Jason Heath’s Heavy Duty Workshop

This is from a story idea that has been in my head for about 20 years now.

Rough draft of something cool.  Thing very retro/mod/sci-fi fairytale.

So guess who got a bright shiny new invitation to the Wrath of the Lich King Beta??

There went my weekend!

Here is a quick tease…

ARRRGHHH!

I have not found a 3D program that just knocks my socks off yet.

So I have decided I am going to try out the last in the big 3, XSI.

I like what I see so far, and version 7 looks like it has some out of the world features, and the UI for ICE just looks so sweet.

So I am going to do my first 3D short in XSI.  I hope to have it released around christmas.
I will post more here about it as I flesh out the concept art and model sheets.
I already have an outline of a story to build into the script.

I have no idea why, but here we are

Wow, thats alot of c’s right there.

So what we have is a quick clip that was shot in front of a green screen. I then composited a background picture into the scene, and applied some color correction.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with how everything is clicking in our current workflow.
I haven’t had much time to really get into some serious work this week, but this weekend I expect to produce some really cool demo/test stuff that will be very exciting.

Here is a quick clip of Delilah. This is about a third of the normal resolution, but its still pretty crisp.
Try checking it out in full screen mode. I am still trying to get the hang of exporting it wide screen from After Effects, so thats why we have bars on the side of the video.

After a dozen years of waiting, watching and studying, I finally have my hands on film I (well, me and Charlie) created.

Here is a quick composite test with Hilary and Delilah.
We shot this on Saturday at Hilary’s apt, in front of the green screen.
This is from the Nikon. Notice how even the lighting is. When I looked at these stills after the shoot, I was like man, thats going to be some good looking stuff.

Imagine my surprise when I opened Premier and saw this!
Yikes!

After scanning thru all the video we shot, I was very relieved to find that this was the worst footage of the lot. We had wanted to experiment with having the girls sit on the green screen and see how it would looks keyed out in AE. Normally, we would have rigged a practical (real world) floor for them to interact with, but this was a spur of the moment idea. The red was caused by a combination of things with the lighting and how we had set the camera.

I pulled the footage into AE and broke out Mark Christiansen’s book.
20 minutes later I had pulled the key and added the Magic Bullet Looks filter Neo to give the scene that Matrix look and well, lookf or yourself.
(NOTE: Youtube’s compression did alot to remove the detail out of this. The full size HD clip has tons of detail in the shadows you can’t really see here)

I can spot about a dozen things wrong with this footage, but for having taken the *worst* footage we got and working it for 20 minutes, I am happy with the result.

This is what I have been animating, for a short story I am working on.

Rendered out in max, this animation was composited in AE.

I still need to add the shadow of the figure walking, and grunge it up a bit, but I was just wanting to play a bit.

a character of the story I am working, animated in MotionBuilder for a walk test.

So I drug out an old friend today, 3DS Max.

I had been trying to be a Maya guy, but something about the way that Max imports all the Daz stuff just made it a natural for this.

I know the animation is kinda jerky, but since I havent touched Max in like 8 years, gimme a break!

I will smooth out the animations this week.

Oh, and this is for a horror short I am working on.

Let’s say one special lady gets to meet this snake up close and personal