Twins on TV!

Holy cow - my sister is on the television!

I wrote about her before, when her book debuted a few weeks ago. Well, were she is, promoting her book "Raising Twins: From Pregnancy to Preschool" on WGN News with Allison Payne.

Way to go, Shelly!

Twins!

Do you know someone with young twins? Or is expecting twins? Is that someone you? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you have to buy this book.

My sister, my amazing little sister, wrote a book called "Raising Twins: From Pregnancy to Preschool." She's a mother of four and a brilliant pediatrician, and offers a unique insight into raising twins.

The book is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which kinda indicates that she knows what she's talking about. She even has a blog called "A Pediatrician Mom of Twins," which features even more advice on having fun with your twins, and also features some of her mentions and interviews in, you know, obscure outlets like The New York Times.

I am so incredibly proud of my sister. You go, girl, indeed.

From the Amazon.com page:
About the Author: Shelly Vaziri Flais, MD, FAAP, is a board-certified pediatrician, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the mother of four children, including a set of twins. She has contributed to Chicago Parent, Healthy Children, and Twins magazines.

James Cameron's "Avatar" Teaser

Looking back at the last few posts, it seems like I nearly leapfrogged over an entire production on which I worked. It's almost as if "Transformers 2" didn't even happen, as if it is being erased from our collective consciousness. Huh. Imagine that.

Anywhoo, the highly anticipated teaser for James Cameron's "Avatar" is now available online. And the image above was chosen by the Randomizer 2009™ software, featuring ArbitraryBoost 3.0.

View the teaser here.

Because Editing Is Fun

Harrison Ford keeps losing his family.

This is the Sports Report!

Here are some cleverly edited clips from "The Colbert Report," with Stephen air-guitaring the 'extreme' theme of the Sports Report. And I say 'cleverly,' because I did it.

Colbert Character Breaks

Here are two amazing fan-made videos of Stephen Colbert breaking character. Serious kudos go out to these obsessive fans who cut the videos together.

Character Break Compilation by Di_br

These videos are courtesy of the No Fact Zone, the amazing Stephen Colbert fan site.

Camera Confusion

From "The Colbert Report," June 2, 2009. During the opening segment, the camera does an inadvertent cut, briefly taking Stephen by surprise. Ostensibly remaining in character, Stephen gives an honest and hilarious reaction. I just love Stephen's complete mastery and control over his face, and how he can change his entire screen presence with relative ease. I also admire Stephen's ability to move the show forward with nary a pause, as well as the producers' choice to keep the minor glitch in the show (rather than edit around it, or reshoot the segment).

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A Summer of Sequels

Two summers ago, I wrote about a Pixar film standing tall as the only major summer studio feature that was wholly original. In Wonder Takes Time, we marveled at Pixar's genuine intent on giving the marketplace of ideas fresh stories. Among sequels ("Pirates 3," "Spider-Man 3," "Shrek 3") and based-on-toy-films, television shows, and reboots ("Transformers," "The Simpsons Movie," "Halloween"), Brad Bird's "Ratatouille" stood alone as the unique entry of the summer.

Well, here we are again, in the summer of 2009, where Pixar has the lone wholly original film of the summer. Pete Docter's "Up," which opens May 29, and is a (gasp!) original screenplay, goes up against these summer films:

• Fast and Furious (sequel)
  
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine (sequel)
  
• Star Trek (reboot/sequel)
  
• Angels and Demons (sequel/based on novel)
  
• Land of the Lost (based on television show)
  
• Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian (sequel)
  
• Terminator: Salvation (sequel)
  
• The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (remake)
  
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (sequel/based on toy)
  
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (sequel)
  
• Bruno (based on television character)
  
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (sequel/based on novel)
  
• Julie and Julia (based on article)
  
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (based on television show)
  
• The Final Destination (sequel)
  
• H2 - Halloween 2 (sequel of a remake)

Post Magazine: "Star Trek" Returns

Post Magazine's cover story is all about ILM's visual effects for J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek." The article, written by Ken McGorry, touches on some of the major challenges behind our visual effects.

