Week 1: Introduction to the Module. Topic: The Age of the Image and the Trend of the Lens
List some current Trends of VFX
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Photorealism
Green Screen
Using Unreal Engine
What do you think Dr James Fox means by his phrase 'The Age of the Image'
In his series, Dr James Fox refers to the fact that our current day and age is The Age of the Image. We are currently taking more photographs a minute then there were photographs ever taken in the whole 19th century. People have become accustomed and obsessed with taking photographs. What James Fox wants to show with these series is the current point we are in time due to photography and filmmaking. The artists and filmmakers from 1900s seemed to understand the concept of the 4th dimension and they have actually created a new language. The language of television.
It's not only the artists and filmmakers that were making history though. In 1895 Wilhelm Roentgen, German engineer, created the first image of an X-Ray ever, showing his wife's hand and wedding ring. For the first time ever, humans could see through their bodies.
James Fox is showing us that The Age of the Image has changed everyone's lives, from photographs taken purely for immortalising the moment of joy to immortalising history and helping people in hospitals and war.
Art, photography and filmmaking has shaped our world the way it is now and is further influencing people's lives for decades to come.
Task - Match four Harold Edgerton images each with a VFX shot
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Antique gun firing
The Punisher Intro
Week 2: The Photographic Truth Claim: Can we believe what we see?
What you think is meant by the theory: The Photographic Truth-Claim?
James Fox starts the episode four of his series with the Plato's Cave theory, that Plato has come up with thousands of years ago. It's about prisoners who have been living all of their lives in a cave without seeing anything else and seeing shadows passing by on the walls that were merely people walking past the cave. One day the prisoners turn around and see the truth. This theory's dilemma and what James Fox wants to tell us in this episode is that the human perception can be very easily manipulated. You present a human a new way a thing works, the 'truth', the 'reality' and that person is living their whole life in a lie. This couldn't be more further from the truth and more appropriate today than it was back in Plato's days.
Social Media has made it extremely easy for humans to manipulate images, therefore manipulating everybody else's perceptions. This goes all the way from Fake News on our TVs to Instagram that is full of narcissists. Of course, not every news outlet out there is fake and not every person using Instagram is a narcissist, there's also good things that our obsession to image manipulation has done. Like being able to see the whole world from your bedroom, although even that can be a bad thing if you are not actually, physically going out there to see it for yourself.
Week 3: Faking Photographs: Image manipulation and computer collage
Collect 4 famous faked analogue photographs (that we now know to be fake)
Benito Mussolini removing the horse handler.
MLK giving the finger
John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe
John Lennon and Che Guevara
Fake Asia Tsunami 2004
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The image has actually been taken in Chile and the waves have been added.
Collect 4 faked shots from visual effects
Wolf of Wall Street - Venice scene
Man of Tai Chi
King Arhur
The Homesman
300 - Rise of an Empire
Write a definition of VFX compositing. What is it and how does it work?
VFX compositing is the process that flawlessly combines images and manipulates them creating an overall picture. Its purpose is to create a believable reality, that the viewers are not even questioning if the scene is real or not. Therefore compositing needs to be seamlessly done. A great example of extremely good compositing is a scene from the film 'Wolf of Wall Street'(2013), where the characters are in Venice preparing to get on a boat. The environment is complete CGI. There are many other scenes from this film that have great compositing. Compositing has its starting roots from the French illusionist Georges Melies, who in 1898 has created 'The Four Troublesome Heads'. This short film was revolutionary and helped with the begginings of VFX. Nowadays, compositing is at a completely different level, creating a lot of real looking environments, making the viewer not even considering questioning the verisimilitude of the images they are looking at. Georges Melies' short film, although ground-breaking at the time, now it looks like a child's play and is not very impressive. Softwares like Nuke are now giving people the ability to create completely new worlds, which is crazy when you think about how much the technology has evolved in over a hundred years.
Week 4: Defining Trends of Photorealism
Boardwalk Empire
Miguel Angel Nunez, an artist from Uruguay, has created an impressive array of photorealistic art – using oil on wood (as with this lollipop) or canvas.
