 All right. Let's fade that out. Hello, Sebel. Welcome to Logic Live. All right, everyone. My name is Andy. It's an absolute pleasure to be with you here again today. And let's see, hold on, hold on. Got a million things to press here. You know, I was just remarking that we use a piece of software every day that has like 57 billion buttons and still for some reason, it has fewer buttons than Zoom. So, my name is Andy. Welcome to Logic Live. Before we kick things off today, I would like to welcome our newest sponsor, which is AJA. AJA develops an extensive range of solutions for the professional video and audio market from conversion devices to IO solutions, digital recorders, cameras and more. The team at AJA has always been a friend of the Logic community, sponsoring prizes for one frame of white and the NAB parties, and they make the best gear out there. So, if you're looking for anything in the IO market, be sure to get it from AJA. AJA, we can't fix the text module, but if you need video IO, we've got you covered. Thank you, Steve Losey, for that one there. And Logic Live is also brought to you by Cinesis Oceana Solutions, integration and support for digital content creators. These guys are my personal reseller. I've worked with them for 15 years. I could not do what I do without these guys. And I can't stress enough how valuable the relationship is with a reseller, especially now that we're working remotely. So, if you are working remotely and you need anything, definitely reach out to Cinesis at Cinesis.io, Cinesis Oceana, supporting Flame Artist since 1997. All right, let's get down to business, stop sharing the old screen here. And I would like to welcome to Logic Live a guy who I first met several years ago. His name is Brian Higgins. He's a Flame Artist and Creative Director of Flavor in Chicago. We've hung out at many in NAB together. Hey, Brian. Hey, guys. Hey, Logic. I also had the pleasure of presenting with Brian at the Chicago user group meeting last year, which was absolutely fantastic. And I'm excited to have him on board. Welcome aboard, man. Thanks, man. Thanks for inviting me. I'm really, really honored to be here and always impressed to be surrounded by a group of such fine people. Thank you. Thank you. Nice. So there's the chat. Okay. This is my first Zoom webinar. So please bear with me as I kind of get to get through everything. Chicago Zoom one, that's my box there. So let me go over to screen sharing. And if I go share screen, post disabled attendee screen sharing. Oh, Hmm. Hold on. Let me start. Start. Oh, here we go. Here we go. I have a thing. All right. And if I go share screen, I can't make it big. All right, hold on. You said it, not me. Those were your words, not mine. But I, but it's recorded now. So don't worry. I'm only 42. It still works. I swear. Hold on. Let me. Let me try this. You, you wouldn't, wouldn't give it a shot now. Yeah. And I do not want to optimize screen share for video clip on, right? Oh hell no. Okay, that's fine. Great. We should see a discriminator. Do we see it to 1,000? All right. You know it. Cool. Is it playing? All right. All right. That's our real real. I'm not going to bother you guys with our real from 2014. I just wanted to have something up. So, thanks for inviting me. I am unlike all of your other guests that you've had probably not going to show you anything that you don't know or groundbreaking because we're all fairly professional and amazingly brilliant and talented artists. However, I am going to be showing some of the work that I did with my team at flavor. A few years ago, that's probably one of the coolest projects that I've worked on in the last couple of years. And I found it really exciting and really fun. And I hope that you guys will too. And have to take any questions that you guys might have about it. And just kind of, I was thinking, I'm just going to talk through it and then we take it from there. How does that sound to y'all? Sounds great, man. Go for it. So this is a project that work on with actually I should back up and give you guys a little info about flavor and cutters and all that stuff. I know some of you already know this Randy. Sorry for boring you with it. Flavor is the visual effects, motion graphics, finishing color, CG, all that stuff, wing of Cutter Studios, which is the parent company that owns Cutters Flavor. Our audio company is called another country. We have a production company called dictionary. We had an interactive company called picnic. I don't know if we do anymore. They were kind of stealth for a bit. We have offices in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo. Flavor has offices in Chicago, LA, Detroit, and sort of New York, New York counts because most of their high mill if you're here. And we work on all sorts of cool projects. It's a company mostly owned by editors. It is owned privately. The editors, most of the editors are partners, or most of the partners are editors, I'm going to rephrase that. So we have been, I've been lucky to be there for 17 years and we have been blessedly immune from holding company bullshit and all sorts of other stuff like that, but I've seen boiled markets here in Chicago and all over the world. And as such, because we have an editorial focus, it means that most of our work at Flavor tends to be more just traditional commercial finishing. So some colorings, finishing, some cleanups here, some phone comps there, screen comps there, the odd header face replacement, and that's about it. In Chicago in particular, the management decided when the English companies showed up a few years ago that trying to beat them at their own game was not a winning move. And to just kind of focus on the B plus jobs for visual effects, which has worked out great for us. But it's kind of disappointing because we see all the amazing work coming through town and we don't even really generally gets a bit on it because it's going to people. The companies that have rosters have been insanely talented CG artists that are, you know, in LA, New York, London, Mumbai, wherever and which is like we can't the owners didn't want to build out to compete with that. So, but every once in a while, a job like this falls under the radar and the people that our clients don't realize that they can go to one of those places and instead come to us when we go, hell yeah, we can do that. And so we got to stretch our legs a little bit out of our