New videos for 'The Fate of the Furious' and Target's "Toycracker" mini-musical

On Sunday night, the long-awated trailer was released for The Fate of the Furious, a project for which I was the lead previsualization artist at Proof, inc. Reception to it has been amazing, with many positive reaction videos, as well as over twenty-four million Facebook views alone for the trailer video. At this point, I think it's clear that people have accepted that "yes, they are making another one" and that they occupy their own space in the market for people wanting over-the-top action movies that know when to blow people's minds and when to poke fun at themselves.  You can learn more about my involvement on the Fate of the Furious project page




Also released on Sunday was the "Toycracker" mini-musical my team prevised for Target's holiday campaign. Our work was needed mainly for shots incorporating the various digital characters. For more details on how we did this, visit the Target project page.

'Star Trek Beyond' Makes the MPAA's list of 20 semi-finalists for "Best Visual Effects"

This week the list of 20 films that will advance to compete for the 2016 "Best Visual Effects" Oscar were announced.  I was excited to see that Star Trek Beyond made the list. The full list is as follows (Proof, inc. films in blue):

“Alice Through the Looking Glass”
“Arrival”
“The BFG”
“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”
“Captain America: Civil War”
“Deadpool”
“Deepwater Horizon”
“Doctor Strange”
“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”
“Independence Day: Resurgence”
“The Jungle Book”
“Kubo and the Two Strings”
“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”
“Passengers”
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”
“Star Trek Beyond”
“Suicide Squad”
“Sully”
“Warcraft”
“X-Men: Apocalypse”

Congratulations to the hardworking artists and production teams who worked on all these films.

"Legend of the Last Lava Pup" commercial

The video for the new Clash of Clans commercial is now online, and is already up to 15 million views in less than a week. I helped previs the animated portions. For a small writeup on the project, click here.

The first 'Star Trek Beyond' trailer is here

I spent a good portion of this year working on the previs team for the latest Star Trek film for Paramount Pictures, both on and off the studio lot. This trailer will also screen before Star Wars: The Force Awakens, so I'm looking forward to seeing those slick finaled shots on the big screen.

Honda's "The Power of Dreams" commercials

Earlier this year I was the Previs Supervisor for five commercials by Honda for their "The Power of Dreams" campaign. Four of them are posted below. For the fifth commercial video and more information on how they were accomplished by my team, visit the Honda page on my portfolio website.

New 'Gods of Egypt' trailer

The work we did at Proof, inc. for the movie mainly focused on a sequence in the third act, which has only a few shots in this trailer. I will be able to share more details as more content for the movie gets released online.

The Speed Chart

In previs, there are often times when you have to animate objects flying through space: birds, helicopters, spaceships, angry flying monkeys, etc. With live action previs, however, the speeds at which your objects move have real-world implications when it comes time for the film crew to shoot, so you'll need to keep accurate speeds in mind. That way your previs team can inform the director and  his crew how fast their helicopter will have to travel to catch up with all those angry flying monkeys.

Speed can be something a bit difficult to visualize for comparison, so here is the Speed Chart I ended up making:

If I had something like this before I started researching, it would have saved a lot of time. I hope this comes in handy for you at some point.

Sources:

Helios: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0109c.shtml

Apollo 10: http://www.history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_10a_Summary.htm

Space Shuttle: http://www.space.com/12127-8-surprising-space-shuttle-facts.html

TOPOL-M: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/RT-2PM2_Topol-M

X-15: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/North_American_X-15

Blackbird: http://www.historynet.com/sr-71-blackbird-sets-london-to-l-a-speed-record.htm

F-14: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat

Concorde: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Concorde

Bell X-1: http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19510007000

B-2 Bomber: http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.asp?aircraft_id=6

747: http://www.therichest.com/business/technology/the-10-fastest-passenger-planes-in-history/

Cruise missile: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cruise_missile

P-51D Mustang: http://www.cafsocal.com/our-aircrafts/our-aircraft-and-history/north-american-p-51-mustang-%EF%BB%BFman-o-war/

Apache: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Boeing_AH-64_Apache

News Helicopter: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Airbus_Helicopters_H125_%C3%89cureuil

Proof CEO Ron Frankel to Speak about Previs and Postvis at FMX

For those attending FMX this year in Stuttgart, Germany, the Proof, inc. CEO Ron Frankel will be presenting there on May 7th. He will go in depth on the work done on Guardians of the Galaxy and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. For more details, click this link for the FMX post.

