VisFX School

Demo Reel

Master Will — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:01:13 +0000

Hey everyone,

Here’s a look at my demo reel that I’ve been working on. It’s a rough cut of it with some weak transitions. I’ve been busy working for this company Nomad Edit in Los Angeles. Here’s a link to their site> http://www.nomadedit.com/

Let me know what you think of my reel. All critiques are appreciated.

Master Will

Demo Reel from Will Cox on Vimeo.

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Distortion Grid for 3D tracking

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:56:31 +0000

I’m on set VFX suping a short for a PBS series written and directed by Robby Hensen (The Badge, Thr3e) and some of the sets call for digital set extensions that I plan to do using Vue, and Maya. I don’t have any distortion grids printed off, so I thought I would drop them on here for easy access. I’ll try to explain why this is needed and go through the steps of how to use them in a future update, right now I’m being called to set.

Distortion Grid PDF

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Say Hello to My Little Friend: The Thunderpipe, a guacamole gun on steroids. Part Deux

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:54:25 +0000

So a few weeks ago I finally got my hands on the Thunderpipe. I had the opportunity to put it to use, soon after getting it in the mail, on a music video I VFX supervised. We are deep into post on it currently, and I will be sure to post a link to it once it is finished. A very avante gaurde Goundrey-esque child’s nightmare. I was only blasting packing peanuts into the air though for the music video.

Now, I am about to put it to use how the good lord intended. Mortars, shrapnel, blood, guts, and explosions. I am prepping, as the co producer and VFX sup, for a Vietnam War era short that is going to serve as a prologue to a post-war feature length character piece we are hoping to shoot about a year and a half down the road.

If you are working on a low budget film that calls for effects like these, I highly recommend purchasing one (or more) of these. You may be tempted to try to create your own, but unless you have a mech. eng. degree, save yourself the time, and headache and support local, homegrown business. Check out The SpudGun Technology Center, www.spudtech.com; I believe it was down for a few months, during my initial post, but Jeremy has brought it back to life, and better than ever. A lot of fun looking toys aside from the Thunderpipe.

Thunderpipe: FX-1 got one 'cause I could

If you are familiar with the Thunderpipe, it is likely you are already familiar with Detonation Films, www.detonationfilms, but either way I highly recommend checking out their site too. Bob, from Detonation Films was very helpful when I was in the early stages of figuring out the right recipe for the best looking effects. They also have a lot of good stock FX, VFX tutorials, and low budget, DIY filmmaking tips.

I will be adding test video if the shots over the next few days.

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New Tutorial: Converting 2D image to 3D in Nuke

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 06:49:54 +0000

There is a new quick video tutorial available in the tutorials section. In this tutorial I show you a simple way to convert any 2d photo or video clip in a stereo anagylph with Nuke. Although a similar pipeline to Shake, and After Effects in some regards Nuke is by far the compositing program of choice when delving into the world of stereoscopic compositing. The Nuke script, and needed project files are included along with the video tutorial although I recomend using your own source image.

Click here to go directly to the tutorial!

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Build Your Own Shake Macro

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:35:41 +0000

There is a new video tutorial available in the tutorials section that is a step to step guide on how to build and save your own Macros to use in our own node trees. Practically any script can be converted into a script allowing you to streamline any project. I hope to follow this up with a tutorial on creating your own Gizmo, Nuke’s equivalent to a Macro.

Click here to check out the tutorial.

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Road trips, car camera mounts, time lapse photography and graphing calculator intervalometers. Part 2

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:10:38 +0000

No DIY instructable yet on how to build the car camera rig, but after a week of procrastination, a few hours in Shake cleaning up the footage, and giving it a more respectable color grade in Color I have finished the time lapse of my road trip from the midwest. If I do find there is interest from visitors in finding out how to build your own car camera mount I will post a how to, but for the moment I am going to try to get back to posting more VFX heavy tutorials. Most likely starting with a crash course in Camera Mapping for nuBees.

Roadtrip time-lapse from Jon Julsrud on Vimeo.

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Road trips, car camera mounts, time lapse photography and graphing calculator intervalometers. Part 1

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 05:31:08 +0000

I finally drove my car out to california so I could have my own form of reliable transportation. I decided it was also a perfect opportunity to mess around with the graphing calculator intervalometer I put together a few weeks ago for another side project that never came to throughition. In order to do the project properly I decided I had to rent/buy a car camera rig. After checking out products on the market, and looking at the rental selection at my local camera rental place, I decided I could probably spend a fraction of the cost to build one myself, and did so quite successfully.

