Mike King

lots o’ stuff

The Incredibles is out and doing well at the box office. I’m really happy to have been part of making that film.

Got a little melancholy when The Incredibles was released. It’s hard to watch all the hype and not feel a little bittersweet about the whole thing.

On the work front, things are going well. Settling into the new job, learning the tools, and generally trying to stop myself from wanting to change everything to work the way I’m used to.

The long drive between L.A. and S.F. is getting easier and easier. I hardly notice it anymore, as long as I get enough sleep before making the drive.

I’m helping a friend finish an animated short film he’s been trying to put together for the last couple years. It’s turning out really well, and he’s wrangled something like 70 people who’ve come and gone during the project. So I’m helping to art direct the lighting and light some shots. I’ll post pix from it when I can.

I’ve been trying to do some sketching and drawing, but really haven’t had the time. I’m being careful not to burn myself out. So even though I’m helping a lot with the short film, I’m not putting in crazy hours or working all weekend and stuff like that. So far so good.

Found a place

I found an apartment near work. Less than 10 minutes away from the office. It’s a bit more than I’d prefer to be paying overall. But I think the convenience will be worth it. I hope I can get the paperwork squared away this week or early next week and then I can figure out what I’m going to have to do for furniture.

Things are really busy with work and training and trying to get settled. Still haven’t had time to catch up with all the people I know around here.

New Job

Settling in at the new job at Walt Disney Feature Animation. Switching offices to a new building on Monday, so can’t get too settled yet. It’s really neat being back. Lots of familiar faces. The funny thing is that a lot of them have also just returned in the last month or so after a long absence.

The drive down wasn’t too bad. 5 hours almost exactly. We’ll see how tough the drive back is. It’s not great, but I think I could get used to it.

So things are good. But I think I’ll be a little more relaxed once I figure out a routine.

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Here’s the Movieweb.com transcript of the Brad Bird and John Walker panel at Comic-Con . I cannot wait to see how the movie turned out. It’s tough reading stuff like this and not feel bittersweet about it.

It’s been almost 18 months since I decided to leave Pixar and put my family front and center. While reading this transcript, I came across something Brad said that really nails what I’ve been going through:

And the family was getting larger, and clearly demanding more time. I was worried that I hadn’t made it yet. So, either I was going to dedicate the time necessary to making it and be a lousy father, or I was going to be a great father and never make it. I didn’t want to lose either.

I often wonder if I’m doing the right thing. And sometimes I have to remind myself there’s no single “right thing” in this life. It’s just a path I’ve decided to take.

mion video finished

To my knowledge, it’s burned onto DVD and in the mail up to Seattle as I write this. Two solid 12+ hour days spent re-coloring the video. I also color corrected a few shots on my brother’s director reel. Also helped to install a garage door opener. Busy weekend!

Quick Update

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

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.

ta03 todo list

For a variety of reasons the last SW:Revelations shot needs to be done by the end of the week!

To do list:

• 2 more layers of misc traffic. one in front of shipyard. one above the moon.
• render new sprites for the misc
• render engine glow element for taryn’s ship
• specular highlight bloom for taryn’s ship
• composite & color correction

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I can’t believe how long it’s been since my last post! Lots of things going on to keep me busy. My daughter got sick (she’s fine, but we did have to go to the very expensive emergency room late one night). Then I got sick again. Then my wife went on a church retreat. So I didn’t do any solid work on my projects for a good two weeks at least.

Right now I’m focusing on getting the Star Wars fan film shots finished. I’m really pounding hard on them, but I only get a couple iterations done per day because my hardware is so old and slow. The first shot contains the opening title crawl and is over 2500 frames long! Rendering and compositing the whole thing is excruciatingly slow.

Not much happening on the writing front. I jotted notes down for my daughter’s story and drew some thumbnails for page layouts. I’d start on some paintings, but my computer is bogged down rendering the Star Wars shots.

The Barnes & Noble writing group disbanded due to lack of interest. I never did make it back for the second meeting. Oh, well.

Updating Website: email broken

I upgraded my webhosting package so that I could do a little more customization, get extra bandwidth, and stuff like that.

They don’t handle my domain name registration anymore. Blah. So that was a hidden cost I didn’t see.

I also don’t get unlimited email forwards anymore. Every email alias seems to count the same as a real email box. Not a big deal, but I’m disappointed.

And until my domain registration gets migrated, I have no email at mkingmovies.com, so just be warned.