SXSW – Day 3
By Day 3 I was hitting my stride and in full information-absorption-networking-documenting mode! I trekked to the convention center with my laptop & I began my day with a panel called Real Time Video Blogging led by the makers of Rocketboom, a witty, successful NYC-based daily video news blog, and Amanda Congdon of Sometimesdaily.
A lot of the session seemed pretty common sense to me, but there were good tips to remember. They suggested that if you are interested in starting your own documentary style blog series, to first and foremost, always get a lawyer involved and make sure you are legally contracted, no matter what the project big or small. Find your personal niche to write about, create a mission statement and figure out who your audience is. Then get involved with larger projects that attract a similar audience so that you can attach your name to them and generate threads of new contacts back to your site.
A great site for copyright free stock video material to use in your blog if needed: archive.org. I’ve known about them for years, but haven’t yet put any of it to use in my own work. Personally I think they need a more organized website to be useful for my needs, but there is a tremendous amount of free material on there.
Video blogging in itself is something I’d like to try my hand at, but have never been good at turning the camera on myself or interviewing people at random. Those are two things I’d like to work on for future documenting practice. After this experience at Burning Man, I promised myself I would learn how to speak in front of the camera properly!
Next up I went to Visual FX for Indies: Big Impact Small Budget by Zane Rutledge of Zane TV. This was probably my favorite panel so far (next to seeing Gondry!). Zane is a writer, filmaker, editor, director, and FX junky who’s main love is post production. He provided a number of awesome slides that I photographed and uploaded here, in order to remember all of his great lists of tips & links.
This is pretty obvious, but the number one thing he stressed as being the key to great fx, is great audio. Never underestimate the power of sound effects and music added to visual effects to give the animations life.
He also went over something he calls “invisible fx”. Touchups and additions to film work that you don’t necessarily notice in the final piece. For example he showed us a clip where he actually tracked cold breath to character’s faces into a scene where you had to understand how frigid the temperatures were! That’s a lot of rotoscoping! I don’t have the type of patience.
He also spoke about “camera projection” which involves mapping still photography over a 3D landscape and matte painting to fake depth. This was really cool and possibly something to experiment with. A good example of this, is the first scene in one of his films called “Wake Up” which I’ve posted below. The entire city-fly-through is done with one still photograph! If you watch the whole thing you’ll see other scenes which use this effect as well, including the man jumping off the building at the end and the cityscape below as you see little cutout cars animating around the photograph. Very cool! Sometimes I forget that simplicity is the answer to achieve a certain effect, especially on a low budget production.
Pretty soon it was time for me to catch the keynote for the day, featuring Evan Williams who created Twitter. I barely got a seat there were so many people who crammed themselves into this lecture. I’m not a Twitter fan, so I was reluctant to go, but I decided it was important to see what all the buzz was about.
Evan described Twitter as a constantly evolving information network to share and learn what you care about at the exact time that it happens. While I personally haven’t quite adapted that into my own life, I see how this form of communication could be necessary progression in our tech-obsessive, ADD culture. It is the quickest and easiest way to connect with the most people at any given time, at anywhere in the world. It was actually hugely useful at the SXSW event itself, because it led me to know exactly what panels, films & shows were going on at the minute that I checked my phone. Perhaps I’ll try and adapt to it a bit more since so many people these days are using it as a major form of communication.
Here is a clip from the keynote where Evan describes the future and evolving features of Twitter. I got bored and left, sorry Evan!
Later in the evening I trekked over to the Texas State Capital building to join the VFX Master Series presented by SIGGRAPH. I specifically enjoyed listening to the visual effects directors for the film, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” They said that the character design was adapted from 60′s children’s travel book designer M. Sasek & UPA Animation Studio films of the 30s & 40s. After many iterations of design for each character, they storyboard out the entire film and begin 3D tests for each character’s gesture, color palette, voice and body language.
After dinner, my last stop that evening was to check out the interactive after-party event called Plutopia. I only caught the end of the performances, missed DJ Spooky, but loved the 3 projection screen set up, visuals by Dr. Strangevibe, and live music mixed with electronica in the auditorium of the Mexican American Cultural Center. I was in time to catch the last band called White from Bejing. The energy of the crowd and the visuals got me excited for my own gig that I was preparing for on St Patrick’s Day as part of House by Southwest. I spent the rest of the night documenting with some video, and drawing to the music until the lights went on.