normal, normal ballpark, and to make a really awesome CG soccer stadium with the crowd, and to bunch of like heavy heavy visual effects stuff for us. So this was a spot for for Nissan for their, it was during the 2018 World Cup, it was a World Cup tie in and the whole premise of it was there is in 1986 and the World Cup quarterfinals finals quarterfinals between Argentina and England. There's a world famous soccer player named Maradona and forgive me, I'm not a sports guy you guys probably already know this and I'm repeating it but if you don't, here's the bat in the back straight for the spot. There's a guy named Maradona and he scored a goal that they called the hand of God goal where he went up for a header and the referees couldn't see what he was doing. Because his back was to the to the refs and they said he said he had it and everyone that saw him on the other side saw him hit it with his hand and do a handball which shouldn't have counted. And it would have been a tie game instead of them beating England in 1986. And so the premise of the spot was what if we had all this amazing car around you technology. And could imagine could reimagine this play and look at it from different angles and use all their the science and all that stuff and I don't know you guys have been on jobs like this and I'm sure we've all been in projects like this where basically the director shot a 90 and the only way to understand the whole thing that's going on is if you've been in all the meetings for it just flies by so fast. And like, why is there that all those people are the Argentinian team now there's a guy jamming across the frame from like wearing everyone's colors. I what's going on there and it's like just shut up and watch it someone sold it and they got to you know the shop the whole thing I'm like vintage and more fixed and it was gorgeous and all of that so I will play the I'm going to play the spot for you. And then I'm going to play the rough cut for you to see where we came from and then kind of talk through some basic challenges that we had on it and take you through a couple of shots and take you through some moments. So here is the spot and oh by the way we have no audio but we do have subtitles. So I apologize for that. Let's go full frame and play it down. The subtitles are being cropped off because webcasting as a monster. Okay. Yeah, imagine having the power to change the way we look at the world that could change history. They were they were. This is game changing technology that the kind that put Nissan puts at your reach here and now innovation that excites Nissan. I'm not a voice over talent. I'm sorry. No, I think you've got a second career like a in your future me and everybody else do you guys know if there's a way to ban voice over talent from trying to contact you on LinkedIn by the way they're like, like, like bugs. Like I have creative directories to my title and they all think they want it, but I get like three invites a day from voice over talent like I can't hire you please. I don't. All right, fine. Anyway, so yeah it's this, you know, gorgeous anamorphic footage they rented out like an airplane hangar somewhere in Van Nuys for all the interior shots. They got all the cars is a GTR in there and we had to turn the tail lights off pond. The MoGraph people had a field day with this doing all the like kind of high tech future UI design stuff. And this one we had to put yeah I'll get through on a shop by shop basis so he's got this little remote and that controls the hologram. And again this this is where we're getting into like, well you needed to be in the all meet in all the meetings understand what's happening so this guy is the host and he's got this remote control that was kind of like a plexiglass iPhone and can control take us back into the past and look at these vintage soccer players running down the field, kicking the ball kick the play happens the announcer can't believe what's happening. He saw the goal and then he says wait let's back up freezes time. We reverse and we see that. At this point, we got after we finish this we got a note from Nissan saying we can't actually see the ball hit his hand, because that would be taking a stance on whether he hit the ball with his hand or not. And we don't want to be that controversial so we had to read change the freeze frames and timings and move the CG ball after we've done it and all that stuff so you can see that kind of it looks like it touches but it's really not we swear it's hovering and even though it looks like it is or isn't it. And then there is another play I guess, and I forget this is two years ago and I forgot what game it was but it was some in the Netherlands, and going over and he he pretended to trip. And he really just jumped over the guy and you can see him give the little thing link. And that's the end. So that's the spot. And here is the rough cut play that down real quick. And just kind of taking some of the plates. The description of this is like one of those real music videos you know where they Yeah, I needed to try to try to try to find line between entertaining y'all and getting fired so I think we're okay this is this was two or three years ago and Nissan frankly has much much larger problems right now than me being a smart ass on the internet. Did you see the thing where they they're like CEO fled Japan and they smuggled them out in a suit. Yeah, I was just going to say that a face case. I was just going to do that. That thing that we do on like podcasts and say like, Hey, I just, you know, I did listen to this excellent NPR podcast about like the smuggling out of Carlos goes and whatever his name is. But I just did that. So I'm sorry, I'm a bad guest. I stole your thunder as well never be a comedian. Okay, so various plates here. You can see that he's, we have a car take we have a guy take. And then we have the awesome circle wipe of the players on the stage at the Cal State Fort in soccer stadium. And you can see if they hopefully put green screen behind the net there for us, which we really appreciate. We do a whole stadium and like, oh, we had, yeah, we had a couple of 20 buys and that's what you get the night. So the stands are empty. They didn't have some crowd. But they were was unable to shoot tiles for us. And we did that usual that dance where the production company is like, well, we need to have a crowd on there but we don't have budget like