2015 Super Bowl commercials and trailers

At the end of last year, I worked on several commercials at Proof, inc. Two of these commercials, one for Turbotax and one for Pepsi, aired on television yesterday during the Super Bowl. A new trailer for the upcoming Furious 7 feature film aired as well, which contained shots I did previs and techvis for back in 2013.

TurboTax: "Boston Tea Party"
I did previs for the first few shots of the Sons of Liberty storming the HMS Surprise (one of the replica ships in the collection of the Maritime Museum of San Diego), and modeled previs characters for the other sequences. I was a bit surprised at seeing so many YouTube comments showing outrage for the mockery of the founding fathers. I thought it was a funny spoof.


Pepsi: "Halftime Touches Down"
Continuing with their recurring U.F.O. theme that they've done for decades, Pepsi's halftime commercial featured previs by our Proof, inc. team. The segment I previsualized involved teenagers playing music in their garage with a nearby dog:


Furious 7 movie trailer
Coming to theaters April 3, Furious 7 has a new movie trailer to get people excited about the upcoming film. I helped previs and techvis the sequence of a Lykan Hypersport crashing through the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi, and did previs for the cargo drop skydiving sequence.


As always, I enjoyed working on the teams for these and learning about new ways to use Maya and After Effects to achieve what our directors were striving for. Each project was a new challenge in its unique way, and I liked how the commercials came out. It will be fascinating to see how Furious 7 turned out this Spring.

2015 VFX "Bake-Off" Recap

This weekend I attended the Visual Effects "Bake-Off" at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. It was fascinating and entertaining look at the best visual effects in film for 2014, as presented by the visual effects supervisors and vendors who produced the final results. Previs was mentioned at times as well, which was nice. At this point in filmmaking, previs settles so many storytelling, art direction, and composition decisions early on, which allows the final vendors to concentrate more of their limited time on producing photorealistic effects.

Going in to the bake-off, the finalists to choose from for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects are (bold = projects I worked on):

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Godzilla
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Interstellar
Maleficent
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
Transformers: Age of Extinction
X-Men: Days of Future Past

After watching so many incredible shots throughout the bake-off, it was clear this is a very tough, competitive year. I have a feeling Marvel Studios will emerge with only one nominee. Transformers will probably be left out again. I have not seen Maleficent, but I know it did very well at the box office, which makes it a strong contender against other kid-friendly movies like Guardians and Godzilla. When all the dust clears, I think the finalists will be:

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Godzilla
Guardians of the Galaxy
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Interstellar

THE MAZE RUNNER is now in theaters!

Although I have not seen it yet, I have high hopes that our previs came out well in the final picture. Congratulations to all the people who helped make the movie happen.

Godzilla previs article on Animation World Network

Roaring Through the Previs of 'Godzilla' (full article, with previs/final comparison pictures)

Here are excerpts that describe two of the parts that I helped with when I was on the previsualization team:

"Dan Sarto (AWN): In terms of the third act, what were the biggest challenges you faced in with the previs?

Eric Carney (The Third Floor): The sequence consists of Godzilla, who is fighting two other creatures, the Mutos, in San Francisco. We've seen Godzilla before, and he's kind of like a big lizard, so we had a fairly good idea of how he might move. But one of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to animate the Mutos. When we were given the designs of the creatures, they were still in development actually. There was a lot of exploration work with Gareth in order to figure how the Mutos would fight and how Godzilla would fight them.

We started to look at footage of animals - Komodo Dragons, bears, even some winged creatures. Gareth sent us a lot of reference material of real animals fighting. So we started out doing a lot of fight tests and sending them over to Gareth, figuring out what he liked and didn't like and developing it further. He had a vision for the film, that even though it's a monster movie, it would feel very grounded in reality. So with that in mind you have to think of these monsters just as big animals, and research how big animals fight each other. A lot of the things you might think would be cool for a monster fight aren't the kind of things real animals do. So there was a lot of exploration in finding the right tone."
---------

DS: Any highlights from your work on this project?

EC: It was a great project. In the end we had about 40 minutes of previs, once everything had been edited down. So there was a large amount of footage. The halo jump was definitely a highlight, and a lot of the imagery in the final sequence, the trailer, and the poster are close to the previs we did. Working with Gareth too was really a fantastic experience. He was a very collaborative director and a lot of the suggestions we put forward made it into the movie. Seeing the final product was great!

