On March 12, 2014, The Wrap published an op/ed I penned. I am grateful that they provided me the opportunity reach a wide audience for a piece that’s meant for such a wide audience. Continue reading “Dear Hollywood, you can’t fix the biz in post.”
Basic Color Science for Cinema
If you like math and really want to the skinny on it, I give you: Bruce Linbloom. In particular, I’d recommend the section on XYZ to RGB to XYZ transformations.
If those really huge square brackets seem scary, it’s all too tempting to cast off the math and fall back on statements such as:
- It looks digital.
- It isn’t organic.
- It’s too clean.
- It feels dead. Not alive, like film.
- Those are candy colors.
- It looks too much like video.
It’s extremely tempting to speak from behind the opaque veil of divine-artistic-intuition. But it’s not good to hide from the truth. If one tries to pierce the veil of divine-artistic-intuition, one is often labeled a heretic and their opinion is cast away by the bourgeois (gab gab gossip gossip gasp glare). As such, many attempts at straightening the path and getting proper color-science into the mix, tend to fail. If someone with enough creative credentials steps into the conversation and makes an observation of divine-artistic-intuition, they win (golf clap). Data, math and science don’t override invalid conclusions in modern Hollywood.
How to actually put VFX and animation into your film
The Visual Effects Society (of which I am a member) recently re-tweeted this article titled: “How to put VFX and animation into your film.”
Go ahead. Read it. I’ll wait.
Done? Good. Its’ wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. If you are a filmmaker, low-budget or otherwise, don’t even start thinking in the terms suggested by that article/post.
So why am I picking on some blogger? Well firstly, Farhan has published a book and seems to feel authoritative on the subject. Second, the VFX Society is retweeting it. But we in the VFX industry are already under assault. And it’s time we started taking this all more seriously. That got me thinking.
Continue reading “How to actually put VFX and animation into your film”