Work for progress

These are the works in progress of Silami. Silami is motion graphics, video artist and compositor Sil Bulterman. Visit Silami at silami.net

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Visa 360 Sochi Winter Olympics

Last winter, I was hired to work on the new campaign for Visa, main sponsor of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

The idea was to let people see the world from the perspective of several different winter sporters. This was the first time I worked with 360 degrees stitched videopanorama footage, so I learned a lot during this project. The medium comes with a lot of shortcomings, inherent to the physical size and position of the lenses, and it was up to me to fix the problems.

Also a lot of logo/branding scrumming had to be done, which is not as straightforward as it usually is, due to the extreme lensdistortion and the fact that the world loops around the edge of the frame.

End product were a website and mobile app.

Visit the official campaign site.

Download the Visa 360 Cam iOS app!

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O2 - Wear the Rose

'the first ever Oculus Rift sports experience'

I'm proud to have been a part of the O2's last campaign called 'Wear the Rose', a rugby experience for the Oculus Rift.

Editing 360 degrees of footage was no easy job. Most software was not really fit for this job, so I just had to make things work, and used some proprietary tools that I had previously written for another panorama job.

Checkout the trailer:

Read what O2 is saying about it.

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New showreel

Here's a short compilation of work I did.

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Dubstep Trooper - Official Trailer

So finally the trailer is out in the wild. There's still a lot of work to be done for the final movie, so if you'd like to help, shoot us a message!

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Just an abstract doodle.

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For OBOMD I created a character for mascot, and created 3 bumper videos. Characteranimation by Carin Huurnink, design, modeling, fur, shading, rendering and post by me.

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Back to Characteranimation

After a lot of compositing and greenscreenwork, I worked on a good oldfashioned 3D animation project. I was asked to create a mascotte for OBOMD, a dutch schoolorganisation. So I went back to the drawingdesk, and brainstormed all kinds of fluffy monsters.

I had about two weeks to complete 3 short bumpers. I did all the 3D modeling in Luxology's modo 601. As concepts for the animations came in, the list of objects I had to model slowly grew.

The character animation was done by Carin Huurnink. All conceptdesign, modelling, texturing, fur, lighting and compositing was done by me.

The fur proved to be a challenge to get done in time, but after the first animation I settled on a faster and more predictable workflow. Having to push out these animations in a really short time learned me a great bunch of fur tricks.

I look forward do to some more characterwork like this.

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Invisible effects for Die Welt

Last week the film ‘Die Welt’, directed by Alex Pitstra had it’s european opening on the IFFR. Here’s a breakdown of some of the invisible effectswork I did.

More info on www.dieweltfilm.com.

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A few stills from Yim&Yoyo

A few screengrabs from Yim&Yoyo. All the animation on these 3 shots was done by Illuster. Tracking and compositing by Werp, and I did some keying and rotoscoping, as my main job was on-set VFX supervision.

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Broadcast Yim&Yoyo

Today the short film Yim & Yoyo aired on national television channel Nederland 3. The film, one in a series of 6 shorts called Nu of Nooit! for Zapp, KRO and Mediafonds, premiered in Amsterdam last Sunday in theater EYE.

It was an honor to have participated in the making of this short(as the on set VFX supervisor, see this earlier post for pictures), and hope to someday work with the crew on other projects in the future.

Update:

You can now watch the show here.

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Dubsteptrooper Update

Some stills whilst laying the last hands on the trailer.

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Scrolling.. I can do this all day.

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Nuke Lensflare script

Remember the NUKE [lensflare script][3] that I built and shared before? A talented compositor named [Nicholas Daniels][2] contacted me, and asked for permission to use it in a neat lensflare tool called [nFlare][1]. It has all kinds of good stuff, like buttons to create the elements you want, and dive into each of them to change them. It's still very much a first release, but I like where it's going. It currently has one complete lensflare preset, but I expect this will grow in the near future as the node matures. It currently still runs a bit flakey when doing a lot at the same time, as the tool basically triggers different scripts for NUKE to execute, but it totally works. Get nFlare_v1 for free, [here on Nukepedia][1]. [1]: http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/func-finishdown/1210/mjv1/ [2]: http://www.endyarts.com/fullSite/ [3]: http://silamiwip.tumblr.com/post/24423674142/lensflares-in-nuke

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On set effects supervision Yim & Jojo

This week I did set supervision of effects for a dutch short movie(about 25 minutes) called Yim & Jojo. The movie is aimed at younger, pre-teens, and directed by [Anna van Keimpema][ak] for [Volt Films][production]. The movie tells the story of a boy named *Yim*, who's often home alone and doesn't have many friends. His best friend is imaginary panda bear *Jojo*, with whom he has a lot of adventures. When a new girl joins his class, he has the opportunity of making a real friend, but he will have to let go of Jojo. The movie was shot by D.P. [Lonneke Worm][lw] on RED Epic, with Cooke Panchro lenses. Yim's imaginary friend Jojo and his dreamworld will all be added in post. The on set crew was about 25 people, and it was a really great experience to get to know all these people and work with them. The movie will air on national broadcast TV, channel Nederland 3, at the end of the year. [production]: http://voltfilms.nl/Volt_Films/Home/Home.html [lw]: http://www.lonnekeworm.com/lonneke/Home.html [ak]: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1554032/

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Bouwbewust.eu - TCNN

This week the site [www.bouwbewust.eu][bbw] launched. [TCNN][TCNN] wanted to create a showcase of ecological and economical engineering techniques. This resulted in a website that guides you through buildings utilizing these techniques. I worked on 30 infographics for the project, on which I functioned as Lighting and Compositing T.D. and worked on the Lighting, Rendering, Compositing, Motion Graphics and Editing. First we had to establish the look. Because the team was assembled just for this project, the lead 3D and I set up a custom pipeline just for this project. I also created some tools, using Python and MEL scripting, to assist in the lighting, rendering and compositing process, to help the 3D artists set up rendersettings and all the correct renderpasses, including some custom created passes, and making sure everything was in linear colorspace.

Using a procedural nodebased compositing system, and a hybrid nodetree allowed us to push through 30 animations within the timeframe, with just a small team of 4 3D artists and 2 compositors. Check out the project on [bouwbewust.eu][bbw], or [the project page on my site][site]. [TCNN]: http://www.tcnn.nl/ [bbw]: http://www.bouwbewust.eu/ [site]: http://silami.net/33196/583087/video/bouwbewusteu-tcnn

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Nukepedia uploads

My tools are now also available on [Nukepedia][1]! You can find my lensflare toolset [here][lf]. My Refractor tool is [here][rf]. For the complete story, accompanying Maya tools and more info, you can still find the more complete explanations right here on my blog. [1]: http://www.nukepedia.com/ [lf]: http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/toolsets/image/anamorphic-lensflare/ [rf]: http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/gizmos/other/refractor/

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Lensflares in Nuke

For a long time I've thought lensflares in Nuke to be a sad thing. The Flare node in Nuke didn't do what I expected, and for a long time I've piped footage through After Effects just to be able to use plugins like Optical Flares or Knoll Light Factory. The Genarts Sapphire Lensflares, which are available for Nuke, are nice, but way too expensive. Then, I tried building my own flare, using what I had, the standard Flare node in Nuke. It's a bare bones node, but if you do what a compositor is supposed to do, namely layering, you can create quite some nice flares in Nuke. Here's a screenshot of the node tree that makes the flare in the picture above. All nodes are the standard Flare node, all tied to the position of the first node, using an expression, to behave like a single lensflare. Download the Nukescript [here][DL]. [DL]: http://cl.ly/2T0v0O0I17032s213w0r