Pedro Campos didn't begin oil painting until the age of 30. Now in his 50s, his incredibly realistic still life shots, city and seascapes are regularly mistaken for photographs.
Adolfo Fernandez Rodriguez
Dan Witz specialises in photorealistic portraits of crowds.
Write a post on Photorealism
Photorealism is a genre of art in which the artist is replicating an image to its finest detail. This can go from artists who are painting highly detailed images that look like photographs to highly detailed renders in VFX that trick the viewer into believeing that what they are looking at was actually real. Or the scene, although looking impossible, has a taste of truth in it by looking very real, giving the out of the ordinary truth behind it.
A great example of Photorealism and extremely good VFX compositing would be the film 'Wolf of Wall Street', which had a lot of VFX scenes that most people would not be able to tell that the scenes were edited. The environment the characters were in looked real, although it never existed.
In the new 'The Lion King' (2019) film, although the viewers know there is no way animals could speak, the animals and the environment look real. Photorealism is giving verisimilitude to the scene. Making it appear real, giving truth to the images through extreme attention to detail, making the unreal look real.
The photorealism art movement started in the 1960s and it had photography as its inspiration. Artists would take photographs and then try to replicate the image with hyper details.
Week 5
Make a list of trends of capture on your digital sketchbook
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Scanning - Laser Scanning
Motion-Capture
An advantage of motion capture is that animation can be more realistic.
How do you think Motion Capture is different to Keyframe Animation?
Motion Capture and Keyframe Animation are two different modalities of creating still or moving images. Motion capture is done by capturing footage of actors in real life that are using motion capture special suits so that the CG characters can be brought to life. Keyframe Animation is done by hand and is 2D, whilst Motion Capture is data driven and is 3D. When motion capture is being used for animating a scene, your brain notices all the subtleties and complexities extracted from an actual living person.
Motion capture can be very useful and efficient when it comes to time and to the fluidity and realism of the animation, but sometimes can be too much and go into the Uncanny Valley realm. 'Hulk' (2003) and 'The Polar Express' are good examples of Motion Capture taking the film into the Uncanny Valley. This goes to show that motion capture is not necessarily always the best go to solution, therefore keyframe animation is still a very good option. The two are different, but can both achieve incredible results. Motion capture tends to be more suitable for stories that have a more realistic narrative and keyframe animation is good for stories in which the character movement is very unrealistic and can't be replicated in motion capture. An example would be scenes in anime, where the characters are moving so fast that the image is distorted and the characters sometimes even have an after image.
Both motion capture and keyframe animation are great for telling amazing stories.
Week 6: Reality Capture (LIDAR) and VFX
Trends of 3D Scanning
Find an example project of each type of 3D scanning.
Put an image from each type on your sketchbook
Caption the image a title of the project and a line of description:
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Depth-based scanning
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Laser scanning (LIDAR)
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Photogrammetry
What is Reality Capture, how does it work, and where is it used?
Reality Capture is the process of scanning an object, a person, or a surface and rendering the data into 3D objects. The device that is being used for 3D scanning is taking millions of measurements to form a digital copy of the object.
There are three different types of reality capture: Depth-based scanning, photogrammetry and laser scanning (LIDAR).
Photogrammetry is the process of taking multiple pictures from multiple angles and then using the required software, the images are being processed by calculating the space from between the camera and the objects. X,Y,Z coordinates are being created as a point cloud from which 3D geometry can be produced.
LIDAR scanning, which stands as an abbreviation for 'Light detection and ranging', uses multiple laser measurements taken from a 360 degrees viewpoint and a 3D point data cloud is built from the measurements collected.
Lidar Lounge is a top team that specialises in both photogrammetry and LIDAR scanning. The founders are Tamara Mitchell and Ross Clark. They do set and location scanning, vehicle scanning, object and prop scanning, character cyber scanning and pretty much anything else. Projects they have worked on include Hobbs and Shaw and Marry Poppins Returns. Marry Poppins Returns has been their most challenging project to work on so far, as they had to scan over 300 props and a lot of the props were very complicated to scan.
