BestGFX

Recently I ran into an old friend who proudly showed me his new digital camera. He’d been serious about his picture-taking, but several years ago his interest waned and he packed away his darkroom equipment and his fancy 35mm SLR. The thrill was simply gone.

HOT MOVES is a 1 DVD addition to The Master Course that’s all about making single shots and master shots look absolutely awesome.
Where The Master Course focuses on drama and coverage, HOT MOVES focuses on a very different angle of how to make single shots look super expensive and sexy for their own sake. What is fascinating is that the vast majority of truly awesome and trailer-worthy shots come from just a handful of techniques, which we explore in HOT MOVES.

In this DVD, director Aristomenis (Meni) Tsirbas covers the basics of one of CG animation's least understood components: camera and staging, specifically in the context of effective storytelling. By breaking open one of his award-winning short films Meni reveals his creative process for designing a sequence to play clearly and dramatically. Story beats are broken down, camera motions are developed, and important narrative tools such as zoom factor and depth of field are explained. A detailed Do's and Don'ts section guides the viewer to create polished, compelling, and tasteful camera animation by addressing proper use of motion curves, avoiding the 'digital curse', and overlaying the right amount of camera shake.

In this second DVD in a series, Chris Stoski illustrates the creation of several 3D matte paintings. In the visual effects industry, directors are always asking for moving cameras in matte paintings and Chris shows how this is achieved. He creates two different environments and discusses how a matte painter creates camera movement in these key scenarios. In addition to Adobe Photoshop , Chris uses Autodesk 3ds Max, but the techniques can be implemented with other popular 3D software as well. From forward-moving dolly shots to lateral helicopter aerials, Chris covers the essentials of 3D and 2.5D matte painting for matte artists of all skill levels.

In this DVD, Tim Dobbert takes you through the more advanced aspects of matchmoving and camera tracking. He discusses how to use survey data to force a camera solution to fit a pre-built environment and how to use camera tracking for paint work. He also covers blending, enhancing and extending matchmoved cameras. Tim shows you how to prepare for a live-action shoot and how to get the right information once you're on-set. There's also a section on advanced object tracking that shows how to use an object's motion to create a camera move. And finally, he covers the tricky problem of lens distortion and how it affects the visual effects workflow. Tim uses a variety of software packages for this lecture including Maya, Boujou, MatchMover, SynthEyes and After Effects