If I ran a Major Hollywood Studio...

A few years ago my wife recommended that I read Nathaniel Philbrick's non-fiction book, "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex". Its an amazing read and tells the harrowing true story that inspired Hermen Melville's, "Moby Dick". If I ran a major Hollywood Studio I'd greenlight this movie in a heartbeat and would try to get Ridley Scott, Philip Kaufmann or Peter Weir to take on the project.

The PBS program "American Experience" aired some incredible television this week with their telling of the history of American whaling.  

Click on the image to watch the episode online.

Keith Edmier at the Walker Arts Center

My friend and artist Keith Edmier talks about rebuilding his childhood home. I got to shoot video documentation of Keith's retrospective show at Bard College back in 2007 where the entire house sat in the middle of the exhibtion. The kitchen has been recreated for its current incarnation at the Walker in Minneapolis.

 

KEITH EDMIER

My good friend Keith Edmier has a new website. Click on the image below to check out Keith's work:

Beverly Edmier, 1967

When he was four years old, Edmier and his parents moved to Tinley Park, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago. They bought a home in the Bremen Towne Estates subdivision, which was a small village within a village, having its own shopping mall, theater and churches. He had an early interest in sculpting, making masks much like those used for special effects in films. In order to learn how to create vampire fangs, he got an after-school job with a dental lab, where he learned how to use acrylics and molding techniques.

While still a student at Victor J. Andrew High School, he managed to strike up a correspondence with Hollywood makeup artist Dick Smith. After an early graduation from high school, Edmier set off for Hollywood, where he began learning more by working on movies such as The Fly. Edmier also attended the California Institute of the Arts for a brief period. It was here that he decided to make a career change from working in film to becoming an artist, moving to New York to pursue that goal in 1990. He became an assistant to Matthew Barney, who advised him to concentrate on creating works which have personal meaning to him.

Many of Edmier's works have very close personal connections to his life. He embarked on the creation of the exhibit "Bremen Towne", where he recreated in exact detail, his childhood home and the family's rooms in it. While his parents had sold the home and were now living in nearby Orland Park, Illinois, they contacted the present owner, who agreed to grant Edmier access to the home where he grew up. The construction of the life-size rooms took the artist over a year. It was shown by Petzel Galleries in 2008.

Some great Mac OSX tips/tricks

Put the Path Bar on Top - If you want to see the path to the current folder at the top of the window, open Terminal and type 

 defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES.

Then press return. Next, hold down the option key and control-click on the Finder icon in the Dock; then select Relaunch. From now on, the path should appear, in traditional Unix format, in the title bar of all your Finder windows. To undo the change, repeat the procedure, replacing YES with NO.

Select and copy text in Quicklook previews -

Look previews, you just need to enable a hidden Finder setting. Select and copy the code below, open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities), paste that code at the prompt, then press Return:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE; killall Finder

After a second or two, the Finder will restart. Once it does, you'll be able to select text in Quick Look previews and copy it to the Clipboard for use elsewhere.

If you decide you don’t deserve to select text in Quick Look, you can turn this feature off with another Terminal command:

defaults delete com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection; killall Finder

 

Both of these tips come from the writers at Macworld.


Prometheus

The official trailer for Ridley Scott's Prometheus is now online. Click on the image below & watch in HD.

VFX Show podcast episode #139 "Tree of Life" & "Melancholia"

Mike Seymour, TyRuben Ellingson and Matt Wallin discuss the visual effects in two very unique films this week, Tree of Life and Melancholia. Click on the images below for the direct link to FXGuide or subscribe for free in iTunes.

This week I pay props to one of my oldest and dearest friends, Negin Bairami. Negin worked as Senior Texture Painter on Tree of Life and is an amazing and gifted artist all around. I actually met Negin in high school art class back when we were both sixteen. We both wound up working in VFX and have been friends for more than twenty five years. Negin's work can also be seen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2 and in the upcoming films Gravity and Rise of the Guardians. 

Eames: The Architect & The Painter

When I first moved to New York in 1999 I went to a retrospective show of Charles and Ray Eames at the Cooper-Hewitt. Their design work was so fun to see, but I was really intrigued by some of their films that I had not previously seen. There was one called, Blacktop: A Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard (1952), which was projected on the floor of the museum and it consisited of nothing but soap suds washing over blacktop. While it may sound dull, the presentation and the overall effect was quite beautiful. I'm looking forward to this new documentary.  

Apple used Charles and Ray Eames in their "Think Different" campaign.  Watching the trailer for the upcoming doc, it seems like they were a good choice.  

 

Katana 1.0 released

The Foundry has just released Katana 1.0.  I used the Sony Imageworks version of Katana on both "I Am Legend" and "Beowulf 3D".  It was a fantastic tool back then and I can only imagine that The Foundry has done a great deal to make it a truly revolutionary product.  Integration with Nuke will make it a fantastic tool for any production pipeline.  Click on the image below to read more.  

Esper Machine (Blade Runner, 1982)

I'm in San Sebastian, Spain preparing to give a talk at the International Conference on the Image and have been thinking a lot about just how we define the nature of the "image" in today's environment.  I recently went back and watched a lot of old movies from my youth. There is a great scene in Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford uses a device, that the script referred to simply as the "Esper Machine", to analyze some found photographs he believes belong to the genetically engineered replicants that he is tasked with "retiring".  

In my research for the talk this scene struck me as an early precursor to some of the emerging technolgies in digital imaging, ie; dual-photography or light-field photography.  I thought it was fun to have a look at the original images from the film here.

The Esper sequence was achieved by taking a series of still photos on a small set and then assembling them on an animation stand to create a piece of film that was transferred to videotape for playback on the Esper prop. Most of the material here is from an early version of the Esper sequence that was eventually re-shot, but includes 35mm positives and 8 x 10 in. transparencies that were eventually used to create the Polaroid of Zhora that Deckard prints out of the Esper.

 

 

 

Visual Effects Society 2.0 "Industry Bill of Rights"

The Visual Effects Society issues an "Industry Bill of Rights".  The VES Board unanimously voted to approve the document outlining the rights of visual effects workers, facilities and studios.  You can read the entire document by clicking on the image below. 

In the Summer of 2008 my family and I spent three months in Vancouver working for a visual effects company on a major studio release.  When the film came out in theaters, I did not receive screen credit.  I hope this bill of rights would eliminate that kind of thing from happening in the future.  A credit winds up being the equivalent of a published work when it comes to academia.  That studio/facility denying credit has the potential to put one's future job security at risk.

© Matt Wallin. All rights reserved.