The week right before Spring Break, Catherine came into our motion graphics class and informed us of a new category being put into the Spring Show, VFX Motion Graphics. Sweet, seeing as how our motion graphics class is the first and only class in the VFX department, whatever we turn in will more than likely be in the show. We have no competition. Problem is, we were only given two more weeks to work on something amazing to knock the socks off of people, with the impending deadline of April 19th. So eight of us got together and formed Team CRYPTALBAYSPLOSIONOMICRON (later split into two teams for different concepts). One of our team members, the talented Roger Apolinar, is currently VFX Supervisor at Paralux Productions. He was able to get a hold of the RED cam for a night and managed to recruit some martial arts talent to shoot in the greenscreen studio. With martial artists Isiah Flores and Michael Gonzales showing off some sick moves in the studio, we managed to get some amazing, beautiful RED footage.

Speaking of which, if there are any of you using Windows right now, REDCINE seems to be the best option to handle any R3D files you can throw at it. Actually, I'm not sure but I think it's the only option right now, at least it was the only one that I could get to work. There was a solution to open it up in AE CS4 but I couldn't get the RED settings to pop-up. If you need some place to get started, I recommend watching the tuts from Final Cut User here. They'll give you a basic overlook on the app, and give you a better insight on just how awesome RED is.

I'm currently working on doing the roto and keying right now, so nothing new for my mograph buddies, but I thought I'd post up some my prev work in progress. This first pic is to be the intro of our project, a 2.5D matte painting depicting an ancient Asian landscape.



I made it in Photoshop, and then rendered out layers to switch to After Effects and displaced along the Z axis.



A styleframe/storyboard in which our hero character hides behind a wall. 3dsmax.








More to come soon, I promise, but there's still lots and lots of work to do!