Having a top scanning business is not easy, but thanks to persons like Tamara and Ross, films with extreme attention to detail like Marry Poppins Returns and Outlaw King on Netflix are possible.
What are Spectacular, Invisible and Seamless effects? Using examples or case studies; Identify, analyse, and examine current trends in spectacular, invisible, and seamless effects.
In my essay I will detail the difference between these effects, and I will be giving examples from films that I have seen or have knowledge about and analyse them.
Invisible effects are the ones that people cannot tell there was any CGI used to make the shot happen, for example trees, tables, streets, buildings, environments. These effects are usually, if done correctly, not spotted by the human brain and they trick the audience into believing that everything that is being shown on the screen has happened in front of the camera, when in actuality that was only a very well done digital environment. A good example for these sorts of visual effects is the TV series The Crown (2016) created by Peter Morgan.
Spectacular effects are the ones that bend the laws of physics for the most part. The audience can tell that what they are seeing cannot be real, still, it has a very realistic touch to it making the audience emerge into this new reality that is being shown and taking it as being real. A great example for these sorts of visual effects is the film Avatar (2009) directed by James Cameron
Seamless effects can apply for both invisible effects and spectacular effects. It’s the special effects that make the action smooth and that help the scene look impeccable.
First proper special effects started in films like Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) directed by Barry Levinson, The Terminator (1984) directed by James Cameron and Jurassic Park (1993) directed by Steven Spielberg. Then the game was on. Jurassic Park made everything real and incredible. Jurassic Park is full of spectacular visual effects. Harry Potter Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) directed by David Yates is another film that is full of spectacular visual effects, but it also has invisible effects. One particular scene that has invisible special effects is the one with the main characters on the hillock discussing their next move.
Usually when people are thinking about special effects the best examples that come to mind are the special effects used for incredible sci-fi or magical scenes, the spectacular effects. The ones that are used for big blockbuster films with giant greenscreens and a lot of computer-generated power, but the truth is that plenty of films and TV series these days would not exist without the use of special effects.
Here is where invisible special effects come along. The special effects that are so well done that the viewer doesn't even question the verisimilitude of the scene they are viewing because they were tricked into believing that everything that is seen was shot in front of a camera.
One of the best examples that had incredible invisible effects is the film Forrest Gump (1994) directed by Robert Zemeckis, which won Industrial Light and Magic, the company behind the special effects, an Oscar. The film has tens and tens of visual effects shots and many of them are invisible. Examples are when Forrest Gump, played by Tom Hanks is meeting with the presidents of United States of America. There is a scene in which Forrest Gump meets president J. F. Kennedy and then later in the film, he meets President Richard Nixon. These scenes have been cleverly made by using compositing, adding Tom Hanks in the actual footage of the two presidents that shows them being in the White House during their different presidency terms and creating the illusion of Tom Hanks, as Forrest Gump, interacting with the presidents by speaking to them and actually shaking their hands. These invisible effects are so well done that they are and will continue being iconic for the special effects industry for years to come. These shots were revolutionary.
Another shot of this kind was the one in which Forrest Gump meets John Lennon, the founder of the world-famous band called The Beatles, on national TV on a chat show entitled The Dick Cavett Show. Once again, the scene was incredible as the musician has been assassinated years before the film being in production. Being able to integrate actual people into old footage and making it seem as though the two persons actually met in real life and interacted with each other was a very astounding thing to see on screen.
The film starts with a shot that has the camera focused on a feather that is floating in the air. The feather has been digitally recreated so it can float nice and swiftly and go to Forrest Gump’s feet. The digital feather would fall perfectly on the real feather that was placed at Tom Hank’s feet so he could seamlessly pick it up. That is a seamless effect.
There is a slight difference between seamless effects and invisible effects. The difference is that invisible effects usually are the ones that are objects and part of the background. Examples: chairs, tables, streets, digital environments, things the viewer would not expect to not be real. Seamless on the other hand, are also invisible, but can apply for both invisible effects and spectacular effects; their purpose is to make the scene look as smooth as possible.
