VizWorld.com

The BBC has an interview with Paul Franklin of Double Negative about the scene at the end of The Dark Knight where several SWAT members and Batman are pulled off a several-story building.

In order to complete the shot, the visual effects department then carefully hand-animated matte shapes around each of the falling stunt performers so as to isolate them from the background.

The whole side of the building was then recreated with computer-generated imaging (minus the crash mats) and carefully lit to match the flickering illumination provided by a helicopter spotlight.

In addition to the short interview, they have Video Footage from the Making Of the Dark Knight.

via BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Oscars | Batman Oscar contender tells all.

Graphics doublenegative, thedarkknight

PixelMagic has also added some shots of the work they did for Marley & Me.

Pixel Magic recently completed over 150 visual effects shots for the 20th Century Fox feature, Marley & Me.  Due to logistical reasons, principle photography needed to occur during the spring, however, the story  takes place over the course of the autumn season.  Pixel Magic’s work thus covered changing the colors of the springtime plates to a dramatic, multi-colored autumn palette.

Pixel Magic – Marley & Me.

Graphics

ArsTechnica has a great writeup debunking the recent “myth” that Magenta is not a color since it has no corresponding wavelength.

They (correctly) bring up the CIE Chromaticity diagram and discus the “pink-purple” line that shows colors that do not exist as any single wavelength, but rather as a combination of various interfering wavelengths.

Yes, Virgina, there is a magenta – Ars Technica.

Science

PixelMagic has updated their site with some photo’s of the various stages of setup for some of the shots in the new Hotel For Dogs movie.

For practical reasons there were a limited number of dogs that were available for the production, however, the script called for hundreds of dogs in some of the wider shots. Due to budget and time constraints, CG dog duplication was not an efficient solution. Instead, McIntyre opted for a more practical approach. Using approximately 10 different dogs at any given time, numerous plates of greenscreen dogs were photographed and used by the compositor to achieve the large numbers the director required. Furthermore, with 10 different dogs come 10 different trainers which needed to be removed from the plates. As such, each shot was meticulously composed and photographed using more than one clean background. This allowed a more cost-effective procedure for removing the trainers using rotoscope and paint work, rather than 3D recreations of backgrounds.

via Pixel Magic – Hotel For Dogs.

Graphics pixelmagic

Data Center Knowledge is running the story that Dreamworks, the studio behind the recent hit Kung Fu Panda, is looking to rent computer cycles from New Mexico’s Encanto supercomputer.  Apparently hitting the wall of scalable cluster designs, they’re looking to “cloud computer” designs to continue to scale their renderpower up.

DreamWorks Eyes Render Farm in the Cloud « Data Center Knowledge.

Hardware

Just stumbled across a new plugin for Adobe Photoshop called “ezlect”.  It works by allowing you to place “markers” within the scene, identifying regions to select and regions to avoid.  The result is a nice antialiased selection of the desired area.

You can download the 30-day trial for free, or buy it for $130.

Ezlect selection and masking plug-in for Adobe Photoshop.

Graphics photoshop

The Starlight Visual Information System, after a decade of development for various US government intelligence agencies, has just been licenses to Future Point systems and will be made available to corporations, law enforcement, and more.

From the press release:

“Starlight is unlike anything analysts—commercial or non-commercial—have ever seen. It allows you to apply your natural visual pattern recognition and spatial reasoning skills to extremely large data sources,” said Paul D’Antilio, chief executive officer of Future Point Systems, Inc. “It provides understanding at a speed that is orders of magnitude faster than with conventional tools. What’s more, Starlight can be used on a standard PC equipped with an ordinary Web browser.”

Starlight was developed by the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Lab, and runs primarily on Windows.

Future Point Systems / Products.

Science

A Fantastic scene created with Autodesk 3DS Max, showing the process and models required along the way.

Making of A Winter Amid the Ice – CGArena.

Science

The USS Arizona sank during the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Today, a large memorial floats over the site and 1.5million visitors a year come to see the wreckage.  Now, a camera crew is there creating 3D Video of the sunken ship.

“You have a million and a half visitors who come out every year. They walk on the memorial and they see a couple of exposed bits. They see a buoy that marks the bow and stern and that s it ” Brett Seymour said

via USS Arizona in 3D; Never Seen Views | KGMB9 News Hawaii | (KGMB9).

Science

MediaShift has a story up about “TimeSpace”, an interesting mash-up of Google Maps with various news sources to show stories mapped out in time & geophysical location via the web.  It’s an interesting way of seeing how quickly (or slowly) news propagates from it’s origin point across the major outlets.

TimeSpace, a Washington Post project, is a coverage mapping framework that displays content from multiple sources in space (via a map) and time (via a timeline). A display map, covering anything from a single city block to the world, is tagged to show viewers where news is being covered. Viewers can also view the news map as it appeared at different points over the preceding hours or days, giving them a picture of how the news events unfolded over time.

via MediaShift . Washington Post’s ‘Web Ninjas’ Build Map-Timeline Combo | PBS.

Science