well we didn't bid for a crowd. So why don't you shoot some tiles for us and they're like, okay, sure. And so they shot this for us and handed it to us or like, okay, what do we do so that this this brought us into the, you know, we're not a large, we are someone international post production company facility but we're not, we can't just whip one of these up out of out of thin air. So I'm not saying that we did this but if you were to look around, there was a gentleman a very enterprising three or 3d artist who has, he's probably made a decent living for himself on turbo squid and he's made just about any stadium you can think about not not any not any in all things but many in Madison Square Garden, you know, whatever football stadiums baseball stadiums are realistically modeled stadiums of various persuasions with animated crowds in them that are baked in with geometry cycles that require you way to buy a very plug and I mean, had we would have had to buy a very plug and to make the crowd instance in work, but they're reasonably priced for what it would take and, you know, you can get them and then have your smaller cg department, you know, chop chop and kick bash the stadiums into something appropriate for what we're trying to do, which was in this case, we're trying to match the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City from 1986 and there's lots of reference out there. And so we took all the evidence from that definitely didn't buy a stadium with people on it from turbo squid and handed to our cg department who then chopped it up and teams the colors to be appropriate to the teams the time and all that so you could definitely not do that if you were interested in good to know that having a whole cg stadium. Yeah, it's good to know that that's that's that's an option to not do. Yeah, it's not that is is out there. It's like yours in mind. Yeah, it's a far cry from me. Did you see the amazing like the mill had like this stadiumizer thing that they came out with a couple of years ago, where it was this whole procedural thing in Maya and there's you see the artist over the shoulder moving sliders and like the number of staircases are changing and the tears are all procedurally shuffling around as brilliant. We don't have anyone like that so so definitely not turbo squid, and we've made this stadium and all the people in it so let me just take you through a couple of shots. The first one take you through is this transition shot here so when the guy put the host clicks the hologram and needs to get us into the stadium world. And I'm going to go switch to so you can see my UI. I think in flam 2021 that finally became a hot key right that I hear that, or am I violating violating no 2021 is out so we're became a hot key to switch between screen grab and I didn't know about that. It's something that I do like every day like several times a day when I'm in set when I was in the session days at least yeah there's wanted to be happy for a long time. And when I read that I was like oh thank you. That's amazing. That's great. If I ever make it back to my office I can't wait for it to show that. Yeah. So we have a giant batch tree here. This is restored straight from the archive I didn't clean it up much clean it up at all for the demo, and I'm going to take you through a couple of the plates that I use to build this. So, on this job about halfway through it, I decided to switch to. Hey Brian, I'm sorry I don't mean to, I don't mean to interrupt is it's looking a little chunky on my end is it looking good on your end. Yeah, it does look chunky. Let me know I forgot to do is hit the recorder button because I'm a bad person so then was only starting now so we can this chunkiness is brought to you by zoom by zoom. Where was that wasn't there was a record button at the bottom of my not allowed to record. Or is it because you're recording. But you know what if you're seeing it if you're seeing it chunky like this then chunky it was queen queen before when we tried the other day right and you know what let's just keep going it's a very I think we're we could be having an internet day if you know what I mean. All right, I'm hitting record I just hit record on this computer I found the button for it so hopefully it'll be better. Actually, let me just make sure that my broadcast monitor is set to 720 oh it's not defaulted to croc croc monotone do it on there. Okay that's much better. So, yeah, zoom out everyone cool. It's a little better. That's better. I take us through it. All right, so I think about halfway through this one I decided that I was so we grade in I grade in Lester and more and more these days in flame in the new image node. And especially as we with the kinds of jobs we've been getting during COVID I've been doing a lot of flame grading on that because the Lester roundtrip overhead is worth it. But if you have a project where you have shot footage instead of instead of a montage of stock clips and re purpose sold stuff like the cover jobs event but if you have like where there's an actual shoot. Doing it musters better and faster still for me at least and so you can, as part of that connected color workflow that came out a few years ago, you can do a color session with your clients interactively and Lester, and then bounce all of those. The nodes per the grades per shot back to batch in flame. And so then you're able to work behind the grade. And you just sort of round trip in and out of scene linear and keep everything clean. And then put the grade on the end and then you're working through the what you can look at your comp through the Lester grade interactively which is really really nice for dialing shots in final so that's what we did on this one we had the client see as the cut was approved and did a color session because they were feeling the momentum I guess, and then sent them away for three weeks. So locked all the grades, and then I balanced all the shots over that I needed to work behind, which in this case was not all of them but but the main grade for the end and work through things so we have some anamorphic plate of the oh and it's not. Let me just check my broadcast options here scale to fit monitor you want to turn that off. I love anamorphic footage. I want to show there. Okay there's I said to zoom out more. All right. So, by by himself clicking the remote. We have the car by itself with a little whip pan on the end because