Articles by COW News
COW Library : COW News
TV & Movie Appreciation
Gods, Marvel, & Maui: Making VFX on a Pacific Island
It's safe to say that there's no other VFX vendor in the world quite like capital T, let alone one that is constantly contributing to films like Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther, as well as the critically acclaimed TV series, American Gods. What makes capital T unique is that they’re a two person, husband and wife team, who work from their home office ??" a beach house in Hawaii. You'll be inspired by what 2 people can do, if also a little envious of where they're doing it!
Feature, People / Interview
COW News |
Cinematography
Get The Shot Without Getting Shot: Adventures in Stock Video
Rick Ray of DVArchive has traveled the world, lived in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, played ragtime piano for money in Australian bars, and both been arrested in Ethiopa and recruited those same police to be in his videos the very next day. In his NAB Show presentation for Adobe Stock, Rick gets specific about how to make real money in stock video following your passion around the world, what kind of equipment to choose and avoid, and yes, some advice about talking your way out of trouble.
Cow News |
Art of the Edit
TV Workflow Supervisor Kylee Peña: The Benefits of Pressure
TV workflow supervisor Kylee Peña (Jane the Virgin, Colony) visits Adobe's "Make It" talk show to chat with host Jason Levine about the evolution of motion picture workflows, from the days of film and tape to our modern digital world of crazy-high shooting ratios and constantly evolving technology. She also expounds on the upside to creative constraints and tight deadlines. And don’t miss the lightning round!!!
Feature, People / Interview
Cow News |
Adobe Creative Cloud
Motion Graphics Templates in Adobe Stock! Everybody Sing!
The recent addition of Motion Graphics templates to Adobe Stock in the Creative Cloud offers immediate access to over 1000 templates for title screens, lower thirds, and transitions, with more to follow, created by some of the world’s leading motion graphics artists and mograph pioneers Digital Juice. Motion Graphics templates inside Adobe Stock also offer a new avenue for Creative Cloud artists to monetize their work, by offering their own motion graphics templates for sale. This is a multi-faceted story that dives deep into multiple parts of a rapidly expanding Creative Cloud ecosystem that doesn’t handily lend itself to brief soundbites. It does, however, lend itself to song. Everybody sing along!
Feature
COW News |
Panasonic Cameras
The Panasonic EVA1: Questions Answered!
Anticipation that Panasonic began building for their "mystery camera" at April's NAB Show 2017 was paid off at June's Cine Gear Expo 2017 in Hollywood, as Panasonic finally unveiled their AU-EVA1 cinema camera. Compact, lightweight, equipped with a newly designed 5.7K Super 35 sensor, and positioned between the Panasonic Lumix GH5 4K mirrorless camera and the VariCam LT 4K cinema camera, the AU-EVA1 is tailor-made for handheld shooting, but also well suited for documentaries, commercials, and music videos. Panasonic Cinema Product Manager, Mitch Gross has provided some answers to early questions about the EVA1’s target audience, shooting applications, Dual Native ISO, the 5.7K sensor, and more.
COW News |
Color Grading
Grading The LEGO Batman Movie: Animal Logic and FilmLight
Following successful collaborations on The Matrix, Legends of the Guardians, and Happy Feet, Sydney's Animal Logic worked with Warner Bros on The LEGO Movie from pitch to proof of concept to post. Animal Logic has gone even further on the latest LEGO animated feature, The LEGO Batman Movie, where they were embedded with the production for over a year. The range of their work pushed every aspect of the Baselight system for editorial, VFX, and HDR not just for post, but for the entire production process.
Feature
COW News |
RED Camera
Don Burgess aligns with Light Iron and Panavision for ALLIED
Don Burgess, ASC trusts Light Iron. His last seven films can attest, so Burgess chose Light Iron to support him again with digital dailies and post finishing services on Allied. Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, the World War II-set film sees an intelligence officer's romance with a French Resistance fighter tested when high command thinks a double agent might be in play.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview, Business, Project
COW News |
NAB Show
NAB Show New York 2016: Growing, Yet Still Intimate
Calling April's NAB Show "overwhelming" is an understatement. The expo that fills the rapidly expanding Las Vegas Convention Center every April topped 103,000 attendees and 1700+ exhibitors in 2 million square feet of exhibit space. The Big Apple's edition of the NAB Show is more bite sized: taking place this week at the Javitz Convention Center, 7000 visitors will be able to engage with 300 exhibitors, along with a variety of new opportunities for in-depth workshops on cutting-edge technologies. Here's a preview of the week's festivities.
