I supervised the shoot and was lead Flame op on InterSport, a world cup ad for Indonesia featuring Fernando Torres. This is why it’s been so quiet here over the last few weeks.

I just wrote another Flame Expressions tutorial on how to animate an element travelling in a perfect circle without having to manually trace a path. Take a look!

Just finished this last week. The sumos were shot on blue/green screens on location. Enjoy!

Suppose you’re missing the lower_left corner of a bilinear.

In the animation menu, choose the lower_left channel under the Bilinear and type the following expression:

And here’s the result:

The method is to add the two nearest corners to the missing point and then subtract that from the opposing corner. 

For easy reference, here are the expressions for all four corners:

upper_left: ( lower_left + upper_right ) – lower_right

upper_right: ( upper_left + lower_right ) – lower_left

lower_right: ( upper_right + lower_left ) – upper_left

lower_left: ( upper_left + lower_right ) – upper_right

So I finally got around to write a beginner’s guide on Flame Expressions. Enjoy!

Ports on the Epic 5K camera?

Scarlet/DSMC buttons? We’ll find out in 3 days!

Richard did a fantastic job of coming up with a reference shot to sell to the director and clients and this is what it looks like.

CG Leaves

The two leaves in the extreme foreground and the one behind it is fully CG. One of the plugins (or Sparks) which I used in almost every shot is Sapphire’s Z-Defocus in conjunction with a CG Depth pass.

Leaf Depth pass

Other passes include Veins, Facing Ratios and most importantly for this shot a Specular map which helped me light the leaves with a nice waxy grade. The reverse side of the leaves had a different, translucent look.

Specular pass

Here’s the final shot:

WordPress is installed and running with the excellent Thesis theme. I’ve yet to tinker with all the settings to decorate the place the way I want but this will do as a start.

Here we go.