Movies made in your home and callaborations

Not too long ago to make your own mini movie would require a rather massive, heavy, awful image producing VHS camera.

They were that bad I literally gave up until the advent of the digital camcorder and so started the home movie revolution that ultimately would give birth to the likes of Youtube.

It's amazing how now with a little know how , determination and passion for film almost everyone could produce something that  not too long ago would only be possible in an expensive studio and once one gathers momentum to take it to the next level as this guy has Kie77 you can output this hugely entertaining short. Check it out you mothers ...

Kie's great production quality and entertaining short Living Doll III

Kie asked me to take part in this video an age ago and I shot my part very early this year (Jan? 2011) and through the miracle of the internet I sent him my ready to go part and he grafted into his fantastic production.

I shot it on a Canon 60d with a 17-55mm F/2.8 lens and coloured it with Colorista in After Effects CS4 I hadn't gone 64 bit at that point (altho am only halfway there now as I don't have any 64 bit apps to use up my 16 gigs) .

I don't know what Kie shot his on but it is very clear and bright always a good thing, you can always muddy things up later if need be, I really like his keying on the News Report section and I think the weather girl is quite fetching too in a albeit unconventional way.

Collaboration's with other "Youtubers" is a great way to combine efforts and reach a wider audience and is something I would thoroughly recommend as it's always great to talk shop with fellow film makers and maybe pick up new tips in this constantly evolving arena that is digital film making

Bring on the LIONS!!!! arrrrrrgghhh s

Phoenix not as hot to handle as Fume FX

 I have dabbled for ages in the past with Fume FX a plugin for 3d studio max to enable the creation of smoke and fire for compositing into your film and or video footage with your fave application be it Fusion, After Effects, Nuke or maybe Combustion.

In search of the Holy Grail of visual effects that is simulated fire and smoke an area of VFX that I have always been interested in but also one of the hardest things after liquids and water to pull off digitally.

 Using Fume FX seems so flaky and it's easy to mis-judge your settings, the difference between 0.1 and 0.2 can be disasterous on some variables (of which there are many) and the long simulation and render times can be quite off putting.

Enter into the firey, smokey arena the powerful and for me at least easier to use Phoenix Fluid Dynamics 2 this I find is a whole lot more accessable to get to grips with and its quite quick to calculate your simulations and you can play around with the variables on the fly and see how it changes things.

The tricky part tho is getting your render and transparency settings right to display your firey wonders but once you get there they can easily be saved for future use, a good starting point is to load in one of the included sample files then save off the render settings and tweak it to suit your own sim.

I recently was going thru some settings so I made a logo for a Youtube friend and as a personal test I wanted so see how quick I could set his logo on fire...haha.

 You can see the intro logo burning away on quite a few of his video's now..glad he liked it.

Click to see the Burning Intro