PixelHub Podcast

As a self-proclaimed “artist, illustrator, and part-time Jedi,” Karen Hallion has built a successful career as a freelance artist. Karen’s forte is taking iconic images from some of our most beloved animated films, television series and books and combining them in unique ways. Within Karen’s work, you’ll often see re-imaginings and mashups of familiar worlds such as Dr. Who and Disney.

She also has a penchant for Art Nouveau styles and regularly draws inspiration from popular graphic illustrations from the late 19th Century. Dan and I ask Karen about her artistic style, its evolution and how she’s managed to build a successful freelance career.

Foley art has existed since the introduction of sound into film in the late 20’s, and foley artists since have been creating unique tweaks, slaps, and bangs that help immerse us into film, television and games.

However, foley art is a subtle yet powerful form of sound design that is different from traditional sound FX. It’s one requiring a keen sense of the characters and settings within a story’s world.

Dan and I sit down with Digital-Tutor’s own foley expert, Alec Carson, and asked him about his work on the latest Digital-Tutors Daydreamer short.

In addition, Alec gives us some live examples of how to create bone crushes, organic splatters, footsteps, and mechanical sounds with common household items.

Every heard of an FUI? Sounds like something you yell when someone cuts you off in traffic, but it actually stands for “Fake User Interface”.

FUI’s are common elements of most major films today; however, you’ve probably given them little thought because good one’s are hardly noticed. They’re the holographic control dials floating within the Iron Man HUD; they’re also the giant iPad-like control center in Minority Report. FUI’s often signal futuristic or technologically advanced settings and they’re designed and built by 3D artists.

One of those artists is Jayse Hansen, an industry veteran with lots of street cred from working on the likes of Iron Man III, Avengers, The Hunger Games and Ender’s Game. In this episode, Dan and I pick Jayse’s brain about how he got started making FUI’s, what types of software he uses and what are some of the hallmarks of a good design.

AJ Christensen has a unique 3D modeling career. As a scientific visualization artist, AJ works at a supercomputing center at the University of Illinois creating digital video renders based on scientific data. Although these types of centers exist across the country, AJ’s team is one of the few that make cinematic quality footage for documentaries like Hubble 3D, and their work has even made it into major motion pictures like Interstellar. In fact, AJ worked with Double Negative on creating some of the black hole FX for the film. We had a sit down with the artist to see exactly what his job title involves, how it’s different from studio work and what his experience was like with DNeg.

The e-NABLE project is a non-profit volunteer international organization that determined to change the way prosthetics are designed and created. Celebrating its second year, the e-NABLE’s “Helping Hands” initiative attempts to supply people with missing or deformed limbs with prosthetics, designed and built by its team of knowledgeable volunteers. It’s also an open source project that believes in sharing design information that can benefit everyone. One of its volunteers is Samer Najia, a do-it-yourself master craftsman and IT consultant who, along with his mechanical engineering and big heart, has donated his expertise to the project. Dan and I ask Samer about his experience with building prosthetics along with his own personal hobbies of building aircraft and improving existing maker tools.

Matt Workman is a commercial cinematographer working out of New York. Matt’s educational and professional backgrounds are uniquely broad, having experience not only in cinematography, but computer science, 3D animation, and VFX. Matt does a lot of previs for his many professional commercials and music videos, and he prepares by drafting designs for camera, character and setting placements inside Maya. Dan and I ask Matt how his previs workflow functions and how he uses Maya to work through some pretty impressive looking camera movements.

VFX technical director for Weta, Stan Alley has a lot of major motion films of which to be proud. From Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to The Desolation of Samug, Stan has helped the New Zealand-based studio reach new heights of visual effects magic. However, one of Stan’s more interesting projects is a small budget, indie film called What We Do in the Shadows, directed by friends Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi.

What We Do in the Shadow’s premise could be described as a combination of This is Spinal Tap meets The Office meets Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a mockumentary that takes almost every Hollywood manifestation of the iconic blood suckers (from Bella Lugosi’s films to the Twilight series), and drives a hilarious streak through the vampire genre itself, one that’s admittedly lacked some fresh ideas for several years now. We talked with Stan about some of the gags he had to pull off for the film, such as non-reflective surfaces and mirrors to vampire-to-bat transformations.

David Bittorf is an instructor for Platt College’s School of Visual Effects in San Diego. In addition to being a recipient of Digital-Tutors’ “CG and VFX Instructor of the Year” award, David is also a talented 3D artists who continues to work today while also maintaining his educational career. David is a book illustrator, app designer and has worked on major video games like The Order 1886. Dan and I spoke had quite an educating conversation with David ourselves about some of the strategies he uses to organize his class, implement online training, keeping students creative, and how to avoid burnout as an educator.

Collaborative workflows of all kinds are hot topics today with companies utilizing the cloud for storage and expanding pipelines across continents. Software developer Digital Rebellion is a company that’s riding the cutting edge of collaborative video software. Its flagship app, Kollaborate is a cloud based collaborative video software that can make production, hand offs, and reviews easier than ever, whether your pipeline exists within a single location or spread out across the world. In this episode Dan and I speak with Digital Rebellion CEO, Jon Chappell about the main features of Kollaborate, the state of collaborative software in general, and where Jon thinks the industry is going.

In this week’s podcast, Dan and I continue our discussion with Digital-Tutors author, Pierre Derenoncourt. Pierre gave us some great insights into CAD software and BIM’s in the first part of the series, and in this final part, Pierre gives those just starting out some tips on creating a portfolio, what to ask during an interview, and how to move up within a firm. Pierre also advises how to build a successful freelance career and where you can get free, valuable feedback for your projects.