COW News |
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe MAX 2016: Breakthroughs in Design and Productivity
You might be excused for thinking that, barely a month since Adobe announced massive updates to their Creative Cloud suite at IBC, there might not be much more to add, except that there’s no way that Adobe would bring 10,000 people to San Diego for the Adobe MAX creativity conference and not have some truly compelling new news. Read on for news of new design tools for app prototyping, photorealistic comping/visualization, the new Adobe Sensei framework of intelligent services built into the entire Creative Cloud Platform, the integration of Reuters video and photography into Adobe Stock’s editorial collection, and, of particular interest to folks working in web video, the introduction of the new Social Publishing Panel within Adobe Premiere Pro.
COW News |
Panasonic Cameras
Shooting MTV's Mary + Jane with Panasonic VariCam 35
To shoot the ½ hour scripted comedy series for MTV, Mary + Jane, the producers at Television 360 enlisted cinematographer Charles Papert (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Key and Peele), who found that Panasonic VariCam is a great fit for moving fast and getting great images when time and resources are scarce.
COW News |
Art of the Edit
Game of Thrones: Battle of the Bastards VFX
Deluxe Entertainment Services Group (Deluxe) has shared with us that its Australian animation and visual effects studio Iloura delivered a significant suite of work for the recent "Battle of the Bastards" episode of HBO's tentpole series Game of Thrones. Working on the epic battle sequence for the Season 6, Episode 9 crescendo, Iloura's team of visual artists used a mix of VFX and hand-crafted animation techniques to realize the vision for the bloody showdown. As a bonus, we include HBO's production featurette on staging and shooting Game of Thrones' most epic scene yet.
Feature
Iloura VFX |
Art of the Edit
Creative Studio leads Pink Through the Looking Glass
The Creative Studio's Director of CG Steve Parish led the VFX team, who first worked to bring together eighteen passes of a continuous seventy second shot as Pink moves across the chessboard in a fully CG generated environment. Meyers and Sarsfield had worked carefully to capture the motion controlled camera move, ensuring that there were no intersections between the characters, but the VFX team had a lot of clean up on the chessboard to create a clean plate before adding reflections and shadows to the floor in order to sell through the separate passes of Pink's game pieces interacting in the scene.
Editorial, Feature
COW News |
Art of the Edit
Adventures in File Transfer: Crawford's Transformed Workflow
The boom in Georgia location production has led to new opportunities for Atlanta's Crawford Media Services to provide everything from dailies to finishing, all the way through archiving. The trick is that while, locations are local, the productions and client operating bases may be across the country, or even on other continents. As media bloomed to over 200TB daily, FTP was no longer an option. To the rescue rode Signiant Media Shuttle.
Feature
COW News |
Art of the Edit
What Comes After Landing that Big Editing Job?
Sitting in on a meeting of The Editors' Lounge can be informative to say the least, and advance your career with wise words and not only been-there-done-that-information, but a real melting pot of new information and strategy. Join in for point-by-point discussion of what to do next after landing your big editing job.
Editorial, Feature
The Editors' Lounge |
Color Grading
Baselight Ka-booms in Belfast
Belfast, in Northern Ireland, doesn't have a great history in post-production. But Ka-boom, which started in 2010 as an audio facility, the specialisation of co-founder Will McConnell, quickly grew to fill the void in a city which is now rapidly becoming a major production centre.
Editorial, Feature
FilmLight |
TV & Movie Appreciation
VFX Legion | Hardcore Henry breakdown reel
Remote post-production and visual effects studio VFX Legion has released its breakdown reel for the incendiary Hardcore Henry.
The reel reveals the work that went into the first-person perspective action film, from augmenting violence to stitching shots together into one continuous sequence.
Editorial, Feature
COW News |
NAB Show
Creative COW NAB Show 2016 News: Wednesday Edition
Welcome to Wednesday's edition of the the industry's most comprehensive coverage of the 2016 NAB Show. Some of the companies with especially wide-ranging presentations including AJA, ARRI, and Blackmagic Design, with the latest news from hundreds of other companies in cameras and support gear, storage, archiving, broadcast, 4K, and much much more.
COW News |
NAB Show
Creative COW 2016 NAB Show News: Tuesday Edition, April 19
Welcome to Tuesday's edition of the the industry's most comprehensive coverage of the 2016 NAB Show. Some of the companies with especially wide-ranging presentations including AJA, ARRI, and Blackmagic Design, with the latest news from hundreds of other companies in cameras and support gear, storage, archiving, broadcast, 4K, and much much more.
