Dune 2 cinematographer Greig Fraser talks about using Unreal Engine to visualize the shots he wanted in the movie. It’s part of a trend of using Unreal as a previsualization and rendering engine for a variety of high quality, high budget movie productions.
Articles:
Just getting to the location of an eclipse is only half the battle. The rest of the trick is the weather; which is often only known 2-3 days before the event. It’s a very good idea to have a changeable fares for air, hotel, and car rentals. For the 2024 eclipse, I needed to switch from Austin, TX to Indiana 2 days before the event. Fortunately I had paid for changeable reservations with became key.
The other part was knowing where to go for accurate data and who to trust. Here’s some of the resources I used:
The most important part was cloud cover. There was a lot of last minute nail biting and plan changes trying to make your bet on where the clouds would split.
Day-of visible live cloud pattern and prediction websites to know where to drive to avoid clouds!
Article Links:
The Arsenal device attaches to your camera and provides a number of previously more manual operations. It’s supposed to automate photo stacking, long exposures, focus stacking, timelapse, removes moving elements (people/cars/etc), color enhancing, and other features using advanced intelligence and AI.
I got captured by their ad because almost everything was filmed here in Oregon and boy is it slick looking:
Is it any good? I wondered if they were able to put the smarts of a good photographer into a device. Well…the British aren’t one for candy coating things:
So, it’s another great reminder that you should take the fabulous promises in a slick video and a smash Kickstarter with a grain of salt.
Christian Möhrle shows you how to magnify specific areas of your photographs using the perspective warp tool in Photoshop. Fstoppers has a number of other interesting tutorials for those who are interested.
The things we’re able to do with 2D images with just a few clicks is absolutely mind blowing.
Luke Edwin shares this video collection of cool and often very simple tricks to get some interesting effect shots. Motion controlled greenscreen, shots that zoom in and out through objects, slow-motion effects, product shots and lots of little effects used in many modern videos. It’s pretty incredible these techniques and equipment are achievable by just about anyone for a very limited budget.
Equipment demonstrated:
Captain Disillusion shows you the various modern video techniques that create the popular videos of very busy and populated locations that appear utterly devoid of people.
Sirrandalot is not the first person to use a film-grain/film-like shader effect to give a certain feel. He is, however, the first to use Blender’s Cycles path-tracing engine to create a highly detailed physical modeling of a 3D camera body, simulate the various properties of a glass lens (then multiple lens system), the properties of chemical film, and then render scenes through this highly complex setup to generate real film-like images. Check out the final not-photos here or on Imgur.
You can download the camera and play with it yourself.
Tilt-shift photography is how you create the illusion of looking upon a miniature world. Done first with special lenses, now it’s easily done in software like Photoshop.
Someone recently tried this with drone footage of Portland and came out pretty well
Manual Cinema does shadow puppet shows in Chicago. They do some amazing shows such as Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol and many others. They use combinations of puppetry and live acting. Here’s a video on how they produce some of their effects and shows.
Here’s another video of how they create their effects:
Here’s an example of what they can produce in a short film called Eighth Blackbird