Tag Archives: Grimm

Thanks to Jalal Jemison (Bent) and James Chick (HiveFX)

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James Chick/HiveFX

Another giant thank you to James Chick from HiveFX and Jalal Jemison from Bent Image Lab for putting together a great night of VFX from around PDX.  I was impressed with the refined approach that HiveFX takes with Grimm and their commercial work – they are clearly a force to be reckoned with and wise beyond their years and James is a great example of the young talent that is booming over there.  Jalal gave us an interesting look into the mind of a colorist and a taste of that world.  I think we’re all envious of the power and control that he wields with that sweet DaVinci Resolve setup.

Everything was recorded and I hope to get clearance to post a highlight video soon – watch this space!  Bits of the Silhouette demo will be included as well.

The raffle was a big success and thank you all for contributing!  We were able to raise about $100 to help defray the costs to import next meeting’s headliner, and that should knock the dollar amount down to a reasonable level that a sponsor can help cover.

Congrats to our raffle winners Chris Greene, Matt Keyes, Steve Molin, and Justin Nichols.  Another huge round of thanks for our meeting sponsors 3DPDX and Autodesk, and our raffle sponsors Silhouette, Blackmagic Design, Artbeats and O’Reilly Media.

The Spring meeting is shaping up to be the biggest yet, stay tuned for more info!

 

Jalal Jemison/Bent Image Lab

Next VFX/PDX Meeting: Monday, February 11th

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Time to mark your calendars yet again, good Portland VFX’ers.  The winter meeting is shaping up to be a veritable pixel bonfire!

Bent Image Lab’s go-to colorist Jalal Jemison is teaming with Blackmagic Design to show us the ins and outs of DaVinci Resolve, which has a great track record and, with it’s most recent release, is fast becoming the gold standard for color grading.   We’ll have the Blackmagic team on hand and the full tri-panel Blackmagic Control Surface in front of Jalal.  He’ll load us up with plenty of eye-popping before & afters from Bent’s recent work, and then show us step by step exactly how he gets those images to pop.  Usually his hands are a blur as he dials in the precise color values across the trackballs, but using the miracle of slow motion photography and instant replay, we may actually be able to make sense of what he’s doing!  The tricks up his sleeves that he usually reserves for clients.   Be careful, you just might learn something about the black art of color correction and image sweetening before he’s done.

But that’s not all.  This is a full on double bill and we’re equally excited to also have Hive-FX’s Lead Compositor James Chick presenting.  2012 was a big year for the Hivers and the momentum continues to build, as they pound out amazing work with their AE/Maya/C4D pipeline.  James has especially formidable on-the-box skills when it comes to After Effects, and has been carving a name out for himself as a prolific and gifted filmmaker.  To top it all off, Hive-FX has been building up it’s sister company Pinata Post and offers – yep, you guessed it – a fully functional DaVinci Resolve suite.  And now we’ve come full circle.  As Hannibal from the A-Team once said, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Between James and Jalal, this is a can’t miss meeting!

As if that wasn’t enough – J. Bills will also be showing a brief demo of the newly released roto & paint powerhouse Silhouette v5.0.   You thought they’d done about everything there is to do when it came to speeding up labor intensive paint & roto tasks?  v5 brings a gigantic list of new features, including Mocha tracking integration, a warper, and a full suite of stereo conversion tools.  We’ll run through the highlights at the start of the meeting and get everyone up to speed.

Happy to announce that following the meeting, we’ll have a raffle with some big prizes worth $$$ thousands, including a license of DaVinci Resolve, a license of Silhouette v5, as well as a $500 credit from Artbeats Stock Footage, and some great books & door prizes from other sponsors.  Speaking of, special thanks to Autodesk and 3DPDX for covering our winter meeting costs.  Our meetings are always free, but the raffle will help raise some funds to cover costs for our upcoming spring meeting featuring presentations from ILM and LAIKA.  Big plans!

Meeting details – save the date!

Monday February 11th, 2013

7:00pm to 9:00pm

Clinton St. Theater

2522 SE Clinton St.

Hope to see you all there!

Grimm Future Looks Bright

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Fxguide has a nice rundown of some of our local VFX work for Grimm, featuring Hive-FX and Bent Image Lab.  Much of the Bent breakdowns you see in the article were the basis of Fred Ruff’s VFX/PDX presentation last year, which also made the rounds both internationally and at Siggraph.  Check out the fxguide article here.

Definitely worth a look – this is the sort of bread & butter work that’s keeping the Portland VFX machine humming!  Be sure to check out the respective Grimm reels for both Bent and Hive-FX, and the Oregon film intern promo piece that featured both companies.


Grimm Behind the Scenes from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

Looking towards the future, it will be interesting to see what the Portland studios are able to do with the creature pipelines refined through this constant flow of Grimm work.  There are already rumblings of some indy films and other projects in the works, no doubt in part being leveraged against the flashy Grimm CG.

Speaking of some leveraging – it was sad to hear the last episode of Leverage Season 5 is indeed the series finale and there will be no 6th season in the works.  But cheers to Dean Devlin and crew on that all-important 5th season and syndication!  Hopefully Devlin can roll the momentum into possibly finding Leverage a new network home for a 6th season in the future (before being fully immersed in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day 2 and other pilot projects).  There are certainly enough rabid fans out there chomping at the bit for more.  Petitions, even!

Either way, Leverage had a good run and is definitely a source of Portland pride!  Next time, in addition to our fantastic production crews – hopefully future Leverage work can employ some of our top tier VFX talent as well.  Best of luck to them as they rally behind the battle cry:  “Let’s go steal a season 6!“

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