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Showing posts from September, 2008

M dot's mini render farm choice for September 2008

I figured it would be helpful if I show you what I chose and why for those interested in doing the same... I was originally going to use an Ikea Helmer cabinet to house all my render nodes but once I found some cheap cases w/PSU's that were cheaper than the PSU's alone for the Helmer setup I decided to just go with 4 separate boxes... CPU: Intel Q9300 = $260.00 - gotta have a quad... could of went with a Q6600 yes but I wanted the lower heat and power consumption that comes with this 45nm chip seeing that its going to be on forever... not planning on OC'ing either RAM: 8 gigs DDR 800 = $130.00 - My workstation has 8 gigs... I matched it so whatever my workstation can spit out these nodes will be able to render it... I'm doing lots of SPD with big textures so need the memory HArd Drive: 80gb Seagate = $40.00 -Nothing special here..just get the smallest, most reliable drive you can find Mainboard: Gigabyte Micro ATX = $104.00 - Why so expensive? Well I needed one that

Filmbaby ftw!

If you ordered a WATS DVD online you probably got it through filmbaby.com.... I just have to say that my experience with them has been nothing short of WIN... The guy that runs it, Jamie... is super cool and like... on it trying to make money for the filmmakers he works with... I didn't do any special deal with them just came in like anybody else would and I am now funding my new animated feature film through my sales with filmbaby... So I just ordered my new mini render farm right now... 4x Q9300 boxes with 8gb RAM for the geeks interested... I was only able to do so because of filmbaby retail sales... This is the way it should be... I mean I did bust my FACE authoring the DVD's and doing all the design etc... but once that was over I spent ZERO time or money on promotion outside of me mentioning it on youtube every once in a while... That allows me to do what I'm supposed to do... make films! I could have spent a lot more time trying to promote it and trying to work spons

Now your playing wiF PoweR ^ ^

Thanks for the D-Cinema link RandomFactor! So on the topic of production thangs that used to be hella expensive droppin down to affordable prices... First lets look at the wraptor... I didn't know about this so thanks RF... When the movie industry switched from FILM to DIGITAL they could of used a NON-proprietary format to make it open to all filmmakers BUT they did they usual bullshit and chose some proprietary format and process that cost the same as printing to film... so in other words its still too expensive and locks everyone but the studios out..... It seems this $700 plugin will create a D-Cinema ready file...something that costs like $80,000 otherwise... $700...$80,000...WIN SHOOT3d single camera mocap system Since Cinema4d 11 has new NLA options I'm looking at different ways to build my motion library... of course mocap is used a lot in the film and gaming industries BUT before I found this product the cheapest solution was about $30,000 and you needed at least 4 cam

Some WATS numbers

Now there are videos on the interwebZ with like 30-40 million views so my little numbers are like meh compared to those... BUT given the fact that I am making bizarre material for a super small niche I think the numbers are kinda inspiring... and also WATS doesn't have any b00bs, cats...nothing to do with celebrities, politics, pop culture or anyone hitting they balls... So as of right now... WATS in languages besides English total: 446,525 views The English version has 687,974 views... so thats 1,134,499 total for a film that old dead bastards and generic sheeple walked out of at Sundance... After looking at the youtube insight for all the versions... Over %50 of the people watching WATS on Youtube are under 18 years of age. So 20 years ago NO ONE would have seen WATS after what happened at Sundance... because there was no interwebs... no way to reach the people who might be interested in it... So I exist only because of this cyber place... If it was up to the rotten bastards who

UnholY

WOW Hollywood has stooped really REALLY LOW now... Remember how I was telling you about how the Weinstein Company guy wanted me to direct a Ninja film and I told him I as doing a Samurai film.... There is something in those old Samurai films from the 1960's that the Hollywood of today could NEVER replicate but they don't care about heart or soul they only care about the bottom dollar... Sooo.... It saddens me to see that they will smear another great movie.... The Weinstein company is remaking SEVEN SAMURAI to be released in 2009 Look at this quote from a press release... "The film company founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein said that it hopes to impart a "Western sensibility" to the productions in the hopes of producing movies that appeal to both Asia and the West." Haha by "Western Sensibility" they mean we will rip out all the heart and soul and replace it with mindless sex and violence to be perpetrated by whatever plastic flavor of the month

Creating and Being...Living and DyinG

I've been lucky enough to be invited on several paid for speaking/screening engagements all over the world in the past year thanks to WATS.... I got to talk about aliens and mind control in front of bewildered Brazilians in Sao Paolo... I got to start a presentation in Amsterdam with a slide that read "Brief pretentious intro"... In Warsaw, Poland an old man who was a musicologist was all teary eyed after seeing WATS when he said "I think in colors and this is the only film that has spoke to me in colors"... I got to act like a maniac when I got wasted and crashed the Berlinale closing party with rogue Dubliners in Berlin... there were some other great times in other countries I'll write about later.... BUT while on those trips I was thinking to myself...This is fun but I have to get back to work.... and I kept saying to myself I should say yes to these trips because there will be a point in the future when I stop getting invited... So I already have speakin

A book oh yeh

So I've been kinda workin on a book here and there for the past 2 years... but never got too serious because I had no way to publish it... Then I found this recently... Seems like a real easy way for me to distribute a book... So what I've been writing recently is kind of a manual for the "M dot Strange style of visual cinema" or something like that where I'm breaking down why I do what i do...and I have some other stuff I wrote for "Rebel without a cast OR crew"... its kind of a creative manifesto as well... Since you don't have to pay to make any books ....even if only 6 people buy em its aight... So I want to know... for the peeps that read this blog... What information would you want in a book if I wrote one?

