History of VFX

The first recorded evidence of VFX was in a short film in 1895 by Thomas Edison and Alfred Clark "The Execution of Mary Queen of Scotts".   George Melies was a film maker who created the famous "A Trip to the Moon" in 1902. Melies was responsible for creating of many visual effects in his films. In 1927
"Metropolis" was presented to the world, it is considered to be the first feature length science fiction film. It was created by Fritz Lang and Eugen Schufftan. In 1933 Cooper and Schoedsack created "King Kong". The special effects used in this monster movie included Stop motion animation with live action, it was animated by Willis H O'Brien. Blue Screening was first majorly used in "The Thief of Bagdad". Larry Butler won an Oscar for the visual effects in "The Thief of Bagdad". This film was created in 1940. Byron Haskin directed "War of The Worlds" in 1953. Many people was a part of creating the many miniatures and matte paintings used throughout the film. "The Ten Commandments" was a biblical epic movie with an enormous cast and giant sets, tons of visual effects were used throughout. This is Cecil B. Demilles masterpeice, that was created in 1956. Don Chaffey's version of "Jason and The Argonauts" is known world widely for Ray Harryhausen's immaculate stop motion that was integrated into this masterpiece. It was released in 1963. Stanley Kubrick created the amazing "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968, this is a masterpiece of cinema and visual effects. Douglas Trumbull was one of the VFX supervisors and is a legend in the industry. Michael Crichton directed "Westworld" in 1973. It was the first feature to use digital image processing and effects which were created by Brent Sellstrom. We all know the world famous "Star Wars" movie, which George Lucas founded ILM  ( Industrial Light and Magic) which created the first ever computer generated images for his film. In 1982 "Tron" was created, Tron was the first feature length film to use 3D CGI. Four Leading Computer Graphics companies were hired by Disney to create the CGI for the film. In 1988 Robert Zemeckis created "Roger Rabbit". This film includes traditional animation, CGI and live action sequences to allow the "Toons" to exist in the real world, Ken Ralston supervised the visual effects on this film. Steven Spielberg directed the first full digital composite with "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade " in 1989. Again ILM was responsible for the visual effects due to George Lucas writing and producing the film. Jame Cameron in 1991 directed "Terminator 2". This film demonstrated a leap forwards in using CGI in films, it also brought one of the first fully CGI main characters in th T-1000. Cameron employed Fantasy II Film Effects and ILM to create the visual effects for this film, which he has done before in a previous film "The Abyss". In 1993 Steven Spielberg created the legendary film "Jurassic Park". This was a landmark visual effects movie that pushed animatronic effects to new levels, it also helped to develop many of the CGI techniques used today in character modelling and rigging. Industrial Light and Magic were resposible for the majority of visual effects in the original release. In 1995 John Lasseter created "Toy Story". Toy Story is the first full film to use CGI throughout, Pixar created all of the computer generated imagery for this film. Wachowski Bros. created "The Matrix" in 1999. The Matrix was the first time CG frame interpolation was used in a feature film. Frame interpolation enabled the development of the "Bullet Time" effect. Animal Logic and Manex Visual Effcets produced the lions share of visual effects for The Matrix. Peter Jackson set a new benchmark for visual effects with the "Lord of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring" using both physical and CGI but the real groundbreaker was the development of Massive Prime, Crowd simulation software with artificial intelligence. This enabled the creation of huge battle sequences. Digital Dom and Weta Digital was the ones behind the astonishing visual effects. Kerry Conran directed "Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow" in 2004, this film was the first feature length to have an entire background created by CGI with a live action cast. There were so many companies contributing to the visual effects such as ILM, The Orphanage, Stan Winston Digital, Cafe FX and Hybride. And last but not least is "Avatar" which is another groundbreaking film created by the genius James Cameron. Avatar was the first feature film made using "performance capture" which allows the virtual world and virtual characters to be shot in real time. This was another film that had many different VFX studios contributing including, Weta Digital, Framestore, Giant Studios, ILM, Hydralux, Prime Focus and many more.

A Trip to the Moon 

King Kong 

The Ten Commandments

2001:A Space Odyssey

Tron

Jurassic Park

Toy Story 

Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring

Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow

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Double Negative

Double Negative is a VFX company that has worked on many titles such as Battleship, Dark Knight Rises, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, The Hunger Games Catching Fire and Thor The Dark World. They are currently working on more titles such as Godzilla and more. They have won the 83rd academy awards Visual effects for Inception. They have also won BAFTA Awards for Inception and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. They have won 4 VES awards, 3 of them for Inception and the other for Sherlock Holmes.  Double Negative have many conferences and events to be noticed and to get young people interested in a career in visual effects. One of them is The Big Bang event which is a big celebration of science, engineering etc for young people in the UK.  Animax is another event that is a festival for animation and VFX in Teeside, England. There are a fair few more events created by Double Negative other than these ones.

Double Negative - Showreel

Double Negative Website

Paul

John Carter

John Carter image and the Double Negative logo collected from the Double Negative website. The videos are subject to copyright due to being collected from Youtube. The Image of the film Paul was collected from www.fxguide.com. They were all collected on the 30th December 2013.

DragonFrame

Dragon Frame is a company that is full of animators, directors of photography and artists. They designed the Dragonframe software in which you are able to create stop motion animations at a professional standard. This is the software I am currently using to create my VFX video. This software is formerly known as Dragon  Stop motion.

