Power, Order, Peace
Paul Chambers has spent the last few months working on a motion tracking project to sharpen his CG skills. Check out the result and learn about his journey in a behind the scenes article.
You may have seen Paul here before – he has posted several cool projects and tutorials here, and he’ll be speaking at this year’s Blender conference!
Paul writes:
I wanted to put together a short piece of work that captured how I feel about the current upheaval in American politics. This proved to be a great opportunity to sharpen my skills integrating CG into live action.
All motion tracking and CG elements were created in Blender. Texturing in Substance Painter. Compositing in Nuke, and finishing in DaVinci Resolve. A great opportunity to plug Blender into a heavy-hitter pipeline. I ended up using just about every key 2.79 feature during the making by using several 2.79 builds during its development. Shadow catcher was used to render shadows from the two drones on the surrounding architecture and the cars and de-noising was used for all rendering. Finally, the filmic workflow played a huge part in creating seamless lighting integration with very little tweaking needed to match the footage.
A huge thanks must go to Troy Sobotka, the creator of Filmic Blender for his guidance in using a Scene Referred Workflow throughout this project and to Andreas Russo for his incredible sound design.
You can learn more about the Scene Referred workflow here, and see plenty more behind the scenes at my website.
This would’ve been a lot cooler without the propaganda in the video (Donald Trump, or any other previous president for that matter)
Like how fluid it is, but leave the politics out of it next time.
I agree.
Heavens! Political statements in artistic expression? OH NOES!!!
its a little shot BUT nice done!a
Nice, and the keep the political comment. Every act is a political act, being apolitical is a political act.
Not agree, CG is not only “cool pictures”, CG use cinematographic langage. CG can (should ?) tell story, deliver a message.
looks good but as others have said please leave the political propaganda out. Had you used Hitler I don’t think it would be a problem, but when you try and portray Trump as if he is hitler I just can’t take you serious and actually lose respect for whatever it is you are trying to do. In this case your video, can’t stand it, and mainly because it’s just playing into the fear mongering propaganda that I absolutely detest. Anyways, sad to see someone who can make such detailed masterpiece succumb to total ignorance.
Happy to hear it’s provoked a political discourse. That was the point. As a resident of New York City I wanted to portray how things currently feel in one of the country’s most liberal and diverse cities.
It might seem like social commentary to you now, but in the future, it will have the same weight as 60s Soviet era Propaganda.
Really well done. Don’t listen to the others – most things are political one way or another and if art can’t be a subject of politics than what can?
There is no comment section under behind the scenes article on the Paul’s site, so I’ll ask here.
I’d like to know how textures were exported from Substance Painter. I mean format and color depth. And does it matter on compositing stage?
Even though the textures are RGB 8 bit outputted from Substance painter, once rendered through Blender they are passed into a scene-referred luminance range because Blender is essentially converting everything to a linear workflow under the hood (that’s an over-simplification, I know). So all is good moving into compositing. The video footage was only shot on a consumer camera, so there’s only about 6 stops of dynamic range in there, so not like 13-14 with a professional digital cinema camera, but certainly enough to bring out some nice compositing effects like motion blur.
OK, I got it. Thank you for your answer.
Well done sir!
I’m not sure this is particularly propaganda, but satire. A satirical look at how things could potentially be in the future (obvious future as we don’t have drones like this currently) if things were to continue on the current path. I guess as much as something like Children of Men is political. As political as you can be in a fictitious, satirical look at a possible future, but not really propaganda.
I must say i really don’t understand why expressing an opinion should be a problem. Whether you agree with it or not. Art as always been a support of expression, and the artists is free to speak for himself. Refusing a political discourse for the simple fact that you don’t agree with it called censorship…or worse. What would be music, cinema, or fashion today if they had not carried an expression of rebellion or opposition. There is no reason for cg art to be different on that point…