Last weekend Hasan Güdücü and I participated the short film festival in Konstanz [1].
Hasan’s graduation short film “Himmel und Hölle” on which I worked was screened there.

I’d like to congratulate all participators and the creators of the winning films as well as the hosts for their kind care.

Thank you for all the valuable feedback, exchange and inspiration of the filmmakers, judging panel and visitors.

Hopefully we see each other next year.

[1] konstanzer kurz.film.spiele

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The team over at Actor Machine [1] developed a very interesting approach to deal with animation.
They basically created a system to control biped animation like emotional emphasized movement to drive characters in realtime. It seems to be like a motion capture system but with the motion being not captured but procedurally generated. The target market for this technology seems to be realtime media like games.
This project is led by Ken Perlin creator of the Perlin Noise function.

[1] Actor Machine(actormachine.com)

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Raf Schoenmaekers creator of the krokodove plugin suite [1] for eyeon fusion [2] announced that Version 5.0 of krokodove is licensed as “lego-ware".

As of today Krokodove is again available to everyone free of charge. Free to use, free to put on as many machines you like. But just as in the early days of Krokodove, if you feel the need to express your appreciation for the toolset, and want to show it, you can send in Lego. Yes indeed, as of today Krokodove is officially LEGO-ware. (Beside the dozens of tools added to Krokodove, the last 10 years also brought me 2 lovely daughters).

[1] krokodove plugins (krokodove.com)
[2] eyeone, creators of Fusion (eyeonline.com)

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bfHDRView [1] is a macro for eyeon Fusion [2] which helps to visualize high dynamic range imagery. It shows floating point values that exists above 1.0 or below 0.0 in map mode or High/Low Mode.

MAP MODE is generally what Shake does in floating point view:
it shows the values below 0 black, the values between 0 and 1 grey and, values above 1 white

The HIGH/LOW MODE normalizes values above 1.0 (in High mode) or below 0 (in Low mode) to 0-1 so you can see what is going on and how much detail is hidden without having to find a correct LUT value.

[1] output (bfloch.com)
[2] eyeon fusion

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David Wolpert and me collaborated for an entry to a contest for the next fluter magazine [1].
fluter is a magazine published by the The Federal Agency for Civic Education in Germany. The topic of the next issue and therefore video clip was USA. We created a fake old propaganda education movie titled »On the track to world power«. Beware of sarcastic humor and exaggeration.

Concept and Idea: David and Blazej
Illustrations: David
Animation and Compositing: Blazej
Software used: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk Maya, eyeon Fusion, Avid Xpress Pro

[1] fluter (fluter.de)

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bfMOV2DPX is released as beta at my output section [1].

This python script automates the process of converting multiple quicktime files in a folder (captured with the Multibridge) to DPX files using the Blackmagickdesign [2] tool called framelink. So far it only works with OSX.

It has a nice little gui and several useful features like progress dialog, email on completion and saving of default values.

Screenshot 01

Screenshot 02

Screenshot 03

It is licensed as open source under LGPL [3].
See the included readme.txt for more instructions.

[1] output(bfloch.com)
[2] Blackmagicdesign (blackmagic-design.com)
[3] LGP license (gnu.org)

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Randy Pausch rests in peace. The inventor alice [1] died on 25th July. But he left something for his family and for the world.
Now that every media reported about it you should also watch his very inspiring last lecture.
I highly recommend the lecture on time management:

[1] alice educational software (alice.org)

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I really like this short film by Ryan Jeffry.

Fallen as Quicktime (roamation.com)
Ryan Jeffry’s site (wrongturn.org)

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Jazz Animation by Michael Levy, Music by John Coltrane [1].

[1] Giant Steps (michalevy.com)

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The shooting is over. I had real fun shooting in Paris. The people in public were kind and open minded. I have to confess, that I was under pressure because of the time constraints. The weather on the weekend was said to be bad. So we had to finish the shooting with both actors on Friday. But due to their experience everything turned out well. The pictures are stunning. This is a big effort of the great acting. I hope that I can do justice to this with the completed short film. Marko will start the music composing as soon as the rough edit is decided.

THANK YOU
I would love to thank everyone who helped to make this shooting happen.
Here in Paris thanks to
Arianna Véronesi and
Sébastien Bourlard
for contributing their talent and valuable time.

Of course huge thanks to my partner Marko Ostojic. Thanks for the producing effort, trust, exchange, fun, problem sharing and sources of inspiration.

Thanks to the staff and support
Maja and Srdjan,
Bojana and Ivan.
At Aachen big thanks to
Pawel, my father, Kuba and
Lutz Tegeler
who helped me constructing the camera rig and supported me with equipment.

Of course big thanks to my professors
Michael Brucherseifer
for his guidance and supervision and the trust in this project.
Thanks professor Matthias Knézy-Bohm for his invaluable hints and teachings.

Thanks to the owners of the bar Le Muller and the city of Paris for being our scene.

Thanks to coffee and cigarettes.

I hope I didn’t forget anybody. Please tell me if I did.
I am sorry that this thanks come before the project is finished but I feel that the people really deserve this.

Here some photos done by Maja:

“Cut. It’s a wrap!”

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We have decided on the actors. Arianna and Sébastien will take the lead roles. We established the details with Arianna yesterday and I’m glad that she looks forward to participate in the project. I am confident that she matches the role and it really pleases me that she shows the same enthusiasm as we do. The shooting will start on Thursday.

This evening we will meet Séb. From what I saw on pictures he will be the right choice for our character. I am sure he will feel the role because of his great experience in acting.

We really love Arianna and Séb to evolve the characters they play. Marko and I have a certain understanding of what we are looking for but we don’t want to limit the actors performance. It is them who will make the character feel, think and behave. We want the actors strongly to be in the process of developing the story from the characters point of view. This whole short film will be a team effort. And we want every person to participate in their way. I am glad Arianna seems to be happy with that. Although it possibly means more work for the actors the artistic freedom will greatly influence the result in my opinion.

Marko will compose the music. I am so excited about this. Not only will the whole short film be original work but also, with Markos deep understanding of the story, we can really work out a symbiosis between the picture and music. This is an often underestimated aspect of motion picture.

We’ve done some test shooting yesterday and the rig seems to be stable. The Parisian sun smiled at us. The picture we made look promising. It’s time to fill the picture with life.

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[1] Creators page (blublu.org)

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