This article originally appeared in DP 01 : 2014.

Blackmagic Design’s Resolve 10 goes into open beta. And while we’re all still playing around with it, we speak to someone who’s already been using it – James Tonkin(www.hangmanstudios.com) is a videographer from London – and has been on tour with Resolve 10 and Robbie Willliams.

DP: Mr Tonkin, how did you come to be on tour?

James Tonkin: I’ve been working with Robbie Williams and the team for twelve years now, and we’ve done a few videos together, so we’re already very well attuned to each other. In addition, after such a long time you know what is possible and what something can look like – be it for music videos, live footage or commercials. On the last tour, we produced a three-minute film for each city where the tour stopped, which was then released on YouTube. We also shot commercials for Samsung, showing the arrival in the city and the excitement of the fans, who in some cases had been waiting months for the concert.

DP: How long in advance did you plan the set-up and equipment?

James Tonkin: Because we’ve been working together for so long, the team gave me carte blanche. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use a few different cameras for each element. As I film a lot “handheld”, the Blackmagic Pocket Camera was a good choice – you want to still have a shoulder after 16 hours of work and not be completely destroyed (laughs). In post, we edited in Final Cut and then did everything else in Resolve – which I’ve been using for grading for a few years now and which has simplified and accelerated our workflow enormously since the last updates.

DP: What other cameras did you use and how did the BMD Pocket perform compared to the others?

James Tonkin: We had a Red Epic, the Sony FS700, the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera and the Blackmagic Design Pocket Camera. The Pocket did well – because of its small size, I favoured it over other cameras when I was shooting “free” and on the move. The advantage is that it looks like you’re just taking pictures. For the shows, I shot mostly on the Epic and used the FS700 as a “documentary camera”. The image quality of the Pocket was really fantastic – especially compared to the other cameras. A good example is the beginning of the commercial: I shot the first few shots of the city “waking up” on the Red, then a shot of the tour poster at a bus stop, which I shot with the Pocket. If you jump back and forth between the two, you can’t really tell the difference.

DP: And what other hardware did you have with you?

James Tonkin: My set-up is practically completely Apple-based. A Macbook Retina for travelling, which also manages Resolve 10, allows me to do a lot on the road. At Hangman Studios in London, we have MacPros connected to a 48 TB SAN network. After a day of filming, a Red can easily generate two terabytes of data. And after each project is completed, the data is backed up to LTO-6 tape and, of course, external hard drives for clients.

DP: You worked exclusively in Resolve 10. How did the features perform, were there any problems with the new version?

James Tonkin: We edit offline in FCP X and then import the XML directly into Resolve. I also think it’s great that you can drag the scaling information directly – which was previously only possible via “Mismatched resolution” to “Centre crop with no resize”. And now that it works perfectly, you can let off steam on the timeline. As I mostly work with shortcuts (a matter of taste), this is very practical. There are a lot of new features in Resolve 10, but the online editing is brilliant. And the layout of the interface is designed so that you can continue working straight from editing, which of course benefits anyone who has previously only used the grading tools.

DP: Why did you do so much in Resolve? Wouldn’t a pipeline with tried and tested tools for the individual tasks have been safer?

James Tonkin: The time pressure was really high: for example, we still had to upload stills taken from Epic for the respective concert in the evening. The short films for each city also had to be online within 48 hours, at the latest – so we had to deliver quality work on the go. And the Resolve 10 workflow came in handy – the navigation and controls are familiar to anyone with editing experience. I can only recommend it to anyone with broadcast experience if you have to work on the road with the smallest possible equipment.

DP: How did online editing perform under production conditions?

James Tonkin: A good example of this: When you open your timeline including different frame rates, different codes and file types, multiple audio tracks and so on from FCP X in Resolve 10, all elements are opened – and the RawFiles are pulled during mastering. This is very helpful under production conditions.

DP: Are there any other new Resolve features that you have used in particular?

