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With the power put into everyone’s hands by the growth of computer capabilities on an almost daily basis, people who want to create their own movies are starting to have a lot of the same tools as the major studios. What this means for folks who have a vision of the film they want to create is they have to approach the studios in a whole new way. Where it used to be good enough to go in with a verbal pitch for your film (This is like The Birds meets Jaws, and everyone is running for their lives), that doesn’t cut it any more. Now you have to prove you have the story telling chops and a tale worth financing by creating your own little preview, more than a trailer but less than a feature film. One of the best examples I have seen of this recently is Controller, about a girl who wants to escape from the corporation who controls her. To do so, she remotely takes control of her boy friend and forces him to wipe out anyone who would stand in the way of her freedom.

It was good enough that Fox is putting up the money to actually make the piece, so we can hope to see the extended story soon. I don’t know how long ago this trend started, but I first became aware of it when the first 6 minutes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was created in just under a decade, and the results shown to a movie company that decided to finance its completion. This is definitely a great way for people to spend minimum money to create something that might get them to realize their dream; thanks to The Dissolve for the heads up on this project!

CONTROLLER (控制者) from Saman Kesh on Vimeo.

There are a lot of great apps to allow you to do video production for TV, Movies, or other purposes, and the folks over at the BBC have put together a video about their favorites. Using these resources might allow you to create something quite unique, and there were one or two I had not heard of before watching this. I have to also mention this is my first use of the new BBC EMB, the BBC Video Embedding interface they have just made available. It takes up a much larger screen footprint than any of the other embedding structures I like to use, including the previous Greedy Gus winner, Vimeo, but I consider that a small price to pay for the right to include their quality productions on my pages.

There is a very creative guy called Joey Shanks who puts together videos that are tutorials in how to create various kinds of special effects in association with PBS. One of his recent projects was to show how to create a scientifically accurate Black Hole like the one in the movie Interstellar. The video allows you to see step by step how each element was captured by the camera, and then gives you a peak at how they look when all the elements are added to the composite layer by layer. This is not how the effect was actually created for the film, in part because a big piece of Joey’s approach is to do as many elements of a given build using real world objects and a camera to film them as possible. But it does give you enough information that you might get some really good ideas of how to build your own effects. I found out about this series from Cinefex, a great place to learn more about how the effects you see on the screen get built, and who is doing them.

Black Hole creation | Shanks FX | PBS Digital Studios from Joey Shanks on Vimeo.

I have sat through a lot of tutorials about how to do things in a 3D CGI modeling and animation software package before, and this one just made me grin. Jay Johnson has a kid who had an animation project in mind, which he shared with his dad. Dad installed the full free DAZ Studio Pro software suite on his computer, the child beat on it for half an hour getting nowhere, and gave up in frustration. Jay then showed his kid how to use the software to make his project come to life in about 20 minutes, and he reports that two days later the end result was amazing according to dad.

That event caused Jay to assemble this 20 minute Quick-Start Guide for DAZ Studio Pro, paring the process down to just those components needed to get a project started and come up with a final product. Mind, he did jump to the various library segments that he knew held the components needed for the specific project to hand, so you can expect to spend a bit of time looking through each area for the building blocks required for yours. But the important part is the way he trimmed back the process to just the bare bones required to complete the task. Follow that process, and save your work often under incremented file names so you can go back to any step of it later. Once you get the first one built, you can go back and tweak any aspect of it to your hearts content until you get it perfect, but this tutorial should help you get started (and finished) a lot quicker than you expected to.