It really was. As mentioned in an earlier Godzilla post, the first Maya scene I animated after graduating from Vancouver Film School was a fight between two enormous monsters in downtown Vancouver. To think that the experience from back then would help inform the motion of the real Godzilla all those years later makes my head spin.

Godzilla credits

Biggest international opening of 2014 so far, and the Big G isn't done destroying yet. Great work, previs team.

The previs credits, with a logo added. Previs lead Eric Carney was credited separately up the list.

Godzilla crew screening

Last night I finally saw Godzilla at the Warner Brothers lot. Phones weren't allowed, but there was a keepsake:

The only evidence.

The director, Gareth Edwards, gave a nice intro speech talking about how thankful he was for all the hard work the teams put in. Since he started from a visual effects background, he said he knew what it felt like to do so much work and have so much credit go to another person. Apparently the cast screening hadn't happened yet, and so other than the press, we were the first people it was screened for.

As usual, I can't go into any specifics that haven't already been confirmed by the film's marketing campaign, but I will say that I absolutely loved how it came out--and my expectations were very high going into it. Not only were the VFX jaw-dropping, but Bryan Cranston's performance kept me emotionally invested from the start. What can I say? Working on the movie turned me into a fanboy. When you go see it, be sure to see it on a huge IMAX 3D screen. Anything else is an injustice to the big guy.

Congratulations to everyone that worked on it. The Third Floor team got lots of names in the credits, which was great (you'll see mine on screen left). At the time I was on the project, we were working on the following sequences, with the shots I personally worked on in parentheses:

1. Godzilla approaching the Golden Gate sequence ('boat getting lifted on a big wave' shot, shots of soldiers reacting from the boats)
2. All hell breaking loose on the bridge (kids in the school bus looking out at the military preparing to fight, navy ships launching cruise missiles, soldiers scrambling around while the bridge bets blown up)
3. HALO jump (high angles on the group as they fell)
4. Very start of the Muto vs. Godzilla showdown in Chinatown

We also did some early motion design tests (6:30) of how Godzilla and the Mutos would fight, which was a lot of fun, even though they were animation exercises that weren't for any particular shots in the movie.

A final note to wrap up this post: Back in 2001, after finishing my Softimage 3.7 training in film school, I knew I needed some animation experience with the Maya program. My classmate Sony, a huge Godzilla fan, had built, rigged, and textured two giant monsters and a city block of Vancouver in Maya, and he asked me to animate them fighting. It was the very first thing I animated in Maya, outside of the Salty the Seal tutorial. Who would have thought that all these years later that experience would help to inform the motion of the latest Godzilla incarnation? What a weird coincidence...

La Brea and Melrose,  Los Angeles

Final DIVERGENT trailer

The final trailer for Divergent is here. Part of my previs work seen in the trailer includes the mirror/dog, hole jump, train jump, and group punch sequences. Release date is March 21st, 2014.

300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE Trailer #3

The latest trailer for 300: Rise of an Empire has hit the interwebbing. Sequences feature in the trailer that I worked on include: the first segment with the triremes (Greek ships) preparing to face Artemesia, the Greek clifftop attack, and the fiery naval battle (with the Persian that swings the big cauldron). It's loosely based on historical events, and still has no actors of Persian descent in it, but it has lots of unique action in it and fans of the first one should like it as well. Its release date is March 7th, 2014.

New teaser trailer for GODZILLA

Some of my HALO jump shots appear in the trailer. Sometimes when you do previs on a project, you have a feeling the movie will end up being very good. This was definitely one of those projects. See for yourself...

Now at Proof, inc.

Today I begin work as a previs artist at Proof, inc. in Los Angeles. I am very excited at the opportunity to continue working on exciting feature film projects, and I hope that those who read this will go and see the final product once I am able to announce it. 

Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem to Open at Universal Studios, Hollywood in 2014

Well this is nice to hear. The Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem ride I worked on--which is running now at Universal Studios in Orlando, FL--apparently is planned to open right here in Hollywood for next year. This means I'll be able to see my work as it was intended! Here's the news article, and here are other times I've written about the VES award-winning ride.

Celine Dion on China Central Television for Spring Festival 2013

(starting at 11:22)

This was something I briefly worked on at The Third Floor, inc. the last couple weeks. It was a new concept to work with, and the way the final came out on their LCD stage was impressive.

Back when the Titanic song came out, I remember working in a music store and selling album after album of the soundtrack. At this point, I think I've heard "My Heart Will Go On" over three hundred times. She puts on a great show, though.