The article includes mentions and quotes from visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett, co-supervisor Russell Earl, animation supervisor Paul Kavanagh, digital production supervisor Michael DiComo, CG supervisor Tom Fejes, compositing supervisor Eddie Pasquarello, paint supervisor Beth D'Amato, and sequence supervisors Greg Salter, Mark Nettleton, David Weitzberg, Raul Essig, Conny Fauser, Jay Cooper, Francois Lambert, and Todd Vaziri.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

J.J. Abrams and DP Daniel Mindel shot Star Trek with an anamorphic lens... and if there's the sun or a star in the corner of a synthetic ILM shot — or when the Enterprise passes in a beauty shot and its lights strike the virtual lens — the compositors have to replicate all the complexities of light dancing across such a lens. "There are all these different layers to the lens flare that we have to replicate digitally," DiComo says.

ILM's Todd Vaziri analyzed what anamorphic lenses do and all their different properties so they could be used in simulated shots and they call the resulting program "Sunspot." Vaziri was a sequence supervisor whose job was to overlook all the sequences and make sure that ILM's shots were "correct to the film" — that they matched. "He takes great, great pains and it shows," says [compositing supervisor Eddie] Pasquarello. "That was one of our compositing coups that I feel made a difference here — finishing touches that help our shots blend with the live action that J.J. gave us."

Click here to see the full credits for J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek."

"Star Trek" Fun

The banner image for Gizmodo's review of "Star Trek."

Here's an excerpt from a Gizmodo article titled, 'J.J. Abrams Admits Star Trek Lens Flares Are "Ridiculous"'

I'm curious to hear more about why you decided to use so many lens flares, and exactly when you decided to use them?

[Smiles] I don't know what you're talking about. [Laughs] I'm kidding. I know what you're saying with the lens flares. It was one of those things... I wanted a visual system that felt unique. I know there are certain shots where even I watch and think, "Oh that's ridiculous, that was too many." But I love the idea that the future was so bright it couldn't be contained in the frame.

The flares weren't just happening from on-camera light sources, they were happening off camera, and that was really the key to it. I want [to create] the sense that, just off camera, something spectacular is happening. There was always a sense of something, and also there is a really cool organic layer thats a quality of it... There are something about those flares, especially in a movie that can potentially be very sterile and CG and overly controlled. There is something incredibly unpredictable and gorgeous about them. It is a really fun thing. Our DP would be off camera with this incredibly powerful flashlight aiming it at the lens. It became an art because different lenses required angles, and different proximity to the lens. Sometimes, when we were outside we'd use mirrors. Certain sizes were too big... literally, it was ridiculous. It was like another actor in the scene.

We had two cameras, so sometimes we had two different spotlight operators. When there was atmosphere in the room, you had to be really careful because you could see the beams. So it was this ridiculous, added level of pain in the ass, but I love... [looking at] the final cut, [the flares] to me, were a fun additional touch that I think, while overdone, in some places, it feels like the future is that bright.

(To learn more about the lens flares from "Star Trek," click here and here.)

Here's a clever video that mixes the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" worlds, from current.com titled "Starship Enterprise Destroyed by the Death Star."



Another clever video, bringing the original series visually up-to-date with J.J. Abrams' film, from YouTube user 'partmor':



Finally, a hilarious video (that requires multiple viewings) from The Onion, with the headline, "Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as 'Fun, Watchable.'"


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Movie Marketing is Hard! "True Blood" and "Jennifer's Body"

Another in our Movie Marketing Is Hard! series.
Okay, so "True Blood" is not actually a feature film (it's the Alan Ball series on HBO), but the studio used this one-sheet as a prominent part of their publicity campaign. The series debuted in 2008, and the Megan Fox starrer "Jennifer's Body" comes to theaters later in 2009.

The posters are essentially dead ringers for one another, with the slight exception of one storytelling element: the "True Blood" poster features a subtle vampire fang, while "Jennifer's Body" has no such fang (since the film is about cannibalism, not vampires). But the similarities in overall composition, framing, color scheme, the heavy lipstick, tongue lick and blood drip are groanworthy.

Thanks to Alessandro for the tip!

Millimeter Magzine: Back On Trek

Millimeter Magazine recently posted a really nice article about the making of "Star Trek," with an emphasis on the cinematography, visual effects design, and the digital intermediate color timing process. As part of a discussion about the photographic style of the film, director J.J. Abrams, cinematographer Dan Mindel and visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett talked about the use of lens flares in the film. As a sequence supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, one of my duties on "Star Trek" was to create synthetic lens flare aberrations for our visual effects shots that matched stylistically and technically with the first unit photography.

