Tiny Island Interview on BBC Business News (I am on video agian!)

A production crew from BBC news appeared in our studio today to shoot a piece on Tiny Island and Cg Protégé. They shot me while I was teaching. Thus for a few seconds in this video, I am seen teaching and explaining matchmoving to the class.

Once again I appear in some kind of video. Thankfully I'm not the main person being featured this time :)

State of affairs in the VFX Industry

The wave of protest that was brewing since last year, and has been gaining momentum since. The topic was about unfair state of affairs surrounding the business conditions of visual effects companies and the welfare of visual effects artists. This started off  on the internet, in small discussion forums with some key veterans in the industry, who educated the rest of the vfx community about the big picture, giving informed figures the momentum of that discussions launched into action when. Here's a video that does an excellent job of summarising the cause and effect surrounding the current crisis faced by the vfx artists and facilities. Here's the video of the VFX Town Hall on PI Day (3-14-13).

The Robotic Musicians known as: Intel's Industrial Control in Concert

Intel is showcasing the precision and practical applications of its processors in real-time control, precision sensitive tasks in an industrial environment like the one in the video.


Besides being amazed by the technological precision and sustained performance in the machines and processors, the music is also pretty cool.

This is the actualisation of an original animation of machine parts that create music by launching balls to hit sound-emitting pieces of instruments/machine parts. Here's the original video:



The amazing thing is that Intel has managed to design such an actual machine, and has programmed and designed processors to turn a whimsical idea into reality. This is an instance where artistic visual actually drives practical design.


It currently seems like the balls are being thrown out to trigger a single note at per ball. It would be even more cool if the balls were re-used, timed to hit multiple pieces taking into account their bouncing trajectory :)

Class Activity: Eye of the Storm

Eye of the Storm 2012 from Patrick Woo on Vimeo.

This is a class exercise conceptualised by Kooi Chek the original instructor for VFX at Cg Protégé and head of FX at Tiny Island Productions. KC has created a complete version for the class.

The purpose of the exercise was to give students an opportunity to apply their knowledge of particle systems, volumetric lighting and rendering techniques, after they learn about Afterburn.

Here I've taken that exercise and redone it with my own look and timing. I've also given it a bit more of a dramatic lighting, including animated lights cast by 'lightning'.

If you are in Singapore and looking to get pick up practical skills in cg and visual effects please look up CG Protégé's vfx and other courses here.

James Bond - Skyfall: The Making Of

I came across an article in CG-Space talking about the making of Skyfall, the newest James Bond movie. In the article, Bogdan Peter Istrate expressed how much he admired the invisible role of VFX in the film. 

He recognises the fact that we often only recognise VFX in the kind of movies which the VFX screams out at you, but often forget that there are also huge amounts of visual effects done to those subtle films from genres that you would never have expected the shots to be touched by any visual effects work. Bogdan feels that good vfx should not even be noticeable. there is a whole lot of VFX work done to the films that we may not even know its there (yes, those that were not included in special/bonus features or covered in 'making-of' articles.