VerveCast

We’ve been working with the Milwaukee Wave since 2005, and in that time we’ve both grown quite a bit, and while this weekend will see them headed to the MISL Championship for the second year in a row (and going for their 6th championship since they started) we decided to look back and some of the video work we’ve created for them over the years…

It’s pretty crazy to think we started doing the game intros with a MiniDV camera in our old photo studio in 2005, and now we’re doing the intros with a RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera in our photo studio (which is now over 3 times larger.)

Enjoy the video, and hey, while you’re at it, let’s root for a win tonight and on Sunday, to make our Milwaukee Wave the MISL Champions once again!

As one of the newest members of the z2 team, I found myself, as most new employees do, in the not-so-unique situation of deciding what personal information to share with my co-workers in order to gain their trust. Generally, I am a “keep to myself” guy when it comes to discussing my life outside of the workplace. I am very cautious when talking about my personal life as disclosing the wrong information can have long term effects on your level of acceptance in the social circles in the office.

Case in point. A few years ago, we were lunching with a new employee. For some reason, the table conversation turned to the “paste eater” kids we remembered from grade school. I can assure you, not a single kid was remembered kindly. In fact, unforgiving ridicule would be an understatement. After we shared a few stories, the new guy, by his own volition, jumped in with

“C’mon. Who didn’t eat paste growing up? I ate paste and crayons until I was in 5^th grade. You mean to tell me none of you like the taste of crayons? You’re lying.”

SFX: Pin drop

There is a fine line between self-disclosure and self-embarrassment, and sometimes we don’t know exactly where that line is, but there is only one way to find out. Throw it out there and see what happens. As I said, being the new guy myself, I feel I am obligated to share something intimately personal and potentially embarrassing. Here it is—my first Rick-umentary. Click and enjoy.

In our photo studio (which is commonly known as Z2 Photo) we’ve got a pretty large cyc wall (36 feet wide, 14 feet tall) which is usually white. But in the last two months it’s gone from white, to black, to white, to blue, to white, and now it’s green. And next week it’ll probably be white again.

Just for reference on the size, here’s a few more photos… one with a big truck, and one with a bunch of people.

Oh, and if you haven’t guessed, we’ve got a green screen shoot coming up. :)

If you saw April’s post last week about a trade show we worked on, this post will go into detail on just one part of our work.

We did a series of videos highlighting many of the Putzmeister products, and these videos were in the booth on video touchscreens. We ended up working with another company who owned the touchscreens, and they provided a few generic samples files and a display for us to test everything with.

Here’s a breakdown of the files involved for one touchscreen. There’s an XML file which controls how the screen functions, as well as a menu video which loops until someone touches one of the on-screen buttons, and then two other video files that play when selected. These all get copied to the root of a CF card and inserted into the video display.

Here’s what our menu video normally looks like when looping. To define the areas where the buttons are, you need to determine the x,y coordinates, and the resolution of the touch part of the display is (oddly) 4096 x 4096 pixels. The videos themselves are much smaller, but the 4096 represents the touch grid.

So the first thing we do is take a screen shot of the video, and then blow it up (un-proportionally) to 4096 x 4096 pixels.

Oh, we also need to flip the screen over because the coordinate system is reversed and 0,0 is in the bottom-right corner instead of the upper-left corner like most of us are used to.

Now that we have the screen grab of our video the correct size, and in the correct orientation, we just draw some guide lines around the buttons, and then get the coordinate points for each button.

Once we have the “start x,y” and “end x,y” coordinates we make note of them for the next step…

If you’re familiar with XML or even HTML image maps, this file should make sense. It’s fairly simple, and you can see where each of the videos is specified, and the coordinates that we determined.

So with our TPANEL.XML file done, and our videos ready to go, we just load it all onto the CF card, pop it in the machine, and it’s ready to go!

We produced about 20 videos for the booth, in just a few weeks, including a bit of shooting as well. Doing work for trade shows is always fun because you get to see things out in the real-world, often with the client right there with you. :)

Last week I gave a sneak peek photo of something we built for a TV commercial we were filming. Here’s a full photo of it during set-up.

The table is about 20 feet wide, and consists of 18 threaded rods, 36 skate wheels (with 72 bearings), 144 nuts, and a lot of two by fours and plywood.

We started concepting the table at the end of December, and I spent a little time doing some research and a bit of design work. I also whipped up a quick 3D model to explain how it would work to others.

The 3D modeling was new to me, as I usually just explain things with bad sketches, but I figured this was a good time to work on my 3D skills, so I took advantage of it.

I also built a small version hacked together with scrap wood to test things out. It worked well enough that I used it to brainstorm improvements with a few of our helpers for the final build.

When crunch-time came, we had less than a week to do the construction on it, and I ended up not doing any of the actual building on it, but our “helpers” (who are much better with tools than I am) ended up completing it a full day before our dry run.

Here’s the table on the set. One of the requirements was that the movement be quiet enough that it wouldn’t be picked up while recording audio. The skate bearings were nearly silent. We got a few squeaks during shooting, but nothing a little WD-40 couldn’t take care of.

We originally thought about motorizing it and having a speed controller, since it needed to move at various speeds during the filming. We decided that being human-powered was the easier path, and that worked fine once we got used to the moves, which had to match up with what the actors were doing and saying.

This is what you’ll see in the final commercial. Even though the table is 20 feet wide, you’ll only see about 7 feet of it at a time. The two actors stay in place as things slide past them.

This project was a great challenge, and it’s always fun to go from R&D to a final working piece in just a few weeks, especially something as large as this was. I’d also like to give a big thanks to the team who worked on this, especially Rob and Steve who did the table construction…. Great job guys!