#0046 VFX Fashion International

A simple cart.  Bagdal Sharif, near Hyderabad India
I felt this looked very interesting.
Is this where Gandalf' parked it?

As some readers may know, I've been in India the last few months Digital FX Supervising at GEON Studios.  GEON is a progressive VFX studio located in a Special Enterprise Zone in the northern part of Mumbai, specializing in digital visual effects for international film and television.



Going International 
My first observation, which I believe I've mentioned before in this blog, is that I see that digital visual effects post has become an international business.  Many Visual Effects Supervisors and Producers are already accustomed to working abroad, in various locales, often for half a year or more at a stretch.  Journeyman level animators and compositors, especially single young men and women with in-demand skills, are often tapped for freelance gigs.   I believe more and more talented artists and supervisors will find themselves looking at work opportunities outside their native land, with talent moving in both directions to meet demands for high-end experience, fresh ideas and perspectives, and help facilitate understanding, communication and cross-cultural relationships in this era of outsourcing.

Image via Wikipedia

People of various countries and cultures, despite the presence of CNN, HBO and MTV on every continent, look at life and experience visual media a bit differently.  At the same time, perhaps due to exposure to western mass-media but more likely due to our common humanity, people experience similar challenges in life and respond to visual symbols with an amazing commonality.  The symbolic language of visual effects transcends verbal expression in a powerful way that I see as a reminder of our common humanity.  Great stories, as told through blockbuster films, can and do reach audiences everywhere.  At the same time, the international audience brings a broader spectrum of perspectives and tastes that are slowly finding expression in American and European media.  Access to self-produced media and internet distribution is making it possible for artists and storytellers around the globe to express themselves. 

The design of these columns in the airport at Kaula Lampur caught my eye.

The Visual Media Fashion Statement
Film media is to some extent a sort of fashion industry, with different directors exploring new ideas in color, lighting, camera, music and yes, visual effects.  Working in visual effects, we may see great landmarks in film making like the VES 100.  But beyond that, if you look at the AFI 100 or make your own list, there have been films that have shifted the visual paradigm of movies, introducing a new fashion statement if you will.  For me, I see films like Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, Bonnie and Clyde, Star Wars, and Kill Bill as some of these kinds of films.   I'm sure you can come up with a great list of your own.

I have always been interested in non-Western architecture and art, and I guess one of my points today is to encourage my readers to give themselves broad perspectives by looking our business as a fashion industry.  To me, this means looking at past trends, current trends, and international trends.  For me has meant looking at design developments of the last century, Japanese and Moorish style, and giving a small amount of attention to popular culture.  Long ago I noticed that many cultures around the world have very different tastes in color and color combination.  Lately, I'm seeing in India not only a much more colorful palette than in America, but also some differences in camera and editorial work.  Not necessarily better or worse, but different, an expression of the local culture.

Jang Dong Gun stars in Warrior's Way, a stylistic art film fantasy cultural mixture set in the timeless old west.

A western fantasy makes a fashion statement
Recently I saw a film that I felt very much was a fashion statement, The Warrior's Way.  (As a disclaimer, GEON Studios did about 120 shots for this film.  I was not on staff when most of this was done, and was not actually involved in any shots.)  My colleagues at GEON took me to see it opening week, and while I normally don't much care for ninja movies, this film, while having many ninjas and some great martial arts fights, is more of a very stylized fantasy-western.  Not quite Kill Bill, but with good performances, a good storyline, well-paced editing I found it a reasonably enjoyable film.  What pushed it over the top for me, was the  mise-en-scène, the totality of mood and style.  The stylization of the sets, lighting and visual effects backgrounds was awesome.

Reading reviews, I am again reminded that film making is a fashion business and that not every fashion will appeal to every person or every culture.  It's a mixture of surreal elements with fantasy, super-real  action.  Those looking for realism won't like the film, but it's a film that makes no pretense that it's a "real" story.  It's an impressionist painting, not a photograph.  If you want to see a documentary, this is not for you.  But it's art.

While some hated the film -- others loved it, such as reviewer Rashid Irani, who called it the "zingiest entertainment of the year" in the Hindustan Times.   I think the surreal fantasy and video-game action may work for some.  I suggest you see the film in a theater to appreciate the style. Make up your own mind.


Exotic and Mundane India

Rajeswari sunrise, outside Mumbai, India

Working abroad these last four months has been very interesting and challenging.  I arrived in the middle of monsoon season, and between the rain, settling into my new job, and the logistics of setting-up a virtual bachelor existence in a far away land (although skype has helped), there was almost no time to do anything more than walk around my district.   Around early November, the weather had let up and things were a bit settled, and I made a trek to Bagdal Sharif with a new friend, where we spent a weekend at a spiritual retreat.   That was a great experience, albeit a bit personal.  It wasn't quite as exotic as the movies, depict, no Taj Mahal, elephants, giant bats, snakes or jungles, but the event was something totally new and colorful, and the sunrise over the rolling plain was spectacular in the morning mist, with distinctive Indian trees and rice paddies scattered in some not-quite geometric and not quite fractal pattern.  Later, I made another excursion outside Mumbai and caught a great sunrise through the trees.