the director wanted to do with him. And then we have the soccer play and I'm not linear sorry I don't use color management because I'm a lot of So we have the log see plate of the soccer team running and that's that's our Maradona with his awesome 80s caterpillar mustache and the shorter shorts and all that stuff and this is the uniforms were all designed to be as close to but not legally implying Argentina and England and all that stuff so it's close but it's not quite the same. Not exactly the same so Between that and the turbo squid stuff I'm or I'm detecting a pattern like a theme for this spot. Yeah, yeah. So we have camera tracks for everything. We have in order to do that. And for those of you that haven't done that don't have extensive anamorphic visual effects experience. If you hope to track anything at all, like at all at all you have to manage the lens distortion. You have to a lot of times with when I do camera tracking on spiritual stuff, you can get away without grids. If you're doing any kind of serious work or even a screen comps on anamorphic tracking if you don't think the lens distortion out it's going to hose you so we Shot grids of everything. So they had the main they had an Alexa mini and they had a phantom and they had this whole series of anamorphics and you might recognize that is Blake Huber's hand there from logic remember him he's probably not on Right now because he lives in Amsterdam now and works for Glassworks there so it's probably like three in the morning, but he's in one of these shots somewhere so we have we got got them there's Blake There he is. So he was our man in LA on this one or one of our many men in LA on this one, people in LA so we got we got men starts for the whole whole shebang 283545556580 and 110 on the phantom same thing on the Alexa, and then there was a zoom that they used on the 35 to 140 zoom that they use on the on the Alexa, and we had them profile that at various focal lengths on the zoom. So then we do all that and then a large part of my job and this was like the effects of things like a spreadsheet of like who's going to manage what and this shot, you know shot 20 shot 12 is on the 25 millimeter this platelets here and it ends up being a lot of administrative stuff and like so I took one or two of the hard shots and then partialed a lot like parceled out a lot of these to other people I think Paul Ross piece came in and helped us on this and rocked a bunch of them and a couple of other people like Blake helped on some and some of our Chris and Steve, my coat my super capable coworkers of flavor helped on some. So you we did all our tracking in in pf track because that's what we know. And that produces a track shot and then once you profile the lens distortion through there. It gives you an ST map. This is the one for the. I don't actually don't know what shot this is because I mean scheme sucks but it's whatever this one was on. So that gives you an undistorted use this UV UV warps matchbox. Everything this has to be the has to be 32 bit float for it to work cleanly. And so we did this UV warp to get there and then that gives you still it still has the anamorphic squeeze in it but it has straightened out all the lines and then you get really wide. And I just squished it down to half rest like just to work on stuff and ideally if you work this way all the way or this is not ideal to work this way all the way through because you're introducing artifacting into the plates here they're filtering transforms and stuff like that and kind of don't want to do that. In this case the shot was moving a lot. And I started to I built it the easy to work with way first like where you're running the plates through the distortion, and then I started to rebuild it. Where I was overing the comp bit the comp bits on to the original plate and I had made almost no difference. And some of the other shots of the hero shots of the car. I did have to re architect the trees to not like have the distortion in this case it just didn't I, you know, put it at 500% zoom and AB between those like it's fine. It's going on YouTube. So I just kept it with the distortion all the way through. It's going on YouTube at 360p. So you'll notice that the guy plate is moving. And the car plate is moving. And we have to get the guy into the car and this is not mo co so I did that thing that I do every once in a while which was after a camera track the shots I loaded up on the Terry's YouTube video on how to 3D camera stabilize a shot that has that is now so old that it has the Pre rewrite flame UI on it, but it's the the old ways are the best ways and it still works. So I use that to zoom is right on it to 3D stabilize the guy. You can see he's now stuck here, even with his motion blur that comes in and later and then put in we put him into the tracker mark paint out and put in a little phone UI because everyone was looking for that. And then use that to drop him into a camera track that I had done of the car shot, which is probably here. And so yeah that's that's him play placed in Z space into the track of the car shot, which is this and then I had to build the transition which I'll get into in a minute. And then there's the whole stadium comp so I'm going to get into that a little bit stuff was coming out of CG. It looked kind of like this. This is our studio is techa with our people on our web pan and are definitely not Seiko and you know definitely not Fuji film billboards that we we faked in there. And then did all the lighting and compositing and all that kind of stuff to it which got us. Here sit in the plate. Nice little CG pass. And then we we wrote out everything. And by we I mean our wonderful overseas road over under wrote out everything. And they're kind of insane you can see those. You can see there's like motion blurred hair, Roto in there and I, yeah, I would hate to be a junior today because I don't know what I would do to get my foot in the door. But we got nice road for that we got Roto for the guy with the remote. We got Roto for the guy for the car. You go full Chicago on you. And yeah needed to then start putting things together so I had to do some cleanup on the field, as there were a bunch of their dolly tracks that had to be removed. The zoom thing is killing me. I'm sorry guys. I'm looking at it on my monitor here and I can see it but I can't see it on on the stream. So yeah there's a there, you know dolly