Today we set out for Tembisa, a very large socio-economically depressed township. Here we are visiting the township center for a meet and greet and to show the first viewing of the Documentaries Trailer to the people of Tembisa and to the kids that are in the film. We did a little shooting of the event but the main shooting is to begin tomorrow.
Vlog No. 5 – Tembisa
March 13, 2010 by JoshVlog No. 4 – Walking in Westdene
March 13, 2010 by JoshStu and Josh set out to explore their neighborhood of Westdene. It’s a small area just outside Jo-burg. The downtown of Westdene is small but equipped with a small grocery store, internet cafe, doctors office, hair solon, wood working shop, and a gas station. Oh and a exotic pet shop with poisonous snakes run by a nice lady named Cindy.
Vlog No. 3 – Deplaning
March 13, 2010 by JoshWe finally figured out how to get our videos up on the site. We’ve already cut together a few videos and we are uploading them all at once to catch up. Due to some technical restraints and lack of time, we will be uploading videos probably every other day to three days at a time. But here are a few to get you guys semi caught up.
This entry shows our travel time from Chicago to Washington to Senegal to Johannesburg South Africa. In all it was about a 24 hour journey. We were exhausted by the time we got to Jo-Burg but we were welcomed with warm weather and a good meal. On top of that our lodging turned out to be a pretty large house fully equipped with a sparkling pool.
The one thing that struck us right off was the security systems set up in just about every house and every home is guarded by a wall or iron gate to prevent break-ins. Apparently there are a lot of thieves in this city.
Rest assure we are safe and sound and Stu stays up at night to keep watch while I sleep comfortably in my very large bed. :)
Other than that, my only complaints have been the loud dogs and very very loud birds that wake us up every morning at like 4 am.
We’ve arrived!
March 11, 2010 by Josh
Hello everyone! We’ve finally been able to get Internet access! Sorry for the delay. I know we promised constant Vlog updates, but to our surprise there was no Internet where we are staying and all Internet communication must be done at a local Internet cafe that’s from the 80′s I think. Regardless we think we’ve figured out a way to upload our videos here and at least get some content up on the site. We’ve also been struggling with power conversion and adapters and my computer just can’t seem to handle the video compressions as well as it needs to in order to quickly turn around the videos. So for now, here are a few pics to get you guys excited. I can’t promise anything from here on out as things work very slowly in this country. We will do our best to keep you updated!
The above pic is of two boys that live in the township Tembisa. They were attending the Trailer screening event last night and were very interested in the camera so I taught them how to use it.
Blog 2 – Packing and Predictions
March 7, 2010 by JoshI’ll say this right off, this Vlog entry is horrible. Horribly shot, horribly edited, and horribly last minute. Sorry. I promise a kick-ass entry come Africa time.
Popcorn Island Prepares for South Africa!
February 25, 2010 by Josh
Popcorn Island’s, Josh Tallo and Stuart Marsh, begin to prepare for their upcoming trip to South Africa to finish Iris Dawn Parker’s “Portraits From South Africa” documentary. Information on the doc and a trailer for the film can be found in the blog under the South Africa Doc Category. Look to the site from March 7th to March 28th for regular Blog updates and videos from Josh and Stu as they bring you their journey as it unfolds. It’s sure to be at the very least educational. Mostly though it will be Josh making fun of Stu.
This first Vlog (Yes VLOG, it’ s a “V” for Video Log) entry is our preliminary test of video blogging and highlights our trip to the Passport Health Center to receive our immunization shots. Little did we know we would be spending lots of money for someone to stick us with sharp needles 5-6 times!! And if anything, maybe we can shed some light on just what needs to be done to travel a crew to a foreign country safely and efficiently. Prob not efficiently though… enjoy!
Popcorn Island would like to THANK Bitter Jester Creative for their guidance and valuable information in helping us get this far in our preparation process. They too had to take a trip to Africa for a Documentary which they are currently in production on. Info on their Doc can be found at their website. Thank you as well for letting us borrow one of your Flip Cameras to take with us to use for our blog. Much appreciated guys! Only the “Rhicters” could have done a better job!
And our sincere apologies for the length of this entry.. the next videos will be limited to 2 minutes at maximum! :)
Behind the Still – Part II
February 11, 2010 by RossHello all! We have been off working on a film for a contest from Canon & Vimeo started by Vincent Laforet. The concept is to take the last still from a film (the previous winner in the contest) and let that inspire you to create a short of yourself. They were very open on what this interpretation could be. There have been many awesome entries spanning a huge range of creative ideas. Some people decided to take the story and go in a new direction, others let the still inspire them to create a whole new story of there own.
For us we felt the nature of this contest was simple. Be inspired. Be Motivated.
I know sometimes I find myself needing that extra push, and little extra drive to make a project happen. I really feel this contest did that for us. Don’t get us wrong we love making movies, but its contests like this that give us that surge of creativity and that drive to create something not only fun for us, but hopefully enjoyable for others.
We decided to go with a continuation of Vincent’s original story, and we did this because we felt it let off at a great place to really explore some characters. We are sticklers to the idea that a film is only as amazing as the story is it telling. Sure making things look beautiful and sound perfect are all pieces that help a vision come to life, but without a solid story it will all fall apart. its the foundation. In our interpretation we introduce you to the girl, years later after she has had contact with her first key. We are taken with her on her mission to unlock something that even we don’t know about. We wanted to make sure if we did manage to win this contest we left the next team with just as much creative leeway as we were given.
