A Smooth Finish for GeoBrau

A Smooth Finish for GeoBrau

They say good things come in threes, but we ‘one-upped’-’em with our FOUR varieties of GeoBrau homebrew. We’ve had wonderful feedback from those who have had the chance to try it (*phew*…), so…

For those who have been following along, our last beer post left off after the fermentation process had begun on our Porter brew. We repeated the same process for our Brown Ale, Red Ale, and Witbier. After about ten days in the fermentation bucket, each brew was ‘racked’ (i.e. transferred while filtering out the spent yeast) into our bottling bucket, and priming sugar was added, which would create carbonation within approximately 7-10 days. From there, we used a special siphon with a push pin at the bottom to carefully fill each thoroughly sanitized bottle.

After capping every last bottle, we applied the expertly-designed labels for each specific brew. Here’s Rudy going through the painstakingly ‘piddly’ process of symmetrically sticking on labels:

By then, our beer was starting to look like beer! Not only did we have labels for our bottles, but we also had a GeoBrau ‘crest’ to add to the side of each GeoBrau 4-pack carrier.

Now that we had proper packaging, we needed something to complete our creation–an additional edible to make for a GeoBrau ‘experience’, not just a pack of beer with a greeting card. And what better beer snack is there than good old fashioned soft pretzels! Thanks to some kind folks at a local pretzel-making company, we were able to get piles of fresh-baked pretzels to bundle individually for each pack of beer. Here’s a candid shot of Martin and Brenna bringing out their inner Martha Stewart:

Once our pretzel bundles were wrapped and bagged, we attached a Geomedia bar key, and voila! Our GeoBrau holiday gift packages were complete! Of course, the only thing left to do was take one for the team and be the GeoBrau guinea pigs….

…It’s a tough life, sometimes…

Salud, San Antonio! Cheers and Happy Holidays!

Decemberfest with GeoBrau

Geomedia staff members get creative for the holidays and add a new skill to their repertoire: brewing home-made beer. Here’s the step-by-step.

San Antonio Spurs “Our House”

San Antonio Spurs “Our House”

By Troy Davis, Animation Director, Geomedia

The lights go down…tip-off is near. You’re the home team and you want your fans pumped up.

Geomedia was recently approached by the San Antonio Spurs to help do just that by creating a series of in-arena presentations including the player introduction video for the Lighthouse Jumbovision display at the AT&T Center.

The project started with development of our in-house creative treatment. The intro needed to be entertaining, but with the opening of the NBA 2010-2011 regular season only weeks away we also had to consider the tight deadline and how to feature all the team’s players. As Geomedia perused various concept directions, ultimately we had to be realistic about the time available to shoot each player. For a typical promo shoot, access to players is usually extremely limited; here we were only allowed a maximum of 5 minutes with each player.

Our original concept involved a “futuristic warehouse” and the individual players moving toward a unified destination. As the storyline developed and the Spurs Game Entertainment team selected Bon Jovi’s “This Is Our House” as the soundtrack, the stage was set and the entire AT&T Center became the players’ environment. While setting the players among iconic locations throughout the arena we focused on each player’s signature move and ultimately the team’s unity.

We were able to take advantage of Spurs Media Day to shoot all the players at the team’s practice facility. Geomedia DP Zach Nasits prepared two entirely separate green-screen sets to enable quick capture of both wide and close-up scenarios. To capture player emotion, ominous and intriguing high-contrast lighting was utilized evoking power and strength.

Murray Breit directed the action utilizing a pre-determined checklist of poses created to efficiently gather the required moves for each individual team member.

A three camera setup with two Red Digital Cinema cameras and one Sony EX3 was used to capture over 60 minutes of HD motion.

Editor Jeff Chesnut cut the green-screen footage into a quick-paced montage that became the backbone of the developing player introduction piece. Post production continued as the project entered the 3-D animation and compositing stages.

Through a combination of dimensional scene geometry and photographic plates, custom sets were constructed for each of the 14 players. Rudy Martinez combined multiple-exposure digital photos into clean high-dynamic range imagery that, combined with SoftImage XSI set extensions provided a dimensional environment suitable for synthetic camera motion.

Extruded and reflective 3D text placed into the sets provided visual interest as well as player identification. Live-action image planes were incorporated into the scenes to allow players to reflect onto set pieces including the floor and text.

Once animated backgrounds were completed Jeremy Kenisky removed the green screen and composited the color corrected players into the scenes. In addition, dramatic optical effects and camera movement were added to complete the visual treatment of each shot.

Using After Effects, Joe Schaertl created a team shot at the end of the piece by joining 14 individual shots of players into a unified crowd match-moved into an animated rendition of the AT&T Center’s main lobby. Martin Jaeger utilized Cinema 4D to construct and animate the heroic Spurs logo.

In addition the the main video, Geomedia also supplied the content for the 360-degree LED ribbon and digital signage that surrounds the court.

Thank you San Antonio Spurs for choosing Geomedia to team up with you on this project.

Mexico City 3D Make Over

Mexico City 3D Make Over

Geomedia recently completed a graphic intense spot for the Mexico City Mayor’s Office brought to us by NXT and director Kiko Guerrero. As Mexico City is growing they have started construction on a new and improved highway system complemented with improved bus routes, rail lines, and subway stations. Due to the construction the city would be a little messy, but the spot wanted to focus on the fact that the end result would be worth the inconvenience.

Kiko wanted a graphic look with almost painterly strokes as a metaphor for how this would turn out. We took inspiration from a variety of spots and ended up coming up with our own unique look and style for the client.

We decided to go with an “ink drop” effect, where color and detail would be added to a parchment like paper background through ink saturating it over and over again with a variety of colors and values. The first process in this was to create a realistic ink spreading effect.

