Last Friday, a funny-looking guy from Oblong mentioned during his introductory remarks at one of the UCLA Mobile Media symposium’s panels a strange bent he’d been noticing among students and practitioners to accept as UI gospel designs emitted by the two major OS manufacturers. What he had no time to go on to say (but [...]

Editorial: Craft & Tools, Craft v. Tools. James Haygood James Haygood, one of the pre- and post-millenial decades’ most respected editors, will discuss editing process, the way in which contemporary tools both influence and impede editorial choices, and the possibility of a new workflow that first enables and then depends on a more explicit integration of editorial [...]

VFX: Pipeline, Bottlenecks, Workflow, Process. John Nelson John Nelson, accomplished visual effects supervisor of such monumental efforts as Iron Man , Gladiator, and I, Robot , speaks about the role of VFX in modern filmmaking, how the discipline has been integrated into the larger production process, and opportunities for refining elements of the effects workflow. ~ ~ ~ John Nelson graduated with high [...]

In connection with the general theme of pipeline & workflow reform, Prof. McDowell — acting as co-chair of the Joint ASC / ADG Technology Committee — guest-edited three volumes of American Cinematographer , the American Society of Cinematographer’s (ASC’s) primary journalistic organ. These appeared as Authoring Images in May 2007, August 2007, and March 2008. With some small [...]

Making Movies is Hard Fun: Building Tools for Telling Stories Michael B. Johnson, PhD. Making movies is a complex, collaborative, creative activity. At Pixar, they don’t pretend to know exactly what they’re doing, but they do have a process. They trust the process, but they constantly test and refine it, based on the stories they want [...]

CTIN 499 is a course about moviemaking and media production; about gestural interface and new technologies that immerse practitioners more completely in the work of creation; about making production profoundly nonlinear, so that its elements are brought into re-entrant contact with each other. And so it’s about process: the organizational structures and the flows of [...]

It’s not wholly clear whether the syllabus for CTIN499 — Immersive Moviemaking: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design — is showing up on blackboard.usc.edu, to all eyes, the way it’s supposed to. So (and in any event) here it is locally loitering . Note too that the class does not meet in Zemeckis, as suggested by certain devious publications, [...]