Produxion

Studio Daily have an excellent article about Pierre Michel’s process for creating the opening trailer for a French film festival, Polar dans la ville.

The whole 40 second sequence took three weeks to complete, and was created mostly in After Effects. What’s most interesting is the approach he took to dealing with high resolution images in a short timeframe.

I’ve had the chance to play with a new filter in FCP called SmoothCam. It’s great, and creates delicious results.

It’s basically a camera stabilisation filter which has been ported from Shake. It processes your footage to create a vector map of all of the objects and movements, then using that data to manipulate the original footage to create smooth camera motion.

I stumbled across this great video tutorial which explains how to easily set up a preset for compressing HD video for Vimeo. It’s clear, concise, and straight to the point.

Until now, I’ve been using VisualHub presets to encode video for online distribution, but this looks like it could be an alternative solution (particularly since the developer of VisualHub has pulled the plug on the software).

We just completed work on a new little documentary titled “Raptors”. Corio Raptor Care and Rehabilitation is a centre specialising in the care and rehabilitation of birds of prey, or raptors. The center is run by Nick and Anji Henderson, who provided us with access to the birds they look after, and to talk about (…)

This is a really – and I mean really insightful video of a talk given by a filmmaker going by the name of M dot Strange. He talks at length about how he created a feature-length animation on his own terms. He learned the skills from scratch, funded it himself, and built up a community (…)