#creative cow

Matthew Parish, Creative Cow

Graham Greene’s spy thriller Our Man in Havana tours with Creative Cow Productions. Jenny Mather sat down with Matthew Parish of Creative Cow to find out more. (more…)

0SHARESshare on facebookshare on twitter Being a filmmaker is not as dreamy as it sounds. Entering the world of filmmaking has its own demands and challenges. One has to be prepared to work hard and be vigilant about what’s happening in the field of cinema. Many a times, there are no tutors to turn to and we find ourselves trying…

Exeter Northcott Theatre secures new funding

Exeter Northcott Theatre is has announced that The Michael Bishop Foundation has granted £50,000 a year for the next three years in unrestricted funds. (more…)

just finished #4 of 4 eyeball animation tutorials via www.creativecow.net .. just a few of *many* free online digital art tuts they offer.. perfect for someone like me who requires my own schedule and ample time to gather inspiration to face the challenge of polygonal modeling & animation.  :-D #mindblown 

John Galt of Panavision on Bayer sensors, the 4k marketing myth, and the science of modern image-making.

Pushing the Limits on Pushing Daisies

Visual Effects Supervisor William Powloski helped create one of the most eye-popping worlds ever seen on TV, as part of a feature film aesthetic on a TV budget and schedule. Although it was canceled after only two seasons, it remains one of the most beautiful and innovative programs to ever air on US television. In an extended version of the original article in The Visual Effects Issue of Creative COW Magazine, here is an exclusive look at how he and his team helped pull it off.

It's a simple story, really. A boy discovers his magical ability to bring living beings back from the dead with a touch. He also discovers its dark prices: one more touch returns those people and animals to death, permanently. And for any of them that stay alive for more than one minute, someone else nearby must die. We meet Ned again as an adult, a pie maker who uses his power to resurrect murder victims to find their killers, so that his detective friend Emerson Cod can collect the rewards. One of the people he brings back to life is his childhood love, a girl named Chuck, who will of course die if they ever touch again. Okay, maybe not so simple. In a TV landscape marked even in its comedies by withering post-modern irony, "Pushing Daisies" is very funny, and exceptionally sweet. One of the keys to pulling that off is setting it in a self-contained world, somewhere between a comic book and a fairy tale, a little nostalgic and bursting with color...

The challenge of shooting on location: the "real world," isn't the same as the "real world" of "Pushing Daisies," 

"But we clearly don't have the time and budget that feature films do, so we structure sequences in such a way that you get the most bang for your buck out of the visual effects shots," says William. "There, I'm talking about the featured visual effects shots. We also do hundreds of 'invisible' visual effects shots that simply add scale to our production environment, like a simple set extension. Or we're creating things that we just don't have the time or the bandwidth to do on sets." They've also discovered the biggest challenge for shooting on location: the "real" world doesn't look nearly realistic enough to fit into the world of "Pushing Daisies." In one episode this season, they find a body in a swamp. "Well it couldn't be just any ordinary swamp. It had to be the most beautiful swamp we can create," William laughs.

"But we clearly don't have the time and budget that feature films do, so we structure sequences in such a way that you get the most bang for your buck out of the visual effects shots," says William. "There, I'm talking about the featured visual effects shots. We also do hundreds of 'invisible' visual effects shots that simply add scale to our production environment, like a simple set extension. Or we're creating things that we just don't have the time or the bandwidth to do on sets." They've also discovered the biggest challenge for shooting on location: the "real" world doesn't look nearly realistic enough to fit into the world of "Pushing Daisies." In one episode this season, they find a body in a swamp. "Well it couldn't be just any ordinary swamp. It had to be the most beautiful swamp we can create," William laughs.

Sci-Fi Classics Part 1 (by creativecowofficial)