We used flares in "Star Trek" as a storytelling device in a way that has never been done before. The great thing is that J.J., Roger and I were on the same visual wavelength in terms of how, when and why to create the flaring aberrations in the film. The flares give the film a unique flavor of spontaneity and intensity, paradoxically giving the film a documentary-style grittiness, as well as a fanciful, otherworldly, abstract quality. I'll let them explain:

[The] technique was the strategic plan to build camera lens flares into the photography. For a sci-fi space film—or any film these days—that aesthetic is extremely rare, since filmmakers usually battle to remove flares from their photography, rather than insert them. Abrams’ and Mindel’s obsession with lens flares, however, was part of a strategic vision for the photography. The technique is so prevalent that Abrams jokes he may have designed “a future in which you’ll have to wear shades.”

“I can’t explain it with intellectual reasoning—I can just say it was important to me,” Abrams says. “Even though some people may think we went over the top with flares, I just loved that they made it feel like there was always something spectacular going on off-camera, as well as what was happening on-camera. It reminded me of the feeling I would get watching NASA footage. It might be a distraction to some people, and I apologize to them, but I loved that feeling that this was a more natural future, rather than a [stereotypical sci-fi] shiny future.”

Mindel says the approach required an attitude adjustment on the part of the camera crew. “We have been spending the last 20 to 30 years trying to take flares out,” he says. “Here, we loved the way the anamorphic lenses flare naturally, and we were told to let them happen and we even put them in when they weren’t there. Other space movies have that non-believable aspect of being photographically sterile, and they rarely allow the idiosyncratic nature of light and movement into the arena, which gives you a kind of homogenized movie. We were eager to make sure that did not happen here. We felt a degree of believability comes with the idiosyncrasies that we allowed onto the film—those aberrations on the lenses, flaring, and even a little misframing or accidents. Often, it’s accidents that go on to make up the great pieces of movie art. We felt that by allowing flares in, we would get an organic infringement into the sterile frame—adding a bit of imperfection, a degree of reality.

“We developed an interesting, low-tech technique for it. We had two guys with flashlights flaring the lens constantly. There is a real expertise to it. The hardest thing about the technique was how to keep the lamp operators out of frame since they had to play very close to the lens. The trickery comes from knowing how to flare the lens and hide behind the flare."

But the flaring technique hardly stopped once the production left the set. Mindel’s camera work served as the inspiration for the creation of artificial lens flares for many bits of hundreds of visual-effects shots. These flares were created using a proprietary system developed at ILM to match the specific aberrations of Mindel’s anamorphic lenses.

ILM Sequence Supervisor Todd Vaziri was responsible for developing the artificial lens-flare software system, which the company dubbed SunSpot. The system essentially combines off-the-shelf software, certain proprietary ILM tools, photographed elements, and several custom paint elements to painstakingly match the flares captured on the negative.

“The technique gives compositors instant, highly realistic anamorphic lens flares for our all-CG shots that are indistinguishable from real, practical flares shots by the first unit,” Guyett says. “We used it to create flares for a variety of purposes such as spotlights on the exterior of the Enterprise, lights on synthetic set extensions, the Vulcan sun, and a dwarf star featured in the film’s prologue.”

The article is available online here (free registration may be required), and in its April 2009 print edition.

Full Credits for "Star Trek"

It looks like the full credits for "Star Trek" are available online at trekmovie.com.  Scroll down to the Industrial Light & Magic section to see the names of the 300 people who worked to create the film's visual effects.

Click here to see the full credits.

Remastering "Star Trek"

I recently came across a nine-year-old article to which I contributed. Frank Garcia was looking for visual effects professionals' opinions on the idea of creating new visual effects for the original "Star Trek" episodes. The article, from January 2000, was written in the shadow of the Special Editions of the "Star Wars" trilogy and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," each of which featured newly created visual effects.


CBS Digital ultimately performed visual effects facelifts to the episodes, and has since released them on video and broadcast. You can learn everything that Paramount wants you to know about the remastered episodes at startrek.com, which features plenty of articles and before-and-after comparisons.

