15 Second Film Festival

Supported by Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland Screen, Filmbase (Dublin), Raindance Film Festival (London), the Queen’s Film Theatre (Belfast) and Adobe, the (Non-Profit) ‘15 Second Film Festival Experience’ was launched by Peter ‘Magic’ Johnston in 2005 and, since then, its distinctive miniature Art Deco Picture Palace has threatened to become the best travelled phone booth sized box since the TARDIS.

Having touched down at festivals from the Galway Film Fleadh, Diversions Festival (Dublin), Foyle Film Festival (Derry), Belfast Film Festival, Read the story »

Radiohead Laser only Video

Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”. No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR.

Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes. Read the story »

Top 5 Rotoscope Applications

Netribution have published a guide to the top post production applications for digital rotoscope production. Rotoscoping was first invented in 1914 by Max Fleischer, who used it in his series “Out of the Inkwell” with his brother Dave Fleischer dressed in a clown outfit as the live-film reference for the character Koko the Clown. One of the most popular music videos of the 1980s was A-ha’s “Take on Me”video which combined the rotoscoping technique with live video.

Digitally produced rotoscope productions have been made popular with films such as ‘A Scanner Darkly’ and to do properly are definitely not an easier option over the manual frame tracing techniques. (see our guide on easy rotoscoping here). Read the story »