So apparently the interwebs can do wonderful things for your career. Not the kind where you tell everyone on Facebook – and inadvertantly your boss – how much stationary you stole on Friday, but the kind where you make a video of robots blowing up your city and posting it to YouTube so that Mandate Pictures can ask you to direct a 30-40 million film and give you 1 million real non-Monopoly dollars that did not come from drug lords in South America or Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which is sort of the same thing really.
That’s what this guy did. Not the drug lords part, the part with robots and blowing stuff up.
So we thought, yeah, this is a cool video. The post production is a little rough, but he definitely has some skills and he knows how to use them. But then we wonder, well, there were no actors, there was no plot, no narrative. Just robots. And destruction. And robot destruction. How is he going to direct a 30 million dollar film? As it turns out, he won’t be writing his own script, but will be directing someone else’s. Either way, we hope he’s up for the challenge.
Yeah but, we hear you ask, do they actually go anywhere? Can these backyard directors actually succeed? The answer is yes. Sometimes yes. OK, occasionally yes. Although it usually helps if Peter Jackson happens upon a few shorts you’ve done in your spare time. And it usually helps if you use your own camcorder, shoot yourself playing the part of a robot, rotoscope, and then you have something like Tetra Vaal. Or a documentary about extraterrestrials marooned in Johannesburg, called Alive in Joburg. Adidas gives you a small budget to make a viral campaign about an artificial intelligence gone rogue that kinda sorta doesn’t really relate at all to shoes. Or yellow. But it’s called Yellow. Then you go ahead and make some freaking awesome shorts for Microsoft’s Halo 3 video game:
Peter Jackson asks you to direct the Halo movie. The studios pull out and the project falls through. So instead, you make a movie version of Alive in Joburg, using the same gritty style of cinematography with seamless CGI so that it becomes a critical award-winning success. This would be called District 9. Which you should know already because if you haven’t seen District 9 we don’t want to be friends with you.
Another newcomer to YouTube filmmaking: the guys behind What’s in the Box?, which went viral last year despite using ballerinas in soldier costumers (you’ll see what we mean if you watch it all the way through) and have since been approached by big wigs in Hollywood. Meanwhile, we here at G Media Post Production, are scratching our heads, possibly with our pants off (hey, it’s Friday), and wondering why we hadn’t thought of this. or why our CEO, Garion Hall, hasn’t thought of this. We’d like to think Garion will ask us to make a video that includes robots, pizza, sex and explosions and robots. Oh wait, that’s Transformers. OK, so robots, explosions and something resembling a plot. But when Peter Jackson comes knocking on our door we’d have to put our pants on. So maybe we’ll just stick to being awesome at what we do and leave the robots for Hollywood. Or Hollywood for the robots.
Here in the G Media Post Production department – or “the bunker” as it’s affectionately known – we don’t get excited over much. It’s not because we’re boring, we just like to think we have high standards. And it was certainly an exciting week when Garion Hall deployed a couple of his G Media Post Production Ninjas into the field. To where, you ask? To the Autodesk Smoke for Mac launch in Melbourne. Some of you will already know all about Smoke, but for those that don’t, Smoke is a high-end editorial and finishing solution. With attitude.
Smoke has been around for a while, often used in high-profile television programs such as “House”, “NCIS”, CSI: NY” and “Entourage”, Super Bowl commercials and even the packaging, promotions and content for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. All in all, Smoke is in its own field as an all-in-one toolset. Editing, titles, high-end colour correction, image stabilisation, tracking, keying, compositing (both 2D and 3D), paint, rotoscoping, retouching — whatever you can think of, Smoke can do it. No more bouncing around between Final Cut “not quite” Pro and Color or Motion or After Effects. Sure, you can do your fancy tricks in After Effects in a few hours, or you could do it in Smoke in five minutes. And now, you can do it on a shiny, sexy Mac.
And so, a pair of Post Production Ninjas wandered down to the venue/pub for the launch/free beer. It was clear from the get go that Autodesk knew how to put on a product launch (take that, Apple). With our hands clutching generous helpings of Smoke for Mac brochures and finger food stolen from the buffet, we sat down for what would an extended yet highly entertaining run-through of just how Smoke works, on a Mac no less. Using real footage from a real television program, we were led through some of the very cool things Smoke can do. And we were certainly impressed. Not only can Smoke rotoscope and key as fast as it takes us to devour a tray of savoury pastries, it’s colour correction cube (in 10-bit no less) is freaking awesome and made us pee our pants a little. All in all, Smoke is intuitive, efficient and a pleasure to use.
After the launch, we were eager to get back to the bunker to download ourselves a trial version of Smoke and take it for a spin. The trial version does not check for specific hardware requirements; you can even run it on a Macbook Pro if you were that way inclined — although you’ll need a resolution of 1920 otherwise you’ll lose a few buttons on the sides. The full version of Smoke will require a Mac Pro that meets Autodesk’s requirements. Oh, and did we mention Sparks? The third-party plugins for Smoke? A lot of people have been asking about Sparks on the Mac, and it seems that Sparks are tentatively delayed for now. This, we were told, all depends on how warmly Smoke for Mac is received by the industry.
(Read: how many copies of Smoke for Mac are sold.) So there’s a fair chance we might see Sparks sometime this year. One can hope, right?
Of course, there is a price. $US14,995 to be exact. And that’s not including the annual subscription for $US1,995. Sounds pricey, yes, but not when you consider it used to cost upwards of $80,000 for one of these bad boys, you can hardly complain. And also consider Smoke could replace your Avid or Final Cut Studio, along with After Effects and possibly others, all on your existing Mac Pro, it’s not too unreasonable after all. Bringing Smoke into this mid-range price bracket is big news, and allows small to medium-sized post production houses the possibility of adding a Smoke in their arsenal; something that will surely pay for itself very quickly. Now if only we can convince Garion Hall the same thing!
Yeah but, we hear you ask, do they actually go anywhere? Can these backyard directors actually succeed? The answer is yes. Sometimes yes. OK, occasionally yes. Although it usually helps if Peter Jackson happens upon a few shorts you’ve done in your spare time. And it usually helps if you use your own camcorder, shoot yourself playing the part of a robot, rotoscope, and then you have something like Tetra Vaal. Or a documentary about extraterrestrials marooned in Johannesburg, called Alive in Joburg. Adidas gives you a small budget to make a viral campaign about an artificial intelligence gone rogue that kinda sorta doesn’t really relate at all to shoes. Or yellow. But it’s called Yellow. Then you go ahead and make some freaking awesome shorts for Microsoft’s Halo 3 video game:
