If you frequent the big CG sites, there’s a good chance you already knew Max Wahyudi‘s work before he ever came to VFS to study 3D Animation & Visual Effects. His model of the Korean actress Song Hye Kyo spawned a 38-page thread on CGTalk, he talked process on CGArena, and the work hit the blog mainstream at Gizmodo and Kotaku.
Then he came to school.
He recently posted his finished VFS reel on CGTalk, and it instantly garnered a feature and pages and pages of praise. Easy to see why – the Casablanca mashup, featuring beautifully rendered models of Ingrid Bergman and Bruce Willis, is beyond jaw-dropping. (You can see it on our YouTube channel right here.)
Not surprisingly, Max is shooting to break into feature films in North America (recruiters take note). Meanwhile, he was kind enough to answer some of our questions.
Where are you from? What drew you to 3D, and what was your 3D experience before coming to VFS?
I was born and raised in Indonesia, and I’ve been attracted to 3D from the moment I saw it on some of the first Playstation games. I started making some of my first 3D models for Bethesda’s Morrowind, which allowed the user to import their own creations into the game, such as custom swords, armor…
You modeled Song Hye Kyo back in ’06, and it was amazing and got lots of praise. Why did feel you needed to come to VFS at all?
Thank you. My knowledge of 3D in general was very minimal even after making Song Hye Kyo. It was just a single model and render. Even though people liked it, I couldn’t do anything else besides that.
One of the reasons behind making that image is because I needed to have a portfolio in order to enter VFS.
[ed. note: We'd like to reassure readers that Max's Song Hye Kyo model is FAR BEYOND the required standard for entrance portfolios!]
What draws you to the idea of modeling famous actors?
I don’t really know, but every time I see any 3D model that tries to replicate someone’s face, sometimes it doesn’t look right, and I just wish i could get my hands on it. After realizing that people appreciated what I did, I just kept trying to improve.
Back to the stunning Ingrid Bergman part of your reel – what were the biggest challenges in creating that piece?
The hair was easily the biggest challenge! The amount of render time, the crashing, and everything else involved in making her hair was very frustrating. The head was also very difficult… even though I’ve done many celebrity heads, they are never easy to get just right.
Rate Parallels between now and May 7th – winners in each category will be selected by Spike Lee, and will travel with him to the Cannes Film Festival! (And if you’re looking for a little Cannes/Spike Lee action yourself, the best audience review in each category wins the same deal…) Check it all out here! What did filmmakers do before online film festivals? We shudder to remember…
First, Game Design instructor Jacob Tran continues his appearances on G4TechTV’s The Lab with Leo Laporte, this time to talk about the development process and playtesting with Little Boy Games founder Ivan Tung. The indie developer had tapped our Game Design students to help test their XBLA game Go! Go! Break Steady. (Not a bad way to put some of the concepts our students are learning to work, by the way.) Incidentally, Classical Animation grad Eric Montero was an animator on Go! Go! Break Steady. Small world! You can see the segment – and this one, which has Jacob talking generative art – on Jacob’s site. Meanwhile, a Game Design class – hard at work on their final games – had the chance to get valuable playtesting from a bunch of Grade 10 students recently. There’s a good mention of this on the Synchrony team’s dev blog.
We’ve gotten another letter from our boys in Copenhagen at Thank You Motion Graphics – Digital Design grads Ryan Uhrich and Boca and Foundation Visual Art & Design alum Todd Smith. The trio all worked on a program package for Danish national broadcaster DR: Boogie Prisen, a music awards show. Todd breaks down who did what: “Myself initially for cinematography and camera rigging, Ryan for 3D supervision, and Boca for the bulk of the work and tireless hours from concept to mastering.” “We moved away from the typical flashy graphics one would expect seeing the MTV Video Awards or Teen Choice Awards in favor of an aesthetic that would inspire kids to be creative,” he writes. “The result was a rough approach, where over three days we bombarded our photo studio with illustrations.” “They were hand-drawn, stenciled, and painted on the studio floor, animated in stop-motion through a two-camera setup (one rigged directly overhead and one at 45 degrees to the left), brought into Cinema 4D, and mapped onto a CG environment. The piece was rendered using HDR projection and v-ray for C4D.” You can see the end result at thankyou.dk – scroll down to “Boogie Awards”.
We’re coming up on the deadline for our BC High School Scholarship competition! The deadline is Wednesday, April 30th… don’t miss your chance to win one of the three available scholarships (Full, $10, 000, or $5, 000) to the VFS program of your choice. All the details on your future creative path are right here.
