‘Coming Soon’: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters

Ross Costigan Photography presents ‘Coming Soon’: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters, in the Watergate Theatre December 8th to January 13th.

The exhibition will showcase a series of Kilkenny-based Hollywood-style fake movie posters, shot against a green screen with a large cast of Kilkenny actors and familiar faces, as part of the Not An Empty Space Programme in association with the Kilkenny Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Here’s the teaser poster for the exhibition featuring:

Jack O’Leary, Alexandra Christle, Ken McGuire, Brendan Corcoran, John Morton, Ruth Phelan, Aoibhín Murphy, Thomas Flood, Sara Begley, Gemma D’Alessandro, Sarah Dreeling, Alan Dawson and Thomas Donoghue.

More details Coming Soon! #comingsoonkk11

Getting back in the game!

I took a much needed holiday. A week of sunshine was just what I needed to recharge my batteries and imagination.

Aside from thinking about poster concepts for the exhibition (while lounging in the sun), I realised it’s been way too long since I worked on any film projects. A situation that’s quickly about to change.

Since I got back I’ve already had one meeting for a project that’s suddenly been kicked into overdrive, pre-production will soon start on a short film that I’ll be directing and I have another meeting this afternoon for a music video project. I’m very excited to be getting back to moving images!

Also, during the week, members of the Cartoon Saloon popped in to the studio to shoot some rotoscoping tests using a scale model against a green screen.

Here’s a sneak peek behind the scenes, you can see more photos here on my RossCostiganPhotographyBlog.

Previously on Vultures…

It’s literally been months since I’ve managed to post anything on this blog, I’ve been working away on setting up my own business and several different projects, all of which will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

For now, here’s the latest video from Mycrofilms, a nice little round-up of everything that has happened previously on Vultures…

Devious Theatre’s Dario Fo Season

Just online today is a selection of clips from Devious Theatre’s productions of Dario Fo’s ‘Accidental Death Of An Anarchist’ and ‘Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!’ which ran in the Set Theatre in Kilkenny in December 2009 and March 2010 respectively.

I still miss my orange dungarees.

After Effects: 3D Cityscape At Night

A first attempt at creating a 3D cityscape at night using an Andrew Kramer tutorial from Video Copilot.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on this, like in the tutorial I just duplicated the same building created from a single image. I just wanted to get through it and figure it all out.

Now, I’m going to go back in and play around with it, try add some weather elements, some new buildings and then hopefully… blow them all up!

Selfish Bass (Music Video)

The music video for DJ Diarmaid O Meara’s track ‘Selfish Bass‘ has just gone online. Produced by ThanklessFilms, the video was a five-day shoot filled with mannequin madness.

Behind the scenes photos coming soon.

Green Screen Test: Backgrounds and Bullets

I’ve just uploaded a new video, some basic green screen background replacement tests I’ve been playing around with the last few days.

Shot on the Canon HG10 with the green screen set up in the sitting room; I was on my own so had to keep it simple with the camera set up on the tripod. I only had one construction light so it was pretty difficult to key properly after.

The first shot was the easiest, adding the alley to footage of me walking on the spot and then playing with the scale and position to add some movement. The second shot took a while to get right, my first attempt was scraped after I got well and truly lost in 3D & time.

Attempt 2 went better, but you’ll notice as I raise the gun at the start that it disappears briefly, I spent hours trying to adjust things so that wouldn’t happen. I’m told it’s not my fault… it’s something called inter-frame compression on the camera. I’ve had Sla explain it to me a few times and kind of understand it but if I tried to explain it then my head would explode.

The next problem I had was timing the movements of the two separate clips of me with the background as the camera follows the bullet. Once everything was in sync I added the muzzle flash and the bullet hit. I did some very basic colour correction on the whole thing and added the bars, some sound effects from iLife and music from Garageband.

