Hard To See

January 22 2024

They were hard to see at first but with a little experience, I was able to spot the drones from 2 kilometers away. They’d always start as a glint on the horizon that slowly grew into an orange rectangular shape before whizzing past. My friends and I try to hit them with rocks as they fly overhead but they were always way too fast. These drones carry packages from household to household. If you’re tech savvy enough you could hack them and deliver other peoples orders to your doorway. My cousin did this a few times, he didn't recommend doing it anymore because of how serious the fine’s are. He was charged $8,000 for the second drone he stole and didn't even end up keeping it.

A Deep Hum

January 14 2024

I remember the first time I saw a BIG Structure. They reminded me of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey but on a huge scale. There was a half-built structure near my grandparent’s house. They lived on the outside of town in the countryside. These structures transmitted data and power between neighbouring cities. Some people even believed the structures were able to pull electricity right out of the sky. During wintertime, you could hear a deep hum through the air when they were under full load. Things never really felt still after they built one by my parent’s place. I could tell my dad always felt unsure about them. I remember him starring at a tower during breakfast one morning then saying “they'll have to fall down someday……..”

Watchmen HBO VFX Breakdown

It’s great to see our work shown in HBO’s VFX Breakdown for the Watchmen series. Lots of amazing work all around. Enjoy the watch!

Watchmen : Looking Glass VFX Magic

Happy to share our VFX contributions for the HBO TV series Watchmen.

Check out the full page in the link bellow.

http://www.nathaniellarouche.com/#/watchmen/

The Version Zero Podcast

Yes that’s right. Another podcast for your consumption. First EP is launching soon.

tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock

Cant wait to share the work we are doing on this show with all of you.

Film Path

I had the pleasure of confabulating with the talented Canadian duo Daniel Young & Christian Giroux on this experimental media artwork. This exciting new project, Film Path / Camera Path with under-titles, merges Young & Giroux’s sculpture practice with film installation using high tech design and manufacturing technologies.

Film Path / Camera Path with under-titles collides the projected image with the apparatus of its presentation and the moving image with sculpture. The project started with the concept of a motion picture projection where the path of the film is the same as the camera path and is composed into a knot. A sculptural materialization of the film loop is made possible by complex multi-planer geometric modeling, parametric design, and additive manufacturing. The 35mm projector presents a one-minute long loop of a camera’s travel along the film path. Accompanying the projection is an LED text screen that displays under-titles prepared for the artwork by poets, theorists, and artists including: John Barlow, Ina Blom, Eric Cazdyn, Geoffrey Farmer, Agnieszka Gratza, Daniel Hambleton, Erín Moure, Bridget Moser, Judy Radul, Patricia Reed, Reza Negarestani, Mohammad Salemy, and Michael Snow.

The Umbrella Academy : Enviroments

Some environment work completed at MARZ VFX for the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy. Our main goal was making the environments as tangible as possible while pulling in as many references from the original artwork as we could. Fans of the original graphic novel will have some Easter eggs to find in these shots.

All or our environment’s start with a solid 3D base we then combined with photo details to escape the digital

Grace Effect

In the first season of Umbrella Academy we had the opportunity of developing Graces more mechanical side.

We wanted the effect to reflect her soft features and compliment her facial structure. Using a 3D scans of the performer we placed virtual lights beneath her skin allowing it to glow from within.
Her mechanical look is furthermore hinted at with robotic structures blocking the light in unnatural ways

These Graces effects were rendered in maya using the redshift renderer. The surface of her skin was gives a frosted glass look. We rendered different passes to animate glitches, pulses and fashes. Our compositing team over at MARZ VFX hit it out of the park, integrating all these pases into the final live action plate.

Cheers

The Umbrella Academy

I'd like to congratulate our all-star team over at MARZ VFX for wrapping up this incredible project. Each one of you brought your own creative flair and energy and I couldn't have asked for anything more. Looking forward to seeing this on the big screen in February. Until then enjoy the teaser trailer :)

Points Vol.1

I’ve been experimenting lately with ways of generating point cloud data from moving footage. This effect has been very popular lately and i wanted to find a way of generating a similar look without expensive equipment or time consuming 3D builds. Bellow is an example of footage i shot over the summer with a Canon 7D and a KAMERAR SD-1 Mark II slider.

This look was generated in the compositing package Nuke utilizing its camera tracker. When creating a camera track, nuke natively spits out a point cloud. This is intended to give you a representation of the scene in front of the camera. Usually these points are not used at all…. but we are going to do something cool with them :)

Bellow is an example of how simple the set up is. All you need is you footage you’d wish to generate a point cloud from and a camera tracker node.

Typically the default settings on the camera tracker will not give you a dense enough point cloud. I found these settings gave the best results on HD footage.

Sometimes id do a few different tracks with different amounts of “Number of Features” and “Detection Threshold”

Once a track is complete next steps are to solve the camera. Go to the CameraTracker tab and click the solve button.

Once the solve is complete go to the “Export” section of the attribute window and click the camera drop down. Select Scene+ in this dropdown menu and click create. This should build what you see bellow which is everything you need to create the effect. Your camera and a nice dense point cloud that represents the footage.

Now all we do is disconnect the original footage. To do this i usually just replace the footage with a black “constant” set to the same resolution as the footage.

This creates a very heavy scene… at this point id recommend rendering the output of the “scanline” to a “.exr” sequence. I'll set my write node to save EXR’s with all channels. We will need depth information included from the scanline to add depth of field back into our image. This render can take a while so go chill out or go for a walk. you deserve it.

Once the render is complete the creative juices start flowing.

I usually start with a blank scene, read in the exr’s we rendered and create a Zdefocus node.

Depth of field helps show the overall shape of the scene and creates focus for your eye. I play around with its depth and the size until i can make shapes out in the scene.

Once you find a cool look all that’s left is color grading and adding elements to give the shot some creative flair. In some i added dust elements drifting through the air. In another I emphasized the rain fall by making it look like they emit light.

Go create some cool looking clips.

Easy

WATCHMEN 2019

Enjoy the teaser trailer

Stay tuned