Standard Operating Procedure, the new documentary by Oscar-winning Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap & Out of Countrol, Mr. Death, and The Fog of War) has a VFS connection. Jeremy Bowker, Sound Design grad, was Sound Editor on the film, which is a exploration of prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib. It’s a move to weightier fare for Jeremy down at Skywalker Sound – his last film credit, you might remember, was Horton Hears a Who. Standard Operating Procedure opened in New York over the weekend and it’s in pretty limited release for now, so keep a careful lookout for showings near you.
Like us, a lot of you probably picked up Cloverfield on DVD last week. If you did, make sure you watch the “Visual Effects of Cloverfield” special feature, and keep your eyes peeled for 3D Animation & Visual Effects grad Nicholas Markel talking about the pre-visualization process. Obligatory screen cap:
Man, we love those guys over in Classical Animation. They do the weirdest stuff, and they tell a good story while they’re at it. Ben Meinhardt, who was recently named a finalist for a Channel Frederator Award for his VFS films Binge and Purge and Dancing Animals in Love, developed and animated four shorts called Perfectland for MTV. They were released this week – coinciding with Earth Day – online and via MTV Mobile. The Perfectland episodes are close cousins – direct continuations, even – to Ben’s VFS shorts, complete with off-kilter singalongs, a ridiculously-cute-but-disturbing aesthetic, and a menagerie of psychotic, vengeful mutant woodland creatures. On top of all that, Ben enlisted the help of some fellow Classical Animation alumni to make it happen. He was kind enough to share the backstory. How did Perfectland itself come about? Why the decision to expand upon Binge and Purge and Dancing Animals in Love? Then suddenly we got a call for a more complete pitch package ASAP, so I stayed up that night and worked on some episode ideas last minute – four of them, because that is what fit on two 8.5 x 11 pages. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had squeezed 20 episode ideas on two pages. Anyway, they said, yes!
Many VFS student films go on to screen at festivals, or are showcased online. It’s one of the things we’re most proud of — VFS films are more than just demo reels, they’re great stories that entertain. But we’d be hard pressed to think of a student film that’s been shown around the world more than Climber, by 3D grad Carlos Villarreal-Kwasek. As of this writing, Climber has been screened – or has been accepted for screening – at no fewer than 17 film festivals worldwide. Festivals specializing in animation and adventure films alike are loving the piece. The next screening will take place at the 30th Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, May 22nd – 26th, 2008. We just had to know what it was like to see one’s student film journey around the world like that. So we did what we do: we asked. Carlos, what has been the benefit to you, having your work screened at all of these festivals?
Jennie Orton is one of the latter. The current EBM student and Calgary native had particular goals in mind for her time in the program – namely to get an artist management career off the ground – and she was kind enough to share her plans and her EBM experience so far. Maybe you could go into a little detail about your ultimate aspirations in the entertainment business. There are many sides of the entertainment business that interest me, but my main focus is music management. I originally got into the program so that I could represent a friend’s band. It was my dream to become the kind of management entity that would be able to guide an artist through the system unscathed. I intend to operate a small management company that will cater to the niche market of Industrial and progressive rock music. I would also like to be involved in concert promotion so that my clients have a one-stop shop at the beginning of their career. What’s the appeal of the “business side” for you? The business side appeals to me because I am a largely artistic individual but have yet to find the right way to express it. Meanwhile I have seen artists who do know how to express it get taken advantage of by people who know more about the business side of things that they do. And with an aptitude for business already, I believe I am a good “hybrid” of artistic appreciation and business know-how to be able to represent them fairly.
Spike Lee’s Eyes on Parallels
In case you hadn’t heard… Film grad Paul St. Amand‘s award-winning documentary Parallels (produced while he was here at VFS) is climbing the charts in Babelgum‘s online film fest.Testing the Games
We love a little symmetry.More Motion from Thank You
Todd’s last dispatch to our fair blog was about some stop-motion work done for MTV Denmark, and this has a similar old-school-meets-new vibe.BC High School Scholarships
Sound Grad on New Morris Doc
The Pre-Viz of Cloverfield
Perfectland: Mutants Attack MTV
Binge and Purge was in the Animation Block Party Film Festival in New York. Casey Safron produces that, and he had some contacts with MTV. It was originally his idea to pitch a series of shorts to them loosely based on my films, which we could use as a ‘proof of concept’. I came up with some rough concepts, Casey gave it to his contacts at MTV, and heard nothing for about four months.The Festival Summit
Promoting my film and my name as an Animator and Director. I think that the real benefit is yet to come, when I’ll start looking for sponsorship for my next short film, for which I’m in preproduction at the moment. I see these times more like an investment.Bending EBM to One’s Will
Students in our Entertainment Business Management program are some of the most focused people you’ll ever meet. Some are exploring the wheeling-and-dealing side of the entertainment arts to see if it suits them, but there are many who approach EBM as a means to a very specific end.