Camera Car Mount from Jon Julsrud on Vimeo.

The next post will focus on how the camera rig was built, and I will put together a tidy little DIY instructable. This post is meant to focus on how you can create your own intervalometer using that graphing calculator you probably haven’t touched since 10th grade geometry. An intervalometer is a handy tool to have in any photographer, or filmmakers bag of tricks, but I never enjoy throwing out $100 on something I will maybe use once a year. So why not repurpose something that has been hibernating in a drawer for eight years.

You can turn your graphing calculator into an intervalometer with a very simple program that can be written in about a minute. You just have to create a new program, named whatever you wish. When you are prompted to start coding the program enter in these lines.

: Prompt A
: While 1
: For (H,1,A,1)
: End
: Send(A)
: End

All of the commands can be found under the Program button. To run the program just select it and hit enter. A= will pop up on the screen and you just need to enter in a number and press enter. This sets off a counter, once it hits the number you supplied a picture is taken, and the count starts over. The actual amount of time it takes for the calculator to count the number you put in varies, and slows as the battery wears down, but that is a slight limitation as I was able to run the camera for two straight days taking a picture every minute without the batteries dyeing on me, and the rate only changed by a few seconds. Unfortunately every time you change the batteries you also need to rewrite the program. With a brand new pair of batteries 300 is roughly a second, and 20000 roughly a minute.

While doing your time lapse photography there are a few key things you have to remember in order to make the effect turn out properly. The biggest of those two are switching off the auto focus, so the camera doesn’t automatically refocus the shot ever time a picture is taken. The second is locking the aperture setting and having the shutter speed fluctuate. Doing so will save you from trying to remove a nasty flicker that occurs when different exposures are shown back to back. The others are less important, and probably more obvious, but you want to plan out the compensation, and framing of your time lapse, make sure you have a good tripod, etc. etc.

Stay tuned, as in the next week I hope to post the DIY instructable so you can create your own camera car mount, as well as the time lapse footage which may come with some lessons involving Color.

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Winter Demo Reel

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:34:18 +0000

Here is a breakdown of some shots I have worked on over the past six months. Some are school projects, others are freelance jobs. The color correction is on an independent film named Montana Amazon that will be released soon.

Jon Julsrud Winter2010 demo reel from Jon Julsrud on Vimeo.

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Stereoscopic Vue Scene

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:56:48 +0000

After looking at the tutorial I posted last week on how to develop a stereoscopic camera rig in After Effects, I realized how terrible the composition I quickly threw together looked, so I decided to render it out with a different composition to see how the effect held up. I dropped in the jungle scene I put together in Vue last month and did a quick render without even touching the settings. I have to say it turned out pretty good, although I may want to tweak the convergence a bit.

Stereoscopic Anaglyph Vue Scene

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Forget Bullet Time, Time Sculpting is where it’s at.

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:20:25 +0000

Remember way back in 199-whatever, the first time you probably every took notice of names like Wachowski, and Gaeta, and finally saw a movie where Keanu Reeves wasn’t a laughable caricature of an actor; OK, I still catch myself saying ‘I know Kung-Fu’ in the burnt out surfer dude accent. Well this is the 21 century, quit living in the past and reminiscing about the the good ‘ol days. Besides, Bullet Time became about one of the most clichéd effects one could add to their demo reel about a year after the DVD came out, along with cg Amazonians with heaving breasts that are the parents’ basement dwelling fully grown man star (add your poison war or trek) geek’s wet dream, and the tunnel of light look.*

Now, imagine if Bullet Time had a red neck genius cousin that did nothing but sit in his trailer cooking up a batch of high octane methamphetamine that he was constantly tweaking on. Sure, he wouldn’t have any teeth, but I bet he could come up with some wild ideas. No need to stress those imagination muscles, save that for your effects shots. She does and his name is Time Sculpting.

Toshiba: Timesculpture from Alex Kehr on Vimeo.

Time sculpting uses a similar set up to bullet time, but instead of still cameras firing off one after another you have HD cameras rolling. The first (and only, from what I have seen) ever use of this was done by Toshiba for an add campaign. It used somewhere around 200 cameras, 20,000 gigabites and took over 350 hours just to process the footage, not taking into account any post effects work compositing or otherwise.

Now I just need to get my hands on 200 cameras and so many tripods.

* As described in the Christmas 2009 3DWorld mag article “A-Z of CGI clichés”

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