thread reboot : glade 2012 meteor and pyromid mapping project

[jamesamcpherson]

yeah i saw they used a 3d app to build their stage geo first so that kind of set the basis of me building the two stages in maya first as a kind of foundation, then i began looking into quartz as its node based and being a comper i found it quite interesting as nuke /shake etc are all similarly node based apps. i just never had the time to learn quartz though which is why i went with resolume in the end. im more of a creative than a programmer anyway its not really my background but id like to try and develop some software down the line at some point.
heres a couple more screen grabs from my raw content. - graffiti panels, aircraft panels and coral
still cant find any photos or video of my stuff but heres a video my mate did of his C4d stuff on friday night before i arrived, he used madmapper and my maya geo /render camera settings.

Glade Festival 2012, Meteor Stage mapped by Martani - YouTube

Glade Festival 2012, Meteor Stage mapped by Martani - YouTube

[sleepytom]

You have some interesting looking content there - however i doubt people could really see it on a 7000 lumen XGA projector with a load of smoke.

Seriously I think the biggest mistake you made was not understanding the hardware side of the job at all. Unless your able to know the specs not only of the object to be mapped but also of the projectors you'll use. Mapping is expensive - for a festival stage of the size of the Meteor I would expect to spend £3000+ renting projectors (and I get extremely good prices on kit) The production budget should dwarf the hardware rental costs - to do things properly we are talking £20,000+ total budgets.

You were very generous to donate your time to creating all this content for nothing, however doing this is utterly pointless if the projection side is insufficient to enable people to see what you have made.

There are a lot of people offering "video mapping" at the moment, and very few of them have the capabilities to pull it off. You can clearly make good content, so your ahead of the game in that respect, but that is only 50% of the task, and you seem to have none of the prerequisite skills for the other 50% which is about projection experience, project management and simply knowing how to deal with festivals where things will always change.

[alfaleader]

Originally Posted by sleepytom

and you seem to have none of the prerequisite skills for the other 50% which is about projection experience, project management and simply knowing how to deal with festivals where things will always change.

That's what he learned from this festival. You have to start somewhere to get experience.

I think you did a good job for having 0 experience in vjing. Now you can start looking for paid jobs and get more experience and learn from the things that went wrong this time

[sleepytom]

I disagree..

The 50% of the skills which he lacks he has not made much progress on at all. If he wants to do mapping projects in the future then it would be better to find others who have these skills that he could work with.

None of the big mapping projects which I have done have been done by a single person. The skill set required to pull of a big job successfully are too wide ranging to have any hope of doing alone.

I'm not discouraging him from working on mapping projects in the future, i'm informing him that by working with others who have complementary skillsets he will be able to actually pull something off at a successful level where people come away from the event excited about what he has done.

[vanakaru]

Yes, Tom sais it very direct, but it is all true. We have not done any ”big” productions but hire pro's to do hardware part regardless.
But I think festivals are good places for experimenting and learning. Mistakes and glitches are politely accepted there.

[deepvisual]

pricing mapping is hard.
I've had people expect it for less than £2k and had jobs go to people like seeper for £150k+ because we came in too low at £90k

[jamesamcpherson]

fair comments everybody but your all critiquing my set and none of you have seen any of it yet. that video i posted above is of a guy who made all his stuff in black and white , and didnt make any exposure boosts. my stuff looked quite vibrant and nice when they werent shining lights all over it.
as far as hardware goes, we did everything on a budget so we didnt have a choice to go out and hire a nice big barco or christie, it was just do the best with what we had .
with my exposure turned up and no light pollution all my stuff looked pretty awesome, my only real gripe was that the thing had holes cut out in it which ruined the illusion it was rotating , moving about etc , and that they had made the dome a completley different size to the measurements i was given originally so my satellite dish got stretched into looking like a cartoon dish =/ im still looking for vids and images of my stuff. i was told it was going to feature in mixmag but ill have to wait and see for now. just please dont confuse my stuff with that other guys because mine was a bit nicer!

