Tag Archives: Bent Image Lab

Office Space: Chel White’s Forest

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Chel White, in his natural habitat

Chel White’s “natural habitat”

On anyone’s first day on the job at Bent Image Lab, there’s this inevitable neck snap of a double take that happens as they are shown around and walk by Chel White’s office for the first time.  Sometimes there’s a sound that accompanies this action – but this is no kung-fu  soundtrack…  this is the much more low key true-to-life sound you hear when you see something unexpectedly awe inspiring.  Sometimes the whoosh has a “wha?” attached.  Sometimes it’s more of a “gah.”  Other times it’s merely the sound of the lower lip separating from the upper as the jaw drops wide open.

Welcome to Chel White’s forest – an office honed to Pacific Northwest perfection over many years spent directing and supervising independent features, commercials, music videos and other creative endeavors at Bent.

I like a good challenge as much as the next guy, but I’ll admit trying to put what Chel has created here into words will be a tall order.  Let’s try this – it’s a bit voyeuristic but here’s a panorama I snapped and stitched that puts you in the center of the room.  Click & drag below, have a look around!

[pano file=”/panoramas/QTVR_chelwhite.mov”]

Can you feel it?  It’s a kind of calming effect.  That same feeling you get when you’re fully enclosed in Forest Park and see the buildings of the city melt away as you ascend up into the redwoods, sequoias and pines.  It took me a while to catch myself doing it, but each time I walk into Chel’s office I almost subconsciously take a deep breath as if there was fresh forest air waiting for me inside.  Yes, I’m being completely serious – this scene he’s created…  it gets me every time.

mirrorI guess it’s no different from a breath you might take when you’re about to tee off at the first hole of the frisbee golf course at Pier Park amongst the trees, or when you take that first step onto, say, one of the more manicured college campuses around here – maybe Reed College down in Woodstock, NoPo’s U of Portland, or Pacific out in Forest Grove.  Or maybe you’re hiking up that trail to the top of Multnomah Falls.  Depending on how long you’ve lived here, you may not quite have put your finger on it yet, but you most definitely know it;  it’s that impossible to define “forest feeling.”  For some of us it’s half the reason we live in the NW in the first place.

But let’s not kid ourselves, this is an office space that lies within the heart of Bent Image Lab.  There’s work to be done — a mountain of it!

And make no mistake – lots of intense, amazing work does flow through this office in particular.  But thankfully (for our sake), the calming effect makes it a much-needed eye of the hurricane.  You step out of Chel’s door and it’s chaos at 24 frames per second (ok, sometimes 30).  But step inside and close the door, and you might be safe if not just for a moment.

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Thanks to Jalal Jemison (Bent) and James Chick (HiveFX)

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James Chick/HiveFX

Another giant thank you to James Chick from HiveFX and Jalal Jemison from Bent Image Lab for putting together a great night of VFX from around PDX.  I was impressed with the refined approach that HiveFX takes with Grimm and their commercial work – they are clearly a force to be reckoned with and wise beyond their years and James is a great example of the young talent that is booming over there.  Jalal gave us an interesting look into the mind of a colorist and a taste of that world.  I think we’re all envious of the power and control that he wields with that sweet DaVinci Resolve setup.

Everything was recorded and I hope to get clearance to post a highlight video soon – watch this space!  Bits of the Silhouette demo will be included as well.

The raffle was a big success and thank you all for contributing!  We were able to raise about $100 to help defray the costs to import next meeting’s headliner, and that should knock the dollar amount down to a reasonable level that a sponsor can help cover.

Congrats to our raffle winners Chris Greene, Matt Keyes, Steve Molin, and Justin Nichols.  Another huge round of thanks for our meeting sponsors 3DPDX and Autodesk, and our raffle sponsors Silhouette, Blackmagic Design, Artbeats and O’Reilly Media.

The Spring meeting is shaping up to be the biggest yet, stay tuned for more info!

 

Jalal Jemison/Bent Image Lab

Next VFX/PDX Meeting: Monday, February 11th

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Time to mark your calendars yet again, good Portland VFX’ers.  The winter meeting is shaping up to be a veritable pixel bonfire!

Bent Image Lab’s go-to colorist Jalal Jemison is teaming with Blackmagic Design to show us the ins and outs of DaVinci Resolve, which has a great track record and, with it’s most recent release, is fast becoming the gold standard for color grading.   We’ll have the Blackmagic team on hand and the full tri-panel Blackmagic Control Surface in front of Jalal.  He’ll load us up with plenty of eye-popping before & afters from Bent’s recent work, and then show us step by step exactly how he gets those images to pop.  Usually his hands are a blur as he dials in the precise color values across the trackballs, but using the miracle of slow motion photography and instant replay, we may actually be able to make sense of what he’s doing!  The tricks up his sleeves that he usually reserves for clients.   Be careful, you just might learn something about the black art of color correction and image sweetening before he’s done.

But that’s not all.  This is a full on double bill and we’re equally excited to also have Hive-FX’s Lead Compositor James Chick presenting.  2012 was a big year for the Hivers and the momentum continues to build, as they pound out amazing work with their AE/Maya/C4D pipeline.  James has especially formidable on-the-box skills when it comes to After Effects, and has been carving a name out for himself as a prolific and gifted filmmaker.  To top it all off, Hive-FX has been building up it’s sister company Pinata Post and offers – yep, you guessed it – a fully functional DaVinci Resolve suite.  And now we’ve come full circle.  As Hannibal from the A-Team once said, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Between James and Jalal, this is a can’t miss meeting!

As if that wasn’t enough – J. Bills will also be showing a brief demo of the newly released roto & paint powerhouse Silhouette v5.0.   You thought they’d done about everything there is to do when it came to speeding up labor intensive paint & roto tasks?  v5 brings a gigantic list of new features, including Mocha tracking integration, a warper, and a full suite of stereo conversion tools.  We’ll run through the highlights at the start of the meeting and get everyone up to speed.

Happy to announce that following the meeting, we’ll have a raffle with some big prizes worth $$$ thousands, including a license of DaVinci Resolve, a license of Silhouette v5, as well as a $500 credit from Artbeats Stock Footage, and some great books & door prizes from other sponsors.  Speaking of, special thanks to Autodesk and 3DPDX for covering our winter meeting costs.  Our meetings are always free, but the raffle will help raise some funds to cover costs for our upcoming spring meeting featuring presentations from ILM and LAIKA.  Big plans!

Meeting details – save the date!

Monday February 11th, 2013

7:00pm to 9:00pm

Clinton St. Theater

2522 SE Clinton St.

Hope to see you all there!

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