Day: September 24, 2021

When it comes to visual effects, bigger and bolder doesn’t always mean better. Three visual effects artists who worked on DreamWorks’ The Boss Baby sequel, The Boss Baby: Family Business, shared their insights and advice for students interested in going into the animation field during a panel at Savannah College of Art and Design’s 2021 SCAD AnimationFest on Friday.

One of their biggest pieces of advice? Sometimes, simple is best.

“When I was a student at SCAD I always wanted to make my effects look big, look cool, as complex as possible. But when I’m working on the shot… the main thing is to help the storytelling and also try to direct where the audience, the eye, is going to look,” said Jinguang Huang, a VFX artist at DreamWorks Animation who graduated from SCAD in 2017 with an MA in visual effects.

“We always want to get them to focus on the character itself instead of the effects,” he added. “Sometimes we don’t need to make very hard, very complex effects setups. Sometimes, the simple thing is good… because we can easily change the effects and also hit the notes and then get a quick turnaround time.”

Also Read: Sci-Fi Gem Ultrasound Was in Pre-Production for One Month and Most of the Film Was Shot in Five Days

Jim Koonce, another DreamWorks VFX artist who worked with Huang on The Boss Baby: Family Business and graduated from SCAD in 2016 with a BFA visual effects, agreed that it doesn’t always make sense to add on unnecessary work just to make a shot look more complex.

“As effects artists, we tend to want to create these awesome systems and setups. And that’s something you do at school… you start to learn more about the software. You want to make it more robust so anybody could open the file and click one button and make it work,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just easier to just do some simple fix — just keyframe something on and off. You don’t need to make some setup that interpolates distance and uses matrix math to figure out some kind of rotation between two different scales. Sometimes it’s easier to just turn something on and off and get the shot done, I think. It’s good to be simplified where you can.”

Jason Mayer, who graduated from SCAD in 2003 with an MFA in Computer Art and is now head of effects at DreamWorks, says people who are learning animation and visual effects should focus on executing one simple effect rather than biting off more than they can chew.

“One of the things I would urge all of the people, especially students, that are listening here is your scope — your scale of what you’re trying to do. When I was a student, it was always, ‘I’ve got this epic that I want to tell of like, you know, this quest that this person goes on and it’s got to be a 17 minute short and I’m going to do it all myself,’” Mayer said. “The reality is when you get out here, you might have 10, 15 experts — like absolute experts — who spent their whole lives working on each individual one of these things, and that’s how these movies come together. Each person is putting that expertise in, and there’s no one person that is going to be an expert in all of these things. And so scaling that down and figuring out exactly what you want to do and being like, you know what, if I’m going to try to be an effects artist, for instance, I’m going to make sure that I can do a torch, like a perfect burning torch, moving it around, just simple.”

Mayer also gave some insight into what animators what to see when looking at a prospective new employee’s reel.

“As a reviewer of reels and stuff like that, I would prefer to see something that’s really slick and put together and is simple but executed at the level that we would expect, rather than this big, broad, ‘I’m going to blow up this building and then it’s going to set this fire and you start a tidal wave,’” he said. “It’s a trap you fall into.”

SCAD AnimationFest is taking place from 23-25, 2021. Learn more and get passes here. Main Image: A still from The Boss Baby: Family Business. Credit: DreamWorks Animation

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Ultrasound is a complex, stylized sci-fi gem that rewards repeat viewings. With confident direction, a strong visual identity and strong performances from a litany of actors like Vincent Kartheiser (Mad Men), Bob Stephenson (The Chair, Top Gun: Maverick), Tunde Adebimpe (She Dies Tomorrow), and Breeda Wool (Mass) — it’s a surprise to learn the actual production was a decidedly indie affair with a shortened pre-production period and quick shoot.

Conor Stechschulte adapted his graphic novel Generous Bosom into Ultrasound and while his script was ready for some time, once the film moved into pre-production in the first week of January, the small team were shooting in early February.

“It quickly ramped up,” director Rob Schroeder said during a Q&A at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival this week. It started as just a three man team of Schroeder, his producer and line producer Justin Cyrul, with no actors or other department heads yet attached.

“A lot happened in the two weeks before the shoot, including all those locations, which was probably the most painful part: finding locations in L.A.” Schroeder says.

“In L.A. you can film anything anywhere as long as you go through a locations service.” But that was deemed too expensive so the team instead was literally “knocking on doors.”

Once production began in February, the newly assembled team “shot five day weeks for a total of 19 days,” Schroeder said. But much of the narrative takes place in a research facility — a location the production did not have for 19 days.

“The most expensive location was the facility that was an empty senior living facility. We could only afford that for five days.”

“We shot a good portion of the film in five days. So those were like 10 page days,” Schroeder added.

Unintentionally well-timed, Ultrasound wrapped production in March 2020 which meant no wrap party. “The wrap party is tonight, ” Schroeder joked.

Also read: Tammy Faye Director Michael Showalter Sees America’s Televangelist Obsession as a Mixture of These Two Things

Actors Chelsea Lopez and Bob Stephenson who play an unhappily wed couple in Ultrasound, were both present at the Q&A. They stressed it was not beneficial to try too hard to wrap one’s head around the narrative at every moment. Instead it was critical to focus on emotion and actions.

“The script is so complex, but for me, it was a lot of conversation with Rob and Conor about what was going on. But I always knew where my character was at emotionally,” Lopez said.

“It really called for me to just jump and be present with the material, for what I knew it to be,” she added.

“You have to just think about what you’re doing in the moment,” Stephenson said. “Because if you think about the whole world, I can never figure it out. So just had to, like pay attention on the activity I’m doing at that moment.”

