vfx.netzfilter

Follow me on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coxit/ (if you like:)

Besides some other projects I was really lucky to have worked on a thrilling movie as a VFX Producer for Pixomondo this year: Ninja Assassin, directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) and produced by Larry and Andy Wachowskis (The Matrix), is a very cool actionpiece in the tradition of ninja films. Dan Glass and Chris Townsend (Visual Effects Supervisors) gave it a stunning look and us the chance to contribute creativity and sweat! Check out the website!

I am very proud of the work the Ninja team at Pixomondo created and happy about how much it influences the look of the movie. It was a great team-effort on a very demanding show with lot’s of ups and downs. So much passion and love (”Add a little bit more love”;) went into the shots. It was a great experience for me!

Unfortunately we didn’t get the chance to give credit to all the great artist who contributed so much with their work, in the rolling titles of the movies. (We had 6 lines – just enough for 10 credits). But I would like to take the chance to do this here.

Thanks you! It was an honor and pleasure to work with you all!

My great coordination crew - keeping track of 160+ shots, countless tasks and notes for more then 50 artists:
Jan Fiedler (the brain)
Viktorija Ogureckaja
Franzisca Puppe

Bernd Nalbach (CG Supervisor)
Pieter Mentz (Bloody Lead)
Mohsen Mousavi

Fikret Yildirim

Marcel Kern
Irfan Celik
Michele Danzé
Julius Lechner
Ralf Rendelmann

» Read the rest of this entry «

(c) shotgun software

Shotgun Software announced their visual effects production tracking application, after 3,5 years of development, as a private beta.

I had the chance to test shotgun in production on two smaller projects in our studio. We used it to track tasks and versions between three branches. I would like to give you an idea about the capabilities of the application.

First some key features:

• Cross platform/Web-based
• Rapid task creation with customizable task templates
• Flexible scheduling including giant-charts
• Integrated messaging
• Issue and bug tracking
• Customizable home pages and project dashboards
• Custom reports of live data
• Tagging for fast and flexible organization
• Customizable Page, Entities, Relations
• Open Python API provides full CRUD access to all data

Shotgun allows you to track every “entity” of a typical visual effects production (shots, assets, versions etc.). There are a couple of predefined entities but you also have the possibility to create your own and link them to every other item in the system.

The heart of shotgun is the schedule which allows you to manage tasks linked to entities, which can be assigned to people or groups. The powerful filtering functionality allows you and everyone in the studio to look at the data and the schedule in the way you want to work with it. 

Integration

Shotgun is the most open (out-of-the-box) production tracking application that we tested so far. It is really easy to integrate it into a pipeline. The application provides a python api but you can also access and write data using a xml-rpc interface. The api is well documented and allows access to all fields in the database. In a quick test, our r&d department was able to connect our versioning tools with the database in less then one day.

Usability

As I mentioned before, the application is extremely customizable. You can easily create own pages from entities (e.g. shots) and just add every possible connected date field to it (e.g. status summary).

Unfortunately the interface is not really self-explanatory yet. You definitely need some guidance to use the full potential of the application. They published some really nice tutorial videos on their website.

Conclusion

I think the current version is just the starting point. It seems like the  developers concentrated on building a reliable and especially adoptable and customizable system as a foundation to build on top of it.

In fact, it is one of the most customizable and flexible web applications I have ever used. It feels much more like a database management system, in which you can create your own application, then like an out of the box package.

The coolest thing about the application is the team behind it. Talking to the people who created it, feels like they really love what they do!

Their are a couple of things I would love to see in future releases (mostly for producers and the management):

• Printing features! (customizable layouts, etc)
• Bidding and change order management/tracking
• Costs management & controlling
• Time-sheets (partly implemented)
• (Management) summaries across projects
• Resources leveling like in MsProject
• Additional editorial features: edl import, scan orders, counts sheets, etc.
• Project wiki and/or wiki pages per entity
• Personal dashboards to present eg. all tasks and related notes accumulated on one page
• Project dashboard with summarized data from several entities on one page (not spread over tabs)

Links

http://www.shotgunsoftware.com
Shotgun Tutorials

“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” – Robert Heinlein

A crowing collection of interesting articles about the technical and conceptional aspects of visual effects pipeline design and production databases:

APIs/XML/Integration

XML Services at Framestore CFC
This presentation illustrates the real-world deployment of a complex XML-RPC service architecture within one of Europe’s largest visual effects houses, ranging from integration with Filemaker Pro, to driving 35mm Laser Film Recorders.

EDDIEOFFERMANN DOT COM 
“XML is like violence. If it doesn’t solve your problem, you’re not using it enough.”

Digital Asset Management

DAM: good solutions;
Post pros want asset management integrated with project management

Specifications

Collada
COLLADA is a royalty-free XML schema that enables digital asset exchange within the interactive 3D industry.

OpenEXR
OpenEXR is a high dynamic-range (HDR) image file format developed by Industrial Light & Magic for use in computer imaging applications.

Products

Temerity
“Temerity Pipeline is the industry’s first complete production control application.  Designed for studios in the film, television and game industries, Pipeline provides seamless control over assets, revisions, archiving and job handling.”

Articles on workflows

Wikipedia: Workfow
“A workflow is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, work of a simple or complex mechanism, work of a group of persons,^[1] work of an organization of staff, or machines. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in workshare, work split or whatever types of ordering. For control purposes, workflow may be a view on real work under a chosen aspect,^[2] thus serving as a virtual representation of actual work.”

Pipelines: Plumbing for the next web
For the purposes of this paper, a pipeline is a metaphor for a series of tasks or operations that run in sequence. In their most abstract form, pipelines are made up of pipes. These pipes can be tasks, processes, actions, etc. Each pipe has an input, a middle, and an output. The middle definition really depends on the context in which the pipeline exists.

An activity based Workflow Engine for PHP
A computer application contains a number of different ‘tasks’, ‘transactions’, ‘programs’ or ‘modules’, each of which performs a particular function. Sometimes the processing of one particular task is supposed to be followed by one or more other tasks in order to complete some higher process.