tracks had to come out and there are a bunch of cones, like little like to help us with camera tracking we through some just little flags like beanbags colored beanbags on the ground. So to help us through the track and had to paint those out so those got painted out or I painted them out. Clean that up. And then the I didn't I didn't do the old college try to keep this net and make it work. But I realized I had a camera track and I had play cubics and I had crock grid. So crock grid of the rescue. No need for college. No need for college. So, you know, made a nice grid and warp that in and track that in. And then because you have a camera track you can start getting a bloody murder I had to build this transition out and the whole like we went through all this back and forth the hologram and the design of it and the initial calls of the director. He he's like so have you guys seen the new blade runner. Yeah, you know that room where the the one builds all the memories for the replicants. Yeah, it should be like that. Okay well they spent probably eight months on that one environment and had a team. Sure. Yeah, it'll be like that. Okay, no force holograms. All right, we're not going to do like, you know, blue Star Wars ghost or anything like that. It'll be somewhat realistic. I'll put some, you know, staff fire warps through it and some texturing and make it look nice. So that's what I ended up doing. We had to Where is that looking like an idiot. That's because I'm after it. So basically I pulled a bunch of Roto and then resituated things to the camera track and then use these various mad fade outs to make the final shot work. We also had had to add extensive motionography to the vehicle, which my wonderful cinema 40 motion agrafing colleagues made Which led to all sorts of interesting conversations like what's lens distortion when you use when you're a C 40 after effects mograph person like that's just not something you ever have to deal with you're like why can't you just give me 1080 plates. It's fine. And they eventually I were kind enough to humor me and we got through it. So again, there's we're adding all this are these light sweeps from the car. There's a UI of the above view camera, which is really the only thing that's important to the client in here. The guys showing the cameras around of the vehicle are showing what's happening in the play. And then we put it all together And throw the watch your grid on it. Lester grade on it and adds a film grain and turn off our linear lookup table. You can kind of shuttle through it. And it looks pretty righteous. That's wild man. Where's the worse. Yeah, that there's there's the thumbnail frame right there with guys but And so yeah, it came out looking looking super dope. So you probably had to blow it up a little bit to get the parts for the lens didn't cover the sensor on the side out, you know, so I think the final is probably more like that. Not that they have it right here in my other tab or anything. So yeah, that's the that's the final framing there. So it's a fun shot. And then we had to do more of the same for the next couple. They were on a like a ATV quad bike sitting on the back of with the camera and like the you know big anamorphic glass on it riding down the side of the race track at the foot race track at the soccer field to get these shots. And so it was just another one of those there. It's the same jam is one before fewer moving parts right we have roto for the players we have a camera track. We have a CG stadium and crowd. We have a luster node putting the grade on at the end and this one and that one. This was a simple screen comp roto. I think they may they were nice enough to put green into the television for us on this one. Down down. Nope, it's black. So that's still a pretty easy. Right. Yeah, right. So There's actually a city a city stadium and crowd inside that TV for like a couple frames like right there. So we had to do that too. But there we were. Is that an RM 450 edit controller next to the TV also? It might be whatever that giant knob is there for a three quarters a quarter deck. Yeah, they had to sell this for advantage. Let me see if I can find a plate. Yeah, it's I don't know if I'm blowing up on it or not. I do have the plate. It's awesome here. Let's look at it. Yep. I don't know is it Takes me back to my NYU days. Yeah. So all right. So there that is. Let's go back to our layers. Many, many layers. You're 100% right though, man. If you have a 3D track, you can almost do anything like if you have 3D track and roto, it's like game changing in terms of like reformulating your approach to okay, how am I going to tackle the task? You know, absolutely. The one that I still haven't figured out how to do in flame and maybe you guys can clue me in on this is I saw a nuke demo probably eight or nine years ago in a B where you can UV unwrap projected stuff. And so it was like it was from one of the it was a Jet Lee mummy movie where there are all the terracotta soldiers and they had a camera track and they had because it's a Hollywood triple Big budget blockbuster action movie. They had a scan of Jet Lee. So they had a Jet Lee CG Jet Lee head. So they then object tracked it on as he's like moving through the scene right so they object tracked the head into the track camera right and then project the plate back onto that, which gives you just the plate but on his face and the UV unwrapped it right so they then were able to make him cry blood tears and like met his face now and pages with paint. Like because it was like his heads moving like this in the shot and they UV unwrapped it and locked it and then just went did paint on it and then reprojected it back through and all went through back through the track and the projection and he's you know, like his face is turning from human into like melted mud and watery blood stuff and it was awesome. Just from a demo standpoint I was like holy shit well I'm never going to get the talent's head so I don't know when I would be able to actually use that but I had car geometry on this one I probably could have used it for the cars. If I ever had to clean and take a camera, you know, crew reflection out of it or something like that. I don't know that's one for the one for the peanut gallery and the assemble audience but it's a way to do that now to like to lock a project with a UV unwrapped a projected texture onto an object and then project it back in. I haven't been able to get that to work. I think you couldn't for a long time and they added a thing a while ago that maybe you can but with projectors but I couldn't get it to work when I did it because I'm old and bad and lame. So, it's a new trick though. I'm old and lame. So moving on. Brian, how many films, how many flames do you have at the at the office? We have six artists now. No assistance anymore because that's how we roll in 2020. Yeah, it was just three of us for a long time and then we grew and added two juniors and then we we picked up a guy. A local or an international legend, Robin Churchill, who was who was in town. He was my direct competitor for a very long time. