Well I commend you on your effort. You managed your time the best you did. Granted you may not be happy in certain areas, your next shot will be a game winner. I personally liked your fx work. FX is my favorite thing to do and most likely what I’m best at, but I’m forced to execute other areas on a high level here at work. So I have to go home to train, reading tut after tut…hell, I’m taking night classes over at SMC learning Houdini. So it will never stop for me. Some people may say, forget that…I’m just going to be excellent in one thing and find work in the industry doing that. It all depends on your title and where you work. Is it possible for you to master everything? I think so. It may just take a while. And if you don’t, you might be pretty close to. Congrats on your entry.
Secret Agent Entry: David Schoneveld
Congrats Dave!!! Nice work. I love those display screens… the pullout screen is REALLY badass. And your new voiceover is definitely better. ; )
Are you locked yet or still tweaking for Sunday? If so I’ll go ahead and give you my 2-day fix suggestions:
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music - no offense to your friend’s band, but I wonder if you can find something free that’s a little more “trailer” sounding. Or have a friend hook you up? I think the right music could really sell these shots even more. Right now it’s more just kind of background music.
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grading - I’m guessing your compositor friend already covered that more thoroughly that I could.
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font - I’m really not a fan of the text treatments in the trailer.
Thanks for taking the time to post your takeaways. Yeah, these challenges are great learning experiences.
- Its always more work than you think, even when you think its more work than you think.
… and then double that!
Hehe. Well hope you had as much fun as we did. Look forward to doing this again and seeing your next project!
Did you end up doing any 3d tracking David? If so, do you have any comments on how that process went for you?
Thanks,
George
Hi David,
congradulation, I love your idea and effects. Also your thread is more informative and i like the way you share it with us. thanks. Good luck
I didn’t uplaod a new making of or 30 second trailer, this is just the final Comps and edits of well it’s a trailer also but main trailer.
Thanks for all the support guys, yeah toms of fixes, this is as good as it will get. I’ve been moving, and the wife won’t hear of any more work on it (since Saturday morning).
I didn’t mention
Tracking: learned the basics of Sytheye, and already knew Boujou. I used to be decent at camera tracking… back when I was asked to do that from time to time, then I forgot a lot. These tracks were easy, the ones that were “Hard” due to no parallax just did it 2d. My tracking was not 100%, I didn’t undistort the plates so things wouldn’t line up perfectly from start to end they would drift and maybe drift back. Things would never be in the right place sense they would be to be a bent and straight line at the same time almost.
IT: everyone’s their own IT guy, I installed windows 7, 64bit during this, in addition to a new computer build. All these “stupid” thing take time. Dang it, I hate that days go by doing computer fixes, and not working on the actual project. All things, lessons learned, altho I wouldn’t change that. The new computer saved the day! Soooo much faster than my old laptop.
Again, want to say Thanks to Doug for joining the team and kicking ass. He would finish a shot in a night and send it to me to check out and make notes. It was nice working with someone who worked as hard on it as I was.
Now its kind of back to the drawing board. I’m going to iron out the linear workflow alpha issue. Back to basics learning more about mental ray, GI, shaders, and lighting. Learn Nuke, and continue with After Effects. But now I can do simpler tests take the time to make sure I understand it thoroughly.
The best Houdini lighter I know, ubber smart guy, really understand lighting (Denis Gauthier @ asylum). He recommend I read intro to computer graphics, to understand a lot of the basics that are never taught in schools. Learn what the “proper” thing a light should do and how it operate. More about the math behind the shaders and whats happening. Even if I don’t get all the math I’ll understand the point. His point is to build a foundation of knowledge of what the software is doing under the hood and how it operates THEN I’ll better understand the switches and dials that make up the lighting pipeline (not just to mental ray, renderman, etc.).
Hey,
I like it better with the desaturation. Great trailer. It’s still as funny :applause:
Good luck!
-IS-
Yeah, I agree. Congrats again.
Good use of the word “final” by the way. : P I can remember projects where I had at least a dozen files labeled “…final”… “…final_FINAL”… “…FINALFORREAL”… hehe.
Mike
Cool David. Btw, is this the book that was recommended to you?
I’d like to pick up a copy too if it is this one.
Thanks again for sharing.
-George
LOL Yeah I had that in this, final, mainCutFinal, mainCutTrailerFinal, newFinal, lol
Grgeon, that’s exactly the book he recommend! Getting it!
Well a disheartening finish. When the guy who did his in a weekend and only scaled the guys eyes got an honorable mention…
I can’t help but feel I screwed my team when I got involved in the whole Aurel0988 scandal http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=292&t=776449
Basically I backed up another guy who thought it was too much work and nothing shown to be done with in the competition time limits (cheating) well that didn’t go well. Hah. My mouth seems to be my downfall here, I sense from the results that my teams entry was “blacklisted”. I’m disappointed, that that seems to be, arguably of course. Our entry has numerous faults, but we were big participators in the competition, with lots of updates n such.
Sorry to my team.
On a side note, On of my favorit enteries seem to win for something very odd. Not sure what “FX” means to cgSociety in that the stop motion one didn’t seem to have any FX… lasers maybe? I can think of a long list of entries that would be on my list before that.
Anyway Congrats to everyone, great job!
Dave,
I had completely missed the controversy until you pointed it out. I want to believe that the judges are as impartial as possible, and as with all art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I feel your pain because our team also put a lot of work into our submission and we did not win either. I was sure we would get at least an honorable mention, but alas, none.
However, I take from this a lot of new knowledge, both technically and related to working in teams. That to me is the real prize. As you said, congratulations to all other teams, winners and not equally. I hope everyone enjoyed the process and continues to learn and grow.
Juan Carlos
Thanks, I didn’t mean to say that controversy is in anyway an issue. I was over that as soon as the forum leaders said so. I mean that me saying that is what originally got me in trouble.
I see what you mean, and I understand your comment that it is hard to know what went wrong.
It would be great if we could get feedback from the professionals as to what didn’t work in our submissions. I understand there were a lot of submissions and it would be hard for the judges, but learning from our mistakes is only possible if we know what they are. I can point to some things in our piece that could have been perhaps improved, but I am really not sure of what was missing in the judges’ eyes.
Anyway, I guess we move on. I heard somewhere that the next challenge might be related to pirates?
Juan Carlos
destruct007, jcgnba
I am unsure about what happened here, but just so you know you guys ended up with real solid entries. And I guess fellow challengers have expressed that too. Congrats for finishing up with great entries. 
Pirates!Really ?There we go again 
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