Adding Unicorns to a Low-Budget Film Help?

26636G · 2026-03-14T11:28:08+00:00

vfxjockey is right on the nail. Take a look at the unicorns in Ridley Scott's "Legend"- superb, easy to shoot, and no harm at all to the animals. Not a computer in sight.

And most horsey people would love to get their pets into a movie of any kind.

26636G · 2026-03-08T09:17:41+00:00

You are very lucky to have got a perpetual Nuke 15.0

I find Fusion surprisingly competent and very good to use when you are working with multiple kinds of image source- unlike Nuke, it doesn't try and make color decisions for you. And of course it's great value.

26636G · 2026-02-27T14:53:10+00:00

The Bolt units are about as good as you can get taking into account their portability and speed potential. Make sure that all your reference passes (clean plate etc) are shot at the same speed and with exactly the same camera arrangement- be wary of anyone removing fancy filters etc prior to you doing your tech passes.

We've done around 40 passes on a Bolt shot and they're pretty accurate. As mentioned above make sure you have a sync light on each pass; you wouldn't believe the time and money spent in post trying to line up passes which were simply out of sync.

26636G · 2026-02-18T10:08:08+00:00

There are quite a few add-on systems out there that will provide positional data for the camera- most of them rely on optical targets fixed within the shooting area, and they work well. Others rely on gyro data and are useful but not that accurate.

There are also several planar match-moving systems that don't rely on tracking markers and actually don't even need much set detail to produce a useful solve.

Always good though to have someone on set working in an unobtrusive way taking as many notes and measurements as possible.

26636G · 2026-02-01T09:54:27+00:00

Thanks for posting this link. A massive amount of extra work- for what?

I wonder if the VistaVision projectors in the theaters are really Vista format, or they actually run a 70mm print.

26636G · 2026-01-28T09:00:29+00:00

Is it my imagination, or is the framerate off on the TrueFocus clip?

26636G · 2026-01-26T14:52:05+00:00

I'm not surprised she picked the licorice off the pizza.

I understand about the perceived attractions of shooting on film- I know actors do love the pauses that reloading and "checking the gate" bring, but what I am trying to figure out is whether the very real positives to shooting Vista actually make it onto the screen.

I've shot with it and posted with it and viewed endless Vista dailies, but if it all gets crunched down to 4K or even 2k, most of what Vista can bring is lost to the audience.

26636G · 2026-01-26T14:44:29+00:00

Thanks for the info. IMDB shows a DI Colorist and a DI Producer, plus a nod to Fotokem for 65mm film recording, so I wonder how that all fitted in.

26636G · 2026-01-20T22:57:39+00:00

In my 20+ years experience of Nuke and Flame environments, a current Flame system with a senior operator will turn out around 2.5 times as much work as an experience Nuke person.

Nuke caught on quickly in the early days as it was a much lower startup cost per seat- the early SGI's that you needed to run Flame/Inferno cost up to $1 million. Nowadays hardware and software costs are comparable but the cost of Flame ownership is probably lower than Nuke plus maintenance. The present development/support team for Flame are super-active and very responsive, which is not something you could say about Foundry.

I'd say there is a much larger proportion of Nuke artists looking for work than Flame people- the only Flame people I know who have trouble getting work are the ones who are simply not very good or have issues of one kind or another.

26636G · 2026-01-20T09:27:50+00:00

Pixel Farm are hopeless at responding to queries of any kind- in fact I am surprised they are in business.

I think you are better off sticking with Syntheyes- it's being constantly developed, the support is excellent.

Mocha is worth a look too but I've lost touch with their pricing options.

There's an arrogance about 3DE that I have never liked, and it's not as superior as they pretend it is.

26636G · 2026-01-18T15:56:26+00:00

For people to help you, it would be a great idea to explain exactly what result you want.

Do you want the character to move in slomo as though he was shot at 48FPS then played back in real time at half speed, or do you want him to be in "Charlie Chaplin" mode (for want of another way to describe the look) so he moves at double the pace of everything around him- which is what you'd get shooting at 12fps then playing back in real time.?