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. And he joined us as part of getting something else going. I don't know if they ever announced there's a I can't talk about it yet. He's he's involved with a larger business venture of Cutter Studios. But for now he's our flame bro and he's freaking awesome. So yeah, there's six of us. And we're not all in our 40s, but most of us are. There's a nice lady in early 20s. A gentleman in his early 30s, Patrick and Allison shout out if you're on this right now or if you're watching it later, you guys all rock. I love working with you. So yeah, there's six, six flame artists. We have probably four or five MoGraph people, three Maya artists. Three or four after effects artists and a couple of producers, three producers of flavor. And that's our that's our next team. Yeah, not huge, not tiny either. So on this one, we had Paul Roskies, the man with the legend freelance working on it. And it was his job to do the freeze frame so he ended up having to like do they do a lot of rebuilding in the background to cover like to keep the freeze frame working and rebuild the guy and rebuild the people behind him to do all the tracker removal and the track for the UI on the phone, all that stuff on this one. And then that brings us to this shot, which is the next one I'm going to demo which is the phantom shot of the play leading up to it. So I'm going to show you first the plate for this because phantom is fun. I saved it somewhere handy and now I can't remember where I saved it. Oh, I know what I did. The batch. And then let's find the shot. That's the time mark. Here it is. All right, and this will be distorted. So bear with me. You see it. There's that crowd tile. Thanks guys. They did a great job like the stuff that they should like the frames are freaking gorgeous. So like I shouldn't I'm being a bitchy post guy and bagging on them and I shouldn't but they did an amazing job where it counted. So. You can see him going up for the header. Still going. Going for it. So close. Then he hits. He does actually hit it, but we couldn't show that. And so yeah, that was 1134 frames of plate that became in the cut 41 frames and finished at it. So if that isn't a metaphor for what it means to be like a flame artist in 2020. I don't know what does I'm sorry I continue. That's all good. So this is this is the one fun little maybe useful thing that I can pass on in parts of the group on this one working on this shot. So we looked at that and went Holy fuck do we really need a roto all that that's nonsense. So we're going to bake it in. And so I baked in baked in the time warp. I made them commit to it. I made the editor in the agency say hey just you know you guys shot a 1200 frame shot and for us to run or 1200 frames of 4k stadium is asinine. I was a little more polite than that. I was like it's going to take weeks like or you know days and days of the bill. The bill at zinc is going to be like $4,000 every time we have to iterate this. Let's just are you happy with it. Do you like it can can you understand that it's going to take some time to redo it if you if you if you have to change. Yes. Okay great. Bake the time work to bake the time work pull the road on the time warp and then I took the time warp curve. I did the built it using the timing functionality and not speed to match it to match with the editor did and then I copied that animation channel and you can't see any of this. I pasted it into the exposition of an axis and explore that as a film box to the Maya team and they are able to take that animation curve then and scale it and then use that to ramp not only the animation cycles on the the crowd in the back. But also the shutter of the camera so when they they they're the motion borders correct coming out of CG and that it goes this time up goes so fast you can't tell but. In this case instead of like any other shot where I phoned in with the distortion pipeline in this case if you were to actually watch like play the thing back our crowd would be moving correctly for the time the cheering motion would be set up appropriately for the time more than locked in so. Dude that's a fantastic tip in order to get a time warp information out is to copy and paste your your the timing variable into. Like you said into the into an axis which you could then speed up by fbx that's a great yeah because Maya doesn't have like a like a time warp node but what can they get okay well they can take a position and it's as long as it's. You know that's the frame and then they can use some math on that to convert that into Maya time or Maya shutter angle or it normalize it or whatever they need to do with expressions to make it work and they did and it worked out great. So that was our that was our clever trick on this one so we had just to keep going. You know we had again. Hair roto on phantom footage. You know there's no path for a junior look at here like it's like look at that it's crazy. It's so good. Beautiful thing and that cost $20. Heartbreak and so you have to have the other players and they you know they do the focus rack on it you see it's blurry there and then it's it's sharp and yeah. So you know there's not you know crazy high frequency detail on their clothes you have the other guys the rest of the crowd wrote it together. And then just had to put all the all the plates together right so we had a render. Coming out of Maya. The artist that worked on this is named Emily J. Reveiler you might notice he so that's that and you can see the little. All the little like Sims people oh yeah that are there we have this this shot in particular from the board we had all sorts of internal discussions about like is this going to work is it