We have taken a little break from feature development to concentrate on improving our infrastructure. We are currently getting ready to move the system over to a larger cloud-based hosting platform. With this new platform, we’ll be able to rapidly scale up to any amount of capacity we need, with professional 24×7 monitoring.

Its amazing how many moving parts are behind a commercial-grade application. There have been a lot of behind-the-scenes changes needed to get us ready to make the move. Just to name a few of the subsystems that have been revamped:

• File management—all files are now on secured cloud storage, and its possible to attach the same file to multiple project objects.
• Outbound email—notifications now go through a third-party sender to keep them from being marked as spam.
• Monitoring—more complete monitoring of all sub-systems. We actually have three different kinds of monitoring: errors, traffic patterns, and performance metrics. This allows us to proactively deal with any performance problems and react to errors even if no one reports a problem.
• Backups—improving the backup system to allow rapid restoration of individual accounts, and let account administrators manage their own backups.
• Content Delivery—all static page content (like javascripts, style sheets, etc.) has been placed on a worldwide CDN to help pages load faster.

Some of our feature development is “stuck” behind this release—for example, we’ve greatly simplified the way you attach thumbnails to shots, elements, etc. This and other improvements will be seen once we do the cutover, which is currently scheduled for the weekend of April 17th.

If you haven’t done so already, please check out the help articles and FAQs at the support site: http://support.shotrunner.com

Cheers, Cameron

In ShotRunner, a project is a film, show, commercial or episode that is to be tracked by the system:

• A project has many members. Your users are given access to projects through memberships.
• A project is usually associated with one of your clients, or one of your vendors.
• A project contains sequences, shots, elements, assets, tasks, notes and files.

But did you know that you also use projects to keep vendors and clients separate on large multi-vendor projects?

If you are running a multi-vendor project, that is, a project that you will be subcontracting, you are going to want to keep your vendors separate from each other, and separate from your client. To do this, you set up multiple projects as follows:

• Check the All Users tab, and make sure that everyone is listed under the right company.
• Create one project per vendor. Name all the projects the same, but set the company for each project to the correct vendor, and choose a code that represents both the project and vendor. Example: Project name is Europa, and the vendor is Roxco, choose a code like ‘EUR-ROX’.
• Assign users to the the correct projects using the Members tab on the Project Overview page.

The ShotRunner web pages have been recently enhanced to make the vendor or client name for each project more visible. The company name for the current project is now shown in blue in the header, and all pulldown lists include at least the project code to make it easier to distinguish between projects.

In addition, we are working on a workflow for transitioning sequences and shots between vendors/projects.

I’ve done a fair bit of work to the Python API. You can download it at:

http://support.shotrunner.com/faqs/integration/python-api

The main changes are:

• User login information is now kept in a separate config file. See the README.
• Several new examples
• Better examples of how to do error handling
• Most all of the examples have been given at least a once-over.

What is still left to do is:

• SSL support
• File/attachment uploads

RAVE is a boutique digital post-production house based in Columbus, Ohio. Its founders, Tobias Roediger and Jared Vorkavich create visual effects and provide compositing, motion graphics, animation, editing and 3D animation for films, television and the web.

Tobias and Jared are at the forefront of an emerging trend in post-production: expert artisans providing visual effects work to clients located all over the world. I caught up with Tobias and Jared recently to learn more about RAVE and get their views on decentralized post-production.

How did you and Jared decide to form RAVE?

JARED: Tobias and I went to college together at Ohio University. After we graduated, we had day jobs, but freelanced regularly as well. It turned out that we were routinely hiring each other on freelance gigs. After passing a few checks back and forth, we realized that it was silly to keep hiring each other for every project we did.

TOBIAS: Jared and I talked about working together for almost four years. I finally told Jared that I was going to start up one way or another, though preferably with him. He thought about it for less than a day, and RAVE was born.

What would you say were your biggest early successes?

JARED: We really built RAVE on a lot of little successes. We’ve built really strong relationships with our clients and the freelancers we work with. In the end, we have to deliver a stellar product, but our clients tell us time and time again that they keep coming back because they like working with us.

