On the 8th of October 2010  I start my work at The Post Bangkok. It is probably the biggest post-production house in Bangkok, however until recently their CG department was not the most famous. A few month ago they started to change that and hired Olivier Welter, the ex-supervisor from Fame Post. Eager to work with this guy and seeking for change and new experiences both I and Joaquim Montserrat are resigning from DMGroup and joining The Post Bangkok on October 2010.

If i can't really say how it's going to be in this new team, i can however tell how it's been at DMGroup and make a brief (hi)story of my time there...

Thailand, land of opportunity

I arrived in Bangkok on October 2003, willing to discover new culture, new countries, new ways to work. I was hired at DM Effects House within a week, at that time the company was 2 years old, counting around 20 people total, about 12 in the CG / compositing department. However mostly working on small projects, the company's showreel was already impressive, with a lot of  funk. I didn't know that then, but I arrived exactly at the right time, in the right place. Thailand was in great need of VFX, demand was high and offer was mostly limited to big expensive and not necessarily delivering companies. By joining DM Effects House i bring talent and french know-how to a small inexpensive company that most production houses can afford. K. Veera Sae-Ueng (K. Ake), DM Effects House's owner along with K. Ti, is very opened to every possibilities, and within a year the company grows fast.

Using renderfarms in an efficient way is a major advantage for DMGroup over the competition, the use of 3DsMax prove to be the right choice over Maya in this matter, allowing for a quick setup with minimum hassle, delivering higher quality in less time. Higher quality compositing, taught by Ake and later pushed further, is another skill that make DMGroup's movie stand out, in parallel with 3DsMax's rendering systems (Vray, Brazil), HDR compositing gives the extra touch of realism.

At the same time many very creative directors emerge in Thailand, specially within Phenomena production house, giving us opportunities to work on commercials that really help the showreel and let us show our skills. With projects like Priston Tale (my first VFX project ever), DoubleA Robot, Father and Son or Winter in Bangkok, DMGroup quickly get internationally renowned and assure steady stream of clients.

Soon Joaquim Montserrat, a fellow student from Supinfocom, joins our team and add an extra dose of "french touch". In the mean time i step up as VFX Supervisor.

Expanding Fast...

With a comfortable income, international fame, cheap labor and "french" skills simultaneously, DMGroup is in a good place. In 2004 owners K. Ake and K. Ti decide to expand, opening Sweet Eyes production house and Artifex post-production and online within a few month. From one house the company expands to three of them, from 20 people, it expands to more than 80.

In 2005 K. Ake decides to consolidate the head of the teams by including me and K. Suk (the other 3DsMax supervisor) in the shares of DM Effects House as well as other key team members in their respective company's shares.

I take my new duties seriously, feeling that DM Effects House itself becomes for me some sort of long term project. Seeing that 3 companies are lacking cohesion and are confusing our clients, I propose to create a single marketing image of  the whole.

With the help of K. Aei I lead the design of this new visual identity, deciding of the look and feel, logo, website etc... of this new entity that will be called DMGroup. You can take a look at the website for a good overview of this work: www.digitalmagicgroup.com .

Aside from these management responsibilities i take on, I keep supervising the VFX team with Suk and Joaquim's help, setting up pipelines, teaching teams techniques and trying to improve organisation on the producers side (the project coordinators).

I develop an in-house organisation tool that focus on project management and coordination, long-term scheduling and clients, projects and employees database

Too Big...

However the size of the companies is hard to manage and the quality that is seen within the VFX department is not easy to reach in the online and production teams.

The VFX team can mostly be left under  K.Suk and K. Norn (head-producer) and my supervision so the owners K. Ake and K. Ti can focus on the other 2 companies . The online/post-production and the production businesses are not as easy as it looks, and as the VFX department makes great profit, the others are not that lucky.

K.Ake doubles his effort to make the production company profitable and steps up as director, investing money to obtain highlight project, trying to make a name. A few projects really stand out but it is hard to break in the tight circles of the production business in Bangkok.

All this has a cost, and however substantial the VFX income is, the profit is greatly reduced.

On my side I try to improve efficiency and rationalize spendings but without backup or real power (over accounting), and on top of my already great duties of VFX supervisor, I cannot change things enough. Not receiving rewards for my efforts anyway, I feel myself give up.

A New Step !

Even though the work in the VFX team stays great and keeps bringing great clients and projects from all over Asia, I feel that i learned all i could and that i cannot advance further within this company. It is time for change !

Julien over and out!

http://omind.net/bangkok-planet/ http://omind.net/bangkok-planet/#comments Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:25:57 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=1097

For a project i am currently working on we have to do a matte painting of the river from a high point of view. Lucky enough there is an abandoned building right where we need to, with all the freedom to go upstairs (54th floor without elevator...) and take pictures from every corner of the building.

This enabled me to create a 360 degree panorama, and with a bit of photoshop to remove the building below and actually have the feeling that the pictures were taken flying... With this panorama i applied some transformation to make it look like this little planet: Bangkok Planet.

You will get to see the actual matte painting and the related project in a later post...

]]> http://omind.net/bangkok-planet/feed/ 14 http://omind.net/shooting-day-night-bangkok/ http://omind.net/shooting-day-night-bangkok/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:01:26 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=1084

]]> http://omind.net/shooting-day-night-bangkok/feed/ 1 http://omind.net/elephant/ http://omind.net/elephant/#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:55:53 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=1034

An elephant sneaking in a construction site to have fun on an improvised trampoline, that's quite the fun concept. Based on the successful short movie by Nicolas Devaux, this story was repurposed to show the strength of a major indian cement product, Zuari Cement.

