Connor’s first visit to a pumpkin patch. He had a great time at Beringer Farm. The day before Halloween every pumpkin was only $3!
Frost on the pumpkin
cold morning but lovely light,
time to take a walk.
Hallowe’en is here
The Great Pumpkin has spoken
Now time to De-Vine!
When Connor was just eight days old we turned our living room into a makeshift studio to shoot the photos for his baby announcement. We used all natural light by diffusing the sun with a white sheet to get a very soft look. All shots were made on the Pentax K10D with a 50mm, F2.o lens. You can see the rest of the shots on Flickr and read my story of his birth in this post.
The entire series can be seen in this Photoset on Flickr
I paid a visit to Gasworks park in Seattle when I noticed that all of the leaves had turned a bright red.
a breeze blows
leaves of all different colors
flutter to the ground
-Rebekah Slodounik
The complete photoset on Flickr
Back in March 2009, I started to create the opening credits sequence for The Book of Zombie. It took over three months and hundreds of hours to complete. I’m writing this to both show the completed sequence and to illustrate how it was done. Get started by watching it below and then we’ll dive into the How-To. Don’t forget to turn up the sound because Adam Gehrke’s original score is killer!
The process began with having the actors performing their parts and shooting in HD. We used the Panasonic HVX-200 for its ability to shoot HD video at 24 progressive frames per second and because in can shoot in true slow motion. We shot both the running and walking scenes at slower than half speed. Those scenes were shot on a treadmill that was later masked out. All of the footage was also shot in front of white backgrounds to make it easier to have small white outlines around all of the characters. Here’s a few samples of what our raw footage looked like:
The next step was moving the footage into After Effects and selecting all of the best takes. Each shot was then edited down to the length I needed and put into a 3D sequence. The timewarp effect was used to create a custom “stop motion” look to each shot. I used key-frame animation to make the characters move at a convincing speed over a simple surface (simple masks and luma keys were temporarily used at this point). Once the animation looked good, I created camera moves to follow the action and provide an interesting cinematic look to the sequence. Shots that had multiple characters crossing each other’s paths were quite complex and difficult to get the animation and camera moves to work out as I envisioned them. I used lenses of various focal lengths to create different looks for each shot.
Rotoscoping is the process that was used to cut the actors out of their original backgrounds. This process began once each shot was complete. The speed, length, position and camera work needed to be perfect before this step. I recruited artists to do the cutting on each shot frame by frame. This step was extremely important, because when it was completed the characters would then look as though they were walking through a small town instead of on a treadmill in front of a white sheet. Thank you to everyone who helped me out here: Steven Quimby – Jason Shankel – Olin Padilla – Maxwell Worthington Walker – Fred Beahm – Jared Allen – Mason Reitz – Victoria “Vic” Simiele – Ryan Czaplinski
I knew early on that the sequence would take place on the streets of a small town and inside a young couple’s home. I recruited my wife, Leah, to hand draw everything that you see. Using white paper and a pencil she drew many houses, two blocks of storefronts, an alley, a church, over a dozen tombstones and four pumpkins. This is what gives the credits the handmade look that I was going for. After the drawings were complete, I scanned them into Photoshop where they were cut out and colored.
This step involved placing all of the new art into the shots that I had already built. This was the most time consuming and tedious process of the whole project. Each house had to be placed into 3D space one at a time. However, the shots were really starting to look close to the finished product at this point.
The sky was created in my basement using dry ice. I set up a small set with a baking sheet, a couple of lights and a black background. Again, we used the HVX-200 and shot in HD and slow motion. The smoke would flow over the edge of the elevated baking sheet and fall in front of the black backing and back lights. The resulting footage was then imported into the computer where it was colored orange, flipped, played in reverse then composited over a dark red background using track mattes.
Up until this point, the look was a quite bland. That’s because most of the colors and all of the shadows of the final product are coming from digital lights. I back-lit all of the houses so they would be black and cast shadows across the sets. The lighting basically completed the look of the scene.
This isn’t exactly the right order, but I wanted to put editing here at the end. Before I finished all of the lighting, I rendered all of the shots low quality. Rendering with lighting and depth of field takes a very long time, so I wanted to edit everything together and see how it looked before I made that jump. I also needed to determine what the order of shots would be before I started inserting all the the cast and crew names. With the edit, I determined the best way to tell the story that takes place before the movie. I then placed temporary credits over the sequence and got all of the titles approved with Scott, our director. The final design step was then to create final credits and place them in interesting places within the shots.
I mentioned that rendering takes a long time. My computer churned for about two weeks processing everything. I would start shots before leaving for work and if they were done when I got home I would set up more to process while I slept.
My son, Connor, was born last Wednesday night at 11:55pm. What a surprise, he was exactly two weeks early!
I was at work at Q13 getting ready to do the 9pm newscast when Leah called to tell me that it was time to leave. She was very calm so I thought it was a false alarm. I started to get up when she told me that her friend, Jenn, had already picked her up and they were headed to the hospital. I knew that I had a little time to spare, so I put together my timesheet and made sure that my replacement was comfortable to mix the show. I ended up beating them to the hospital by about five minutes.
On the drive over I heard the new Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling”. When I heard the line “tonight’s gonna be a good night” I started to feel that this was really going to happen tonight. I was also warned to be aware of the full moon which was just one day away. I met up with Leah and Jenn at the hospital and she delivered our son less than three hours later with an emergency c-section. I was scared out of my mind.
You can see the more pictures in this set on Flickr. Slideshow
