On Febuary 7th, 2012, Vernon Wilbert Jr, Richard Morton, and I received the award for outstanding virtual cinematography in a broadcast program or commercial for our 'Dust to Dust' tailer/cinematic for the game Gears of War 3 at the 10th annual Visual Effects Society awards.
See full list of recipients here:
http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/10th+Annual+VES+Awards+Recipients
It's pretty great to have a carreer theme of working on projects that are sequels or franchises you've previously been an outside fan of. Like the Matrix and every comic book movie I've been affiliated with, Simcity is one of those projects. I remember playing the first Simcity back in the early 90's on Super Nintendo and doing the initial production design and camera work for this new cinematic for the latest version of the game which is a fresh reboot, was quite nostalgic.
This version of the game is great because it blends traditional elements of what's always made Sim City great, the former fixed perspective aerial point of view, with new graphics technology that has allowed the viewer to get closer and more intimate to the street level subject matter, all in a modern day tilt-shift photography style.
After building a rough set, we used a day of camera capture to not lens final shots but instead find our angles and shots very quickly and efficiently before fine turning.
Even more than real tilt-shift photography, HUGE inspiration for the spot was taken from this promotional piece for the amazing model sets of Germany's Miniatur Wunderland.
Supervised a team of animators during previs and then lead a composting team working closely with Jeff Husser, co-founder of FX Guide, to finish this fully CG spot for Cisco Systems under a very tight overall deadline.
I’m politically aware enough to know the legitimacy and phenomenal importance of Occupy Wall Street. After being part of the initial march of Occupy LA and spending the first few weekends there I wanted to do even more to support the movement and decided to use my skill set to create a advertisement to help get the word out.
After shooting quite a bit of live action footage at the LA camp at city hall downtown with no particular narrative idea in mind and after seeing all the amazing YouTube footage along with a series of nicely shot live action pieces from Zuccotti Park and other occupy campsites around the US, I decided to go a different direction. I knew I could create a short and effective spokes piece in under a month by making it a still moment in time without any animation, designed in a graphic novel style, with a very simple and to the point concept. The primary goal of which was to capture the deeply empowering feeling and energy one can get from peaceful democratic protest within a group that's on the right side of history. Jeremy Joyce's song "Occupy" is certainly key to help elevate the spot to that level of emotion.
They said they came to Liberty Plaza to inspire a nation wide movement. Instead they inspired a world wide movement.
Following up our teaser trailer "Ashes to Ashes" for the third Gears of War game, collaborated with supervisor Vernon Wilbert and director Adam Berg on this final release trailer entitled "Dust to Dust". This marks Vern's sixth Gears spot for the franchise but the first to be done outside the game engine.
The concept was to show the whole timeline of the overarching story of all three Gears games via a time laps environment which our characters travel through in real time. The whole piece was to be lensed in a war photographer style as single camera move a la Children of Men.
Prior to starting this job, Digital Domain's hybrid production company Mothership had recently moved into a gorgeous new headquarters in Playa Vista, California. To quote the press release, "The spacious new studio space gives directors and the company's advertising, video game, and entertainment clientele access to live action and state-of-the-art virtual production capabilities and extended art, conceptual and creative development firepower." This spot marks the first piece I've done using the new motion capture stages, which were initially built by Disney and Robert Zemeckis for Image Movers Digital and are some of the nicest high-end stages in California and possibly the world.
This was my fourth collaboration with fellow film maker and Animation Director Rick Glenn, who's work usually picks up immediately where mine leaves off after motion and camera capture. This time around we had signifigant overlap due to camera essentially becoming the editorial department since the piece is all done in one take. The same Virtual Camera technology used for a year straight on Avatar was a perfect for acheiving the battle cam feel and a huge time saving tool allowing us to do in just a few hours what would take days if sitting at the box animating by hand.
On set toward the end of our 20 hour motion capture day.
Hollywood nepisitm runs true. Executive Produced this cleaver short film for NYU Grad student, Writer/Director/Actress & Sister-in-Law, Jessica Dela Merced.
Some of the best films educate in addition to entertain. On top of being a very clever short with good comedic moments, BLEACHED has a very serious undertone and an impressivly strong ending. It definetly has somthing to say and I was totally un-aware of skin bleaching in Asian cultures prior to seeing this film. Bravo Jess, mission accomplished.
Created the "Toughest Skin" official music video for Composer, Producer, and DJ The BS of D.
I could watch music videos all day, even bad ones. Good music videos, however, can be a true auteur art form. Since electronic music is a very new form of music only recently made possible through the advent of computers and technology, it's appropriate to associate that audio with visuals also created with computer technology and/or technologically advanced imagery. Ever since the early 90's when playing Tempest 2000 on my Atari Jaguar as well as using various music visualization plug-ins for Winamp, I have been interested in making a non-narrative music video for an instrumental electronic song. The flood gates opened in early 2009 on my decade-old-idea when I discovered several pieces of particle based software that can be driven by sound. I'm a big fan of futurism and while getting ideas for an environment I started researching real-world technologically advanced engineering marvels such as Tesla coils, fusion reactors, and particle accelerators. Then I discovered various mind-boggling photographs of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. They lead me to decide on creating a music video that takes place inside a hybrid fusion reactor / particle accelerator-type environment that reacts to music.