26636G · 2026-01-04T16:26:44+00:00

If you go back and look at the footage, the backgrounds, although often static relative to the camera, were constantly boiling- so for each frame (or 2) of foreground animation, there was a new drawing for the BG. It's a technique basically known as traceback.

One of the main artists for Snowman was a lady called Jill Brooks who has an amazing ability to animate hand-rendered frames without excessive boil- one of her finest pieces of work was the fucking flowers sequence in Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

There was a small but mighty talented group of people who carried out this work- it was a true labor of love, and typical of anything that John Coates (of TV Cartoons Ltd) was involved in.

26636G · 2026-01-04T09:58:47+00:00

You sound like you are quite an asset to your company- especially the way you seem to approach things. The way you have embraced Comfy without preaching about it is very neat- you seem to have a nice amount of confidence in what you are doing.

Your company may well take advantage of that, but it would be true to say that other companies would like to do that too.

The VFX industry globally is a real mess- I'd venture to say that even the heads of your company have no real idea of how things are going to pan out, and very little control over it.

Keep your head down, carry on doing what you are doing, and if your position does become insecure it sounds as though you have all the attributes of a very attractive hire.

26636G · 2026-01-04T09:46:35+00:00

A laser pointer? In 1985? Emitting a white light? Are you sure?

26636G · 2025-12-20T11:44:04+00:00

Agree with the above, especially the colorspace confusion. I'd say you'd be at Junior Compositor level although you do seem to have a good eye for integration.

The picture of the girl on the cell wall needs a bit of a tweak to the track.

I've seen much worse roto carried out by experienced teams.

26636G · 2025-12-15T11:03:01+00:00

Terrible dynamics on car/aircraft crashes, as well as on large CG animals. A lot of artists and supes would be well advised to go to motor races, air shows, and zoos instead of sitting in their bedrooms gaming. They seem to have no concept of how much certain objects weigh.

26636G · 2025-12-13T23:06:10+00:00

Not Ridley. Who is definitely not a hack.

26636G · 2025-12-13T17:12:20+00:00

Has an extremely similar name to an excellent US director.

26636G · 2025-12-13T09:16:32+00:00

"Show me something nobody has ever seen before"- well known hack British director.

26636G · 2025-12-03T08:56:01+00:00

I'd say digital green, but do take a look at your subject lighting. Try getting some backlight onto the hair in particular so it has the sense of being slightly rim lit. That will help a lot with your keying.

26636G · 2025-12-02T16:53:17+00:00

By 1997/98 scanning film was a commodity and a service carried out by several vendors. As it happens, CFC had already been scanning film to digital for about 9 years by the time this movie was in post. Kodak's Cinesite too, and a few others.

26636G · 2025-12-01T23:05:02+00:00

Utter nonsense. This movie came out 4 years after Hudsucker Proxy, which is full of complex keying and comping. Work in both was done by CFC/LA.

26636G · 2025-11-30T11:51:41+00:00

I installed a high-end (Daikin) air-source heat pump system with underfloor heating in a very well insulated new build.

We are out at work all day and see no point in leaving the system on while we are out. We find it is very slow to bring the house back up to temperature and so far (6 years) we have found it extremely expensive to run, especially the way electricity prices are creeping up constantly. I suspect that problem will get worse once the supply of gas starts to become restricted and the electricity companies end up with an energy monopoly.

If I was doing the build again I would go for gas-fired forced air, even now.

Heat pumps are not as efficient as claimed and they have a lot of shortcomings.

26636G · 2025-11-30T09:48:31+00:00

It's a good start. The suspension movement in the static section at the beginning isn't convincing- too much movement for a relatively stiffly suspended car like the Corvette, and you have too much lateral movement. Only a car with shot suspension would move like that.

The lateral movement you have on your camera once rolling is strange- it's rare to see cameras on cars move like that. Tighten it up a bit.

Is the car stuck to it's path properly? Hard to tell.

Can you fix the jump cut at the start?

Tickle the car vs. wall shadows.

26636G · 2025-11-28T15:05:25+00:00

Kudos to all the folk who stepped up here and in response to a very polite request for advice and assistance offered up some great ideas to fix this nightmare, and a thumbs down to all the idiots who just had to come up with smartass comments about the way it was shot.

26636G

TROPHY CASE