James Tonkin: Resolve 10 has phenomenal new features – online editing, for example, has the “Contextual Trimmer Tool”, which allows you to ripple and roll and slip and slide on the timeline with the mouse. Another great feature is the speed control, which allows you to adjust the playback speed in real time – something I used a lot in the tour videos. Plus, of course, true multitrack editing, and sync, trim and drag for audio tracks, independent of the timeline.

Many Resolve users have also asked for additional plug-ins within Resolve and with version 10 this is included – namely the standard OpenFX format. So, for example, I was able to add my favourite lens flares from the Sapphire library via keyframe. And – also from Sapphire – additional film noise. There is also an unlimited number of Power Windows per Connector Node, and a Gradient Power Windwow, with which you can distribute gradations over the entire image. It’s also a great time saver to output a DCP directly from Resolve. In the past, I always had to either book a studio or pass the work on to someone else. Now an EasyDCP licence is enough for me.

DP: Have you used the Cinema DNG workflow? How did it perform?

James Tonkin: I’ve shot a few projects on Blackmagic cameras now, each in CinemaDNG and then graded in Resolve. And I love how much information comes out of the dailies and the footage, and how you have all the freedom on the image – especially in grading.

I shot in S-Log on the FS700 so that I could get the maximum out of the footage, even though you can clearly see the difference between the 12-bit DNGs and the 8-bit AVCHD FS700 files.

DP: Finally, what do you need to become a good grader?

James Tonkin: I came to grading via offline editing – with the intermediate step of online editing, so I was always trained from the practical side. Mostly on real projects, with the deadlines of the TV world. It’s extremely important to watch a lot of films and learn from their examples – both positive and negative. Over time, you build up a mental library of looks and their effects. I believe that a good colourist should not only master the technical side of the software, matching and simple error correction, but also bring different perspectives to the project. Grading is the final step in the creative process and the first point where the images really jump out at you – that’s what I like about it.

The post Resolve 10 on tour first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

With its animated musical “More Stuff”, Blue Zoo from London got to the heart of the true spirit of Christmas last year. This year, the studio submitted the short film to the animago AWARD. Here, Blue Zoo explains how the project with the singing and dancing elves came about and how Brexit could affect the studio’s day-to-day work.

The British team specialises in the animation of CG characters for broadcast, advertising, VR and mobile games. The name Blue Zoo was chosen for the animation studio, which was founded in 2000, primarily because it is easy to remember. An animation reference was deliberately omitted from the name to make it more SEO-friendly. The entire team consists of 120 artists, the majority of whom work on TV series projects; around 15 people are involved in commercial commissions and VR and app development.

Blue Zoo likes to hire people from all over Europe, which may become more difficult in the future once Brexit is finalised. The team is waiting to see whether there will actually be restrictions on the recruitment of international staff. The fall in the pound sterling exchange rate is currently at least resulting in more orders from countries outside the UK, which the team sees as a big plus.

Blue Zoo’s biggest project to date, which has just been completed, was the children’s TV series “Digby Dragon”. The commission consisted of 52 episodes, each 11 minutes long. With “Digby Dragon”, Blue Zoo set itself the goal of raising the quality of animation content for the pre-school age target group to a new level.

More stuff!

Why do children look forward to Christmas in particular every year? Because that’s when they get the most presents! In “More Stuff”, Blue Zoo takes an ironic look at the capitalist realisation of the once fundamental Christian idea.

The project was launched when Blue Zoo commissioned a song for an animated musical as part of its in-house short film programme. Blue Zoo has worked for many years with Ben Champion(www.benchampion.co.uk), who in addition to being a qualified composer also works as a musical comedian, on the music for children’s TV shows – so he was the perfect choice for the job of writing the song for an animated musical that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Ben composed and wrote the song “More Stuff” in just a few weeks. Everyone in the studio was then invited to develop a visual design for the song and direct the animation.