Unlike the other movie, this one use a mix of live action backgrounds where the elephant and trampoline are computer generated. Shot on location at night in Mumbai, the construction site was so big the lighting team had to manually rig more than 200 lights to illuminate the area including a giant light balloon to simulate moonlight. It took the most part of 2 nights to get the desired footages.

The CG process started way earlier than the shoot. Setting up a familiar creature like an elephant in such a way that it should fool the eye and feel real takes a lot of time. Animation setup, bone structure, modelling and zbrush took place in parallel. When the footages from the shooting were made available, the elephant was fully ready to be used in every shot and the animation and rendering process was then very straightforward. Chromeball light informations were used to match lighting as well as to give a very slight oil layer to the skin of the elephant.

About 6~7 weeks of work, 2 cg artists and a roto team. Animated in 3D Studio Max, rendered in VRay and composited in After Effects.

Since then the elephant was also used to create this DMGroup Logo.

Credits:
VFX Supervisor - Julien Vanhoenacker
Senior VFX Animator - Alejandro Garcia

]]> http://omind.net/elephant/feed/ 17 http://omind.net/dmgroup-logo/ http://omind.net/dmgroup-logo/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:02:05 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=973

Here is an animated logo i did for my company DMGroup. We just installed a big TV in the lobby showing making-of and past projects and this logo will be randomly displayed among them... Hope you like it. Rendered with Vray.

D

]]> http://omind.net/dmgroup-logo/feed/ 21 http://omind.net/macro-bubbles/ http://omind.net/macro-bubbles/#comments Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:04:08 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=511

I was having fun with the macro-lens and the nail polish remover of my girlfriend and some neat pictures came up !

I decided to use them for some UI theme for this very website (you can activate the themes at the bottom right in the menu).

The first one is tileable horizontally and both of them are free to use =)

]]> http://omind.net/macro-bubbles/feed/ 0 http://omind.net/s26-club/ http://omind.net/s26-club/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:42:22 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=1202

One of the last projects i did for Digital Magic Group... Again with director Thanonchai Sornsriwichai. Good taste and rather minimalistic, specially for a commercial for this kind of product (a milk that is supposed to make your kids smarter).

Credits

Director: Thanonchai Sornsriwichai
Production: Phenomena
VFX Supervisor: Julien Vanhoenacker
VFX Artist: Alejandro Garcia
VFX: Digital Magic Group

]]> http://omind.net/s26-club/feed/ 0 http://omind.net/cold-christmas/ http://omind.net/cold-christmas/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:56:18 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=718

]]> http://omind.net/cold-christmas/feed/ 17 http://omind.net/lexus/ http://omind.net/lexus/#comments Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:52:23 +0000 kanex http://localhost/wordpress/?p=1

This is Raw CG material we created for Lexus Japan to sell their new hybrid car, the HS250h. It has not been color corrected yet and the editing is just something rough to present the work. It's the first time Lexus use CG for promotional content. We managed to finish this in a month with a 4 people strong team and lots of support from the Japan side.

]]> http://omind.net/lexus/feed/ 20 http://omind.net/motorola-shatter/ http://omind.net/motorola-shatter/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:56:57 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=232

This is a printAd project i did with photographer Sanjay Kothari from NY. The client is Motorola China and to be honest it wasn't easy to give birth to this picture! But we made it, that's what counts... Most of the broken pieces of glass were actually hand cut, to obtain the exact wanted shapes.

]]> http://omind.net/motorola-shatter/feed/ 2 http://omind.net/book-of-blood/ http://omind.net/book-of-blood/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:58:11 +0000 kanex http://localhost/wordpress/?p=3

The "Book of Blood" is the latest story from Clive Barker to be adapted as a movie, this time directed by John Harrison. The horror story features a young college student who appears to be channeling messages from the dead.We worked on this movie as a small team of 5 persons and did 21 shots in little less than two months. Our job consisted in doing dozens of Dragonflies, a blood fountain, and an effect that couldn't be done in prosthetics, an invisible clamp on Mary's mouth.The blood fountain scene features a group of dancing ghosts girls that can only be seen when covered with blood. The dragonflies scene is a key point in the movie's narration as it shows the moment when Mary understands the secret of the house.

The "Clamp on the mouth" scene had to display an invisible ghost grabing Mary's mouth, so she would pay attention to the words written on the walls.The 3D job required extensive particle setup for the dragonflies, fluids simulation for the blood fountain and facial tracking as well as delicate compositing for the clamp on the mouth.

Credits:
Joaquim Montserrat - VFX Supervisor
Julien Vanhoenacker - Senior VFX Artist
Alejandro Garcia - Senior VFX Artist
Yves d'Incau - Senior VFX Artist
Pichaya Popanyasak - Senior VFX Artist

]]> http://omind.net/book-of-blood/feed/ 2 http://omind.net/new-york/ http://omind.net/new-york/#comments Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:53:33 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=697

Just a quick business trip, some VFX supervision for a Japanese commercial, not much time for visiting much but here are a few pics...
(Don't panic about the orange/red pictures, it's not the apocalypse, just some infrared pictures...)

]]> http://omind.net/new-york/feed/ 25 http://omind.net/timelapse-experiment/ http://omind.net/timelapse-experiment/#comments Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:58:10 +0000 kanex http://omind.net/?p=750

Well the idea is to use the sun as a moving light source, hopefully getting a very smooth light movement... Unfortunately it's still pretty much the rainy season here in Thailand so i get more clouds than i need... 
3 Exposures per picture on this timelapse, from 2 s to 1/125 s... One picture every 30s (too long, i'll make it faster next time...)

]]> http://omind.net/timelapse-experiment/feed/ 0