Shot with a Nikon D300 during a return flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco, at last count this little video has earned Flickr member Ettubrute more than 1000 faves.

By my estimation, the Flickr group upholding the highest standard of excellence in feeling and sensitivity to the subject matter as well as technical proficiency has to be the one calling itself Art of Landscape. As the administrators state: ‘This is a group for the photographers who create landscape images that can be watched for hours.’

Art of Landscape member Vorlich is the artist responsible for the bit beauty to the left, a shot looking across Loch Achray, Scotland.

When the Art of Landscape administrators deem fit to include something by iImagineSo in their collection, then I’ll know I’m really getting somewhere.

 Clicking the photo will take you to my brand-spankin’-new Flickr account!

“Purple is mad as it can be both warm and cool at the same time.” Treated to such a beautiful presentation, I found Words and Thoughts in RGB an enjoyable refresher on the basics of colour history, science and application. I hope you like it too.

A funny thing happened today. I pointed my camera at some things, and the pictures I got seemed truer to me than what had been in front of my eyes in the first place. I don’t know what to make of it.

BRADREID.COM remains in a holding pattern. Following the most costly software expenditure that he has ever made in his entire life, the artist is currently investigating the possibilities offered by 3D computer graphics, of which the above test pattern is in no way representative. (I’m talking about the same technology you see in the movies, folks.)He hopes to have some little thing or other to show for it here very soon.

Please stay tuned.

May 28, 2008: I put quite a lot of time and effort into the CG thing, but truth be told not much came of it. CG is a lot to take on in one’s spare time. Oh well, I don’t have much else to do but brush myself off and try to get on with something else. Too damn bad I spent so much money though.

 
Peter Jackson’s Monkey Business, (c) Brad Reid 2006
Illustration Friday topic: E is for… Entertainer

If you’re like me, then you’ve been ogling the advances in motion picture colour for some years now. Some recent standouts like Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers and Michael Mann’s Collateral express a joy of colour that makes almost everything else – and certainly almost everything from before 1995 (or around then, I would guess) – seem grey and tired by comparison. I love the colour in these movies. For my liking, their use of colour seems to go beyond mere assistance to the story – their colour seems instead to be part of their whole reason for being.

One thing that I have been craving, however, is a look behind the scenes at the new colour technologies that have allowed these advances.

Luckily for me, at least one such look behind the scenes has recently become available. While Universal Studios has requested that Peter Jackson’s King Kong Production Diaries be removed from KongIsKing.net, the Post-Production Diaries are indeed still available, and at the 12-weeks-to-go mark we find a short video detailing the colour grading process as it was applied to the film. Here it is.

Colour grading, as the video presents it, is the post-production process by which the image captured on the raw negative is then transfered to digital files and adjusted for changes in lighting and corrections in continuity. The word “grading” is used to emphasize the filmmaker’s ability to make these adjustments by any measure of fine degrees. The true star of the video is Jackson’s own Discreet Lustre software, which we are told was developed for the Lord of the Rings, and I was mightily impressed by its ability. In the video we see it used variously to change the apparent time of day (a process called colour timing), to fill out scenes that originally appeared a trifle flat, and to draw out details in objects of particular importance, such as an actor’s face as the camera draws in for an expressive close-up.

I heartily recommend this video to all admirers of cinematography.

Think of this as the shorter, edited version of what was previously posted at this url, the most difficult post for me so far. Despite its apparent simplicity, One Dozen Flavours, presented ‘live’ as a work-in-progress here at bradreid.com, had an arduously prolonged development.

What the problem came down to was a failure to follow my own advice. As someone working in the theatre might say, “if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage,” so too I told myself that everything that can be accomplished in pencil, should be accomplished in pencil. Yet, if you look to the earlier process links under the illustration you will find that my original sketches were indeed underdeveloped. (Certainly nothing fit for presentation to an art director.) Given such a poor start, it should not have been unexpected that throughout the inking and colouring process, when I should have been primarily concerned with embellishing and drawing out my illustration, I was instead preoccupied with making repairs.
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Much to my relief (and more than a little surprise), with its latest, small repairs, I now count One Dozen Flavours as a marginal-to-fair success, a satisfying step above the marginal failure that it was at stage five.
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Next time I really should follow my own advice.

Watchmen (Issue 5, Page 8 detail), Dave Gibbons 1986
Colours by Brad Reid 2005
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Basically, ever since a lack of funds forced me out of my painting studio four years ago, I’ve been racking my brain for some new inlet – economically feasible inlet – back into the full-time creative life. Such was the problem that led me to two or three months this past year during which I did little else with my free time outside of figuring out the new digital methods of comic book colouring.
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I’m sure there was some regression involved here. From the third grade on until I began to favour painting at the age of 22, my whole ambition in life, filled with youthful naivety and a whole-hearted love for comic books, was that I should become the greatest comic book artist that the world had ever known. Yeesh. But still, I must admit, even now, that if some work with comic book colouring were to happen by my way, it would thrill me more than just a little bit.
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Gold Digger (Page 4 detail), Jean “Moebius” Giraud 1987
Colours by Brad Reid 2005
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I expect that the methods of digital colouring that I worked out during this period of learning will stick with me and continue to develop throughout the rest of my career. Repeat visitors to this site will see them implemented in upcoming work. A future post just might feature a tutorial on the basics of my approach to digital colouring. Suffice to say, any kind of advanced work is not as straightforward as Photoshop dabblers might guess – my initial efforts were devoid of any real sense of light. One should consider that Photoshop was never intended – at first anyway – as a generator of content, but rather as an editor.