Comic-Con: Friday Fun Stuff

I feel like a dork for posting these things so late. I missed so much work being sick and whatnot that it's been kind of crazy for me to try to catch up. Anyway, I got to meet Lloyd Kaufmann (president of Troma films) at Cannes this year. My friend Pericles (director of "Loop," for which I made some 3D helicopters and various other fun things) directed a film for them several years ago- "Redneck Zombies" and introduced us. He sent me an e-mail informing me that Lloyd would be there at the Troma booth. I stopped by about a dozen times throughout the conference, but no luck. Llyod was never there. However, I did find a copy of Pericles's film!

(Peri's film is on the lower right. Right above it is the film the South Park guys made while they went to my school. Special guest star: Stan Brakhage! Did you also know that he is the guy for whom Stan of South Park is named? The more you know...)

I also wandered around the exhibition space (oh yeah, I was once again too late to test for the Dharma Initiative recruitment program). I found an interesting little... seemed like a scavenger hunt of some kind. There was a card with a staticy pattern printed on it. You had to take a plastic sheet and place it over the card in order to decode it.

(My phone has been acting up lately. It's very slow at doing everything, including taking pictures, which means the shutter stays open too long and blurs everything. Blah.)

I can only focus on one or two ARGs at a time and right now, I'm giving my love to Lost (though it's kind of trying our patience at the moment, I'm betting it will be fun once it gets going) and Fringe (more on that one later). I was interested in this one, though, because of the "seek the six" message. The Oceanic Six (a Lost reference)? Was it a Fringe reference (there's a six fingered hand print in some of the advertisements)? Later, I saw some cool sky writing:

Okay, cool. I was intrigued enough to start the game. Turns out it's a reference to "The Prisoner," which they are going to be remaking. I'll watch it, but I'm not interested enough in the game to continue.

Friday night ended with the best solo dinner I've ever had: Nobu "The Sake" Jyunmai Daijingo and edamame followed by the black cod with miso at Nobu. It was SO good that I didn't even care that I was dining alone. The cod was the consistency of butter and just fell off in perfect bite-sized pieces. The miso sauce was just sweet and crispy enough... heaven.

And now for some new news! LOOP at Cannes!

That's right! Real, realtime, new news! Next Monday I will head overseas for the 2008 Cannes Film Festival! THIS is why I have been such a blog slacker lately. When I traveled to the festival in 2004, it was mostly for fun. This time, I will be representing a film that I have really been working really hard on. The film is LOOP by Pericles Lewnes.

Now I know I have plugged this film before, but since then, Pericles has been generous enough to let me go to town with visual effects... and I have! I have gone rotoscope-crazy!

For those of you who do not know what rotoscoping is, I'll put it like this: it's like tracing, only you trace over every single frame of a movie (by the way, video is roughly 30 image frames per second, meaning one 8 minute scene (which each still above represents) contains about 48,000 images...)

Now, I didn't do all of the inky, graphic novel-looking stuff by hand. Most of that was automated (most of it- though I might add that "automated" does not necessarily mean "easy"). What I did do frame-by-frame was trace over the "real people" to cut them out of the graphic novel-looking background or vice-versa. There are usually MUCH easier ways to do this- typically involving keying out some shape or color (think bluescreen), but the scenes were not set up that way when the film was shot, so I had to do it all by hand. Yes, my hand hurts.

I will dedicate an entire posting to the art of digital compositing at some point, but for now, the most important thing is LOOP is playing at the Cannes Film Festival and I am happy to represent it! I am very proud to be part of the team that put this film together. Pericles has done an amazing job to pull off an independent film worthy of attention and I hope it receives a lot of it at Cannes.

A little over a year ago, now, Pericles and I competed in the prime time disaster that was On the Lot (think American Idol for film directors). He had posted a question to the forum asking if anyone knew how to do 3D animation and if they thought they could make a helicopter. He had no budget, but I saw it as a great learning opportunity. So I taught myself Maya. Which is insane, but yes, I did it (incidentally, it is now one of my favorite programs). It took me a while to do, but I modeled the helicopter, textured it, and composited it into the scene:

(The Loop section of this video starts at about 2:10 into it)

Pericles and I have never met in person. We have never even spoken over the phone. Despite physical obstacles, we have managed to pull off some pretty slick visual effects using e-mail, snail mail, ftp, trust and probably some sort of strange psychic something or other. I can't wait to see it on the big screen!

Okay, I'm slacking

So I've been working on this incredible independent film by Pericles Lewnes. I haven't been able to say much about it because it's all been top secret, but I'm really excited that I might not have to be quiet too much longer. Pericles is the quintessential independent filmmaker. Whenever I start a job for someone, I always get a little nervous when it comes time to actually watch the movie. I hope for the best, but I'm often... a bit let down when it comes to "quality." People often overrate their abilities as filmmakers (or underrate the difficulty of the jobs people on productions have) and try to act, write, direct, edit, sing, fly... on their own, usually ending up exploiting me or whoever else they have suckered into working on their production. However, this was not the case with "LOOP." I was blown away by the quality of the production, the acting, the...

I still can't go into details here, but I wanted to give a little shout out. Pericles has been a great person to work with. I met him participating in the "On the Lot" competition. "LOOP" is premiering at FAIF on October 31st at 7:30 PM at the AMC Downtown Disney 12 Theaters in Los Angeles. I highly recommend anyone who is going to be there to go see this film. At least check it out online at:

http://faif2007.bside.com/?_view=_filmdetails&filmId=32395578

Additionally, if you want to hear a little true independent spirit, he was on blogtalkradio, interviewed by Jon Moody for "The Independent Corner." I had wanted to get this blog up before his live interview last night, but the wireless in my house was acting up and I haven't mastered my new iPhone quite yet (more on that later). Click on "The Pericles Lewnes Show:"

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/JonathanMoody

The poster below will take you to the the site for the film.