Magnetic Dreams is an effects house based in Nashville Tennessee. With experience in both 2D and 3D animation, they did most of the compositing for the film Yellow Day using Blackmagic Design’s Fusion. Fusion is a compositing program that, since its acquisition by Blackmagic Design in 2014, has seen a significant price drop – you can get a version for free — and the release of a Mac version. We spoke with compositing supervisor Joel Gibbs and one of the owners of Magnetic Dreams, Don Culwell, about working on Yellow Day, what it’s like to learn and use Fusion, and […]

One of the earliest challenges in making Uncle Howard was figuring out how to tell a story around a main character who is essentially absent. My uncle, Howard Brookner, was a fairly obscure director, whose work went missing to varying degrees, and who had died some 25 years ago. Yet, to me and others around him, he left a very strong memory and spirit. How to show this? For inspiration, my producer, Paula Vaccaro, and I turned to Howard’s friend and former film subject, William S. Burroughs (Burroughs: The Movie, 1983), whose book, The Western Lands, was the last he wrote before dedicating himself […]

The director Ruben Östlund shoots wide in 4K, composing the individual shots for films like Force Majeure by, in post-production, pushing in and moving from side to side. Now, Disney Research has developed a new tool, Face Director, that offers directors even greater possibilities; it crosses the final frontier in post-production manipulation: actors’ performances. Whereas, previously, directors would shape a performance by using multiple takes or, in post, skillful editing and music, with Face Director directors can alter performance by modulating them between two extremes. From Disney’s page: We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of […]

From classical Hollywood continuity editing to Eisensteinian montage, from the quick jump cuts of the French New Wave to the even more accelerated and spatially destabilized editing of the Hollywood blockbuster, filmmakers from the dawn of cinema have had to embrace, even if only on a subconscious level, some theory of editing. What, then, of today’s nascent medium of Virtual Reality (VR)? Some are calling VR the next phase of cinema, but many VR works are more akin to video games, where cuts are hidden within approaching horizon lines. Or where, inelegantly, an edit is simply a transition from one […]

PremiumBeat, a royalty free music library, offers a variety of affordably licensable cues that can be used in your video project. In addition, the company is offering a number of other useful tools for free that can be of use for your video editing projects. Here are five of the most recent packages from their site: 20 free hand-made animated icons that can be dropped into your package. The icons are all pre-rendered footage, meaning they’ll work in any video editing or motion graphic software. The icons were all created in After Effects and you’ll see the project file included […]

The LG34UC87, an ultra-wide monitor, is designed with the needs of editors and gamers specifically in mind. At 34 inches, the curved display eliminates the need to set up two side-by-side monitors, reducing your workflow to one manageable screen that appears in 3440x1440p resolution. The IPS display gives you over 99% of the space of sRGB in over twice the space available on a 16:9 full HD resolution display. With a wide screen, the need to move from one open program to another is eliminated, and you can complete your video without the need for any additional rendering, making the […]

Today teenagers interested in the world of special effects are a few tutorials and some affordable software away from getting their feet wet. In 1977, the requirements were a bit more elaborate. It involved woodshop, sheets of styrene, and maybe a few surreptitious pictures taken at a screening of Star Wars. That’s how a teenaged Bill George got his start – making models from scratch dedicated to George Lucas’s space opera. Four years later, George was working on the crew of Return of the Jedi. Now in his 33rd year at Industrial Light & Magic, George has been a part […]

Sponsored by PremiumBeat.com Choosing the right music cues for a video project should take place earlier rather than later in your editing process. Working with temp tracks can lead you to get attached to music you can’t afford, and hiring a composer can be untenably expensive, especially for smaller projects. PremiumBeat, a royalty free music library, offers a variety of affordably licensable cues that can be used in your project. Here are seven things to keep in mind when choosing from those cues: 1. Commit to music as early as possible It’s good to make sure that any client you’re working […]

A LEGO Brickumentary, a documentary that looks at the culture and appeal of the LEGO building block, opens July 31. Like many historical documentaries, this project involved working with a wide range of archival footage, but it also made use of footage shot with a wide range of modern cameras — in one case, all shooting the same event. Co-producer and post-production supervisor Chad Herschberger of Milkhaus talked to us about the work they did on this documentary and the ins and out of post-production work, including animating faces on LEGO bricks, moving media between Avid Media Composer and DaVinci […]

Blackmagic first announced DaVinci Resolve 12 back in April at NAB, but now they have released a public beta and say that the final release will be available in late August. DaVinci Resolve began life — and is widely known — as a color correction tool, but the last two updates have seen significant advances in its editing capabilities, making it a possible competitor to programs like Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut. For those on a budget, the free version offers a surprisingly complete feature set. With the release of the public beta comes some new features that weren’t […]