DIGITAL KITCHEN Brad Abrahams, Creative Lead Cody Cobb, Senior Creative John Foreman, Designer Mark Bashore, Head of Production Steve Fitzgerald, Designer (not pictured) Project:WiredScience :30promo(PBS) Featured Plug: Trapcode Particular www.d-kitchen.com

“As soon as we got this job, we went head rst into production. Steve provided a board design that proved to be the inspiration for the spot. We knew from the start that we wanted to show science in a simple and colorful way, mainly because Wired magazinehasalwaysexpressedoptimismtowardsscienceandtechnology. We wanted the piece to be very playful and appeal to a layman’s view of these sci- enti c endeavors and discoveries. We started building and animating the 3D and 2D elements before shooting the host, Chris Hardwick.” —Brad Abrahams

“When the spot concludes, the host, the owing water from the opening and all of the 3D elements are sucked into a large vortex in the sky. Water can be very di cult to create in 3D, especially on a tight timeline. With just 10 days to deliver 30 versions of this spot, all in full 1080p HD, we decided to create the water by hand rather than uid simulation. We engineered a solution within Softimage | XSI to quickly visualize, animate, and tweak a oating cuboid of water. We also made extensive use of Particular to balance the 2D/3D load. It was great not only for particle generation, but also for assembling easily editable 3D forms within After E ects. With some very choreographed interaction between the 2D, 3D, oating steak, and live action, we pulled it all o just in time. In fact, I was still building the vortex within hours of delivery, but it all worked out well.” —Cody Cobb

FRANTIC FILMS

Sean Konrad, 2D Technical Director

Project: Mr. Magorium’s Wonder

Emporium (Mandate Pictures/Fox)

Featured Plug: Frantic Films Awake (for eyeon Digital Fusion) www.frantic lms.com

“Frequently in visual e ects we are asked to recreate lens artifacts, such as chromatic aberration, lens distortion, DOF e ects and the associated “bokeh” e ects that come with them. On this lm, premiering on No- vember16,partofourtaskwastoaddanumberof“magic”particleef- fects. In order to integrate the renders that the compositors received into the scene, we used the Frequency Blur, a tool in the plug-in package we

created called Awake, currently available for eyeon’s Fusion. It created realistic DOF e ects on these particles. In a real lens, defocused highlights become disk-like shapes, which re ect the shape of the aperture (this is what the term bokeh refers to).

After applying the frequency blur, the resulting image contains DOF and bokeh e ects that re ect the spherical aberration (Bad Bokeh) of the actual lens. e Frequency Blur also lets us input custom blur kernels as images, so we could match the aperture shape of the lens (as well as include a few presets to help get the job done in a pinch).”