Author Archives: Julien Guertault

Francesca Da Rimini

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Following yesterday’s post about a music video featuring modern dance and computer visual effects, here is a video featuring classical dance and a robot controlled camera.

Francesca Da Rimini was a historical figure portrayed in the Divine Comedy and numerous works of art, including a symphonic poem by Tchaikovsky. In 2014 the director Tarik Abdel-Gawad and his team recorded a performance by two dancers of the San Francisco Ballet, Maria Kochetkova and Joan Boada, using a robot controlled camera. Tarik was also the technical and creative director of the demonstration video featuring the same Bot&Dolly robots (a company acquired by Google in 2013) and which turned viral, “Box”.

In the accompanying back stage video, he explains how seeing dancers rehearse over and over gave him the idea of experimenting with a pre-programmed robot, in order to make the camera part of the choregraphy, and allow the viewer to have a closer, more intimate, view of the performance.

The Chemical Brothers: “Wide Open”

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Earlier this year at Tokyo Demo Fest 2016, we were honored with the presence of Solid Angle‘s founder, Marcos Fajardo, who did a long presentation of the Arnold renderer. Various examples of productions that involved Arnold were included, like captures from Iron Man or Elysium, but between those blockbusters one production in particular held my attention.

It was a long shot of a dancer turning limb after limb into a lattice body while performing. That film is in fact the music video of the song “Wide Open”, by the Chemical Brothers, and directed by Dom&Nic. It is a brilliant piece of technical and artistic work, that I can only recommend to watch.

Some of the details of the creation are shared in an article by the excellent fxguide, as well as in this interview for Solid Angle, like for example how they dealt with the challenges posed by a single long shot under varying natural light. Finally, there is this behind the scenes video from the studio, The Mill:

Making of the “spinning house” sequence in Twister (1996)

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Earlier this year filmmaker Stu Maschwitz posted on Twitter a series of messages recounting the work he did, as a then junior visual effects artist, on the scene of the house crashing on the road in the 1996 summer blockbuster, Twister. He later copied them to his website: go read it there.

The story comes with a fair amount of detail, hacks and tricks to make the best of the technical limitations of the time, and gives an idea of the amount of work such a scene in a prominent Hollywood film entails.

Metal materials study

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Texture artist Jarrod Hasenjager posted a page of various metal materials study: aluminum, brass, bronze, chrome, copper, gold, iron, lead and steel, and rusted steel and iron. According to the description, the renders are done in Houdini, and the look is driven by artistic taste and personal experience rather than from physical values.

Coordinate mapping between sphere, disc and square

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This paper, published by Martin Lambers in the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, compares different mappings between sphere and disc, and between disc and square. It is worth noting that the source code is available on the publication page.

Mappings between Sphere, Disc, and Square.

Abstract:
A variety of mappings between a sphere and a disc and between a disc and a square, as well as combinations of both, are used in computer graphics applications, resulting in mappings between spheres and squares. Many options exist for each type of mapping; to pick the right methods for a given application requires knowledge about the nature and magnitude of mapping distortions.

This paper provides an overview of forward and inverse mappings between a unit sphere, a unit disc, and a unit square. Quality measurements relevant for computer graphics applications are derived from tools used in the field of map projection, and a comparative analysis of the mapping methods is given.