Anyways! it has been so much fun the last few days. As some of you know there are four of us here at popcorn island, and we pulled all the strings we have to get favors for locations and pieces of random “garbage” to build up this movie. For those interested we shot on Canon’s 5D, primarily using 2 len’s, a 24-105 and a 90mm macro. As you can see on our behind the scenes page our gear was pretty rigged. Aside from a steady cam we recently got a hold of we used rolling camera men on carts, leaf blowers, and even wired together some LEDS into an old box we had laying around. To be honest though we have had some crazy late nights and way to much caffeine and pizza, it has been the most fun I have had working on a project. Who would of thought my soldering skills would be useful again!
We want to thank Arica Maldonado for coming out and acting for us, and a shout out to a few of our friends, Ryan, Brittany, and Max for all your help making things come together!
Thanks a lot for stopping by and reading this, we hope the film inspires others to head out with whatever equipment that have laying around and push forward on your own projects! With the change we are seeing in cost and quality of cameras now-a-days, it is become practical for feature quality movies to be created by smaller groups and communities. We can’t wait to see what this year brings in dSLR film, and independent film in general!
To end I will include a link to the Vimeo Contest Page and our Behind the Scenes gallery. Oh and Also if you would like to watch our submission right now! Check out Beyond the Still – Part II. We hope you enjoy it!
MoGraph Physics and Hair Dynamics
January 23, 2010 by Ross
I have been exploring Cinema 4D more and more, and I have really become excited about the MoGraph Rigid Body simulations. The Maxon people have made is extremely easy for users to add physics simulations to your scene. This in combination with the already powerful MoGraph module really makes for some really cool possibilities. In this tutorial I run through quickly how to get physics up and running and interacting with the hair module.
The hair module is a really powerful generator. You could easily generate hair, grass, etc and create very realistic behaviors. Like I was saying this is just a quick look at how to setup a scene with MoGraph rigid bodies falling into hair. The MoGraph bodies will interact with the hair.
I will also take a look at a cool utility called Clone Info Hierarchy, this will allow you to attach null objects to different MoGraph Instances. For example if you have a cloner object with 15 spheres, you could quickly create 15 nulls that follow each instance exactly. These nulls can then be exported into an external compositing tool, like after effects, which can then be use to track items with your cloners or maybe attach a particle emitter. In the tutorial I mention color correction on an object but really that isn’t very practical, using object buffer would be much more useful for that. Regardless there are all sorts of possibilities for using nulls.
So if your interested in dynamics and hair interactions then definitely check out this tutorial. Thanks a lot for stopping by and we hope you find this useful!
Watch the Tutorial: Cinema 4D – MoGraph Physics and Hair Interaction
Cinema 4D – Irradiance Cache File
December 29, 2009 by Ross
So I have been working a lot in Cinema 4D over the last few months, and I decided to take advantage of this holiday break and fill my head with as many tutorials and article’s as I possibly could. Overall I can say it is definitely worth it Cinema is an awesome program and is going to be an extremely helpful application in my Motion Graphics toolbox, if not the go to tool itself. I want to make sure to thank Nick Vegas of Greyscale Gorilla and Rob Redman of Pariah Studios for all there tutorials and openness with support. Seriously the work they are doing is awesome and saving me hours of headaches. Thanks to them I have a huge jump start on Cinema 4D.
Now into why you are here, Global Illumination or GI. GI is consider an effect in a C4D render but it really is a dramatic one. The quality of lighting, reflection and overall look of an image can be made by using this and some basic understanding of materials and lights. The downside to GI is render times. A normal render time in C4D can quickly blow up when adding GI, and the more lights,, materials, reflections, etc you have the crazier those times will get.
TextMate for Actionscript 3
December 20, 2009 by RossI recently taught a class at the MGFest in Washginton on animation with Actionscript. In doing so I had to find a good way to teach students using both windows and OSX how to program AS3 in an External Editor. For windows I was very comfortable showing FlashDevelop, a free open source editor, and personally my favorite to work with. Having started to work at home on OSX and having to teach this to other I decided to research a good editor.
The obvious leader is FDT from Powerflasher, who has an eclipse based solution that is well tied to the Flash IDE and the mxmlc compiler. Having used Flex builder for a while now I felt pretty comfy in this environment. the problem is I don’t like eclipse. the program itself is made to accomplish so much and I see this as its advantage and its downfall. it has always felt a bit bloated to me, and I have had slowdowns and simple problem with just color schemes I would like to use.
So with that I started to look at easier solutions. TextMate has always been a big favorite of mine for editing all sorts of documents. From PHP, HTML and CSS, and now to ActionScript I have found TextMate to be lightweight and simple, yet powerful. So I started a hunt for a bundle to help do As3 Development. that’s when I cam across a Blog post by Simon Gregory which included his Actionscript 3 and Flex Bundles which have since then been placed up on github.I ended up forking this project and started to work on some variations of my own. Nothing too amazing, just simple things I was use to in FlashDevelop, now I could accomplish in TextMate.
To make this easier I decided to do a Video Tutorial on getting everything setup. I apologize in advance as I have been sick and still decided to record this thing, so if there is some sneezing and stuffy nose madness, well I am sorry. Either way, the following is a link to the tutorial and all the assets I used. I really hope this is helpful for people getting started in Actionscript programming, and stay tuned for more on why I see Actionscript and Flash in general starting to push its way into Film, Motion Graphics and Television!.
Watch Tutorial : TextMate for Actionscript 3 Tutorial
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