Took me too long to get this thing done. Won’t even dare to tell you how long…
But It’s finally here.
The thing is… I was just fed up with the same wipe-after-wipe-after-wipe VFX reels. No-FX, wipe, FX-applied. Over and over… I mean, there are great artists around, much better than me, doing fantastic jobs on VFX. But showreels sometimes don´t make a great deal of justice to the work shown.
Besides, my son is just as gorgeous as a summer morning… So I had to do something with him.
Always thought that VFX, and visual stuff in general (and almost everything in life, why not?), had to be crafted with passion, care and love. Don´t like using this kind of empty-entrepreneur-handbook phrases, but in this case I really mean it.
You have to put your persona in every personal task you face in life, mate. Just like a good meal. I myself like having a good meal no matter what time of the day it is. I´m an eater, I know. Should be fatter than I actually am, but that´s a whole different story.
Thought of breakfast. The smell of a bakery bread toast, the looks of a delicious marmalade, the taste of that superb Nespresso coffee… One fine senses journey, early morning, outdoors, of course. And all of these things should somehow connect to video. My portfolio. After many brainstorming breakfasts, came up with the one thing that would join all the dots just fine: a VHS toaster-player. Instead of slices of bread, I would toast tapes. My boy (and my partner) would insert tapes into the toaster, contents would be reproduced by it on a little display embedded onto toaster’s front face, and those contents would be the actual jobs of my portfolio. Yeah, genious.
Reel title is a spin-off of this idea. Initially I was going to name it “Tasty!”. I had Chocolate Dealer font in mind all the time, for “Tasty!”, and then I visualized it too close to Candy Crush… So I changed it to “Toasty!”, addressing comfortable feelings and toasts themselves. Then I did some more research and found out “Toasty” is a popular sound that gets triggered at some situations on Mortal Kombat. But I just felt this was the right title, so I left it there.
So I prepared the table as we would be having that glorious breakfast. Then placed a box where the toaster actually is on video, marked it for camera tracking, sat my boy to the table and started shooting. Very home made. Very crafty. Just the way I do video.
Tricky thing having an 18 months old boy as your lead star… Kids that young have the excuse of being chidren to do whatever they want to do whenever they feel to… They just don´t care if you tell them to “put that tape into the box… and strike your best smile, darling”. In fact, I could have rotoed out my partner´s reflection on back window glass on some shots, where you can clearly see her desperately waving at our son trying to make him do… whatever. But this is not Hollywood, and kinda liked the feeling.
Two days shooting. Standard SLR camera, no fancy gear.
Next step: offline draft editing. Best thing around I know of: Final Cut Pro X. Have already told you on previous posts, but it´s just nothing but the truth. It instantly reads and plays many different formats, which is just what you need when you have to review and select trillions of shots. No Cmd+R every time you want to play anything. It´s really fast and, though the editing philosophy may seem a little awkward at a first glance, once you get used to it, it actually makes you work cleaner.
Got an offline edit ready very quick (three edits, three different audio tracks, to be accurate), so next step was to balance shots all throughout the entire timeline, as there where exposure issues. Used to do it by eye, just using FCP X. But this time I felt like giving DaVinci Resolve a try. What a FANTASTIC coloring tool I tripped into, guys! It´s just amazing. Media organization and metadata handling lets you work neat and tidy. Editing is not its main feature, but it’s robust enough to carry out any job, even from scratch. The only flaw I found: optical flow retiming.
Next up: camera tracking. Exported balances clips and xml edit from Resolve into Nuke Studio. Great media organizing criteria, lots of timeline editing tools… Seems the perfect tool to combine digital editing, composing and delivering. However, I found it still lacks the robustness and fiability to get the job wrapped up. For starters, Nuke Studio does not import FCP X xml… You have to bridge along Davinci Resolve (which does accept FCP X xml, and imports it perfectly) and export your timeline edit as classic xml to feed Nuke Studio. Conforming was not easy neither. There’s always work to be done when conforming, and it’s not a single click job, but had to tweak quite a lot of things to get a perfect match between offline and imported clips…
Anyways, moved on to create different compositions for every breakfast shot, and this is where Nuke Studio really nails it. Then camera-tracked every shot, got solid cameras and some reference geo and exported to .fbx, to have something to work with for next step: modelling, lighting, animation and lookdev in Maya.
Started the whole CGI job using Maya 2016 Extension 2, which had better integration with Solidangle Arnold and a completely rebuilt render setup system. Seemed just the right thing at that moment, as I had many shots with different settings to be tweaked.
LookDev was quite challenging. Knew I needed a VHS toaster, but didn’t knew how the hell it should look like. Some internet surfing helped a lot, and found an old osciloscope which would be perfect as a display for my toaster. So fusioned both into a bizarre single piece, and started the whole shading and lighting process.
I wanted toaster main body to be kind of chrome classic metal. Could’ve picked some other material (plastic, brushed metal)… But chrome was what I wanted, and this led me into triple lookdev work: had to recreate almost the entire environment for reflections… Teapot, table, chairs, fruits, buildings…
Wanted to have my logo on toaster display at some moments of this piece, so before rendering out anything from Maya, I created a project on After Effects and played around with latest Trapcode plugin: Tao. Fun indeed: geometry along paths, fine and fast texturing system, endless possibilities to let yourself go almost randomly into what this plugin has to offer. So… created some nice sequences and loaded them into Maya.
Everything almost good to go…
Just in the middle of lookdev process, Maya 2017 came out… Had had some very serious issues with Maya 2016 render setup system before when putting it all together, so I did what you never have to do in the middle of a project: updated. Yes. Render setup turned up to be very much stable, and Arnold became main rendering engine, fully integrated into Maya.
So went for it. After some adjustments, everything went smooth as silk. Rendered every shot and went back to Nuke Studio for compositing. This is where I found most of software’s weaknesses: frequent unexpected shutdowns when applying ZDefocus, or rendering corrupt frames. Had a hardtime getting compositing done, but finally got through.
Next up: coloring on Resolve. Davinci is really fast and versatile, but didn’t cop smooth enough with exr sequences. Fast enough for color, but quite annoying when making editorial changes. Anyway, ultra precise tools got the job done for final color look.
Last step: final FX on After Effects. You know, those glitches you see at the beginnng and ending of this piece, plus some chromatic aberration, which is almost my signature. And “Toasty!” 3D extruded text on glitches flashes as well. Love it.
So after many, many weeks since shooting session, it was finally wrapped up.
Very happy with the result. There were many ideas I left aside on this journey, but didn’t want this thing to go eternal. Have a good starting point now to go back anytime in the future to change or add things. Stand by for Playmobil clicks moonwalking around that toaster…
In the meantime, let’s enjoy this delicious summer breakfast! Yummy…