We used Softimage particles along with a variety of After Effects turbulence and distortion filters, but decided it would be best to shoot real ink interacting with real paper to give the effect the authenticity required to sell it. We set up a rig to shoot the effect on camera. We ended up using a mirror at 45 degrees under a glass table to get the necessary angle without having hands and fingers interfering with the shot. We shot a variety of fluids, food colorings, papers, inks, and oils until we had enough versions of the type of effect we were looking for.

After digitizing the footage into the computer, we had to move on to creating the iconic Mexican urban landscapes that would be used in the spot. The client had sent us hundreds of images of Mexico City landmarks and places of interest. Rudy Martinez painstakingly rotoscoped out all of the buildings so we could use them in our 3D world. Troy then took all of the cutout buildings and created the 3D sets complete with roads, cars, highways, and various other urban elements to complete the look. Once the sets were finished, he choreographed the brilliant camera choreography and started rendering the shots inside Softimage.

For rendering style we chose to go nearly photorealistic. We would then take the photorealistic images from Softimage and edit them in After Effects to create our effects. For each render we would create several looks for it inside our compositor by running a variety of wireframe, cel shading, and other filters over it. By mixing our different variations of the same image, we were able to create a look that we could tweak over and over again without having to completely rerender the image should a change occur. It also made it possible for us to tweak certain aspects of the image over time, while leaving others the same to further the “painted on” effect.

I handled most of the After Effects duty with several cameos by Joe Schaertl, a Geomedia editor / compositor artist. By layering the ink blots and using them as luminance mats for the color passes of our rendered images, we were able to create a very fluid ink wiping effect. With control over opacity and subtle color changes, in addition to A LOT of finely tuned layering, the ink smoke effect became very believable and ultimately very beautiful to watch. By mixing our render variation layers back on top we were able to control where we wanted detail and color on every part of the screen.

The project garnered a bronze ADDY at the recent 2009 ADDY Awards Banquet here in San Antonio.

Geomedia is Golden at 2009 Addys

First Contact

This is the first in a special series of posts from Geomedia 3D Artist Jeremy Kenisky who is blogging for us from SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 in Singapore.

So I’ve been here in Singapore for about 14 hours now and thought I’d write something about my initial culture shock and adventures so far.

While this isn’t specifically production or animation related I thought it still might be fun to read.

The first thing I noticed last night was that everything here is backwards. The cars drive on the wrong side of the road and if you want to move out of someones way on the fastwalk systems at the airport, you should move to the left.

I arrived last night at around 1:30AM to my “hotel”. Hotel turned out to be a hostel and for some reason my name wasn’t on the guest list. A few quick phone calls later I managed to get in touch with one of the SIGGRAPH guys and they got me in. So I walk up to my room and there are 5 other guys in there all asleep – not only were they strangers but they weren’t a part of SIGGRAPH either. I went to sleep at around 2:00AM after trying to put all of my stuff away in complete darkness. I thought turning on the lights would be rude, but after banging stuff around because I couldn’t see I probably just trumped that idea anyway.

After sleeping for what I thought was about 6-7 hours, someone else in the room turned the light on and I could see out our window that the sun was starting to come up. This other guy was getting dressed and leaving, so I figured I’d jump out of bed too and head downstairs to check my email and see any students had emailed me in the last few days since I wasn’t able to check since I left San Antonio. I walk downstairs and the clerk informs me that I should “get some sleepy time”, because it was only 3:00AM. I had been asleep for less than an hour. I’m having a hard time adjusting to the time differences but I was finally able to get a few more hours of sleep before getting up again at around 7:30AM.

Today (Dec7) is sort of a free day for me, I’m supposed to be catching up on jetlag but I’m not tired so I figured I’d go check out the shopping malls and market places.

A lot of things are cheaper here. There is a place called Sim Lim Square that is essentially the electronics Mecca of the island. 6 Floors of every single electronic device you can imagine, and then some. Before leaving I was talking with Troy about different lenses for a Canon DSLR I recently acquired. I’m not sure how the guys at Sim Lim compete because it seems like every other vendor has tons of Canon lenses at pretty good prices. So after haggling with a few vendors, I was able to track down a 50mm/f1.8 lens, uv and polarizer, battery charger, and a lens cleaning kit for what was essentially $65-$70 USD. I’m not sure why everything seems so much cheaper, but I guess when it breaks in a week I’ll know why. 😉

I also managed to find a mall here that is open 24 hours. It’s different. A mall has groceries on one floor, toys on another, jewelry on another, and traditional cultural wear on another. One thing I noticed is that everywhere I went was very cramped. The aisles are very close together and it’s hard for 2 people to walk side by side in them. It didn’t help that I was carrying my “look at that stupid tourist” camera bag around, but I figured getting some fun pictures would be worth it.

The smell here is very different. Different places have a strong what I would call “Indian” spicy smell. It smells very good and they often play complementary music and it really creates a great atmosphere. Other places have different smells and other types of music and together you really get a sense that you really are on the other side of the world. I’ve really enjoyed just walking through the local neighborhoods and shops and taking it in. Even the architecture of the buildings (at least where I’m staying) is very different. You see movies like The Bourne Ultimatum and you see him running through a busy street in Lebanon, and the atmosphere seems similar here. There is a huge mix of culture here and it is different from what I expected.

I’m still trying to figure out how the SIM cards and wall outlets and internet connections work here but I’m surviving. This is definitely one of the most different things I’ve ever experienced but so far it’s been great. I’m looking forward to tonight to see the city really light up.

Hopefully I’ll get some actual CG related stuff up soon, but for today this will have to do.

Also, I’ve uploaded a few pictures to http://www.kenisky.com/singapore/

40d canon siggraph sim lim singapore