PORN BUTCHER EPISODE #1

Bubble Pop : Compositing a Real Bubble onto a digital set (Behind the Butcher #2)

Out of everything in Episode #0, the shot I get the most questions about is definitely the popping bubble. I’m sure the fact that it’s funny and gross has alot to do with that, but it wouldn’t be anything without the careful integration of the digital background and the live action bubble. That’s right, we shot those popping bubble for real. Here’s the shot to refresh your memory :

Simulating fluids is a huge part of computer animation. On most big special effects movies, entire teams of incredibly skilled animators and math minded programming wizards are assigned to making fluids look good. A team of specialists labored for over a year to produce the whirlpool at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Dead Man’s Chest. Realities like these lead many viewers to think that everything they see is a digital simulation, however that’s not always the case. If a shot calls for a quick and simple fluid effect that’s within the realm of reality, generally it is accomplished in reality. This avoids the millions of dollars and thousands of man hours it would take to recreate it in the computer.

I do not have millions of dollars or dozens of people, but I do have corn starch and Adobe After Effects. As it turns out, that’s all you need to pull off a massive popping goo bubble. The first step we need to accomplish is to actually videotape the popping bubble. Three things needed to come together to make this happen:

1. I poked a hole in a plastic cup and duct taped a piece of automotive vacuum tube into said hole. This is our bubble blower.

2. A black background is needed so we can more easily isolate the white bubble. Poster board works fine.

3. “Bubble Solution.” This was all natural. A secret all natural mix of corn starch, milk and diet root beer.

With all this arranged I fired up the camera and had a friendly grip blow on the vacuum tube. We shot about 5 minutes of gurgling and popping bubbles. If you’re going to make a mess you should exploit it as much as possible. After transferring this footage into the computer I selected the bubble pop that looked the best and got to work :

In case you missed anything, I’ll run down that process in text as well:

1.We need to separate the white of the bubble from the black of the poster board. Applying the color key effect with a few adjustments gets that done.
2. The bubble doesn’t look as white as it could. Let’s Crank down the saturation to drain out any shades of grey.
3. The bubble looks a little too transparent when we composite it over our digital background. We’ll duplicate the bubble layer and shift the blending mode to ’screen’ to make the bubble less transparent.

I hope you’ve enjoyed another entry in my continueing series of gross oversimplifications of the digital post production process. Watch out for the next ‘Behind the Butcher’ where we’ll tackle some even more complicated work with even less acknowledgement of how complicated it is.

Cheers!

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The Butcher Salutes Marc Norton

In Porn Butcher Land, we’re lucky enough to get Norton Furniture commericals over the air on regular TV. Who is Marc Norton? Simply the greatest man alive. He owns a furniture store in Cleveland. He has amazing TV commercials. Marc is creative and brave enough to make his dreams come alive. Here’s the Butcher giving a great impression of Marc Norton :

And in case you haven’t seen Norton’s commercials, here’s one of my favorites:

Godspeed, Marc Norton.

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Porn Butcher Theme Song Sing Along !

Viewers asked for it, so here it is : A sing along version of the Porn Butcher Theme Song! This is the theme song and video included at the end of Episode #0, now with trippy psychadelic sing-along lyrics added so everyone can play along at home. I’ll talk more in a future post about some of the inspiration behind the opening, but for now, enjoy the video.

Here are the lyrics again, just in case you were wondering:

PORN BUTCHER!
He used to mop up lots of nasty semens;
Now he chops up lots of porno demons
Whoa-oh!
He’s the Porn Butcher!
The Porn-Porn Butcher!

When Fapilicious attacks
Porno Butcher don’t cut her no slack!
An angel zapped him with a magic beam,
his outfit changed
he had a bad wet dream!

He’s the Porn Butcher,
The Porn, Porn Butcher.

His talking knife is a prude.
He gets ladies in the Nude.

Porn Butcher, yeah!

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Flash Gordon 1980 : Butcher’s Choice

From time to time I’m going to spotlight movies that have had an impact on the way I do things. The 1980 rendition of Flash Gordon is a masterpiece of camp in every way imaginable. From story to the visuals on through the acting and the music, everything in this movie is simply an assault on the senses, in a very wonderful way.

Lucas swung sci-fi fantasy in a ‘realistic’ direction with his lived in space ships and down to earth magic powers in Star Wars. Flash Gordon thunders forward in the opposite direction, putting the opera back in space opera as it creates a fantastic world from little more than super saturated comic book colors and funny costumes. And Queen music. Fantastic Queen music.

There are so many great visual and plot gags in this movie that I’m just going to give you a Joe Bob Briggs style of reasons to watch this movie:

• Our hero, Flash Gordon, starts out as a star player for the New York Jets before he’s kidnapped by an insane scientist and flung to the far reaches of space to battle the Overlord of the Universe, Emperor Ming.

• Space is filled with trippy lava lamp clouds and breathable air as opposed to blackness.

• Midget’s wrapped in Technicolor tin foil

• Hawkmen / Tree Men warring for the favor of the emporer

• Ming’s daughter is incredibly hot and sleeps with everyone - maybe even her dad.

• The final battle concerns the hijacking of what can best be described as a ‘dick ship’ which is subsequently crashed into the oddly vaginal upper parapet of the imperial palace.

I can’t stress enough that this movie is a constant barrage of images that go above and beyond the call to make a pulp comic book reality. The sheer spectacle of this alone is reason to watch if you haven’t seen it. I’ll leave you with Queen’s fantastic theme for the movie - no words can ever champion Flash Gordon as well as this music does.

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• Greenscreen Magic ! : Behind the Butcher #1

Curious how all the special effects magic comes together to create an episode of Porn Butcher? You’re in luck! Think of these ‘Behind the Butcher’ posts as behind the scenes DVD special features you’d dont have to pay untold tens of dollars to watch. In these posts I’m going to break down the special effects into simple steps and illustrate each one with a video, as not to bore all you readers with too many words.

This week we’re going to start out simple by showing exactly how we take raw footage of an actor in front of a greenscreen and end up with a finished shot of an actor in a porn store. Sound simple? Think you can flip to the weather channel and get this gist of this? That’s not the case. In reality there are many complicated steps to accomplishing this simple effect, each of which is composed of dozens of precision applications of advanced technology. We will not explore the agonizing details. I will, however, treat you to a dazzling series of before and after comparisions! Let’s begin.

1. Taking the Green Out

Just like movies such as Sin City, 300 or ‘Elmo in Grouchland’ we begin with our actor in front of a green screen pretending to be somewhere he isn’t. We apply what is called a ‘Keying’ effect to knock out and the green and violia, no green! Actually it’s not that simple. We need to fiddle with that keying effect using some informed guesstimation to completely eliminate the green while not eliminating the actor AND keeping the edge between the actor and the green crisp and clean. Where does the informed guesstimation come from? Doing alot of this. This is better seen than explained - check out the video below.

2. Something to go back there…

Now that we have the green removed, we have to replace it with something. I am painstaikingly crafting each background setting for Porn Butcher from scratch with 3d software. The digital porn store set you see in Episode #0 took about two weeks to create from scratch. Everything single thing you see back there from the floors and ceilings to the DVD racks and the DVDs on the DVD racks are created in the computer, piece by piece. Each piece must be built out of blank surfaces (or modeled with polygons if you want some terminology) and then colored with images (or textured), each of which must also be custom created with photoshop. Once that’s done we need to light the set, setup virtual cameras and ‘render out’ background images. We’ll talk more about these last steps in a future post, for now check out the video :

3: Colorforms Madness! OR Compositing

We continue on by placing the digital porn store behind our actor. This step is what’s called ