Well… I pestered him long enough, and  Plot Device Director Seth Worley finally agreed to put together an awesome series of tutorials on visual effects for filmmakers. Part of the time he’ll focus on the work he did in Plot Device, and part of the time on entirely new stuff. But 800,000 views later and a barrage of emails, and we couldn’t ignore the requests to learn more about how Seth creates great VFX on a very limited budget. In addition, Seth is also creating a bunch of presets for Red Giant People, based on projects he’s currently working on.

We’re starting off the series with a walk through of creating one of my favorite effects from Plot Device: The Flip! If you wondered how Seth got Ben to flip through the air after being shot by the alien/gas mask guy, here’s your chance to learn how. Hint: it involves a trampoline, a green screen, and possibly some brotherly love/pain.

Here’s the Episode description:

In this Episode of Red Giant TV, Seth Worley walks you through the flip effect seen in Plot Device, where Ben is shot and spins through the air. You’ll learn about, keying, rotoscoping, compositing, color correction, visual effects and trampolines.

Watch it HERE.

Yesterday, the world lost one of it’s greatest innovators.  When we heard that Steve Jobs passed away, none of us at Red Giant were unaffected. We all took time to reflect on the impact he left on the world and on each of us individually. Steve literally changed the way we communicate with each other and how we interact with technology. He also created a new standard in storytelling and branding – showing the world that communicating the benefits of a product is as important as designing them well.

I just wanted to share an email from Karen Gauthier, our Senior Product Manager, sent to the rest of the RG team:

As I rifle through my drawer of white earphones and a pile of white cables for the pile of ipods that are part of my household I can’t help but think about the impact that Steve and Apple have had on our every day lives. There was a time when Apple was an esoteric, elitist brand for “artists”. Something that only the pros used. Not so any longer.

My kids who are 7 and 9 don’t know any other way. They download apps, music, movies without thinking twice. They know the difference between browsing free apps and paid apps. They know itunes like the back of their hand. My son is saving for an itouch. His life won’t be complete until he has one. Their generation knows that Apple logo like we knew McDonalds in the 70′s.  (for all you youngsters, it was a big deal in the 70′s. You saw those Golden Arches and almost teared up with anticipation)

Anyhow, I’m saddened by this news.  He made an impact and was an inspiration.  As software designers I think one of the things we can learn from Steve is his philosophy of making products that were at the intersection of art and technology.  I think Red Giant embraces this philosophy and I love being part of it.

Have a good night everyone.

-karen

By the way, I read Karen’s email (as well as the news that Steve had passed) on my iPhone, just as I lay down to bed. It’s the same phone that wakes me up every morning, and from which I email and tweet throughout the day. Sometimes it’s subtle, and sometimes it’s in your face, but there’s no arguing it: Steve’s legacy is with us from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep. He will be missed.

It’s already received an honorable mention at the LA Reel Film Festival and was selected to be the opening night film at the Oakland International Film Festival 2011. And this dark and haunting film wouldn’t look out of place beside ‘The Big Sleep’ or ‘Night and the City’ and other noir classics.

Oakland filmmaker Vincent Cortez’s ‘The Hush’ follows hitman “Freddy ‘the Hush’ Burnett” on his quest for redemption as he fights to stay alive and faces the tormented ghosts of the people he has killed. With a budget $8,000 – writer, director and producer Vincent Cortez had to be ‘creative on his toes’. We asked Vincent how Magic Bullet Looks and Magic Bullet Colorista II allowed him to focus on the storytelling.

“Our workflow began with shooting directly into our Mac Pro tower, in FCP Studio 2 from a HV20 with a 35mm lens adapter (before the dawn of the VDSLR). We needed a high quality digital negative because we would be mastering our entire film’s visual style using Colorista and Looks in AE CS3. I quite literally colored every shot to create an dark, organic and gritty atmosphere that shifts as the story and characters progress. It is noir, but in a graphic novel fashion. Red Giant tools never hindered or failed me – they were quick and flexible, allowing me to be as creative as I could think and feel.”

Links:

• Mitchell Street Pictures
• The Making of ‘The Hush’

Last year, we discovered that one of our customers was using Trapcode products to help people scare their neighbors. Ghosts, zombies, and other assorted monsters were haunting houses in neighborhoods across the USA. People were seeing creepy stuff as they looked into their neighbors windows.

But have no fear… it’s all in Good Fun.

Mark Garvais creates scary and fun animations for you to project onto your windows for added Halloween festivity. The animations are available on a set of DVD’s called Hallowindow (actually, there are 4 volumes, with more on the way) and their designed to add fun for Halloween as Trick-or-treaters come to your home looking to score candy.

Mark, who is clearly a fantastic After Effects Animator, painstakingly creates each animation for maximal fun and scariness.

We asked Mark what Red Giant products are the most helpful is scaring the bejeezus out of people.

“I use Trapcode plug-ins for Hallowindow quite a bit. Particular 2 is probably the plug-in I use the most. It’s amazing for effects like fire and smoke but I’ve also used it for flocks of bats, streaks of light, atmospheric haze and leaves… the list goes on. It’s been a really reliable and indispensable tool for me. There’s also a tonne of online knowledge sharing on Particular so it’s easy to find help when your stuck, either on Red Giant People or elsewhere.

“Another great plug-in I’ve been using is Trapcode 3D Stroke. I’ve been able to create some cool lightning effects with some detailed frame-by-frame animating. It’s tedious key framing but worth it and 3D Stroke has all the control I’ll ever need.”

Well Mark… We’ll see you in hell!!!!! And by that I mean – great stuff!

By the way, Mark was kind enough to share a spooky fire preset from Hallowindow on Red Giant People. Get it while it’s hot!

Also – don’t forget that you can get Hallowindow HERE.

Boo!

British independent filmmakers Ben Franklin and his team at Bloody Cuts grew up with a love of horror films. Ben cites the ‘Nazis-meet-their-doom’ scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark‘, and Stripe taking on the Peltzer family in a particularly scary Xmas in ‘Gremlins’ as some of the formative images that sparked his own interest.

Their recent short – Stitches – is five and a half minutes of creeping horror with a gloriously gruesome finale. Opening scenes may remind fans of Ju-on (aka The Ring), but Stitches keeps you on the edge of your seat right up to the last shot.

I was surprised to learn that this isn’t the team’s day job, which typically involves corporate and more traditional editing work. But their love of the horror genre has encouraged them to explore indie film making too. With no professional backing (in other words, no money), Ben adheres to the staple filmmaking ideology of ‘grass roots horror on a low budget’. We asked him how Red Giant Software helps bring Bloody Cuts’ ideas to spine-chilling life.

“We colour-corrected and graded the whole film in Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 and used a combination of hot/cold filters, the awesome HSL filter (to really bring out the reds) and of course curves and auto-shoulder. Other bits and pieces were used elsewhere, but I found a combination of these filters really helped to give it a cinematic look. In many cases I reduced the ‘mix’ to ensure that the overall ‘Look’ wasn’t too heavy at any given time as well as being consistent, and added to that Cosmo (within ‘Looks 2.0′) gave a nice subtle soft skin appearance without being overboard” said Ben.

“The Stitches text animation was created with Trapcode 3D Stroke, by our graphics artist Alexander Purcell, and it appeared on both the teaser and the titles for main film. We also found Magic Bullet Denoiser extremely useful for the low-lit intro/title shots, which were caught on the fly during the shoot on a secondary DSLR camera. We did several tests to get to the look we wanted, which needed to be subtle, but cinematic, as well as distancing it from the (sometimes noticeable) DSLR look as much as possible. Worked like a dream!

Stitches is the second film in an anthology of 13 and we can’t wait to see the next terrifying installment.

Important Links

• Bloody Cuts
• The making of ‘Stitches’
• ‘The Lock Up’
• Interview with Ben
• Follow them on Twitter as @BloodyCutsFilms
• Join the Facebook Group

We’re always busy coming up with new ways to keep our software up to date, add in the support that you’re asking for, and ensure that bugs you’ve been telling us are getting fixed – roll that all together, and you get Magic Bullet Suite 11.1, the latest incarnation of the suite, with these great additions:

Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 for Vegas Pro

To quote a great man, “It will be available soon. Yes. You heard me. Soon.” Well, soon has arrived – download the latest Magic Bullet Suite 11.1 installer to grab Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 for Vegas Pro. This release has all of the great Looks 2.0 features working in Vegas Pro 10, in both the 32 and 64 bit variants. We are also actively working with Sony to ensure Looks 2.0 will work perfectly in the upcoming Vegas Pro 11 release. So, grab it now for Vegas Pro 10, and get our thumbs up on a seamless transition when you upgrade.

Magic Bullet Colorista II 1.0.4

One of the bugs we’ve been hearing about the most in Colorista II is an issue in Premiere Pro CS4, CS5, or CS5.5 where you end up with an error dialog stating, Error: “Unable to get a suitable preview frame for the keyer dialog”. We’ve found the solution and are including this fix in the Magic Bullet Suite 11.1 release.

Introducing Red Giant Link 1.0

One of the toughest computer maintenance issues everyone has is ensuring that you’re running the latest versions of the software you rely on daily. For Red Giant customers, this has meant checking our website for updates or perhaps hoping you didn’t miss the blog post or newsletter that mentioned the update you’ve been waiting for. We’ve identified that hole in our software delivery process and are introducing Red Giant Link 1.0 as the solution. Link is a simple piece of software that will let you know when updates are available to fix issues or add functionality. For the full details on Link, read all about it here.

Grab the full Magic Bullet Suite 11.1 installer here.

In case you missed it, we recently shipped Trapcode Form 2.0. Never content to just sit back, we spent some time post-release fixing up a few issues that we discovered and wanted to share the fixes for those issues with you today (as well as a bonus fix for Lux!). The issues we have resolved:

Lux 1.2.1:

• If the spotlight was pointed at 90 or 270 degrees to the camera, you end up with a single line of transparent pixels.

Form 2.0.1:

• A crash with opening some projects with OBJ models containing texture coordinates.
• Added support for point cloud and vertex only OBJs.
• Fixed an error when keyframing fractal field parameters.
• Catch and return AE error when using multi-processing with low memory, now returns an error dialog instead of rendering blank frames.
• Fixed world transform being double what it should be.
• Added Invert Z option for OBJ models exported with a z axis opposite to that of After Effects.

You can grab the latest Trapcode Suite 11.0.1 installer here. The suite installer contains the fixes for both Form and Lux.

Episode 61: Working with Looks Presets in Magic Bullet Looks 2

If you’ve worked with Magic Bullet Looks, then you know how ridiculously awesome it is for both using the huge library of preset looks for quick results, and for creating your own looks as well. But you’ve probably come across the situation where a look you absolutely loved didn’t quite work with your footage.

Well, In this episode of Red Giant TV,  Simon Walker will go over the presets in Looks 2 giving you tips and techniques for getting the most out of them, while working faster, and he’ll also look at some of the new features in Magic Bullet Looks 2 to talk about how you can use them in this process to get even more out of this powerful tool.

Watch it HERE.

LIA – Lab Inter Arts, (based at the University Mozarteum Salzburg, Austria), is a performance-oriented workshop headed by Prof. Helmi Vent, in which projects on various themes are developed together with the participants on location through improvisational processes. When the group took their performance work to India recently, they faced more than one or two challenges.

From the outset they knew that financial resources for the documentary would be limited and coupled with environmental issues (monsoon season); it was not going to be a straightforward project. The story of this documentary is enlightening in every sense of the word and we asked Martin Gerhard Hantich, the Technical Director at LIA, how Magic Bullet Looks gave definition to some of the more color challenging shots.

Martin told us: “We had to travel light (in overly crowded trains), so there were no lights, bouncers or a larger crew; it was me together with an Indian camera assistant who had a lot of other duties to handle, like discussing with officials or translating. I was capturing sound and video material at the same time while chasing our performers through the crowded streets of Mumbai. The relatively high humidity and heat, coupled with the spontaneous nature of the project, made it quite a challenge.

“Most activities were chosen on a day-to-day schedule at many different locations, so there was hardly any time for thorough planning, manual white-balance or all of the other amenities you have when you’re shooting feature or in a more ‘controlled’ environment. It was more like ‘this performer will start the performance there and whatever will happen – we’ll see’.

“I knew from the beginning that this rather ‘instantaneous’ way of working will require some adjustment in the post, also because the light situation at that time of the year in Mumbai was far from ideal with a hazy smog dome covering the city most of the time.

An example of the footage before and after Magic Bullet Looks

“Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks gave me the power to easily adjust the overall look and give the documentary the ’16mm’ appearance I wanted, set highlights where there were none and tweak the entire picture. Without Looks, it would have been way harder to achieve all of that while maintaining a small production budget.”

Before Magic Bullet Looks

After Magic Bullet Looks

Learn more about the documentary HERE.

Every once in a while I like to put Netflix aside and look for a good short film on Vimeo (I have a Roku box, so I can watch Vimeo on my TV). There’s a lot of great stuff there, from a lot of talented people. In fact, I recently found a film called Unemployment, that was just so wonderful, I wanted to share it with you.

The hilarious, well shot, well-acted, and well written film is co-directed and acted by Chris Crutchfield and Austin Herring, two very talented guys who who’ve done a lot of great work together over the years. Trapcode Particular and Magic Bullet Suite, which are both part of Chris’ and Austin’s filmmaking arsenal, were used in Unemployment.

From Austin: “Trapcode continues to blow my mind every time they come out with a new plug in, and its no surprise that Magic Bullet is quickly becoming THE color grading software of choice for guerrilla filmmakers like us and high end Hollywood professions too. I use those on pretty much every single project I work on.”

From Chris: “Red Giant products have been a crucial tool in my arsenal. It’s like having a Swiss army knife of plugins, where there’s always something I can manipulate or modify, with relative ease and speed, that will allow me to achieve whatever look or effect I’m going for.”

I’m not new to Chris and Austin’s work. I actually found their stuff a couple of years ago, when they were working together at IMIGpro, where they created a series of “educational” videos to explain the various facets of our industry. I never realized how little I, and the rest of Hollywood, actually knew…

Ok, maybe they’re not educational, but they’re seriously funny – and there’s a bunch more, so check ‘em out. We’re glad that our products help such talented people tell their stories.

Check out more of Chris Crutchfield’s work HERE.

Check out more of Austin’s Herring’s Work HERE.