You guys have been involved in the Aidan 5 project, right? How did you get involved in that?

JARED: We competed against the Aidan 5 team in the 2008 48-Hour Film Project in Columbus, Ohio. Shortly after the competition we all met for lunch just to talk about the experience and get to know each other. We’ve kept in touch since then, and when the web series started production, we started talking together about how we could help.

TOBIAS: Yeah, Initially we were talking about working on some really complex shots, which we can’t talk about yet, that are coming up in later episodes. When the main compositor had a family emergency days before the premiere at Gen Con we jumped in to complete the last 40 shots of episode one in 4 days.

“We were brought in to the Aidan 5 web series project on episode 101 to do compositing, visual effects and color grading work. With a very tight deadline right before Gen Con, we were able to pull off just under 40 shots in four days. ShotRunner was the only way we could all stay on the same page.”

How has working on a highly distributed project like Aidan 5 affected communications with the team? What problems have you encountered?

TOBIAS: Aidan 5 is an ongoing series with only the first of fifteen episodes released so in a lot of ways we are just scratching the surface of the project. It is a fast paced project with tight deadlines and minimal budget which means that we have to come up with creative solutions to issues that arise. The post team for the first episode was pretty small with a matte keyer, three compositors, two illustrators, an editor, director, producer, sound designer and composer that all needed to be on the same page. Because the pace was so frenzied we needed a clear and concise way to determine who was doing what on which shots. The biggest challenge was the crunch at the end where files and information needed to be accessed and moved around very quickly. Oh, and the fact that we had never met half the team before starting in on the project—still haven’t in fact.

What solutions did you employ on Aidan 5 to overcome the issues?

JARED: ShotRunner gave us a way to organize things so that everyone could see at a glance where each shot stood. Everyone could also be clear about their individual assignments, and they could post to ShotRunner when they needed feedback or review. When you’re 14 hours from delivery, it’s really nice to pop into the shots tab and find out exactly where things stand. It makes it really easy to prioritize and change assignments as needed.

Do you see the emergence of distributed/virtual studios as a trend in the industry?

JARED: Well, we’ve always worked with clients in other locations, and recently we’ve been working more and more with people all over the world. For Aidan 5, the entire team is in central Ohio, but we all work at different offices with different schedules. I see the limitations of geography diminishing every day. There’s no reason visual effects artists and post houses all over the world can’t work together on the same project, and we’re seeing this become a trend in the industry.

Any advise for other distributed/virtual studios?

JARED: Get a handle on your workflow before things get busy. Tobias and I are workflow junkies. It’s easy to believe you can just figure it out when the project starts, but the truth is you need to have the systems in place before you ever get the contract. If we hadn’t already had our project set-up in ShotRunner and our post-workflow sorted out before we got the call to help finish the first episode of Aidan 5, we never would have made it on time.

TOBIAS: The folks at fxphd.com deserve some credit in this too. This is our ninth term at fxphd, and we’ve learned so much from them over the years. In particular, their work on the Red Dwarf miniseries really inspired us to explore working on remote teams. Their ShotRunner-based workflow on Red Dwarf laid the foundation for the workflow we developed for Aidan 5.

To learn more about RAVE, visit their website at http://ravevfx.com/

Last week I was at the Siggraph conference in New Orleans. Siggraph is THE place to be if you are at all involved in computer graphics, and this includes animation, scientific visualization and visual effects. With temperatures in the 90s, and around 90% humidity, it was great to be able to walk directly from my hotel to the convention center via the indoor Riverwalk shopping mall that runs along the Mississippi River.

I was there to take in the production sessions, vendor talks, panels, courses and exhibit hall—and of course, to talk up ShotRunner whenever I could.

I can’t go into everything at the conference, there is simply too much to cover, but I thought I would relate details on a couple of interesting presentations I attended that I haven’t yet seen blogged about elsewhere. Another great source of Siggraph news is fxguide where they cover days 1, 2 and 3.

