Weeks 1 and 2

02/04/2008

8:30 – 19:00

Today was my first day of work experience at Texas @ 360 which is a production house in Albion. They do everything from Tele-Text for broadcast, commercials, film and television series. Unlike many production houses though they do everything from pre-production through to final distribution. It was great to have the opportunity to work in such a diverse creative environment.

After being introduced to a number of the staff I was put into a room called the Flame Studio, which is where a lot of the compositing is done. Flame is a comositing software that runs off Linux on silicon graphic hardware. Silicon graphic computers were used on films such as Jurassic Park however with software such as After Effects and Avid so easily available and the computers powerful enough to run such software is also easier to obtain Flame suits are not as widely used anymore.

Although Flame is becoming less widely used it was still interesting to watch Eric, the compositor working on the current project. The project was a commercial for a company called “Navitas” http://www.navitasworld.com/. I was shown the brief, which said that they needed a person standing in a spinning globe moving text around the screen like in the movie “Minority Report”. At this point the green screen, 3D, textures, text and sound had been supplied and loaded into the software, it was simply a matter of putting it all together. I didn’t realize how much time was put into the postproduction stage of development.

I mostly sat and watched Eric work most of the day, I asked plenty of questions though and made sure his coffee was full. He also showed me his show reel and some of his finished works. The ad we were working on needed to have one version for India, China and Australia so the person in the 3D globe was of that background for each. After being shown how to animate the 3D globe so that the person looked as though they were standing inside it I got to work on the Indian version. How it is done is by adding a “clipping plane” to it, with this you can adjust what will be seen in front and behind the object in the center.

After watching these commercials get composited together and ready to render I asked how film is exported at a high enough quality for DVD. I didn’t know that the project is first rendered as an uncompressed TIF sequence and then the audio is exported uncompressed separately. The two elements are then brought into the DVD making software as two separate layers so that if you had say a Chinese dubbed version you could select the language from the menu and it would play the corresponding soundtrack.

Before leaving for the day I went to see what the CGI department was up to. Rangi Sutton was the head of animation, so he was whom I hung around for the couple of hours leading up to me leaving. He was working on a film that is due to be released later this year called “Day breakers” which is an Australian film about vampires. He showed me a couple of shots he had been working on which were awesome. He walked me through the different special effects and techniques used. I got to do a little bit of work on one of the sequences, but Rangi was giving me step-by-step instructions. So although I didn’t technically get to do anything, it was a buzz getting to work on a commercial and a film in one day.

03/04/2008

9:00 – 18:30

So today I went to work with Eric again, we had one more version of the commercial to complete. The agent and client were arriving that day to decide if the ad was ready for broadcast. I didn’t realize that was how the advertising industry worked. I was lead to believe that if a client wanted something they would go to the production house and talk directly to the producers. Instead the client had arranged to meet an agent.

The agent came in earlier in the day to clarify a couple of little things that the client wanted fixed before he arrived. It was frustrating to finish rendering the ads to have the client call up an hour before arriving asking to put a number of new effects in. I asked Eric if it was a wise idea to send little bits of completed footage at a time so that if anything does get changed it is quick to fix. Eric said that that isn’t always how a project is done saying that if a client sees larger bits of finished material they are less likely to want to change it because they can see how close it is to completion and so don’t want to mess around with it.

So I got to sit in the meeting between the producer, agent, client and compositor. It was interesting to see this piece that had started as nothing but a piece of paper being shown to a client. It was interesting to hear his ideas and slight changes he wanted, but he loved it and we rendered it out while he was still in the room. I didn’t realise that some ads will be completed and then aired that same day, it does make sense however, ads for coles and Woolworth’s for example, and that change every week would have to been created and aired fairly quickly.

After meeting with the client I went to go help out in the animators studio again. Rangi was working on a commercial in which he had to animate a crab walking across the screen. He showed me the model, textures and software he used to put it all together and walked me through the different techniques he used.
I asked when he had been given the brief for this ad, he told me only that Monday. Today was Thursday, so in that time he had modeled the crab, textured and animated it. I had no idea the industry moved this fast. He told me how about 70% of what you learn is learnt in industry, when you have no choice but to sink or swim. This was daunting, but a good reality check, and although it was a bit scary, it was great to see how professional you become after being in the industry. Rangi showed me his demo reel also, I was impressed, and he has worked on everything from Harry Potter to the Matrix. I hope I get the chance to work on some more stuff next week in the 3D department, because it was fascinating.
Because the main project I was called in to help out on is now complete Paul Swain, the head of Texas @ 360 told me that he would call me in as soon as a new project is issued. He said something about a commercial for Subaru. Paul said my demo reel was that of an A student, which was such a complement, and gave me a huge amount of confidence in my abilities. I was told I was welcome whenever I wanted and that the staff really liked having me around.