I contributed to the article, "Special Effects Redux," and my comments hold up surprisingly well. I'm always hesitant to read some of my old writing and interviews, (a few of the reviews on VFX HQ still make me cringe) but am happily satisfied that, in this case, I made an ounce of sense. I still am of the opinion that these 'special edition' revisits are ridiculous and purely driven by commercial concerns, rather than artistic merit.

For a discussion on contemporary visual effects and exploring the idea of recreating STAR TREK'S SFX, Fandom asked two visual effects professionals who are working in the business today for their views. First is Todd Vaziri, a noted visual special effects supervisor whose artistry can be seen in DR. DOLITTLE and XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS. He also writes extensively about the visual SFX business at his website Visual FX Headquarters. After a full briefing of Digital Stream's activities, Vaziri's feelings were mixed, just as they are with STAR WARS' special edition releases, about which he has written previously. 'As a purist, I think it's rather ridiculous,' says Vaziri. 'At a certain point you have to call a piece of art finished. And when they're done, you let it be. And you move on to a new project. You don't continually go back and fix a mistake that you may have made or retread the same ideas you had before. 'I'm very much an advocate of preserving the past and looking forward to try and create new classics. Which is the current, most accurate film? Are we going to get special editions with every film every 10 or 20 years? When a film comes out I'm assuming already 'Okay, this is the first pass, the rough draft.' '

On the other hand, Vaziri recognizes the allure of a compelling idea. 'It was such a refreshing change to see in DEEP SPACE NINE's 'Trials and Tribble-ations' the technology and the detail we can get today of the space station and the Enterprise. It was an interesting gimmick. Replacing the SFX of a single episode, that would be kinda cool. You put it on UPN and get great ratings. But to get into it for the entire series or a couple of episodes, is ridiculous.'

Vaziri also has strong feelings from an artists' point of view. 'I think of the people who toiled feverishly over the original STAR WARS, getting the shots and how revolutionary they were. The original SW shots that were replaced, they'll never be seen again!' Although Vaziri recognizes that the original STAR WARS releases will live on with DVDs and videotape, he says, 'The Special Edition is the 'final edition.' 'They made those episodes as well as they could with the money they had,' he says. 'Don't betray their efforts just because, oh, 20 or 30 years have passed and they can do it much better now.'

Asked if it is likely for Hollywood to develop a practice of replacing SFX on other iconic film or TV projects, Vaziri replies that the bottom line is economics. 'It could be profitable,' he says. 'The studio executives have to look and say, 'Are we going to spend to revamp this 30 year old film?' Studios are even reluctant to making new video transfers. They think it's not worth it. I think it will be very sparse.'


If there are any sins in Hollywood, in the way that visual special effects are produced, says Vaziri, are those projects that are spectacle over substance. 'I'm constantly pushing towards the use of SFX as a portion of the film,' he says. 'Not as a character gimmick or 'Hey! Look at me!' The best films are always about stories and characters. The SFX creates the worlds in which they live. In rare cases, the SFX are the characters, like JURASSIC PARK or THE PHANTOM MENACE where an entire character is being generated as SFX. For the most part, they should never take center stage. They shouldn't draw attention to themselves. The best SFX I've ever done are the ones people haven't noticed because they were so caught up with the film. We did about 50 or 60 visual effects for A STIR OF ECHOES, and there were only two or three that were really 'in your face.' Nobody noticed any of the other SFX. That's a big compliment because the work doesn't draw attention to itself. People don't walk out of the theater saying, 'Wow! Great SFX!' I think invisible is important.'

Contextual usage of SFX as part of the film is also very important, says Vaziri. Sinful 'spectacle over substance' effects films includes THE AVENGERS, LOST IN SPACE and GOZILLA, says Vaziri. In the case of a Digital Stream-created STAR TREK vision, Vaziri also has a problem with the forced comparison between the original and a new edition. 'That's extremely distracting. You're going to see an episode where the sets were so cheaply made that you can see a little gap on the floor and then you cut to this new, perfectly detailed CGI SFX shot? It totally does not fit within the context of the film! It takes you out of the film and draws attention to itself. If new SFX are made for 'The Doomsday Machine,' they're out of place and context. It draws attention to them rather than being a service to the story and characters.'

We Are America

For quite possibly the first time ever, I wholeheartedly agree with a Fox News anchor. Here's Shepard Smith speakin' the truth, with some salty language, as an added bonus!



Update: Our friend Stephen Colbert had something to say about Smith's antics.

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