The Wishing Well is a short experimental one-man film by artist and actor Rod Maxwell. He shot the entire film by himself in his livingroom in a small 4'x4' homemade greenscreen. He did EVERYTHING including the script, directing acting, makeup, prosthetics, efffects. The video below is a trailer for the film and a 'Behind the scenes' video. The film has one several awards, too.... just check out the bottom of his website! It's really damn impressive. I was impressed.



Thanks to Diannah Morgan for posting it to the AE List.

Labels: 3D, Documentary, Film Short, Movie Trailer

This was posted by Pete Kirn at Create Digital Motion. This kind of stuff fascinates me. Enjoy.

Labels: Documentary, Retro

In honor of Earth Day, I bring you The Culmination of Consumptionism. Natsuki Kato is my former student and created this clever animation about plastic bags. I did bring my own bag to the grocery store this morning, as well as my own mug to snatch a free cup of coffee (no foam!).

Okay, back to the video... The V.O is by AJ Hamilton. Music: Lucas Schurkamp. Natsuki says "I got this idea from what my little sister Jenelle told me in a grocery store: 'I won't take any plastic bags so that I can save polar bears.' I am excited to see how far the message of the green organization at a high school in Bay City will go. My friend, A.J. did such a great job with the voice over by adding his humor based on a lot of info that I gave from my research."

Check out Natsuki's other work at her web site.

Labels: Documentary, Film Short, Student Work

The first, Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us/ing Us, really makes me want to redo Toolfarm in XML. Boy that would save time!



Here is the response to the video: Health 2.0 Version 2 response to The Machine is Us/ing Us. They're similar in style but different in content (obviously), so is it really a response? I don't think so. Its an interesting video none the less.

Labels: Documentary, Film Short

This is "Animated Documentary-Mockumentary about Evil in western civilization from Ancient Greece to present day." It was animated frame by frame in Flash and composited and textured in After Effects. It was designed and animated by Ole-Magnus Saxegard as a student project. It is lots of fun. I really thought it would end with Dick Cheney ;-)

Labels: 2D, Documentary, Film Short, Humor, Student Work

I thought you all would appreciate this. It's a short documentary on the difference between professional video standards for television and standardless anarchy known as the web. This was done for the Independent Film Channel and is pretty funny.

Labels: Documentary, Humor

This is just cool.... and now the right video is up here. Sorry about that. I've had the flu and this cold medicine is fogging my brain.



Via Flowseeker

Labels: Documentary

'Seam carving' photo resizing now for video shows an incredible new technology for making photos larger. You just have to see it to believe it. I can't imagine the complex algorithms that went into that one.

Labels: Documentary

Beautiful animation of cells. Fascinating. No idea what it is exactly, but its gorgeous. This was made by Biovisions at Harvard University.



There's a larger, cleaner-than-YouTube version at Studio Daily.

Labels: 3D, Documentary

Take a trip from Venice, Italy to the far reaches of space. Yes we're very small. Take 10 steps from St. Marks Cathedral (well if they're Power of 10 steps) and you're looking at the universe.



Via Axiom Sun

Labels: Documentary

This is kind of funny. I admit, I've never played Halo. I'm not a gamer. I used to kick major ass at Q*Bert and Tetris on Nintendo. I'm a bit old school when it comes to gaming.

This faux documentary of Halo taking over the world uses a lot of bad video effects. I was hoping in the future, we would no longer have bad video. Hehe.

Labels: Documentary, Film Short

Okay, so this isn't exactly video effects, but it sure looks like it. This is really amazing technology.



Read the WIRED article about the process

And thanks, Jim G., for the link.

Labels: Documentary

A nice animated explanation by Rob Bryanton of a very complex theory.

Labels: Documentary

The rescaling and removal tools are mindblowing. I wonder if Adobe will buy this technology and incorporate it into future versions of Photoshop? One can wish.

Labels: Documentary, Experimental

"Design can change the world. You just need the right plug-in." That is Toolfarm's mantra! I guess it's catching on. Awesome.

You've probably seen Designer//Slash//Model by now. It's been on several blogs and list-servs. I'm hopping on the bandwagon a little late. It's very clever and very well done and contains some very hunky men and some lovely ladies. It's a mock documentary about a group of models who are also artists and they talk about their craft. Do they create beauty because they're beautiful or are they beautiful because they create beauty? Haha.

Make sure you check out the whole site. The behind the scenes of Chaz are especially funny with some nice Photoshop work at the end.