not we don't know and so before the production and I still get shit about this. I spun up our production company and said hey can we take over some space at our office and do green screen tiles of our coworkers and so we have I have a bunch of my coworkers like jumping up and cheering and like being disappointed and. High fiving each other and so far all we've done is use turn turn it into a gift to each other for company email chains. It burned like the junior director's day probably and I made them rental light so it wasn't like we burned thousands of dollars on it. But I probably did burn a couple hundred bucks in my company's money on it at least a day of some one's time so for that I'm sorry guys but it's been great for me friends for the means and so. You can see the people do look a little a little sim like not great but we weren't really looking at them they're going to be out of focus and through a heavy vintage grade and as the shot developed it became apparent that this was going to work just fine and so none of my coworkers actually made the final cut. Sorry everybody but the CG stadium that we definitely did not buy off turbo squid worked fantastically well so. So yeah same same jam on this one remember when you're blowing anamorphic it's twice as hot the border aspect is twice as high as it is wide. Have a nice plate there. Did the same distortion stuff I showed you the grids for that to the the PF track distortion round trip on this one and that came out looking that's this is the behind the grade version I think right yes. And it came out just looking fucking fantastic I think it's great and if I put the grade on it and turn off linear like there's. That's the one for the magazine so it came out just super super dope and the people hold up fine right no one's looking at what they're doing and you know it looks right it is right so right that was that one and then. We were just more of the same right to the rest so we had another camera track here this one was phantom I will show you rather than taking you to the whole tree I will show you that he was put on wires and told the whole real still. Oh yes. The wires that's amazing dude. Dude that's wonderful. I think there's a rig maybe from the other guy. Yeah that looks like it might be on a on a pipe or something. Or something so he was like just hold still hopefully the wind won't play your hair and they shot this one I think this one was shot this one was shot on the election of the phantom so. Yeah so that became that and then we just had to put the state wrote him out Kim put the stadium behind him make the ball not touch him. And then this other one was all it was just the last couple of. Shots to you can see the guy it looks like the guy on the left is going to slide tackle or slide and trip the guy on the right and he goes oh no or not I'm I'm just going to jump here's a wink and that's the end. So I could take it to you a little more but I think now is probably a great time to see if anyone has any questions or wants to take potchats and if you're being an asshole or however you want to play it. I'm just remembering like I did I definitely did my fair share of like the the matrix bullet time you know frozen moment things when that was popular and then. At the end of its popularity like I had clients who wanted it but they couldn't afford the rig and so we totally had like some guy like standing on a turntable you know just trying to stand still and there's like three crew members rotating him around you know. The same kind of thing. Oh my God. Now where people they they just tell people to hold still as possible and then they camera track the shot and rig removed stuff. There was a guy. Daniel Kelly or someone from logic that did that and showed it off a couple years ago it was for a Canadian. Or ship a restaurant chain and it worked amazingly well like it's just you can tell people holding still and it looks like a frozen element and they see you didn't like all the things that you couldn't freeze right like the coffee pot getting tossed into midair and the big stack of papers going up and all that like it's. Yeah it worked out really well I thought. Totally I remember that got two questions for you first coming from Nino and Nino on Facebook wants to know how did you deal with the motion blur the players because the vendor supplied feathered Roto and the background of the plate is pretty light compared to the CG stadium which is quite dark. Pixel spread aggressive pixel spread because it was moving so fast. That was a thing and you can kind of if I'm being honest you can kind of see it here a little bit on the guy as he runs past. He is pixel spreaded heavily on the part in particular where he's where he's not as blurry. And then it just ended up feeling like room light to me and so I didn't go through a frame at a time and paint it darker on the edges which is what I would have done in a shot like this where it's 12345678 frames or something like that. I would have gone in probably with the drag brush in paint which I only discovered recently. Oh my God where has it been my whole career it's amazing for stuff like that. It's been a desktop paint. Yeah. So it's in batch now and it works so yeah I would have gone through and like you know gone drag drag drag and then just to kind of to see that together a little bit better. And you know Nino there was a post in logic on July 10 from the question was posted by Charlotte Cook who had a similar question about dealing with the edges through motion blur. Excuse me and there was one of the comments was from a guy named Chris Howard who posted a frame grab of his schematic using two matte curves nodes and and it's a really really great technique so I'll post a still frame of this so I can I can maybe screen share real quick. Now it'll stop yours. I'll post it in the in the chat but definitely look for that. Charlotte Cook on July 10. Yeah that's a great a great trick in particular for using green screen people and trying to key green screen into different backgrounds for anything so very transparent like it it can really really really help. I agree it's a good one. Jason from Facebook wants to know is there a link to the final spot that they can check out. If I can find it. I'd have to look YouTube. The name of the spot is called generation out a lot of it was on their Nissan social media channels during the World Cup and then it disappeared