“Making of AROG…” at Bahcesehir Uni.

This week, me and my colleagues from AROG Visual Effects Team Alper Sarikaya and Haluk Demirel are doing a seminar on the Visual Effects of Feature Film “AROG” atSeminer Duyuru Istanbul Bahçeşehir University.  In addition to going over visual effects for AROG in detail, I will also talk about some of the effects work i’ve done when i was at Pixar.  Here is the programme:

  • Location  : Bahçeşehir University – Büyük Konferans Salonu – Beşiktaş
  • Date : Thursday, 5th of March 2009, 15:30
  • Programme :
    • Opening speeches
    • Making of AROG
    • Visual Effects in Pixar Films
    • Q&A

Anybody interested is more than welcome…

Browsers…

Believe it or not, not all browsers are the same. Apparently there is a lot of exotic features like drop shadows, rounded corners etc. that you can use during formatting of a webpage that is not fully supported by every browser. And of course I use all of those exotic features 🙂 So for the best viewing pleasure of this site, you should use Firefox 3.1/3.2 Beta or Safari 3.2.x. Internet Explorer as of now sucks at rendering most of those new features, so what you are seeing in Internet Explorer is not the correct look. So, go and get the latest Firefox or Safari. Not only they work better, they look better too…

WebSite stuff…

This website and the blog is my first foray into designing/implementing a website. I am using WordPress as the blog engine which turned out to be a suprisingly good tool even for a general purpose website. I decided I just need to get my hands dirty with the tool to better understand the concepts behind various aspects of website design and lately i feel like I kinda get into the grove with the whole thing.

Maui and San Francisco

After working on Arog as the Visual Effects Supervisor in a grueling schedule, mannn, i was tired. It was good to rest for a couple of months and very nice to go to Maui for a week for some windsurfing. Visiting my previous hometown San Francisco on the way was the bonus of the trip. I am back in business: Time to start working on the school project.

Fave AROG Stills

Here are some of my favorite still images of shots we worked on AROG. Enjoy…

All images © Fida Film.

AROG

I was looking at some numbers that i prepared for the production company that i worked for as a Visual Effects Supervisor for the feature film AROG. The number of 3D and 2D effects we accomplished in a very limited time for this film is simply staggering:

With a team of twelve 3D artists and fifteen 2D artists, we designed eight 3D characters from scratch (a trex, an ancient bee, and various other ancient animals like “the tavukcuk”, pterosaur, barosaurus etc). We painted, textured, shaded, animated and lit them for almost 50 shots. We also created a totaly 3D virtual set (a first for Turkish Cinema), Hangar, for a sequence of close to 70 shots  and another virtual set for a tower sequence which covers almost 20 shots. Add to that 15 shots of general 3D work, 115 shots of matte painting, 200 shots of 3D/2D previs/storyboarding, 100 shots of compositing effects (wire removal, sky replacement etc.), close to 250 shots of digital fix/cleanup of plates, start and end credits; we had a lot of things to accomplish. Well, we finished the movie and the visual effects received very good reviews from critics and public alike. Job well done…

Finally…

It was about time! I was meaning to start blogging for quite some time but I was so busy with work and life. Now that i have some free time, voila, here it is…