Labels: Documentary

This is some amazing new technology from Microsoft that will connect images from around the web to create multidimensional images that you can zoom in and out to unbeliable closeups and detail. You have to watch the video to really understand what that means. It's impressive stuff.

Labels: Documentary

This is freakin' amazing stuff. The future of visual effects if you will. This just makes it all look so easy. Color me impressed. The website of the project is Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene

The work presents a system for automatically producing a wide variety of video enhancements and visual effects. Unlike traditional visual effects software (e.g., After Effects, Shake, Boujou, etc), the system is completely automatic and no manual labor is required from the user. The major limitation of the work is that it can currently handle only videos of static scenes (i.e., videos shot with a moving camera but containing no moving objects in the scene). Efforts are being made to lift this restriction in future work.

Applications of the system include:
High resolution/definition video,
High dynamic range video,
Removing objects from a video,
Creating painterly (NPR) videos,
Video stabilization,
Easy video editing

Via Flowseeker

Labels: Documentary

Floris: Metalosis Maligna, which came out last year, is a scary documentary slash short film about medical implants gone crazy. There's lots of cool 3D and some stellar compositing and tracking work. The man with the metalosis maligna, with his body being replaced by "metal tissue" and the stop motion portions are really impressive. Wow. I'm blown away.

The Dutch duo called Microbia, Floris Kaayk and Sil van der Woerd, produced this amazing piece.

Labels: 3D, Documentary, Experimental, Film Short, Stop Motion

This link was in the Red Giant newsletter and reminded me of a film that I was an extra in many years ago called LAM, a film by Justin Woiwode. They both take place in mental institutions where the staff is nuttier than the patients. I'm digging the shaky cam effects in Broken.

The best stuff is here:

Magic Bullet Editors helped Alex Ferrari create three signature looks for the indie short, Broken, an action suspense movie that has been accepted at over 90 film festivals around the world. The DVD includes over three hours of helpful tips on production design, costume design, lighting, color correction and props. Magic Bullet is covered in the section called How to Make Video Look Like Film.

• Read the Broken user story
• Watch the Broken trailer

Labels: Documentary, Film Short

"300" Smashes Box Office Records

Visual Effects in Frank Miller's 300 is an interesting mini-documentary on the LightWave effects in the film. It's really interesting stuff. They used boujou for their match moves and moved between boujou and LightWave.

See more stills and information about the CG here.

Labels: 3D, Documentary

Last Best Hope: A True Story of Escape, Evasion and Remembrance is another example of zooming through 3D space with the camera, through 2D photo scenery. This one has played at film festivals, won awards and showed on PBS. This one will make you say wow.

Labels: 2D, 3D, Documentary

We're looking for a few good animators, editors, students or even just fans of visual effects to contribute to this blog. Not HTML skills necessary, but a good eye for the most ground-breaking and rule-breaking techniques and styles out there. We want eye candy! Yes, we do.

Interested? Drop me an email and tell me why you should be considered. You would be expected to make one post per week, but you can post more, as long as they're quality videos. You're welcome to add your thoughts and opinions about the video, too.

Labels: 2D, 3D, Bizarre, Commercial, Demo Reel, Documentary, Experimental, Film Short, Interview, Movie Trailer, Music Video, Podcast, Stop Motion, Student Work, Television, Titles

My friend Alicia sent me this engaging video transformation. At first I thought it was a makeover video but it's nothing like that. Watch in amazement. The tagline "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted" says it all.

The video was done by Reginald Pike director Yael Staav for Dove's campaign for real beauty. This is exactly the type of thing I was showing to my Photoshop class last year.

Labels: Documentary

Check out this mini documentary for Kong is King. I really feel sorry for these guys.

From the site: "These guys and gals are the ones who intricately remove all the 'real world' stuff that is in a shot. They also paint over things that need to disappear to make the movie as realistic as possible. We get to see some amazing blue and green screen footage, lots of running and falling shots of Naomi Watts, and a super close-up of Jack Black's head (no whale for you Jack)."

Labels: Documentary

Paula Scher is a logo designer and type artist. She creates incredible type designs and some of the most recognizable logos around (citibank, anyone?). "Adobe Studio Presents" has an interesting interview with her as well as some beautiful examples of her work.

Labels: Documentary

Van Helsing: Monsters, Magic, and Macs is a 10 minute documentary on how a major effect - the Frankenstein monster and an angry mob of villagers - came together in After Effects. Industrial Light Magic's Todd Vaziri shows you some amazing work.

Now let's see how much bandwidth this guy has ;-)

Labels: Documentary