturation.

 Getting the camera home, I popped the SD card into my card reader, read a few short technotes on the web, and copied the contents of the card into a folder on my hard drive before launching Final Cut Pro 6.

Bringing up the log-and-transfer window, Final Cut found the footage in my AVCHD folder without me having to look for it.  The process is almost identical to the process for using Panasonic P2 media, but without the concise and very manageable (although cryptic) file naming that’s implemented for the P2 footage.

I took a default import and wound up with 1920×1080 (anamorphic) ProRes 4:2:2 footage.  The files are not small, as one minute of footage comes in at around a gig.  The bandwidth (17mbps) is such that I can edit it comfortably on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core2 Duo iMac.

Weirdness is that the footage comes in at 29.97.  Dealing with the 24PF footage off of the HV20 involved some compressor magic, and I think I’ll probably have to do some digging to get the footage transcoded exactly the way I want it, but for purposes of this little “getting to know you” session, I’m really happy with the HF100 Camera, the AVCHD footage, and the ingest into Final Cut Pro.

One other not about the camera.  It was moderately windy at the Presidio of San Francisco the day I shot the footage (It’s more-or-less always moderately windy at the Presidio), and there was quite a bit of wind noise in the audio.  I’m going to be exploring a number of audio options, including using a BeachTek XLR adapter/Preamp and shot gun mics.  External mics do seem to be a necessity with this camera for just about anything more demanding more quality than some home vids (which could probably be said for just about any consumer level camcorder.)

On the whole, I’m really happy with this camera and the technology in general.  More later …

Yeah, I’m friggin’ psyched and I’m blogging about it … Deal!