Cow News |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Peter Doyle: Supervising Visual Colourist at Technicolor
Peter Doyle, Supervising Visual Colourist at Technicolor, shares details of his upward spiraling career. His deep technical knowledge allows for a perfect blend of creativity and productivity in equal measure. Here he talks about his career, his aspirations, and his involvement in productions right from the outset.
Feature, People / Interview
FilmLight |
TV & Movie Appreciation
The Walk: Largest Use of Cloud Computing in Film History
Award-winning VFX Company Joins UPP and Rodeo FX to Recapture the Legendary Walk Between the World Trade Center Towers. Lead VFX vendor Atomic Fiction needed a more efficient way to do the compute-intensive, and traditionally very expensive, processes of rendering. The company used their cloud-based software Conductor, which allows artists to offload the processing from their own computers and send it to the cloud. By the end of the project, Atomic Fiction had completed 9.1 million hours of processing in the cloud, which equates to over a millennium of processing time!
Editorial, Feature
Shaina Ostroff |
Art of the Edit
Tomorrowland -- Building a World Beyond with cineSync
Earlier this year, Disney brought another of its theme park attractions to the silver screen in Brad Bird's Tomorrowland - a VFX-fuelled adventure that whisks viewers across time, space and alternate dimensions. Computer graphics facility Whiskytree was brought on to the project to create the gleaming cityscape of Tomorrowland itself.
Feature
Whiskytree |
Color Grading
Colour Grading The BBC's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a seven-part adaptation of Susanna Clarke's novel set in the Napoleonic Wars, and says Technicolor Montreal's Head Colourist Nico Ilies, a beautifully crafted period fantasy drama with outstanding acting, great cinematography and art direction, beautiful costumes and amazing VFX work -- an absolutely ideal colorist's playground. Working in Baselight, Nico took pictures in a variety of directions for this unusually diverse tale.
Feature, People / Interview
Nico Ilies |
TV & Movie Appreciation
VFX from a tropical paradise
In today’s landscape, post-production companies are no longer restricted by geography. Husband and wife VFX team Lindsay and Jamie Hallett have based their business in Maui, while working on some of filmdom's biggest franchises and features: Avengers, Iron Man, X-Men, Ant-Man, American Sniper, and the latest installment of the Divergent seris, Insurgent. Here are some of their insights on remote collaboration. VERY remote.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
cineSync VFX |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Poldark: Full CG Elements and Dramatic VFX
VFX is playing an increasingly important role in small screen period drama, and for the vendors has become a more demanding prospect than ever before. You just need to watch an episode of BBC's Poldark to see why.
Dark, dramatic and oozing atmosphere, Poldark is top quality British drama indeed, its narrative unravelling across the southern coasts of England across eight eventful episodes. It was the London-based studio Lexhag that brought this new vision to life for the BBC, using a mix of LIDAR scan technology, full-CG ship elements and the organisational capacity of ftrack.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
London-based Lexhag |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Dragons reborn: cineSync and Game of Thrones
Transporting George R.R. Martin’s fertile imagination from the page to the screen is no easy task, especially when that means creating three fully-grown CG fire-breathers. Thankfully one of the shows dragon wranglers, Pixomondo, has been on the show since Season 2, and with cineSync on its side, there's no challenge it can't tackle. We're very glad to have special guests Pixomondo join the Creative COW Library to tell us the tale.
Editorial, Feature
Pixomondo |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Stargate Studios: VFX for Television
Nightmare-spawning VFX, gruesome yet realistic shots for monsters we're glad are on the other side of the television glass, heart-wrenching, but necessarily believable medical drama effects are all but part of a working day at Stargate Studios. Working a television post production schedule is a beast all its own, and here, they tame the beast a bit with some great VFX and some mocha Pro magic...
