the Scarlet Letters

i'm curious: why did you use the house kitchen rather than the studio kitchen?

Mostly because there's more space. But also because the light is better. I needed a lot of ambient in order to get decent white backgrounds.

Sweet! Here's a cool tidbit, I watched the Fountain last night, amazing film....reading up online, turns out Aronofsky wanted to use as few cgi shots as possible, so a lot of the effects work was done with liquids in tanks....I'll keep researching, havent watched the dvd extras yet but it sounded interesting, and the movie definitely has a unique look.

Good luck with your RAM purchase, and congrats on your elder rig!

from wikipedia, on the Fountain:

"Using CG is really the easy route because it's so prevalent and the tools are great. What it did was really force us to come up with creative solutions to solve a lot of our problems." One creative solution was uncovering Peter Parks, a specialist in macro photography, who had retrieved deep-sea microorganisms and photographed them in 3-D under partial funding from the Bahamas government. Parks brewed chemicals and bacteria together to create reactions of which Schrecker and Dawson shot 20,000 feet worth of film in the course of eight weeks for The Fountain. To create the effects, Peter Parks had taken advantage of fluid dynamics, which affected the behavior of the substances that he photographed. "When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you're looking at infinity. That's because the same forces at work in the water—gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices—are happening in outer space," Parks said. The specialist's talent convinced the film's creative department to go beyond computer-generated imagery and follow Parks' lead. Instead of millions of dollars for a single special effects sequence, Parks generated all the footage for the film for just $140,000."

That was a lot of work for your art, Sven, way to go!

Great find for Sven, Jeffery. Inspiring!

Do not discount the "toy aisle". There are lots of variations of the old 80's concoction "slime" that will allow you to use an ACTUAL slimy pseudopod in a variety of colors - this stuff has the advantage of being able to be used in open air, and is generally more washable than, for instance, paint.

wow!!

mr. creative pants!!!

nice work on just jumping in to get the effect happening!

...Its allways a big experiment and possible wasted time in figureing out ways of getting the look you want.

I applaud your creativity and go geterness!

@Uba: Thanks for the info about "The Fountain!" I'd been thinking I maybe wanted to see it -- now I think I gotta! (Um, after October, that is. :-P )

I love the look of special effects that get done in a watertank. There's a lot of stuff from the 80's -- like in Poltergeist and Ghostbusters -- but not so much in the CG era. I'm tickled at the idea of having water tank shogs skronching the CG elders. ;-)

@Markalope: Good point about the toy aisle. Particularly for stopmo projects, there are a lot of elements that you can find on the shelf, rather than having to fab them yourself.

With the shoggoth effect here, I need the ooze to be black because I'm doing a faux green screen effect -- using black against a white background, boosting the contrast, deleting everything that's black, and then replacing it with modified footage of boiling sugar.

While not perfect, the tempera/flour/corn syrup solution has a couple of big benefits: it can give me the high contrast that I need... And it's extremely cheap -- which is good, given the huge number of takes that I need.

@ Justin: "Mr. creative pants" -- ha! If we didn't already have a studio name, I might just steal that for our DBA. :-D