Benjamin Button

First up for me was a keynote by the folks at Digital Domain on the making of Benjamin Button. I didn’t know this, but the head of the ‘older’ Benjamin Button was a complete replacement—a complete ‘digital double’. And I also didn’t know that a feature-length, fully digital human head had never been done before. There have been non-humans like Dobby from Harry Potter, but achieving a realistic human face has been incredibly elusive. In fact, people talk about this phenomenon called the ‘uncanny valley’ whereby the closer to get to realism, the more ‘creepy’ the face seems to people. When the animation is clearly not trying to fool us into perceiving a human (as in Dobby) our minds are able to let go and be drawn into the story. But as we approach a lifelike human, our minds start to fight the image—and this sort of “digital Botox” effect becomes distracting. We could see this in movies like Beowulf.

So the prospect of doing a digital double of a well-known actor like Brad Pitt over the length of a feature film was admittedly terrifying for the folks at Digital Domain. But after a successful screen test, the project was green-lit and over 155 people at DD got to work. Some of the extraordinary steps they took to insure that Brad Pitt’s performance came through to the digital double included covering his face with a phosphorescent paint and literally recording every single movement that his face could make. They also made a series of incredibly lifelike head models showing how he would look at age 60, 70 and 80 and lit them from dozens of angles inside of a automated light dome. They worked for two years to get a twitchy, natural look to the eyes.

Even the lighting was a major accomplishment in itself. With Brad Pitt’s digital head traveling through so many different lighting environments, sometimes within a single scene, getting the lighting right was extremely challenging. They decided to use image-based lighting (a technique that drives the lighting in a 3D scene from high dynamic range spherical panoramas of the set) throughout the project. But because the character was often moving, they had to additionally develop a method of animating the light spheres—a topic of at least 2 other highly technical talks.

The difficulties didn’t end there: sometimes the neck and collar of the body double (for ‘young’ Benjamin Button) did not match the Brad Pitt’s acting in the scene and much reworking of the images would become necessary. To ensure accurate tracking, extra ‘witness cameras’ were brought in to survey the scene from alternate angles—this meant that up to four 3D match move solutions had to be worked on for every shot. Many shots needed well over 100 revisions before final approval.

All in all an extraordinary effort, but the results were equally extraordinary.

Randy Thom

Randy is director of sound design at Skywalker Studios and he presented a keynote on designing a movie for sound. His premise was that sound design is not just adding foley and cool sound effects, great sound needs to start with the script, otherwise its a potentially distracting decoration at best. Planning needs to start in pre-production.

His main example was the opening of ‘Apocalypse Now’, which provides an interesting juxtaposition of stylized helicopter sounds with the image of a spinning ceiling fan. This required quite a bit of experimentation during production to arrive at the final sequence. Francis Ford Coppola’s main character, Willard, morphed from a very active participant in the action to someone very passive, thereby letting us experience the world of Saigon through Willard’s eyes and ears. This opened the door to many creative uses of sound to help tell the story.

In a picture that has space for dramatic sound design, the dialog is sparse. The script will have ‘holes’ and ‘pauses’ for us to experience the sounds of the world the character inhabits. Music, by contrast, sits on top of the action and primarily imparts a mood.

He also spent a little time talking about the process of acquiring sounds for movies. People seem to think that most sounds are somehow synthesized, but that is not true. Most sounds used in films begin as actual recordings of real things. There is just so much complexity and texture to real sounds that can not yet be completely synthesized.

Randy then did a fast-forward to Pixar’s Wall-E. In this animated film, they started to think about sound design early on in the storyboarding process. Perhaps because there was not a lot of dialog in the first 20 minutes of the film, sound design became a crucial part of the storytelling process. Sounds would be created and given to the animators as inspiration, for example, Wall-E’s ‘trash compactor’ sound went through several iterations and sparked several different versions of his animated motion. They would repeatedly screen the movie without dialog, without music and then again with just sound effects—all to be sure that the audio was always in service of the story.

So his message was that sound can be just as effective a storytelling tool as the visuals or music in a film, it just takes a bit of planning and space in the script for the sound to be heard.