New York Film Academy's blog

Kolly Times - “Achamundu! Achamundu!”, a Tamil thriller, directed by Arun Vaidyanathan, stars Prasanna Sneha and Emmy award winning American actor John Shea.

Vaidyanathan, a US based software professional turned filmmaker after graduating from the New York Film Academy Film School in 2004, has plans to dub the Tamil Film Achamundu! Achamundu! in Spanish, French, German, Creole, Mandarin, Mende/Temne, Arabic, Bangla, Burmese, Vietnamese, Srilankan and Urudu.

The film will be released in 18 different countries.The director promises that this will be thrilling and emotional with a hair-raising climax. With this movie, Vaidyanathans ambition is to have Tamil cinema noticed internationally.

This is the first Tamil film to be shot in the RED camera, which is taught at the New York Film Academy. This futuristic HD4k resolution camera has only been used in a handful of Hollywood productions. Red is the next generation technology that will combine both the quality of 35mm and the adept ability of digital editing/transfer systems.

We can only get so far by creating viable images in our animation program by using shaders and lighting. At some point we will need to take our files into a compositing package in order to finalize the look of our scene.

By employing “render passes” we can output various aspects of a scene such as the reflections, lights, and colors into separate layers and then import them into a compositor such as After Effects, Shake or Nuke to name but a few.

Once in the compositing program we are able to combine the passes in “layers” and modify each one in order to get the best result image wise. For instance the image with the bright colors is an index pass and allows the compositor to mask out specific areas of the scene in order to apply an effect to the unmasked areas.

The white image at the bottom is an occlusion pass which allows us to bring soft shadows into the scene. This is a great technique for softening and neutralizing that harsh cg look that were all familiar with.

Understanding render passes is an important and essential technique for image creation and one that we encourage our students to master.

By Robert Appleton, 3D Animation School Instructor

Soitu.es Cine - Martín Rosete (Madrid, 1980) es, sin lugar a dudas, el mejor ejemplo de quien la sigue la consigue. Este joven realizador español estudiante en la New York Film Academy (NYFA), está preparando su primer thriller, 'Anne's truth' (título provisional), idea original de Mikel Urmeneta (fundador y actual director creativo de Kukuxumusu)... y todo, gracias a su corto 'Basket Bronx'.



Desde que Rosete llegó a EE.UU. las oportunidades no le han dejado de perseguir. Además de preparase formalmente en la New York Film Academy (NYFA), a través de una beca de 'La Caixa', ha seguido desarrollando y ejecutando proyectos en Kamel, la productora que creó junto con su hermano nada más licenciarse en Comunicación Audiovisual por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

'Basket Bronx', producto final del primer curso en la NYFA, ha representando un punto de inflexión en la carrera de este joven director. Su corto ha sido el catalizador que le ha permitido llevar a cabo su primer largo y que entidades como el Instituto de Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA), la Comunidad de Madrid (CAM), el Gobierno de Navarra y empresarios como Mikel Urmeneta y Gabriel Omania sean figuras claves en su materialización...more.

Film School Student Presents Jaglfab Film Fest 2009
March 19th, 2009 Posted in Film School
On May 2nd and 3rd, New York Film Academy alumni Chris Banks will be hosting to his “Just A Guy Looking for A Break” (Jaglfab) Film Festival at the Historic Antholgy Film Archives in New York City.

Banks, an award winning film director, decided to produce his own film festival due to the numerous rejections from Studios, Festivals and Film Schools that many filmmakers experience.

The Jaglfab Film Festival is a showcase of his own short and feature films. Films with a fresh perspective and familiar themes that the modern audience can identify with.

For more info:

Official MySpace

Official Facebook - Search “Chris Banks”

or email Ashacinema@gmail.com

We wish you the best of luck Chris! Keep the dream alive.

When watching a car commercial one can safely assume that cg cars will be used for many of the shots. Depending of the location different kinds of lighting will be need to be represented, recreating reflections of the surrounding landscape, be it city or countryside also needs to be taken into account.

Mental ray has many different kinds of shaders (shaders determine the surface characteristics of a 3D object) for describing the look of elements in a scene. This semester we have spent 2 classes just on car shaders in mental ray! There are a set of shaders in mental ray called architectural shaders (called mia) that contain many attributes essential for creating a car surface. Although there is already a shader in the mental ray library called appropriately a “car shader” we usually create our own from mia shaders for greater options and flexibility for the look of the car paint.

In order to create the surface look we need it's necessary to create what we call a “shader tree”, which is composed of a number of shaders, textures and utilities. Shader trees can range from simple to outrageously complex. The car shader is relatively straight forward though understanding how all of the attributes contained within the mia shader work together can be quite an endeavor. It's not just putting all of the the “nodes” together, but also optimizing them to render in the shortest time possible. Rendering just one frame for a movie can take many hours, and as there are 24 frames per second for a movie and 30 fps for TV, rendering a 5 second shot can take allot of time and money.

Understanding how lighting and shaders work is a big part of creating convincing animation in games, commercials and movies. At the New York Film Academy we take allot of time and effort with the students in this area, ensuring that they graduate with an in depth understanding of mental ray fundamentals, lighting and their importance in the cg pipeline.

http://www.nyfa.com/film-school-blog/3d-animation-school-rendering-cars-with-mental-ray/