History
Jamie and Dyami Caliri are brothers who have been collaborating to create stop motion software since 1993. Dyami is a professional software engineer and his brother is a noted and awards winning director. Jamie began to work on the United Airline advert called Dragon in 2005. The brothers worked closely with Kim Blanchette to develop software that meet there needs. After there success they went on to make there software available for the public.

Personally I believe the software is simple and effective. It certainly helps to make your footage look a professional standard. I also think it is a lot like Frame Thief but with out the keypad and the Dragon software is more professional.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Visual Effects Society

The Visual Effect Society is an organisation that represents Visual effect practitioners. The practitioners can be artists or educators. It doesn't matter as long as they are from the same industry. The objective for this organisation is to promote the arts within visual effects. There purpose is to also bring the practitioners together at events etc. They also want to encourage the teaching to others what the practitioners do. This is a non-profit organisation and is only there to promote the industry recognition.
The Visual Effects society have many competitions and awards ceremony's to promote and award visual effects artists for there contribution to the industry. There are awards ceremonies such as the 12th annual VES awards which has 24 different categories, The 12th annual VES students awards which is an honorary award in visual effects in student projects.

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Pixilation

Pixilation is where you use live actors to create a film using the stop motion way. Which is frame by frame method. I am going to incorporate this method into my VFX module as most of my VFX film is a claymation. I will be using this method for when my actor is going to crush the flower.

Some films that use this method are  The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, El Hotel electrico and  Neighbours by Norman McLaren.

Neighbours

El Hotel Electrico

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

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Notes on the History of Compositing

Compositing is when various images are used to create an illusion that the elements are a part of the same scene.
Un Homme De Tetes (The four troublesome heads)

• Melies 1898 film used a double exposure technique to create the composite shot. 
• Parts of the exposure where matte paint is used (black).
• Melies is a pioneer of visual effects.

The Great Train Robbery 

• Edwin S. Porter created this film in 1903 using matte painting technique that Melies used.
• Porter used double exposure.

Matte Paintings

• New techniques for augmenting sets were developed in the 20th century.
• The 'Glass shot' was developed by Norman Dawn, it was a plate of glass he started on.
• The problem with this technique was that the paintings needed to be ready on set but Norman Dawn got round this by re-exposing. 
• The technique has been used since the early 19th century. 

The Glass shot 'Soldier Jack'

• Cheaper
• You have limited movement of the camera. 

Black Screen

• Frank Williams patented the 'Black Matting' process in 1918.
• The process used a black background and exposure.

'Sunrise: A song of two humans' (1927)

• Ground breaking when it was first shown to the world. 

Blue Screen

• A major issue of the black screen process was that shadows were lost.
• The Dunning process used coloured lights to identify subjects (yellow)  and background (blue) enabling a clean separation. 
• It can only be used with black and white films.
• Colour film was becoming more affordable to make.
• In 1940 Larry Butler devised a process that would allow the creation of travelling mattes. 
• Three strip process, they are combined using an optical printer. 
• The best method until the 1950's. 
• Petro Vlahos invented the 'Sodium Vapour process'
• Sodium Vapour lights= 589.3 nm/s
• With this information Vlahos created a special camera film. Which has a prism within it.
• Only Disney has these cameras. 
• It wasn't very cheap to rent off them.
• Vlahos spent 6 months working on improving the blue screen method, eventually he developed the 'colour difference matte process'
• The colour difference matte was so successful that it remained popular for the next 40 years. 
• Technique developments meant that effects could be processed faster but very little changed until the      advent of digital compositing.

Blue becomes green

• Green became more and more popular colour to use green screens. 
• It was easier to lights than blue, green registers brighter on electronic displays and was a less common colour in clothing/ costumes.
• Many digital camera sensors capture twice the amount of green as they do blue or red (bayer pattern) making it easier to key a green screen. 

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Lecture 2- Consumerism: persuasion, society, brand, culture

Here are the notes I made on lecture 2 and the Context of Practice lesson notes about the lecture:

Learning new equipment

We have been given a lot of inductions to help us learn all the assets we need to create a VFX video. So far there has been After Effects inductions, DSLR inductions, Using the Dolly and the Crane, Premiere Pro induction and using the Green screen equipment induction. I believe I now have more confidence in myself in being able to create a VFX video. When I was first told that we was making a visual effects video, I must admit I was worried as I have never done anything like this before especially when I watch the Star Wars documentary, as so much goes into it, much more than I ever thought. Now that we have been learning all the different things that are needed to create a visual effects video, I don't feel as scared, now I feel more like I can do it. However my video will not look like Star Wars as that is way too advance for my skill set, hopefully I will be that good in the future but for now I am only a beginner.
Here are some notes I mad from the inductions.

Introduction into After Effects lesson 2 notes

We had another lesson helping us to learn more abut After Effects. This lesson was very useful and I learnt a lot from it. We combined using photoshop to manipulate an image them moving it over to After Effects to do more experimentation with the software. Yet again I wrote notes on what we did and new buttons we used and what they are for. As you can see we learnt a considerable amount which I am very happy about as I found it very useful.

Transmedia Storytelling

Today Mike was talking to us about transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling is a technique of telling a story across multiple platforms. There are advances in technology that have allowed us to expand on to different platforms such as Mobile devices, Internet and online gaming.
We mainly talked about Henry Jenkins "Transmedia 101". Henry Jenkins is a professor of media studies. Here are my note I made on this talk.

I am going to take a closer look at Transmedia story telling as there is so much with in the meaning and I am keen to learn more about it.