While I’ve posted about Florian Witzel before, I came across a post on notcot.org pointing to some of his making-of videos and thought that I’d put some up here. What I love about Florian’s work is that – for me – it is where mathematics, nature, 3D and design intersect. He makes very complicated things look very simple and beautiful.

The above video, Vestige, was a personal project that was later picked up for the SIGGRAPH 09 opening. More videos can be found at vimeo or his website.

While this is a little dated now, I only just got around to watching the science behind Benjamin Button detailing some of the techniques used by Digital Domain (among other companies) to bring Benjamin and the world around him into existence. It was an Oscar that was well deserved.

The thing I like about David Fincher is how he uses visual effects in that it always serves something in the story – rarely is it spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Well worth a look if you don’t mind having the movie magic that is Benjamin Button destroyed.

Quadcamera is an iPhone app that loosely simulates the multi-lens camera that takes a series of images over time and presents them as one image. Resolution is rather limited – my understanding is that the app is actually taking screen grabs of the iPhone and scaling them down rather than directly taking the 2MP image from the camera. So you’re not going to be able to print any of these pictures off (at any reasonable size) severely limiting its actual usefulness. But when you pair it with CameraBag you can at least get some interesting photos that you can upload to facebook.

Both apps are available for a few dollars each on the app store.

Tomorrow’s the day, ladies and gentlemen. A day where America can start to rebuild its credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world that it has lost over the past 8 years.

Poster design by ISO50.

I followed the 2004 elections quite closely and was deeply dissappointed when it went to Bush again (How does that happen?). This time around, though, there doesn’t seem to be any question about the outcome.

EDIT: The guys over at fivethirtyeight.com have their estimates of Obama winning sitting at a whopping 98.1%. This is of course assuming that there are no voting irregularities, shy tory or Bradley effects.

I’ve also been testing the site for mobile device compatibility, which works quite well, although a mobile specific CSS would be nice… iPhone users should check out the showreel to see some nice integration in action.

Keith Loutit has an awesome series of shorts up on Vimeo that utilise the ’tilt-shift lens’ effect where the depth of field of an image is dramatically narrowed and gives the illusion of everything being miniature. I first saw this technique in Thom Yorke’s Harrowdown Hill video clip and was sure that I was looking at miniatures. It’s remarkably effective and surprisingly easy to achieve. Keith’s videos, Shot around Sydney harbour, are a lot of fun and well worth a look.

I’m trying to get in to doing more HDRI images now that I finally have a camera with auto-exposure bracketing. Having been in awe of this guy’s images for the past 12 months, I decided to give it a go after I discovered a set of stairs near my hotel with this amazing view of the city.

This is my first real serious foray into High Dynamic Range photography, so I’m still working through the ins-and-outs of how you go about it efficiently. The trouble with doing HDR panoramas, I’ve discovered, is the fact that you have to take 9 exposures (which at night range in times upwards of 20-30 seconds) and all 9 exposures have to be flawless. One exposure from a series of nine had moved on this shoot due to the fact that I’m using a very light tripod and there was a strong breeze, so I couldn’t use that mid-range series of exposures. So the above wider panorama image was constructed using the over and under-exposed images. While nice, there is still a lot of detail that we can’t see.

However, I was still able to use the three exposure version and crop out the offending frame which gives a lot more detail to the city as you can see. It provides a much softer and detailed image.

Another issue is the sheer amount of data that these images generate; ~20mb RAW files x 9, merged into 3 panoramas as 16bit TIFFs at about 8000×2000 pixels which are then merged into a 32bit HDR file which can then be put back out as as a 16 or 8 bit TIFF. So we’re looking at about 1gig of data that’s generated to get to the final photograph. Yes, I know I can delete some of the working files, but I’m a data hoarder…

The final issue – while not a particularly big issue, but still being an issue – is the processing time that a lot of this takes. It is very processor intensive and time consuming. This is not something that you sit down and do in a few minutes, but need to set aside a good hour for. Perfect for doing with a coffee in one hand on a Sunday morning.

If you look at the full sized results on flickr, you can see that there is some weird posterized-halo-effects around the brighter lights which I wasn’t able to fix in this piece, but I have a feeling that this is determined by how the program blends the images in the first place. For this I simply used photoshop, but would probably get different results from something like photomatix pro, a stand-alone HDR processing app that seems to be popular with the HDR crowd.

Stuck in Customs has a great tutorial on HDR imaging which is worth a read, although he uses a different workflow, and the aesthetic is pretty heavy-handed, but it’s the same principles.

So it looks like I’ve still got a lot to learn with this HDR stuff, but check back to see how things are progressing over the coming months.

The world is a small place. Last year I discovered that there are two degrees of separation between me an Florian Witzel – a super smart CG guy who currently works as a technical director at the always cool New York firm, Psyop. I admire his work, which in some regards reminds me of Chris Cunningham’s work in its aesthetic, but much slicker and more refined. His portfolio has just been updated with a bunch of new clips as well as some interesting breakdowns of the construction of a few of the pieces.