The first version of the shot was sped up by precisely 715% (thanks Sla) to get the fast whip and the second shot plays at the speed I put the whole thing together but appears in slow motion thanks to a nice bit of sound design, once again thanks Sla.

Finally, after explaining inter-frame compression several times then cleaning up my speed and sound issues, Sla added some colour grading in Magic Bullet.

Overall, it was good fun and better practice and as always comments, feedback or advice are welcome.

Irish Blog Awards 2010 – Net News Nightly – Blooper Reel (Video)

Out-takes from the Net News Nightly sketch for the Irish Blog Awards 2010 featuring Ken McGuire and lots of bad language. Enjoy!

One Take Sessions: Kieran Byrne (Video)

The 2010 series of KilkennyMusic.com’s One Take Sessions kicked off last Friday night in Cleere’s Theatre with four more acts taking to the stage; first up on the night and fighting for the record of most OTS appearances is Kieran Byrne.

This new video, ‘Seven Day Mile‘, is the first of four videos from the night (one of each of the acts), we’ll be uploading a new video every week in the run up to the April Sessions and hopefully by the time the Sessions close at the end of this year we’ll have built up a great collection of videos over on KilkennyMusicTV.

Shot on a Canon HG10 and Sony Hybrid HandyCam; with the Canon set up on a tripod at the back of the room and me with the Sony at the front right of the stage (standing on a chair) with Ken recording the tracks through the desk and mixing in Pro Tools.

Cut together using Final Cut Express 4 (the other three are currently rough cut), Ken designed the titles and overlays and I added them in After Effects. In post I also added some zooms to the shots from the Canon.

I’m really looking forward to the constant flow of video footage for editing practice, I’m currently working on an animated intro sequence for the videos and we’ve got a few more content ideas that we’ll be adding as we go along.

Don’t forget to subscribe to KilkennyMusicTV for upcoming videos and keep an eye on KilkennyMusic for news on the next One Take Sessions.

Irish Blog Awards 2010 – Net News Nightly (Video)

The 5th annual Irish Blog Awards took place in Galway on Saturday and here’s the Net News Nightly video sketch myself and Ken McGuire threw together to be shown on the night.

Ken had asked me weeks ago if I was interested in throwing something together for it but with the run of ‘Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!’ we had forgotten about it. With the play finished and the awards looming we met up on Tuesday afternoon to brainstorm ideas. Most of the afternoon was spent drinking tea and coming up with dead-end scenarios, all we knew for certain was that we wanted it to focus on the highly debated topic of late “Blogging is Dead!”.

The videos had to be sent on Friday so given our time constraints we needed to keep it simple, opting to go for a single set-up news bulletin with everything shot on green screen (giving me more practice in After Effects). We met up again on Wednesday for the shoot in my sitting room. The main problem was a lack of lights, Ken brought a double-headed construction work light but only one of the lights worked; I used this to light the green screen and used my small desk lamp to light Ken. It wasn’t ideal but we were working against the clock. We shot the whole thing in about 20 minutes with Ken as the Net News Nightly reporter and me as the terrorist leader responsible for the death of blogging.

The opening sequence was put together using a royalty free graphics sequence and music from the iLife collection then I added the animated titles designed by Ken. The background behind Ken is another royalty free graphic sequence, the green screen removal is a bit rough but that’s simply because of the lack of lights. The riot footage was pulled offline and Ken designed Sky News style overlays which I added to the entire sketch.

With the rough cut assembled, all the backgrounds replaced and the overlays in place, we added the finishing touches with the scrolling bar at the bottom displaying retweets from Twitter about the death of blogging and finally a completely random image of a cat and a laptop to finish Net News Nightly; your daily internet news… nightly!

I’m told there was a great response to the video at the awards on Saturday night, having missed the session this year I’m already making a plan to go to next years awards and hopefully we’ll put together another video for that too.

You can check out all the videos from the night here and you can see the list of Irish Blog Awards 2010 winners here, well done to all the winners.

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