Shortly before the end

Animators Simone Giampaolo and Joe Kinch only came up with the idea of the cheeky elf characters shortly before the end of the pitching phase, so they were only able to present a few quick sketches to the team in advance. Nonetheless, they won the most votes in the studio’s internal voting, after which they got straight to work on the actual production due to the tight schedule. The animatic created was also approved in less than a week, as decisions had to be made quickly in view of the tight December deadline.

The film, which is just over two minutes long, was completed in around 8 weeks, with the core team consisting of 8 artists. So that as many employees as possible could share in the experience of the project, numerous artists also created just one 3D model, animated a few shots or realised the compositing of a sequence.

Special elves

The design of the characters was crucial for the successful realisation of the film, as all other aspects of the film had to be developed on this basis.

There are already countless examples of singing elves in the world of animated films, but something special had to be created for “More Stuff”. Creating stereotypical elves with a high recognition value that are also unique was a major challenge. The team solved this problem by giving the elves huge eyes, which gave the animators many design options and gave the characters a fresh look. Three different elves were modelled in ZBrush for the entire film, which were then imported into Maya. The characters went through several iterations until the look was as close as possible to the 2D designs.

It has to be snappy

The animation style for the elves was inspired by two masters of animated comedy: Tex Avery (Bugs Bunny) and Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Hotel Transylvania). The team’s goal was to push the limits of CG rigs to achieve the fluid and snappy movements typical of traditional animation: To achieve this, the team utilised blurred frames, exaggerated deformations, squash & stretch and strong poses.

However, the high flexibility of the rigs was not enough for the animators, so they added lattices for greater deformation possibilities. During the animation process, the team often used the Maya plugin TweenMachine(justinsbarrett.com/tweenmachine).

Environments

The film’s 3D environments were intended to convey a large scale – but as there was no time to build elaborate 3D assets, the artists projected environment paintings onto 3D geometry. The team reused many of the assets, in particular the gift piles and the tiled floor and wall textures.

GPU rendering

The look of the animations needed to convey a real, tangible feel, which traditionally can only be achieved through higher render times. However, the project schedule did not allow for this, so Blue Zoo utilised the Maya plug-in of the Redshift render engine to take advantage of GPU rendering to achieve the highest possible quality in the shortest possible render time. Compared to conventional CPU render engines, Redshift ran 5 to 10 times faster. As the renderings could be seen much more quickly, the artists were able to experiment more with the shaders and achieve a nice look in a short period of time. Apart from Redshift, the regular studio tools were used for look development, lighting and hair.

Scripts and bugs

Before the project started, the team wrote tools to speed up the animation and rendering pipeline. This allowed the animators to work with light rigs, after which the scripts automatically copied all attributes to the heavier render rigs and optimised them at the same time. This allowed the artists to work with lightweight files that could be rendered quickly but still contained a lot of detail. At the same time, this approach prevented many potential problems associated with different file referencing.

Halfway through production, the team encountered a tricky bug that caused renderings to crash and appeared to occur randomly. An upgrade of Redshift on the render farm fixed the problem, but other productions needed the older version to run smoothly. The Blue Zoo pipeline team managed to separate the projects so that each production could use the appropriate version of Redshift. In order to realise the project in a very short time, a solid but flexible pipeline was extremely important.

More Christmas stuff

Blue Zoo is currently working on the realisation of another festive short film that picks up at the end of the story of “More Stuff” but comes with a twist. Blue Zoo plans to release the new film in December (the film was not yet online at the time of going to press, just take a look at vimeo.com/bluezoo ).

The post Noisy Night, Senseless Stuff first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In this VFX breakdown, The Mill shows you how the London-based VFX studio managed to digitally revitalise possibly the most famous physicist in human history – Albert Einstein to be precise. A campaign for Smart Energy GB was the reason for bringing the ingenious storm hairstyle to life.

VFX | A Photoreal CG Einstein for Smart Energy | The Mill

The post The Mill | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

All further information about The Mill here.

The post The Mill Reel 2015 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.