4K →

It's a hot topic. Almost like stereo.

ToDoList →

Frank Rueter: 

The ToDoList panel is a simple widget that helps organise your work on a nuke script.

 

Important

I heard a story about DD one time about how a producer pulled aside the Roto/Paint Lead and told him "On this show roto and paint will be very important."

The Roto Paint lead responded " Everything is going to be important, we are all important."

Why am I sharing this with you? Because that type of thinking is hurting visual effects as a whole. Everyone is important.

Put together a team, do not just fill seats. Plus if you really want your "A" team all the time as a producer you need to make sure they don't leave. Keep them busy, keep them happy. Don't micro manage them. Let them do what they do well. Making a film is hard, no doubt. Don't make it harder by hiring the guy off the street. The story starts with a single image. Talented people put there minds to work on what that world should look like guided by a director that hopfully has a vision, and can articulate it to others.

Assemble your team carefully. Choose the roto artists because they do great roto not because they are cheap but because you know their is going to be a shit load of roto to be done. Find really good texture artists if you need to be inches from cg with your camera. Get the right lighting people in. Set upon the crew based on talent not price.

Visual Imaging

"Life of Pi" and "Hugo" both had a huge amount of pixels that where not captured in camera. Both DOPs won an Oscar for their work. If more and more of your images are being composited together to make one cohesive image all those artists that brought that image together should be awarded as well.

The traditional director of photography model is broken. Almost all if not all of the images you see on the screen have been manipulated after being captured in camera. Gone are the days of testing and developing a look for a film. Sometimes months before production started the DOP would start testing film stocks and lens with the main actors and actresses. This would make sure that the look that the director wanted could be achieved and that all the lenses would make the face you just paid 20 million for looks as good as it can. After the image was captured there was very little that could be done to fix it. They had to have it right.

Enter Cineon and scanning of film. Things could be fixed well after the image was shot. At first small things. Then the whole look of a film was developed after the fact and digital intermediate became the norm. As digital techniques got better we could do more and more. George Lucas is famous for cutting a actor out of one take and placing him into a completely new one. I will even say these are not split screens, this required lots of artists not in the camera department to achieve.

So if a DOPs job is to light a blue screen and get the key light on the right side of the subject does he/she deserve a credit for images the matte painter makes, or the lighting on the cg tiger, or train station? If you as a DOP only contributed 1/25 of the pixels on the screen then no, I think they do not.

Historically to win a best picure oscar you as a producer had to be able to connect all the department together to make one cohesive world that the audience accepted as real. The tools to do that have changed. The academy needs to start understanding what and how the new tools work and how they add to the film making process.

Right now that cohesive world we want is built in a computer not a camera.

What can we do to change this? It's complicated and involves changing a process is decades old. Answer this question and I bet the visual effects/movie making process as we know it also changes for the better. I am in no way saying that the DOP is not needed or there job is easy. In fact it's is an incredibly hard job, in fact without a DOP to capture the first images and set a tone. Going to a location and shooting a scene that might not even take place at this time or place is a challenge. It's just that increasingly more of the images comes from other sources than just in the camera.

I am not sure if adding a extra category will help but I would love to be proven wrong.

VES Summit: Will 'Gravity' Prompt Push for 'Visual Imaging' Oscar? →

Carolyn Giardina:

 

Cinematography, art direction and visual effects are so blended in new movies that it might be time for a new Oscar category to be introduced, admitted Hawk Koch, past president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and current co-president of the PGA.

 

 

The DPs that won the Oscar for Best Cinematography The last couple of years looked stunned when they heard there name called.

Using Python to Script User Interface and Workflows in Nuke →

Lester Banks: 

Escape Studio’s Victor Perez provides some great tips and tricks for using and scripting Python from within Nuke taking a look at some of the possibilities for customizing the user interface, and scripting workflow assistants, and providing a great introduction to using simple Python within Nuke.