headbin

New naming convention

We're switching to a new (pro) naming convention for Sanctuary renders.

It's a little more complicated but a tool to make this transparent is under development.

NOTE - the render monitor still understands the older (simpler) naming convention but VFX artists should use the new one to avoid clashes.

The inclusion of a version number in filenames means that the ability to update a shot via FTP is going to vanish any day now!

http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/sanctuary/wiki/NamingConventions

UPDATE - Thank God it's Friday

Or does it make any difference??

DRINKS, INTROS

Not long now till I pack up and shoot off to get things rolling in Aus. Would be great to get some informal get-togethers happening, principally so I can introduce a few more people to each other. This virtual team malarky is definitely working (i.e. things haven't collapsed in a heap over, how many years has it been??) but nothing beats face-to-face...

Any suggestions?

I'm thinking BAFTA in town and 9 Wyndham Street (while we have it!) are the best venues at my disposal for get-togethers and perhaps some regular early evening slots over the next month so that people can drop by on their way to other things.

NANOBAT SHOOT

Tamara is starting to pull this together. Please go through her for stuff on this rather than me, to avoid any nasty Scanners type incidents (you know, the old head exploding thing). I'm kinda overloaded at the moment. Still hoping to just wander onto the prop set and mumble some Lucas-like direction to the nanobats themselves. "That's great. Just like that, only stronger."

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/NanobatShoot

VFX

Paul has started giving CD some funky moves. Thumbnails of the latest renders appear on the homepage of the new VFX tracker

http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/shots

MODFILMS.NET

Work on the trackers is progressing well. I've had lots of feedback from the demos and it's been a mad flurry to try and keep pace with suggestions and bugs. Busy adopting the artist upload capability to cope with the naming convention for renders suggested by the Quadratura guys.

I'm aiming to have a hands-off demo site up and running soon with Sanctuary data. It's almost there but juggling madly and dusting off sysadmin 'skills' I'd happily shelved years ago (email configuration is still a pig).

I spent a day at Molinare helping with their pipeline (backups mainly) which has also shed some welcome light on how the majors are doing things. I'm even more convinced our new media approach has huge benefits to offer every production.

Gave a demo to a Swedish film school and have shook hands on the idea of students working on Sanctuary via modfilms.net as part of the curriculum. Post production training facilities have a hard time acquiring good quality footage so Sanctuary material is perfect. The particulars of the deal still need to be worked out but the broad idea is that MOD Films provides content and some services in return for getting timeconsuming VFX shots completed. Thanks to Soren for doing the legwork on this one.

My notes on this as it evolves:

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/FilmSchool

Yesterday I gave a demo to Stewart Till, Chair of the UK Film Council. He seemed to get the product. and the challenge. "The good news it that it's brilliant" .. "the problem is you're asking people to work in a new way". Heard that before... "... I guess it's not THAT different" he went on to add (after seeing the dailies as podcasts). He offered to do some introductions to established film producers so we'll see where that goes.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Close observers of MOD Films may have noticed that half our online battle has been over the reluctance of people to use wikis or any non-hierarchical information system. The trackers are really all about compensating for this (and still sneaking wiki use in through the backdoor!). I'm including a link to this interesting essay suggesting why people distrust the wisdom of crowds. I.e. why Wikipedia, evolution, re-mixable films.. It's all about psychology after all.

http://karmatics.com/docs/evolution-and-wisdom-of-crowds.html

Quadratura

Big welcome to Adriano and Gaetano from Italian VFX start-up Quadratura (which means 'simulated architecture' according to Wikipedia).

They will be road testing modfilms.net for their own projects and contributing some of their expertise to Sanctuary.

Demo season

I'm exhausted. Did a two hour demo of the system this morning. That was fine but I haven't been sleeping enough. Up too late last night trying to work out this FTP configuration weirdness. Looking forward to handing a stack of sysadmin issues over to someone else to deal with. Nothing impossible but everything is so time consuming.

The guys from Quadratura seems pretty positive about the demo. Note to self - SMS alerts go down well! It will be great to get their input on the Sanctuary shots and next steps.

I think that's what I will focus on tomorrow, getting the demonstrator up and running, get togther some notes on Sanctuary style wise and then see if I can get the render monitor working on the demonstrator.

Rock Band

This whole idea of playing a film like a musical instrument is going to get one step closer to reality with the release of Rock Band, a new game from the brains behind Frequency, Amplitude and Guitar Hero.

The process by which Harmonix, the developer, secures original session tapes and converts them to a real-time playback format is very similar to my idea of how the film RIG.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/15-10/mf_harmonix_sb

Still, we're not playing with Bowie classics, we're trying to make a new work of our own. That's the real hard part.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band_(video_game)

Team Sanctuary update

Busy week or maybe just that I've had my head down in code which hasn't been pretty.
The new Sanctuary VFX system (based on a trac module I've been writing) is getting to the point where we can open up to public contributions and add new productions gracefully.

http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/shots

I've also reskinned and renamed the previous Sanctuary trac so that we've got a clear place to stick traditional IT stuff (like bug reports, enhancement requests etc).

http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/sanctuary

Big welcome to Tamara (tamara@modfilms.com) onboard to help coordinate the nanobat shoot this month *touch wood*. Please help her out if you can.

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/NanobatShoot

Hugo and Steve are doing a hand over for sound design. Can't wait to hear what our man in Paris cooks up.

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/FilmSound

New beaut podcast channel is up purely for distributing a nice high res (500Mb) version of the work-in-progress film. Please don't distribute URL - it's not password protected or anything but there's only a 30Gb monthly download limit and in case you haven't noticed, this thing ain't finished.

http://modfilms.jellycast.com/podcast/feed/43 (add this to iTunes, Miro or your podcast reader - no use via web browser)

That's probably enough for now. I've got a Facebook newsreader on the list of things to do so that it's easier for peeps to keep track of different parts of the project (there are RSS feeds already for every system but personal newsreaders really haven't caught on yet have they?)

Cheers
.M.

Team Sanctuary
http://modfilms.com/teamsanctuary

MOD Films on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8193990437