Other invisible effects from the film would be when Lieutenant Dan, played by Gary Sinise, loses his legs during a war battle. The actor had his two legs covered in blue material and they were edited out. This might not be that impressive as many other productions are using this modality of editing out limbs, but a scene worth mentioning is when lieutenant Dan gets himself off the wheelchair onto the edge of a bridge and jumps in the water. The way that specific scene was made is that there was a missing part from the bridge through which Gary Sinise could get his legs that were covered in blue material so he could place his body at the edge of the bridge creating the seamless illusion that he does not have legs. Small details like that can make you completely forget that the actor most likely still has his legs in real life.
In all the shots in which Forrest Gump is playing Ping Pong, Tom Hanks wasn’t using any Ping Pong balls. They were later added in, digitally creating the seamless invisible effect of Forrest Gump being a true Ping Pong master.
These are some of the best examples of invisible and seamless effects in the film Forrest Gump.
Another ingenious film worth mentioning for its invisible special effects and its digitally created environments is The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) directed by Martin Scorsese. The invisible special effects have been created by Brainstorm Digital. Due to the lavish lifestyle of the characters and because they were flying around the world to all sorts of exotic and exquisite places, the production used many green screens to digitally manipulate and do compositing, creating the invisible effects of the characters being in places like Venice and Switzerland and many other places of the likes. Towards the end of the film there is a prison scene that the main character, Jordan Belfort who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is being sent to and he is playing tennis there. The whole prison is CGI. The film is full of scenes that people would think the environment was real, but in actuality, it never existed. Digital environments is a concept that is used very well and a lot in this film showcasing the power it can have on a viewer’s perception. As this film is not in any way magical, sci-fi or out of the ordinary when it comes to visual effects, the viewers would not even consider the fact that possibly special visual effects were ever used for the film. Since the film has such big well-known actors in it, obviously the production can afford a lot of money to fly the actors to all those expensive places, right? Only they didn't fly them to every single place in the film as that would be too much time and money consuming. The easier and more convenient approach was to create digital environments. The power of digital environments is very useful especially in films of the likes of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) as people are not expecting any sorts of VFX to be used.
When it comes to the film Avengers (2012) directed by Joss Whedon, it is mostly known for its incredible blockbuster level spectacular special effects. Hulk smashing everything around him, billionaire high tech suits capable of destroying entire cities created and owned by Tony Stark, Demi-Gods, aliens and so on and so forth. One might be surprized to find out that there were a lot of scenes in the film that were actually invisible. Due to New York having restrictions and limitations when it comes to shooting and where you are able to fly a helicopter through the city, Industrial Light & Magic has compiled over 2,000 spherical images made up of over 250,000 images recreating over 20 blocks of New York creating an exact digital copy of the city to be used instead of the green screens and the results are extremely realistic. There are a lot of flying and fighting scenes that are happening throughout New York in this film and whilst it looks like everything is happening in the actual New York, we are looking at its identical digital copy generated from a bunch of images.
Harry Potter Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) directed by David Yates is a film that is full of spectacular visual effects created by some of the biggest names in the visual effects industry such as Framestore and Baseblack. The film includes spectacular special effects all the way from magic wands to walls you can walk through, cloaks that make you invisible, talking hats and epic wizard fights. Although the blockbuster is full of ravishing, magical, spectacular effects, the film also has, surprisingly enough, a lot of invisible effects scenes. Just like in the film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) that has a lot of digital environments, Harry Potter Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) has some of those too. There is one particular scene that Baseblack was in charge of for the film. It consists of the three main characters of the story getting out of a lake onto a hillock trying to dry themselves and discussing as to what next steps they should do. The scene was created using a cable-cam on a greenscreen that was set perfectly around the hillock Harry, Hermione and Ron stepped on. The way the scene was further created is with the help of a bunch of reference plates of lakes and mountains gathered by the team in Scotland, added in Nuke to create this digital environment and with the power of compositing, the mesmerising scene has been brought to life. This particular scene was difficult for Baseblack as not only there was a green hillock through all that outdoor greenscreen, but the actors were also wearing dark green, which can be a challenge when trying to use the power of greenscreens. With all this in the way Baseblack still managed to create a realistic, incredible, seamless, invisible scene, not even allowing the viewers the slightest thought of even considering the fact that what they are looking at is not real. Everything in the scene was real, all of that happened. No doubt about it in the viewer’s mind. That is the power of digital environments.