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Imagineer Systems |
TV & Movie Appreciation
The Giver Blooms with Color from Technicolor PostWorks NY
The Giver centers on a boy who comes to question the colorless, utopian community he has grown up in after learning about the "real" world from an elderly man. The reawakening of the boy's memories and emotions is reflected in his growing ability to see in color. This gentle transition from b&w to color was handled by Technicolor-PostWorks' boutique finishing facility, The Room, which handled numerous creative and technical challenges in post production.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Technicolor PostWorks |
Adobe After Effects
Zero VFX: Why Some Effects Are Better Unseen
Kyle Andal and Gerard Andal, lead compositors at Zero VFX, bring invisible post-production magic to several films - including 2014 Academy Award-winning "American Hustle," in which the team helped transform 2013 Boston to 1978 New York - and also several commercial shots with mocha Pro.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Imagineer Systems |
Canon Cameras
Homeland: Behind the Scenes with Canon Glass/David Klein ASC
David Klein, ASC, who is nominated for a 2014 Best Cinematography Emmy® Award for his work on Homeland, first AC Dominik Mainl, and B camera operator Bob Newcomb break down what's in their tool kit: an ARRI Alexa mounted with Canon Cinema Zoom Lenses, a RED Epic, a Canon Cinema EOS 1D C, and a Canon EOS 5D Mark III.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Stefani Rice |
Cinematography
The NASA IMAX Project with Cinematographer James Neihouse
James Neihouse, the large format cinematographer renowned for his work on projects from shuttle launches to volcanic eruptions, and newly-minted Academy member, finds himself working around the globe, literally, shooting the IMAX 3D film, Earth 2.0 (working title) co-produced by Walt Disney Pictures and NASA. In this feature, Neihouse reflects on experiences working with astronauts, race cars, and rocket launches, and how important choosing the best equipment is in extreme production.
Feature, People / Interview
Creative COW |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Milk Explodes All Over London For “24”
Milk is working with Fox as the lead VFX studio on "24: Live Another Day" -- currently airing on Sky 1 in the UK and around the world -- to create a mix of CG and effects work for the heart-stopping series, as it celebrates its debut year in business.
Editorial, Feature
Creative COW |
Better Technology For Better Brand Engagement
Whisper Media is a Singapore-based advertising company specializing in post-production branding and product placement. With incredibly tight deadlines, and massive files to move, Whisper used Signiant Media Shuttle to reduce transfer times from 24 hours to less than 30 minutes.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Manav Kapoor |
Adobe After Effects
mocha Tracks The Wolf of Wall Street
With multiple VFX Oscars (Hugo and Titanic, plus a nomination for Apollo 13) plus a couple of Emmys (Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) under his belt, the most remarkable thing about Rob Legato's latest VFX extravaganza is that it doesn't appear to have any VFX at all! Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is a masterpiece of what has become known as invisible effects, and this article from our friends at Imagineer, highlighting Rob's work with mocha, is a real eye-opener.
Editorial, Feature
Imagineer Systems |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Method Studios Creates Dramatic Effects for Divergent
Method Studios was selected as the lead VFX vendor, who ultimately proved to provide 381 shots for Summit Entertainment's Divergent. Set in a dystopian Chicago, one hundred years in the future, the film demanded seamless and invisible VFX to create a believable world of complex environments using set extensions, digital doubles and CG characters.
Editorial, Feature
Method Studios |
Art of the Edit
LOOK Effects Takes Wing in Noah
LOOK Effects is proud to announce their visual effects contribution to Darren Aronofsky's latest film, "Noah," from Paramount Pictures and Regency Enterprises, which opened in theaters March 28.
Editorial, Feature
LOOK Effects |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Thor: The Dark World: Luma Pictures Unites Two Continents
The VFX house, Luma Pictures was called upon again to deliver VFX shots for the newest installation of Marvel's Thor adventures, "Thor: The Dark World." Working seamlessly across two continents, Luma delivered major villains, creatures, sets, atmospheric effects, character-interactive effects, and much more for the second film in the series.
Editorial, Feature
Creative COW |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Restoring the Frank Capra Classic, It Happened One Night
Frank Capra's 1934 comedy "It Happened One Night" was recently the subject of a lovingly painstaking 4K restoration by Sony Pictures Entertainment. With tender care to retain the soft, glowing look that Director of Photography Joseph Walker, ASC was so well known for, Colorworks beautifully restored the film with all of the nuance and elegance of the original.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Creative COW |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Ender's Game: The Set-to-Screen Color Pipeline
With 1500 VFX plates, 900 final VFX shots and 350,000 R3D source VFX frames spread across more than a year's work and a hundred different people, Light Iron colorist and co-founder Ian Vertovec and CEO Michael Cioni needed to create an efficient data management and color pipeline for Ender's Game. In this case study, Light Iron takes you step by step through the collaboration and innovation that fueled this demanding project.
Feature
Light Iron |
TV & Movie Appreciation
Warcraft: A Virtual World from a Virtual Production
Read about the amazing CG work with Animatrik's virtual production technology used in Warcraft. The team supplied their camera tracking, motion capture suits and technology to enable realistic on-set performances from the orc performers.
Editorial, Feature
COW News |
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COW Library : COW News