Mammoth Lakes Film Festival runs through Sunday.

Main image (above): Vincent Kartheiser and Breeda Wool (C) in Ultrasound.

The post Sci-Fi Gem Ultrasound Was in Pre-Production for One Month and Much of the Film Was Shot in Five Days appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

The Conjuring house is for sale, with ghosts included; people are freaking out over dubious reports of an X-Men name change; great festival news for cinephiles in Atlanta, Indianapolis and Austin. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.

Ghosts for Sale: The Wall Street Journal has a very funny, kind of scary story about the owners of the house from The Conjuring selling it. It’s actually haunted, they say, and they pull in a tidy sum renting it out to people fascinated by the paranormal. The asking price is $1.2 million, which makes you wonder — how much is it without ghosts?

No Thanks: I’d rather live in Buffalo Bill’s house.

Out on Film: The Atlanta festival, which opens today and runs through Oct. 3, just announced that GLAAD has come onboard to sponsor the closing night world premiere screening of William T. Horner and Stacey Woelfel’s Keep the Cameras Rolling: The Pedro Zamora Way. The doc is especially intriguing for those of us who grew up watching Zamora on The Real World, where he bravely worked to de-stigmatize homosexuality and HIV/AIDS in an era when ignorance and bigotry ran rampant. (Also, every single time I eat Skippy, I think gratefully of the time Pedro scolded Puck for his disgusting habit of sticking his hand in the peanut butter jar.) Zamora’s partner, Sean Sasser, worked with GLAAD from 1997 to 1998, helping to open and run the organization’s Atlanta chapter. Here’s more on this year’s Out on Film, which also features a 30th anniversary screening of Madonna: Truth or Dare, among other films.

Cool AFF: The Austin Film Festival just announced a lineup that includes opening night film The Same Storm, directed by Oscar nominee Peter Hedges and starring Noma Dumezweni, Mary-Louise Parker, Sandra Oh, and Elaine May, among others. Other titles include Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Mike Mills’ C’MON C’MON. And the Writers Conference, a major draw of the festival, will include Judas and the Black Messiah co-writer Will Berson, Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy, and Gentefied co-creator Linda Yvette Chavez. Details are here. The festival is from Oct. 21-28.

Heartland: Indianapolis’ Heartland International Film Festival, running Oct. 7-17, also features The French Dispatch and C’MON C’MON, as well as the highly anticipated Will Smith film King Richard, about Venus and Serena Williams’ father, and the Princess Diana film Spencer. We’ll have much more on Heartland soon, because I just spoke with Heartland artistic director Greg Sorvig about how he put this year’s incredible lineup together. More details are here.

Today’s Dumb Joke: “How many producers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “Does it have to be a lightbulb?”

Mogul Mowgli: Check out Micah Khan’s great interview with Bassam Tariq, whose new film Mogul Mowgli follows a rapper (Riz Ahmed, always good) as a rapper who falls ill just as he is about to embark on his first world tour. “I’ve had a few years before Mogul Mowgli where things kind of went south for me with a few projects, so I learned very quickly that the reason why they went south was when I was trying to act smarter than I am. So, learning to just be very honest with everybody in the team is the key,” Tariq says. (His honesty is one of the qualities that landed him the job of directing Marvel’s upcoming Blade, but we don’t talk about that in the video.)

Ex-X-Men? Social media people did what they do best yesterday over a story warning that Disney’s Marvel might change the name of the X-Men to reflect the fact that there are also women on the team of super-powered mutants. But this was dumb. First, because the X-Men are just pretend. But more importantly: The basis of this story was an offhand comment by Marvel executive Victoria Alonso during an interview two years ago. There’s no indication that any “news” occurred here, and to present this as a new development is dishonest. (You can watch the two-year-old interview here, if you care. The X-Men comment is at the 3:41 mark.)

How Did This Happen? The site that posted the X-Men story, We Got This Covered (no link, it’s that bad), does little or no original reporting. Instead it traffics in clickbait headlines based on clueless or deliberate misreadings of things that people said in interviews with other outlets. For example, an obvious joke by Johnny Depp at a news conference this week led to the clickbait We Got This Covered headline, “Johnny Depp Wants To Be Jack Sparrow at Kids’ Parties To Keep The Spirit Alive.” A better headline for this silly non-story would be, “Johnny Depp Jokes About Playing Jack Sparrow at Kids’ Parties,” but of course, no one would click that.

What to Do? The fan-sphere is filled with sites like this, and I guess I should be grateful they don’t cover, say, vaccines. But it’s frustrating, for anyone whose livelihood is based on researching, interviewing and fact-checking, to share the movie news space with sites that don’t “cover” anything — they just rewrite other people’s stories, badly.

Finally: If you’re a man who worries that they’re coming to emasculate us via the old change-the-names-of-our-favorite superheroes trick, remember that it’s our job as husbands, fathers and sons to find positive ways to channel our raw masculine power. I go out back and chop wood with my pretend Wolverine claws.

Comment of the Day: “Please. This guy was the luckiest horrible musician that has existed. He is in the right genre now. Rap.” — a commenter named Half Cack, not buying our praise of the Penny Lane documentary Listening to Kenny G.

Confidential to Half Cack: While we welcome opposing points of view, please be advised that this website fought on the side of rap in the Great Rap-Rock Wars of 1986, before the combatants came together and recorded the terrific soundtrack to Judgment Day, a fact no one remembers. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Main image: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, who will probably be a Disney princess in the next X-Men movie unless people on the internet act now. I mean, I assume

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The post A new exhibition opens a window into Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch appeared first on Little White Lies.

The post A new exhibition opens a window into Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch appeared first on Little White Lies.