Image via Wikipedia

Then a bit later in November, while on  a shopping excursion for family back home, I experienced one of India's more mundane sides: shoddy road construction.  It was near Muhammad Ali Road, a popular shopping destination with hundreds of booths in a spider-web bazaar stretching down small streets in all directions.  While walking along a busy and crowded thoroughfare, single file in the gap between moving and parked cars with people pushing past in both directions, I suddenly found I had stepped off into air with both feet at once, meaning the road was suddenly absent, and fell a few inches into a recess covering some subterranean access portal.  I've spent the last four weeks recovering, with two weeks using an office chair in my flat as a makeshift wheelchair and another two weeks building up strength to walk.  I'm ambulatory again, and that's good because I've been pushing too finish 400+ shots for an exciting new Indian TV series premier episode. 

Perhaps my fall is a reminder that we need to keep one eye on the goal and the other eye on the journey.  Or put another way, as supervisors, we need to look at where we want to go, and how we are getting there.

Have a great day 

may your endeavors be rewarding and 

your visual effects be monumental.

Image via Wikipedia

#0045 Ten Essential Rules of File Naming 4-6

Previous:      Asset Management 101 –  Ten Essential Rules of File Naming 1-3

Asset Management 101 – part 4
 In my last post we looked at the first three of the ten essential rules: Let it Speak, Make it Short, Keep it Simple.

These provide the foundation of a good asset naming scheme.  Before we go on, you will notice in this series  I will use the terms file and asset interchangeably.  For the most part, this is true, but sometimes an asset is a collection of files.  For example, a sequence of image files actually is one asset.


Let's look now at rules four through six:

#4 Avoid Special Characters and Control Punctuation

Special characters, like the colon, semi-colon, parenthesis, brackets, asterisks, ampersands, and so forth can and will choke some application you may use now or may need in the future. This may seem like real basic stuff, but it's also stuff that's regularly ignored. Here's a primer on what to do and not do – and why:

Use command-line compatible punctuation

For safety, I suggest keeping all file names friendly for UNIX or LINUX command line work. While most users today interact with file through file browsers built into the operating system or application, advanced users will rely on command line and scripted solutions to speed repetitive tasks. In UNIX, the only foolproof punctuation characters are underscores and periods. Anything else can and will cause problems. Escaping special characters will increase your in-house program development time AND errors will occur in file operations.

Avoid Spaces

The most famous special character to avoid, now widely violated, is the inclusion of spaces w i t h i n f i l e n a m e s. As illustrated, spaces can make things less understandable if overdone. You and I can read my little example, but a text parser will certainly not know what to do with it. While most software today, will tolerate a space in an asset file name well, but it only takes one application to puke and your whole naming convention is in the dumpster. If that application is your in-house back-up script, I pity the fool who loses a fi le with a space in the name.

Two periods maximum

Stick to periods to separate basename, sequence or frame number, and extension. Period. No extra periods. Extra periods will cause chaos with some software that expects the first period to denote the sequence number and the last (or only) to designate the extension. Period.

The hyphen – if you dare

The next one to risk –and I use the word risk with intent – will be the hyphen or short dash. The hyphen is tolerated well most of the time. But be careful, the hyphen in UNIX means command option. So while you can usually use it with safety, it is ill-advised because, like the space, it can break things. Pity, because it looks great in file names.

Use postScript Notation

Other than underscores, the best way to separate words or concepts is what is called Postscript notation. It's now common in scripting languages, and to remind, it goes like this:

nocapitalCapitalCapitalCapitalCapital.ext

In more words, don't capitalize the first word, eliminate spaces, and capitalize words that follow.
Postscript notation is great, but it breaks down when you have initials, and doesn't always read so well, and that's when underscores help out:

rGB_1stDetail_Layer.ext

You'll notice that in this example, the “r” in RGB is lowercase. You can expect that users will violate the rules and make abbreviations like this all caps: “RGB_” at the start of assets unless you make the rule to keep leading abbreviations lower case:

rgb_1stDetail_Layer.ext

Special Emphasis

There is no way to underline text in file names, but special emphasis can be achieved when necessary with doubled underscores. Notice how the word “1st” stands out in the next example.

rgb__1st__Detail_Layer.ext

Hint: I like to set off take numbers (some people call these version or revision numbers, but I will explain why some files have version numbers and some have take numbers later) with this technique, avoiding the letter:

comp__01.ext

#5 Protect Sort Order

Maintain Chronology

Often people will put dates in file names. When doing this, don't put the day ahead of the month or the month ahead of the year. Make sure all file names with dates will sort in date order by always putting them in year, month, day order. If you ever include time, make it follow the date. Never leave out the year because sooner or later, a project will cross over two years. (For short duration projects, you might be tempted to leave off the month, but again, think ahead....) Some examples:

comp__2010_10_14__01.ext

comp_20101014.ext

comp_2010-10-14c.ext

The last is a good example of when you might wisely use hyphens, if you dare. Note the use of double underscores in the first example. Note also that in the third example, the letter “c” follows the date. This is an excellent way to version date-named files, because it is distinctive and gives you 26 revisions with one character. (27 if you make “a” the second version.)