and as far as the comments about hardware/projectors go - we had our own dedicated A/V company who set up the projectors and provided all that side of it, i was dependent on them and they were just doing the best they could. originally we wanted two 8k about 10m off to each side, but we ended up with 1 5k about 15m back because we didnt have enough render time to make two sets of content and also the 8k one we had specced got rained on / ruined on friday before i arrived
the only bad thing for me about the projectors is the xga res softness/lack of resolution. i made a lot of my stuff at 2k to combat/downrez the 1k output,which looked twice as crisp but as time drew on i began having to render stuff out at base res which lost most of the detail because i ran out of time and was doing too much for one person. so that lack of resolution coupled with the fact the focus was a bit soft, meant a lot of the detail was lost, but it stilll looked fucking awesome. they also ran out of smoke on saturday so i didnt have any of that shit interfering with my set

if we had the budget you guys are speaking about im sure we couldve made it all look truely photorealistic and pin sharp and correctly exposed. a big part of VFX is being an image tecnhician and creating ultra sharp correctly exposed / graded images to play on screens like the IMAX so i understand how to do all that, and the a/v team we worked with were pretty good too and get regular work.

[jamesamcpherson]

first couple of videos are starting to emerge from my saturday night set, theres an offical one being edited/made so ill post that when its done

Meteor Glade 2012 7 - YouTube

Meteor Glade 2012 7 - YouTube

[thatangrykid]

Sorry for digging up a two week old post, but there's just so many things wrong here, I just can't let it go.

i wanted to re-boot this thread because i got off on the wrong foot starting it and some of the things i posted were a bit disrespectful and rude to the people here who make a living out of VJ'ing

The reason you were met with hostility after your first post, is because the majority of the people here have worked their asses off for a very long time, and the last thing we need is some new guys coming in, thinking they know everything and in the process ruining their name and ours. And guess what happened?

what stood the amon gig apart from the crowd is that they had some pretty nice stuff going, although it was very diluted down with glowing edges on black and nothing else

V-Squared and your Swiss friend (who you don't mention by name anywhere btw, nice way to return the favor of saving your ass) use black and white and outlines because that stuff works. No need to crank up exposure or wait for the light guy to go home. It just works. I've seen 4K content made by famous 3d production houses fall to pieces on LED screens because the bit depth wasn't enough to render all their fancy glows, or because the light guy decided to shit all over the doublestacked 20K projection with his battery of moving heads. Making content for live visuals is different from post production. No amount of skills in making "photorealistic UV mapped textures" for IMAX screens is going to help with that.

by june i finally had the money spare to buy an educational copy of resolume,

Your whole first post is nothing but namedropping all the big hollywood productions you're working on, and then you use an educational copy? Awesome way to thank the devs who made "the gridwarp in resolume" which is so "really simple to get the hang off". Just because you decided to work for free doesn't mean they should get paid less.

it was all quite easy for me.

Dude, seriously?

i actually missed my train up there on friday night and only got there saturday, and went home sunday morning because of a health problem.

All this and dependable too? Remind me never to book you for a show...

So in the end, there was another show with mediocre visuals and a promotor who got them for free. Big whoop.

You ruined our chances to get paid to do it properly. You ruined the willingness from promotors to put it up in the first place, because all they see is mediocrity. Which is exactly what we were afraid of in the first place. James, I think behind all this you're not actually a bad person, but you got played like a chump. Do us all a favor, and think before you jump next time.

[Pesh]

you do seem a bit angry dude, especially for a first post...

i thought the meteor looked great, great concept for a stage, content was nice, but to be honest i think you were let down by the projection...

that projector would have been 5k when it was new, and are you sure they hadn't stuck a scan converter inline somewhere?

i did see your content and it looked great but was as soft as a soft thing, before i saw this thread i thought it was a (very) custom DVD on a loop.


technicals and music policy apart, Meteor was the best stage there...