For Harry Potter Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) there have been around 1310 special effects artists working to get this masterpiece of a film done.
The film Contagion (2011) directed by Steven Soderbergh has gained a lot of popularity during 2020 due to the Covid-19 outbreak and the film’s accuracy when it comes to depicting what is happening in the world after such an outbreak. In the film a deadly new highly infectious virus has started its rampage, being spread all over the world. The film in on itself does not have that many visual effects shots, however, there is a final scene in the film that explains the roots of the virus and how it came into fruition. The beginning of this virus comes into realization when a sick bat is displaced from its natural habitat, eats and drops some food in a pig barn, a pig picks it up and then later humans are infested, hence the worldwide spread of this virus. The bat that is used for this shot is completely CGI only. The team in charge for the bat has begun their study about what possible fruit bats would make sense to be in Honk Kong, where the transmission has started. After finally finding one, they decided to name the bat ‘Rosie’ and they have also bought a dehydrated bat from a store in Lose Angeles to use as reference. They have found a lot of different details about a bat’s wings and bone structure. The bat was fully animated in Maya and then released to fly onto the screen.
The demand for visual effects has significantly risen during the years. A true game changer when it comes to the films and visual effects industry that changed the visual effects landscape is Jurassic Park (1993) directed by Steven Spielberg. After the unbelievable apparitions of dinosaurs in the real world, giving the illusion of majestic beings that have been extinct for millenniums now to be very well alive during our age and time, people have formed a sweet tooth for visual effects, for the fantastical and the science fiction. Ever since this masterpiece and other films like The Terminator (1984) directed by James Cameron and The Matrix (1999) directed by The Wachowskis , the use of visual effects in films has drastically risen and they are now being used in almost any production, be it for spectacular effects or for invisible effects. Jurassic Park was not the first film to use visual effects, but it was one of the first to seamlessly blend in spectacular visual effects in a somewhat grounded reality. Of course, dinosaurs don’t exist anymore, but the way the production and the VFX team went about creating this film and giving the dinosaurs life was completely new and has forever shaped the way CGI was about to be used. Visual effects weren’t anymore regarded just as a mere tool to use, but now as a very essential part of the films industry.
For Jurassic Park, Industrial Light & Magic had been working with computer graphics and they put together a fully CGI tyrannosaurus rex, which Steven Spielberg was happy to use. The team did intensive research when it comes to depicting dinosaurs. They have studied behavioural patterns of giraffes, elephants and alligators, as well as their walking pattern and muscle movement. The motive why the tyrannosaurus rex is better by far than all of the other dinosaurs in the film is because there have been over 1000 hours of work put in of palaeontological research and design. As tyrannosaurus rex is one of the biggest and most ferocious dinosaurs there ever was, of course it had to be the best one, and the team managed to do a beautiful digital recreation of a being that existed over 65 million years ago. Of course, all the dinosaurs in the film look great and realistic, but tyrannosaurus rex takes the cake when it comes to how real it is and that is probably not only because of the extensive research that was devoted for this creature, but also because of the big puppets that were used in the film and that also helped the animators to better understand the scale and the weight of a being as such compared to human beings.
Without a doubt Jurassic Park (1993) directed by Steven Spielberg, just like Forrest Gump (1994) directed by Robert Zemeckis and The Terminator (1984) directed by James Cameron, has had a great influence over the visual effects industry.
In conclusion special visual effects, be it spectacular, invisible or seamless are now a big part of the film industry and will continue being. Without VFX a lot of both magical scenes and ‘normal’ scenes we are able to see on screen would not be able to exist today without the ingenuity of people before us that showed us and gave us new methods to use to make the visual effects look as real as possible and send our viewers into the world that is being shown to them.