Monthly Archives: July 2004

Quick Update

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My brother Gary delivered the music video and Mion really didn’t like it. It was too pop and she wanted a more urban feel to it. So they’re working on re-editing. Hopefully it will all work out okay. I’ll be doing another color grade once that’s done and try to get a grittier feel to it.

The summer is winding to a close and I’ve started a job search. I’ve got feelers out to the big 3: Pixar, Dreamworks, and Disney. We’ll see what comes through first.

I got a screen credit on The Day After Tomorrow for my work on the snow explosions during the helicopter crash scenes. Mike Fu and I developed some particle FX scripts and rendering pipeline for a client while we were still at Fluid. The client was The Orphanage, a really cool up-and-coming FX house with offices in the Presidio. I wasn’t expecting credit, so it was really nice of them to include me.

music video work

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I spent last Sunday at my brother’s house doing a finish on the music video he shot last month for an artist named Mion.

Earlier that week he finished the edit after a marathon session at his editor’s place. Mucho technical glitches like failed hard drives and crashing computers didn’t help any.

He brought it over on his way home and me and the family watched it. It was really good. Even more amazing because it was super low budget, only had one location, and he did all the preproduction from California while the talent and crew were in Seattle, WA. I have a feeling my brother is going to make it big someday with that kind of talent and drive.

Anyway, I liked what I saw, but asked him if he’d done color correction on it yet. He’d done a little, but he thought he was done. And I was pushing a little so he’d get that final MTV polish to his video. I didn’t pick the best of times to bring that up. But to his credit, my brother thought about it and then we got together to show him what we could do to his footage to plus it.

After some fumbling around in Final Cut Pro, I figured out how to do all the compositing and color tricks that I wanted to do. First we did some simple vignetting of a couple of insert shots that made them look more dramatic and helped to focus the eye. Did some minor color tweaks. Things were looking good.

Then I hit one of the first glamour shots of Mion and really went to town. Color correction made the image punchier. I added a gradated blur to the background simulating depth of field. Immediately the image felt more like film instead of video. I composited a blurred version of the clip over itself to simulate a little diffusion. Finally I keyed the skin tones, gave a slight blur and comped that over the whole thing to give that smooth complexion that everyone has on TV these days.

My brother loved the look! Seeing the before and after for comparison was pretty amazing, even to me. This was my first time doing finishin work on live action like this, so I had a lot of fun putting theory into practice. I guess all my work doing lighting for CG helped with knowing what to do.

Spent almost 12 hours finishing a little over a minute of footage. I had a lot of fun and will probably want to use the stuff on my reel for variety.

We’ll finish the video later this week and deliver it. I just read Mion’s website and it’s been a month since the shoot. So I think she’s pretty eager to get the final. My brother gave her a rough cut last week. I think she’ll be shocked to see the difference from the raw cut to the finished footage.

Sketch: little E concept

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Here’s a new sketch of the main character for the story I’m writing for my daughter. It’s less simplified than the other concept work I’ve done for this project. I like the direction this is going in, but am unsure whether or not I can keep drawing like this for the whole story because it takes a lot longer to finish. I’d like to go with this style though, and to be honest, my daughter probably won’t care at all until she gets older. It’s taken months to get to the point where I have my story outline more or less done. So I suppose if she has to wait a few more weeks for me to finish the artwork that won’t be such a big deal. I’m actually considering giving her a page or two at a time instead of all at once and adjust the story according to her reactions.

Ella Enchanted sketch

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This started out as an attempt to caricature Anne Hathaway of The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted. I was trying to get more practice at drawing a likeness and figured that caricature would help me analyze the face better.

But in the end my drawing doesn’t look like her very much. I’m still pretty happy with the way it turned out as a sketch and the style is kind of different for me. I might base a character from one of my comic book ideas on this drawing.

So even though this wasn’t entirely successful, I can feel some improvement in my drawing skills and am encouraged to keep going.

concept art: Dot in alley

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Real quick update this time. Finished a conceptual piece of Dot standing in an alleyway. I was looking at a painting by Craig Mullins as a guide for the background. Dot’s costume was designed by Albert Truong, a very awesome concept artist and illustrator I worked with last year. This image was an experiment combining colored line art for the character and a more painterly approach for the background.

I wish I were a better artist. I’m improving little by little, but I still see I have a long way to go. In the meantime I’m still having fun exploring ideas and getting more practice.