Atomic Fiction comes to Belfast – Part 2

Posted 17th August 2011 by Andrew

Two weeks ago I blogged about the first session of Atomic Fiction hosting a one day Visual Effects Seminar at the University of Ulster, Belfast. In this blog I will talk about the second session.

The second session (2pm – 6pm) started with Kevin Baillie talking about the VFX pipeline and what all goes into a VFX shot… as well as the people involved in this process and the importance of organisation when working in a team of people.

Software was then covered with a great insight into why Atomic Fiction use off the shelf software instead of building their own for parts of the production process. In summary, making software is a long, buggy and costly process and also why do it when others have already gone before and made fantastic software! Although he raised a good point that if ILM used off the shelf software they would have to buy a lot of licenses (1000’s possibly) so making their own makes sense as a long term investment. Knowing a good few design/media software packages myself I was keen to find some of the tools they use, like Autodesk Maya, The Foundry Nuke, Side FX Houdini, Chaos Group V-Ray and Thinkbox Software.

Laura Livingston followed this with a great talk on asset management and on the online software they use called Shotgun which is used for production management. I found this very interesting as the production management is part of the industry where you hear/read very little about. They also make use of tools like cineSync to talk/show stuff with clients/partners when in different locations.

Next was an amazing insight into how they render their VFX compared to nearly all other VFX studios… I could write about it but this great article by FX Guide covers everything you need to know about Atomic Fiction and rendering on the cloud.

The session finished with a talk labelled ‘Training the eye and how to make stuff look real’. The tips included, going out and using a camera to shoot in the real world to see how things/light etc react with the camera and analysis them. Small details can make things look real and bring the viewer along with you, like a clip that was shown where blood got spattered on the camera and stayed on it until the scene was over. When you can’t go out and use a camera just ‘Google it’ for reference. Movies aren’t real… look at moves… they dramatize things up, so don’t be afraid to do that. For matt painting take photos and try doing it yourself. Remember the rules of exposure and finally use glow wisely… a link about this subject can be found here.

After the seminar both Kevin and Laura generously spent time talking and answering further questions and even posed for some photos! Here’s Kevin with my good self below:

A big thank you again to Kevin and Laura from Atomic Fiction, NI Screen and the University of Ulster. I can safely say I along with the rest in attendance really enjoyed the day.

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