The film “Fathead,” produced by the Entertainment Technology Center@USC, continues to garner recognition. Nominated earlier this year for a NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Short Film (Live Action) category, the film was most recently included in The American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival. “Fathead” — directed by c. Craig Patterson and produced by Erik Weaver, ETC’s director of adaptive production — was featured among 38 short films in the Showcase at Cannes and was announced winner in the Student Short Film category. Continue reading ETC’s ‘Fathead’ Receives Honors at the Cannes Film Festival

The Entertainment Technology Center@USC has begun releasing its case study entitled “Fathead: Virtual Production & Beyond.” Section 1 of the four-part white paper is “Cloud Computing: Growth Without Bounds.” “Everything on this production was done in the cloud, minus the shoot on set,” explains ETC@USC head of virtual & adaptive production Erik Weaver, executive producer of the 20-minute “Fathead” film. “We did some very innovative work, ingesting ARRI Alexa RAW to Amazon S3 buckets on the AWS cloud in real time, which had never been done before and I don’t think has been done since.” Continue reading ETC Releases First Section of Virtual Production White Paper

Content creators who relied on remote workflows through the height of COVID-19 now realize those protocols are here to stay. Centralized cloud-based data repositories are a convenient hub from which to manage the processing of sound and image throughout production. The HPA NET lunch event, “Color Grading in the Cloud: A Case Study” analyzed that critical step from the perspective of the short film “Fathead,” produced by the Entertainment Technology Center@USC. “Fathead” was shot on a volume stage and uploaded from the camera to the cloud, where the entire workflow took place. Continue reading ‘Fathead’ Case Study: HPA Analyzes Color Grading in Cloud

Production in the cloud, virtual workflows and remote work solutions were hot topics at the 2022 NAB Show in Las Vegas last month. Erik Weaver, director of adaptive production at the Entertainment Technology Center@USC, discussed new tools and techniques implemented during the production of ETC’s “Fathead,” a short film that experimented with in-camera real-time VFX and LED stages. Weaver joined “Fathead” virtual production producer Tom Thudiyanplackal, the short’s post-production supervisor James Blevins, and the global lead for Film/TV production partners at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jack Wenzinger for a compelling NAB panel discussion, “ICVFX and the Cloud.” Continue reading ‘Fathead’ Team Explores Virtual Production During NAB Panel

Cloud computing and virtual production were the hot tickets at NAB 2022, where attendance was 52,468, down 40 percent since the previous most recent live show in 2019, when 91,500 convened in Las Vegas. And there were fewer exhibitors (about 900 vs. roughly 1,600 three years ago). But some things never change. Amazon Web Services, ARRI, Blackmagic, Quasar Science and Mo-Sys were among the notable companies touting cloud-based and virtual production solutions. And Sony Electronics wowed the crowd with a sprawling booth that featured its new Venice 2 digital cinema camera. Continue reading Cloud, Virtual Production Power New Workflows at NAB Show

Jack Wenzinger of Amazon Web Services’ Global M&E Partners vertical moderated a discussion during the HPA Tech Retreat on what’s been learned about cloud-enabled virtual production during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also noted that Epic Games’ Unreal Engine has published a field guide to virtual production that focuses on the work being done in pre-production and post. Joining the conversation was ETC@USC senior consultant Erik Weaver, Solstice Studios chief technology officer Edward Churchward and Mo-Sys Engineering technical director James Uren. Continue reading HPA Tech Retreat: Cloud-Enabled Virtual Production – Part 1