Variations and Passes after take or version

I cannot tell you how often I see labels identifying variations, particularly layers and render passes, before the version or take number. Almost always. Maya's built-in syntax machine does it this way, and, in my humble opinion, it's backward because it makes sorting on revision level break.
A render layer or render pass is always
Why this is important should be obvious if you are a compositor: you want the latest revision of each item. It is much easier for a compositor to go to the folder where the renders are placed, and get all the elements with the latest revision. If, assuming the compositor has been informed a new revision is ready, there are seven layers and only three new elements or passes, it implies that the prior revision is still valid. But if the version number is after the pass name, the compositor has to be more careful to collect all the right elements.
The final reason: it has to do with my next rule:

#6 Rendered Files Must Refer to Their Script

Every file produced in a digital pipeline is either a script, meta data (such as a shot list) or a product file, and every product file is either directly produced, such as a hand-rendered illustration, or indirectly produced, such as script driven renders. Every cg or composite render comes from a script, and the naming of the script and data products generated must always match.

If I have a most vital rule. This is it. Data products must match their script names. Or, more accurately, because an artist's focus should be on producing a new take or revision, the script must be named so that it refers to the product it produces and the product identifies the script used to make it.

Ignorance of this rule is one of the most common cause of chaos. Imagine you've been asked to revise 23 elements, but have no idea which scripts in the shot tree made them. You have to open every script until you find the one that generated the current version of each element.


Next:            
Asset Management 101 – part 5: Essential Rules of File Naming 7- There Can Be Only One

#0044 Ten Essential Rules of File Naming 1-3

Previous:      Asset Management 101 –  part 2: Understanding File Classification


Asset Management 101
The Ten Essential Rules of File Naming
Ever sit at the computer wondering what to name a file? Who hasn't? In the world of CG-VFX, this moment of decision gives either life or death to your file system organization. Good asset management begins with a good name. The magic of naming things is to remember the basic rule – I Am What I AM.

What does it mean, “I Am What I AM?” For most people, this fundamental question is exactly why there is a moment of indecision about what to name a file – too often a user doen't really understand what a particular file IS. 
 
Remember, in my last article I explained that there are more than 14 broad categories for every asset. So what a file is comes from those 14 plus categories.

Except in some far-off alien world, most files have an extension, which takes care of the file data type. By the way, file data tyoe was deliberately not included in my list of 14 ways to classify an asset, precisely because I consider this an inherent classification. So, since the extension (almost) always provides the essential file data type information, let's continue to ignore file data type. 
 
Now, I'd like to share my 10 Essential Rules of File Naming. Today we look at the first three:

#1 Let it Speak

File or asset names work when they speak to you. Now, how can a name speak? Well, what I mean, is a good name will tell you lots of information about the asset. This is the core and this is the reason we need to consider the 14 classification systems. 
 
For example, often an asset name contains a shot number, some sort of revision number and often a frame number. (Frame or sequence position numbers, are also outside my classification systems, but they are clearly relevant and must be given proper attention to protect them from confusing your applications.)
We will come back to this later. For now, keep in mind that the main function of the asset name is to speed understanding and help bring the most important information forward.

#2 Make it Short

My first principle is a simple one: keep the name as short as possible. The old fashioned 8.3 naming rule was about as useful as used gum on a shoe, but names that are two long can cause problems. The first problem, is that names that are two long can eat-up name memory space in software that limits this sort of thing, which is common in older applications or legacy apps that still have an old-fashioned code base. What happens is that if the names are X length and you have N files, N*X can be too much. I've seen it in some apps' bins and in at least one OS. Another problem, is that a name that is too long could break a database program that assumes a file name of a maximum length for a data field. Too long and the name could get truncated, making it inaccurate or useless, or worse, the program could crash or not accept the entry. Even if the filename length is accepted, the display of the long filename could be a problem if using a spreadsheet or a data form with a fixed length of the name display. So, if designing a name space for your assets, consider your legacy applications' restrictions. (If designing an application, consider your users' name space needs.) The best reason to keep names short is you (and everyone else) will be typing them again, and again and again.

#3 Keep it Simple

Overly elaborate naming conventions suffer from several problems. First and most significant, users will forget the rules or disregard them. Also, an overly elaborate name may be too long, be difficult to read or contain characters that make your OS or applications choke.

While these first three rules may seem basic, they provide a foundation for all the rest.  We'll look at the next set in tomorrow's installment.
 

Next:            Asset Management 101 – part 4: Ten Essential Rules of File Naming 4-6