Blog

Started a podcast.

July 5, 2023

Looks like we’ve started a new VFX podcast! One of those random things that if you’re not careful can very easily spawn from a “why not” at any given time.

OK but why.

After some months back I took part in a Foundry Livestream with my good friends Tony and Josh, which I mentioned in the last post, we all felt that time had gone by really quickly and we had had a lot of fun. So we all said “man we should do more of this, even just by ourselves”. And that was the Why Not moment right there.

Josh and Tony’s friend Gautama Murcho, or “G”, came along and we four scheduled and recorded a random zoom call. And oh, it was fun. G is amazing, great artist and supervisor who I literally met in that improvised conversation. And yes, his real name is a single letter like the true masters – you can watch the episode to understand.

So here we are, The VFX Nomads. And we even have a logo. And a .com domain and YouTube and Spotify, isn’t that pro!

On teaching VFX, and anything else really.

June 8, 2023

“Aren’t you afraid of teaching everything you know about a subject?"

This is a question I never managed to make sense of – like… what?? I wish I could help others to know more than I do, not less!! What gives you value and purpose as a human being? Making others around you better, happier and smarter, or patting yourself on the back in some conception of a zero-sum universe?

Rephrasing this question however, we can turn it into a really fun one:

Is it possible to teach all you know about a subject?

Now this is a fascinating topic. Because in order to answer this question, you also need to explore how exactly one’s understanding about a topic develops.

I recently took part in a Foundry livestream on their YouTube channel with my awesome colleagues Tony Lyons and Josh Parks, and among other things we touched on this topic of sharing your knowledge with others. And while “briefly” gathering my thoughts, I ended up writing down a lot more than expected and elaborating properly, so it turned into this post!

You can watch the livestream here, or keep reading for some of my random thoughts on teaching.

The Creation of OpenVPCal

November 10, 2022

There’s times that you start a project planning to complete it in a few days, and it takes a bit longer. Well, I’m here to talk about one where “a bit longer” turned into 2+ years. And for this I’m blaming the amazing people that I was able to develop it with. So here’s the story of OpenVPCal…

OpenVPCal is an open-source Screen-to-Camera color calibration tool for virtual production (In-Camera VFX) that I’ve been developing for the best part of the last 2 years alongside with Francesco Luigi Giardiello, an Imaging Technologist from Netflix and amazing color scientist, as well as his team, plus a whole lot of input from many other people.

OpenVPCal is now (writing this on November 2022) in beta state and already being tested by 40+ partners around the world. The tool was presented in Siggraph 2022 by Carol Payne and Francesco ¹, and we also made a presentation of the tool on Netflix Post Production Summit 2022 in Madrid, last week.

Here’s my latest big dev project… this website

May 29, 2022

It took me so many years to go ahead and make a blog… then I made one in 2016, and as soon as it was working I didn’t quite feel like writing anything. So that was the end of such futile effort. Fun thing to build though.

Fast forward to 2021, after having redirected my digital compositor career more towards supervision, education and development, it was the moment to start building something new. Except for the fact that those occupations combined take like every single waking hour I have. So getting a new website creation into my to-do list (which tends to only be inhabited by vfx tools) wasn’t the smartest of possible decisions. Especially given my most-probably-pathological and definitely unhealthy perseveration for any stuff that goes into that list. Nonetheless it got there. And that’s not even the worst part: a blog also got its way into the list. And a newsletter. And… an online learning platform. Not sure how I let the guard down but it was already too late.

Now – good news is if you’re reading this, I’m potentially still alive and made it to the other side of that part of my to-do list. So welcome to my blog, website, and little online learning platform!

Started a podcast.

OK but why.

The Creation of OpenVPCal

Here’s my latest big dev project… this website

Join my Newsletter

Section Coming Soon