so. Generate generation out a lot of things to find it. Not. Sorry you know what we'll we'll we'll track it down or if we can track it down Jason will put it in in the. I'll put it with the in the in the description like the show notes with this episode when I put it up on logic TV. Yeah I if you're OK with risking the iron of Nissan's copyright lawyers. I'm happy to just spit out a pro resume for you if you want with sound Andy. I think it'd be fine if it's buried in the middle of this I don't think anyone's going to know but that's up to you and your appetite for for risk. Hey you know what it could be like the turbo squid thing that we don't that we don't use you know. Yeah but I'd be happy to be happy to send it to you with sound so. Love it. Love it. Cool and then who was it John from our from the live stream here was wondering if you if you could share the name of the Roto company that you use. Yeah there it's a studio 8 FX their studio 8 FX dot com they work on the Marvel movies and stuff there's a lovely woman their name Casey Padini you store her company three out in LA. Her brother was Grizzly Adams fun personal fact about Casey Padini. And fun I think I think he recently passed so maybe you don't bring that up but but they edit that out. They're fantastic they have all the security stuff they have a spare. They can turn around stuff pretty quick and they're they're good and cheap. Generally they can do cameras packing and other stuff although we've only had them do that once or twice. We generally but I've used them for over 10 years. Yeah they're looking at their website and there's once once upon a time in Hollywood's. Captain Marvel Game of Thrones. Black Panther Crazy Rich Asians all that stuff. So cool. Yeah they also fun story about them doing visual effects that I'll share with you guys we had. We had to do some cleanup on someone like some beauty work. And it was eye bag removal and there was a client in town that asked for our real on that and they went that's great. Can you do a 25 minute interview. And we went no no we can't we don't have the balance of eye bag removal on that. And we ended up sending at the studio and they did the whole thing and it was Lisa Marie Presley being interviewed by Oprah. And then so they did 25 minutes of that for Miss Winfrey. And she comment the comment that she made was that looks amazing I want you guys to do all of my interviews. Which you saw and I don't think they do but but they did listen at least Marie had had a had a rough night the night before interview a couple years 10 15 years ago. And they did all like a whole thing off of you know interlaced video off of HD cam and all that stuff and did all the cleanup and did it for I don't know 50 60 grand or whatever it was that they had to do that 25 minutes that we couldn't touch so bless them. Oh goodness does does anybody have any other questions for Brian. I think we're good man dude that was phenomenal. Thank you so much. That was great. Brian thank you very very much I really appreciate it man. Thank you for the invite I wanted to demo this one forever and then it just got done after NAB that year and then Autodesk stopped doing NAB and like I was like this is the perfect thing let me like let me be in the booths and started pinging people and they're like yeah we're not doing that anymore sorry. So thank you for giving me an outlet for it I really appreciate it. Oh my pleasure man. Thank you. And I would also be remiss if I didn't you know point out that we you know we happen to be wearing the same shirt. No strange coincidence there. And he's just backwards though. Oh damn it. Oh well you know what. Here's flames. No no I'm backwards. See. Yeah. I don't know my zoom mirror. Oh yeah why this is my better angle and I never get to see myself. I've never looked better. I agree. I agree. Thank you so much for agreeing. Well thanks everybody. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks to census and AJA and all the all the friends there Keeney and Steve and everyone who keeps us running. Thanks to everyone for coming to watch media and blather on a Sunday evening. I really appreciate it. It's awesome. Oh wait I'm sorry I got one final question. What was the time frame on the whole job? So the VFX part of it was like three weeks. We had probably the color grade was the first day and then we spent three weeks working on the rest of it. The editorial took a little bit longer than that beforehand. It was a three. I think it was a five day shoot on this but there are three, three minute long or four minute long web videos with feature demos and all sorts of other stuff that I'm not showing you. This is just the fun third, the fun broadcast 30 that was all lumped into that. So this probably took like a week and a half to do and then the oldies took the other staggered week and a half on top of that. Still we can have that's a quick turnaround for something like this. That's great. Great job. Great work. Thank you. Thank you very much. You got it. All right. Let me share my screen here and we'll close it out. All right. So coming up next week on logic live, we have Andy Davis who's got some amazing tricks up his sleeve. He's going to share with us. That's followed on the 26 by Naveen Srivastava. August 2nd. We're going to have an interview with Autodesk Fred Warren. August 9th will be Chicago's own Randy McInty. Get ready, Randy. And August 16th using flame with shotgun, which was a suggestion from the community. So if anybody does have any suggestions for things I like to see in the future logic live, please let me know. Also, the logic podcast is available. We launched it last week. I want to thank everybody for all the great feedback. There are two episodes up now and I'm going to try to have another one ready for you next week within the next week or so. I've got a few in the, in the queue, but if anybody has any suggestions, please feel free to send them my way. And be sure to check out logic dot TV for all for some for all kinds of great content. All the past logic live episodes, of course, logic podcast, logic fest, tips, tricks, tutorials, links. And please take a few minutes to subscribe on our YouTube channel if you haven't already. And this episode of logic live is brought to you by AJA. AJA develops an extensive range of solutions for the professional video and audio market. 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