From this spring to summer 2025 I was involed with a advertisement project form uni helping out with the vfx onset and in post. As a supervisor and an artist.
the result
© Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
production tracking
For the production tracking I self hosted a kitsu instance on my homeserver. I was a great learning and a good battle test of the reliablity of the system. Here you can see the rough networking. I didn’t have acces to port forwarding options in my network so i have to route the traffic through tailscale to an extern VPS. Which worked suprisingly well.
Sometimes I could feel the limited upload speed of my home network which only around 20Mbit/s. But with the limited about of users it was totally fine.
onset
The onset experience was stressfull but a lot of fun, a nice alternative to sitting in front of the pc the hole day.
“live” vfx
On special thing was that I tried out live vfx the first time onset. It only really worked for one shoot but was a nice experiment. In the office scene the ceiling was looked to the camera, so i could take a live camera feed and overlay / adjust a 3d ceiling according to it. This was made possible by taking a NDI stream from the editor and then streaming a NDI stream wirelessly to a tablet next to the camera screen. With that the DOP could get a good sense how to frame the shoot and how close the ceiling should be to the camera.
test
post production
For the post production I had help from a student from the first year. Together we used Houdini and Arnold for Rendering and Lighting and Blender / Maya for Layout. We both had some experience in houdini but this project helped getting more into it.
procedural plant
A lot of time went into building and shading the procedural plant in the bedroom shot. I really wanted to get into procedural generation and animation in houdini so it was the perfect opportunity.
syntheyes
I used this project to try out syntheyes, cause both of my shots had to be matchmoved and weren’t super challenging so i thought it would be a good excersise. In the beginning it was a bit to get my head around all the new tools but a lot of things also felt similar and i really apperiated the iterative match moving process. Really gives you control!