Joelecdote

I was inspired by a post over at the BlenderArtists forum about matte painting, to give camera mapping (a technique employed in the modern matte painter’s toolbox) a try. I remember a while ago following this tutorial, but it was very “hacky” and complicated, now there is a much easier/simplified way of doing it.

I partially followed this tutorial over at the Blender Wiki, but I decided I wanted to try something more organic, and found this picture:

The first thing to do, was to isolate the foreground hill in the image, by cutting out the original reference image in GIMP:

Then I roughly modelled the hill in Blender, before using a “UVProject” modifier, which (as the name implies) projects the isolated image onto the 3D geometry.

The next thing to do was to prepare the background. Using the clone tool in GIMP, I repainted the parts of the background that the foreground hill were covering to produce a background image.

Admittedly the cloning was a bit rushed, so it’s not a very good result!

Anyway, all I needed to do now was to map this image to a plane (for even more realistic results, I could have roughly modelled the background mountain, and made a second projection), and make a simple camera move.

The result was quite good, but just to had some of the errors in my model, and to add “real-world” camera properties, I also added some motion blur (or Vector Blur, as it’s called in blender).

OK, so after all that, here’s the result:

Camera Mapping Test (AVI, h264)

Camera Mapping test from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

Another editing job!!

My latest editing project was for Caernarfon based “Cwmni Cofis Bach”, and their opera, “Trwbl yn y Gwynt” (Trouble in the wind). Read more at this Daily Post article.

Basically I got 5 DVDs of archive (newsreel) and stock footage, that I had to edit down into 3 specific clips that were to be projected during the production.

It was a pretty short deadline, and was surprisingly a lot of work even though each clip was only roughly 2-3 minutes long. I was briefed to make it “not look like it’s a newsreel” and instead to make it more cinematic or artistic. I decided to crop the footage into a typical film aspect-ratio. This involved resizing each clip individually, but unfortunately the newsreel footage had different aspect ratios throughout, so it wasn’t a “quick-fix”.

I was also going to try and do some vigorous colour-correction to make the footage more cinematic, but didn’t have the time, plus a large portion of the footage was black and white anyway.

It was quite good to have a short deadline, because I learnt how hard it is to edit under pressure…

One last piece of news, I now have some fairly decent headphones, yay!!

This is a bit late, but the Project Treborth teaser trailer is now online…

Project Treborth: Teaser Trailer from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

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Well… I’ve bought Edius Neo… and I have a new short film coming soon!!

“Project Treborth”

Me, Huw and Laurence went out to do some test/pre-production/teaser trailer filming the weekend before last and it was really quite an awesome filmage sesh. We actually managed to get quite a few really good shots, although we made the mistake of not planning them first again which has made the trailer editing a bit difficult, but still it’s ok… All in all it was a really inspiring sesh and gave me plenty ideas for the rest of the Project Treborth storyline.

I couldn’t get the trailer quite right before, so I decided to edit together a behind the scenes type of video thingy (warning: ultra cheesy music!)…

Project Treborth: Behind the Scenes from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

I’ve also uploaded The Deadly Diamond to stage6, and someone made a comment which just really made my day:

I agree with comments posted aboce, you kids got talent.

Simple, but really encouraging aye… shame about the spelling mistake!

Anyway… there should be a teaser trailer coming online soon (probably tommorow)…

Wow it’s 2008 already! Seems like I’ve neglected updating this blog for a while :P, well this should make up for all the missed posts!

During a revision-sesh (read: a revision session) I noticed what an awesome clear sky ’twas outside. So I decided I’d do a time-lapse gradually getting darker to reveal some stars. Anyway it was already pretty dark by the time I got it all set up, so it ended up being just an ace video of a constellation moving across the sky. Obviously seeing as it was only a 4 second video, I had to add some titles, and an “extra sharp” version of the video where the stars are more visible.

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