A full confession regarding this piece is that it was initially motivated more by a tool than by a story, and my goal as a story teller is to of course not make a habit of this. So call this project a guilty pleasure if you will, but since it’s a non-narrative work I suppose I’m off the hook. Finding the right song that fit our extensive list of requirements for what we wanted out of the video would prove to be quite difficult, and securing the rights to associate with a song I feared would be even more difficult. Since you can’t really do an official music video for a older song, we needed a fairly recent track, which was of high quality and tastefully done, with a mix of classical as well as electronic elements, and because of the resources we had it couldn’t be more than 3 minutes long. Most importantly, it had to be a song which drove our pre-set visuals and of course, not the other way around. I prepared a pitch to send to several well established electronic musicians who were close to having new albums released, but ultimately deviated from that route due to the vast amount of independent electronic music available online. The appeal of working to promote quality substance from the bottom-up for an unsigned musician and not top-down is a general life philosophy I'll always try to follow in all of my work. Having the option to pick and choose and find exactly what we were looking for also greatly appealed to us over shooting blind with a well known artist's future next album.
Websites such as soundcloud and the Nine Inch Nails official remix site are not only great online communties for musicians but are also valuable resources for finding top-notch, non-signed, music online. Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails have been really supportive of opening up their music to fans and releasing songs as multi-tracks, which actively encourages high quality remixing of their original material and is a fantastic way for up-and-coming musicians to learn by reverse engineering. I ended up collaborating with The BS of D who makes great stuff and is also the creator of another NIN remix site ninremixes.com.
Director/Producer Bastiaan Koch at Marauder Film came onboard early on and was extremely valuable to the project helping design the environment. After initially experimenting with making the center system very colorful with a whole rainbow spectrum of color, the final look ended up being very cold, sterile, and monochrome. I generally always encourage referencing real world images and frown upon referencing other CG when developing the look of something that's not real, but I couldn't help but take a bit of inspiration from the 5gum spots The Mill did a few years prior. Huge thanks to Computer Graphics Supervisor / V-Ray Master, Tim Jones for his technical expertise on this project as well.
Continuity contact sheet here.
Did one insaine week of previs with Neil Huxley for the 2011 E3 trailer to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. Starting out with only select character and environmet assets from Ubisoft, we had five days to go from nothing to a full, first-pass, 90-second edit.
A great deal of insipration and creative influence for the peice was taken from the amazing & eery Phillips Carousel spot directed by Adam Berg.
Worked with Director Arev Manoukian and Spy Films in Toronto on this stunning spot for Sony's 3D Television. A commercial I would work on from previs to compositing for over 4 months. A longer schedule than some film jobs I've worked.
Arev had previously made a gorgeous short film entitled Nuit Blanche and was hired to re-constitute his basic story premise and execution from that beautifully done 5 minute long short into a minute long, even more beautifully done commercial with visuals created by Digital Domain. A significant portion of Nuit Blanche was shot at 2000 frames per second on Phantom cameras and the v2.0 would be shot at a lesser speed due to it’s shorter length but now done in stereo 3D.
High speed photography has so much visual richness and can be an extremely powerful tool to help tell stories in a way never able to be seen by the naked eye. I recall viewing dailies one day one the set of a previous film and some of the high speed footage we shot from the day prior was so beautiful we just couldn't stop watching it on loop. Combine that high speed cinematography with 3D sterography and you're really taking it to the next level. 3D looks its best in shots when you have any sort of debris, particulates, or any sort of volume in the frame (snow, leaves, embers, confetti, etc...) so an urban city landscape with debris being ripped up and surrounding the characters create a best possible scenario for stunning three dimensional imagery. The combination of live action and CG elements requires significant amounts of stereo tweaks making it far from easy to do.
Just as with Nuit Blance, this piece would have live action characters with most of the environment and destruction being done CG. Previsulization on this spot was complicated not for editorial purposes because we stayed true to the animatic and didn't constantly change shots, but more in the since that each shot was extremely dence with very heavy art direction. We ended finding around 500fps to the sweet spot to shoot at which can make animation/simulation can be very tricky. The end result however, is quite breathtaking.
Being extremely passionate about clean energy and a sustainable future for the planet, I felt obligated to do my version of a public service announcement. The concept was to start dirty and end clean. Beginning by showing the most destructive forms of energy (deforestation, coal, oil, gas) in addition to some of their side effects and then transition to systems that are cleaner but still have major downsides associated (nuclear, bio fuels, hydro) and conclude with renewables (geothermal, tidal, solar, and wind) which have very minimal negative side effects and impact on our ecosystem.
Virtually all forms of generating energy share the commonality of being large-scale operations that take up a great deal of space and can most easily be shown from an aerial point of view. Tilt shift photography works fantastic from a high angle POV and the miniature feel it generates through its depth of field is also a perfect story telling tool for saying how small our planet is. While being far from the first person to use tilt shift, Australian photographer Keith Loutit's tilt shift combined with time laps photography work is spectacular and was a definite influence for doing this project in that style. Growing up I used to build tones with Lego's and to this day love models & model train sets so I had been wanting to do a project using the tilt-shift + time laps technique and this idea was the perfect excuse. The actual execution was not done using aerial cinematography but instead employs a combination of hand painting, photo collage, morphing, and texture projections along with the very old but extremely useful Ken Burns Effect to essentially create as series of moving matte paintings. Andrew Kramer has done a great tutorial that shows a very similar technique for how each shot in this piece was done.
Niles Heckman