Samurai/Ninja film galore

You will notice that in 2009/2010 the Hollywood studio system will put out a number of Samurai/Ninja films... Including Frank Millers "Ronin"... "Ninja Assassins" by the Matrix Brothers/Sisters...that "Bunraku" film I wrote about before... there's also a ton of Anime remakes coming out... So I guess its a new fad for the studios... I will tell you.... in late 2007 I was in talks with the head of production of a major Hollywood studio... they were interested in having me direct a live action Ninja film produced in the same way 300 was... ya know live action actors/green screen/cg fx.... I said.... well I am doing a samurai film next... he said that they were interested in "ninja" films... "Hard R with asian appeal" those were close to his exact words... Short story shorter...I wasn't interested as I knew no studio backed film would be intense, insane or honest enough to hold my attention... yeh there would have been a lot of mone

Fitting Zbrush in the pipeline

Ok after wrestling with it and reading tutorials for a a week or so I'm starting to find the right place for Zbrush in my workflow... I was deforming the geometry WAY too much before and expecting it too look good AND I didn't know I had to flip the UV's vertically when I brought the Displacement map back into Cinema 4d... So I just exported a sphere from Cinema 4d... screwed around with it for 2 minutes in Zbrush... If used correctly combining Zbrush and Cinema4d can do some pretty awesome stuff... So I exported a sphere from C4d and sculpted on it real quick... then I tested SPD maps on 3 versions... a 266 poly version, a 1000 poly version and a 4000 poly version... I tested them with different SPD levels to see what SPD level/poly count would give the best combination of quality/performance... Here is the 266 poly object with no SPD map applied.... 266 poly object with SPD levels 4,5,6,7...didn't bother doing 3 looked to crappy Here is the 1k polygon obejct with no S

HyphY and realitY

So now that ipods come in all the colors of the hyphy rainbow which I lurve to use in meh designs I'm all like whoa.... these colors used to be too bright for normal grown up folk application but now they are in teh mainstream in places besides kids crayons?... FUCK how much further do I need to pump up my RGB values to stay on the edge?!?! ^ ^ I put Itunes 8 on my laptop and the new "Jelly" visualizer is pretty much like single cell Str8nime organism fireworks... Colors Colors Colors... My colors aren't cutting edge anymoreS OH NO What will i do NOWS?!?! XD FUCK So being an all around animation-video-film-audio-gfx geek and seeing that I have a long history of twisted live action productions... I've been following the tiny CMOS HD video cam thing... I finally made the leap and got a Canon HF100 which costs under $700 but shoots 1920x1080 24p video onto SDHC cards... No capture! Awesome I said... No tape?! Awesome I said...HD not SD! Awesome I saiD!.... So then I

Thoughts on workflow 9-9-08

So I've been teaching myself Zbrush the past few weeks.... its been going ok and I've done some tests with it and Cinema 4d....here's some of my observations... Zbrush is really good at sculpting fine detail and creating organic forms that would be impossible to replicate in a non 3d sculpting app... Zbrush and Mudbox are the only two I know of... On the other hand to create the fine detail the Zbrush object get really high poly like 3 million polys+ Its not practical for me to use such a high poly model inside Cinema 4d for animation.... I really love painting my models in Bodypaint... Bodypaint DIES when trying to work with these mega million Zbrush models even on my mega machine... Zbrush can be used to output a low poly model and a displacement map so that all the fine detail from the millionpoly model can be added at render time... So far I haven't gotten this to work correctly.... BUT even if it did work I would have to paint on the displaced model which can be do

The struggLE in three dimensionS or is it four?

Since technique and pure aesthetics excite almost as much as moods and stories... I simply cannot create HSM without redefining my visual style...and by redefine I mean make it more complex ^ ^ I excel at creating super blocky raw looking paint splattered 3d characters like the one I used in the Rabbit Junk promo... or the dancing block man in the PnoK video I did... If I were to make HSM look like that the only thing I would be thinking about right now is the HSM story... but I like challenges and I love learning and trying new things... Soooooo... I've been studying and practicing to extend my 3d skillset and utilize techniques I have never done before... I mean I could use a semi-toon shaded look like I did with "Blue" in WATS but there isn't enough dynamic range in the color space with that technique to get me excited... Here's the thing... before I started creating the models and the like for WATS... I envisioned it being a very dark and serious film... So I

Automated call center advice

So my heatsink was supposed to come yesterday but UPS never delivered it...and when I tracked it...the status said there was an "exception" So I called the UPS 800 number and it was one of those automated call center things... and I went through the options and got to a point where there was no option for talking to an operator.... so the automated voice was all... "Please choose an option" and I was all "FUCK..... YOU" and it was all "We're sorry will you please repeat that" then I said it louder and creepier "FUCK... YOU" Then it was all "We're sorry will you please repeat that" and even louder and creepier I said "FUCK YOU!!!" then there was a pause....then the automated voice said "We're now transferring you to an operator" So I got what I wanted initially by just screaming "FUCK YOU" over and over....Gawd Bless America..THE END.

I didn't think I was cool enougH

So after getting the major work out of the way with my new workstation now I'm starting to nitpick ^ ^ The stock intel fans are loud and when rendering they whine up and down...and they don't do that good of a job of cooling... So since I am going to be in a prolong relationship with these CPU's I have to make sure we are both comfortable... So I ordered two of these... Its the Thermalright HR-01 X....And I got two quiet 120mm fans to put on them... there actually isn't much choice at all when it comes to finding coolers for socket 771 CPU's... I already tried some Dynatron ones but they were LOUD.... so hope to get those by the end of the week and be at peace with my workstation.