Tag Archives: PDXclusive

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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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!

I Am VFX/PDX: Randy Wakerlin

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The “I Am VFX/PDX” series launches with Randy Wakerlin, a long time Portlander who’s as talented as they come.  And many talents at that – Director, Animator, Compositor, Supervisor, Teacher, and let’s not skip Dad and avid Biker.  I’m very excited to be catching up with Randy…   and make no mistake, he is hard to catch!  

VFX/PDX:  Where to start — how about “the beginning?”  Some of us get bitten early, you know, maybe in high school there was some equipment to play with – or maybe before that? Maybe a certain toy under the Xmas tree? The Etch-a-sketch Animator? The Fisher Price Pixelvision? The Little Orphan Annie Jr stop motion kit?  Ha ha – you’ll animate your eye out, kid!

For me it was a tablet and an Atari 800XL (64k RAM!) cartridge called “Atari Artist” that got it going.  I think I was 9.  How did you get bitten by the film & video bug? And more specifically, the experimental video/animation bug?

Portrait of the artist as a young filmmaker/astronaut

Randy:  Back in middle school I played around with my dad’s video camera shooting silly skits with friends. He also had a Super-8 camera that I coveted because it had an intervalometer and it could shoot single frame. When I was about 12 I started playing around with object and clay animation with an obsessive fervor that has yet to mellow.

I can remember the first time a piece of experimental animation really grabbed me. It was my first year at Hampshire College and we watched “Allegretto” by Oskar Fischinger (click to view).  It was a beautiful film with colorful geometric shapes moving to fast paced jazz music. That film was a huge inspiration to me. His films reminded me of daydreams I had as a child while listening to music, I used to see colors and patterns choreographed to the music when I closed my eyes. The connection between music and experimental film has a long and rich history, and Fischinger turned me on to all forms of experimental film after that.

VFX/PDX:  Ok, and knowing you’re a serious academic, I have to get this one out of the way. Talking all time here – who is your favorite visual artist?

Norman McLaren is my all time favorite. His films are a perfect balance of technical and poetic. I love how “Begone Dull Care” links jazz music and his direct animation techniques, simultaneously loose and precise, so amazing.


VFX/PDX:  Wow, now I see where Kyle Cooper was inspired to scratch the titles directly into the film “Se7en!”  With these types of interests, the Portland animation scene seems like such a perfect match. When did you arrive here, and what attracted you to Portland?

In 2002 I was on summer break from CalArts. I knew that I wanted to get out of LA for the summer and had an old college friend living up in Portland with a little room to rent for $200/month but you had to walk through a bathroom to get to it. Animation was in a lull in Portland and I didn’t think I could find a short term animation job anyway so I ended up waiting tables at Nicholas’ Restaurant serving Lebanese food to make some money. I met this cute girl at a dive bar called The Gypsy on NW 21st and we fell in love. For my 2 remaining years at CalArts I found myself working through the summers up in Portland and visiting whenever I could, mostly because of the girl (who I eventually married) but partially because Portland was the first city that really resonated with me. The art, culture, cycling, public transportation, proximity to nature, and overall vibe was really attractive, and I knew that stop-motion animation was happening up here, I just had to find it. (continued on next page)

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