The Online Portfolio of Colin Levy

March 21, 2010

Full Steam Ahead on Durian

For those keeping track, I’m still in Amsterdam working on Project Durian for the Blender Institute. Time is flying by. It’s a bit hard to believe I’ve been here for nearly eight months! Only three more months on the project, and we have SO much more work to do. Are we really 75% done? Doesn’t seem like it.

Things are picking up speed though, and the team is expanding! Hopefully we’ll be able to do this thing justice.

Since January I’ve been focusing most of my effort on the 3D animatic, which I’m trying to bring to the level of quality where you can just watch it and see the film as it will be, with decisions about character blocking, shot design, and editing all set and final. There’s a lot of considerations to be made, from timing and performance, environment design and composition. It’s been a really fun and gratifying experience, because I’m basically shooting an entire movie without having to get up from my chair! Week-by-week, scene-by-scene I’ve just been piecing the film together… and just this past week I’ve finally replaced the last storyboard. We’ve got the whole film in layout!

Although we’ve been posting frequent updates on the Durian Blog, my most recent post I feel is worth including here as well. Here’s the first scene of the film in OpenGL. So no renders, but the animation is 90% done:

Although there are flaws I’m aware of, I’m pretty proud of how the scene is working. I’ve never actually shot a fight scene in real life but I did a fair amount of experimentation and ‘research’ (action movies FTW!). Check out all the cameras!

I would say my usual “Let me know what you think!”, when I post new work, but we’ve already got 115 comments on the Durian blog, and it’s hard to even find time to read them all.

Later!

–Colin

January 5, 2010

Work on En Route Continues

As you may know, my life for the past four months has been consumed by Project Durian, which has been an amazing experience so far. However, I was fortunate to be able to spend the holidays at home, and over the past couple weeks I’ve been trying to get some work done on my film En Route. Things are coming along nicely!

As we’ve known from the beginning, the visual effects workload is pretty intense, and we’ve allowed our vfx team to set the pace for postproduction. I’m extremely excited by the work they’ve done so far, and plans are currently in place to bring this film across the finish line in late March!

I’ve only bit off a few shots to handle myself, but I thought I would post a tidbit about what I’ve been working on the past couple weeks.

There is a scene in the movie that involves a CG toy plane. Here’s a glimpse of the final shot of that sequence:

Doesn’t look real yet, but I’ll keep working. I also worked on a shot from a scene at a science fair. My actor was supposed to play a character at multiple ages, but for this scene he was supposed to look twelve or thirteen. On set we I had him stand on his knees, to make him look shorter… but it didn’t look quite right. In After Effects I tried fooling with his on-screen proportions to make the shot more convincing:

What do you think?

Anyway, I’m really holding out on you — these are just random shots that I’ve spent a bit of time on. There are a lot more ‘newsworthy’ shots being done by the vfx team… but they may not see the light of day till the premiere!

For now, I’m back in Amsterdam to redirecting my focus on “Sintel”. Full-on production is gonna be a long haul, but who said animation was easy?

–Colin

October 1, 2009

En Route – New Material

This summer I’ve been working at a snail’s pace on the cut of En Route. During this time we’ve been accumulating even more material to fill in the gaps in the edit. Last week, Yotam Dor, my producer and main actor of the film, was able to get into a real live cockpit and shot some footage for the film!

Check out some of these beautiful stills, which have now found a place in the edit:

All shot with a Canon 5D Mark II. Looking forward to posting the trailer as soon as we have some completed VFX! The team is making awesome progress.

–Colin

August 27, 2009

Amsterdam!

I’m in Amsterdam!  Arrived last Sunday after about 12 hours in planes and airports, walked a long time with far too much luggage to get to the Blender Institute.  Met Ton, got a tour of the studio.  It’s much nicer than I expected!  Really fantastic space.  Space for meeting, space for working, space for eating and sleeping.  It’s pretty awesome.

This week we’ve spent meeting and getting acquainted with the team for project Durian.  There are currently 7 artists and 2 developers on the project, and everybody seems pretty much awesome!  We’ve been talking loosely about the film, about the team roles, about our technical targets, but we’ve also spent a great deal of time discussing story.

Originally the plan was to have a finalized story for Durian by the end of July.  However, the story process has been extremely protracted, mainly due to problems communicating and collaborating long-distance with the writer, legendary dutch comic author Martin Lodewijk.  Both he and I have been busy, and the back-and-forth between us has been very slow.

I have been given the opportunity to adapt a concept supplied by Martin– to develop it further and expand it to screenplay format.  However, since we didn’t meet our end-of-July deadline, we’ve found ourselves without a fully developed story.  Members of the team have come up with a number of hypothetical concepts and inklings for the project in discussion with me, and I think many of these ideas have a whole lot of potential.  However, it is my task to work within a concept provided by the writer, so at the moment we’re waiting for another concept from Martin.  It’s a bit sad not to be able to seriously consider these other great ideas, but I think the discussion has really gotten our creative juices flowing and I’m confident we will settle on a really great story for Durian.

This week has been very exciting, and very stressful/frustrating at the same time.  Be sure to follow the progress of the project on the blog: http://durian.blender.org.  I plan to keep the more personal ramblings and my feelings about Durian on this personal blog, and the more public updates and presentations on the Durian site… but I’m sure there will be some overlap as well.

I’m crazy excited about the coming months so expect a number of updates!

In other news, work on En Route continues.  I probably won’t have much time to touch the edit in the next few weeks, but I’m pretty excited about where it’s going!  The vfx work happening in Savannah is picking up speed.  Looking forward to posting some renders!

August 17, 2009

Summer Recap

Geesh, time is slipping by! The past few months I’ve been working on my film En Route in Savannah, Georgia. We’ve been trying to get into some flight simulators or actual cockpits for a couple of the remaining scenes of the film, but after a few dead ends we ended up resorting to the greenscreen studio.

Bourbon St. in New Orleans

I’ve also been working with the visual effects team to begin chipping away at the 50+ shots of the film. I’ve got an amazing team and I’m excited about the way things are coming along! More updates on this front to follow. Postproduction will likely take another four or so months…

I also had the opportunity to go to Siggraph in New Orleans to work on the Blender Boothcrew! I met a lot of awesome and talented people, and I had a great time.

Now I’m back in Maryland and I’ve got only 6 days before I leave for Amsterdam for Durian! I’m using the time to get as much editing, vfx, email correspondence, family time and lifeplanning taken care of so I can throw myself 100% into the project without distractions. Not sure what it’s gonna be like, but I’m getting pretty excited!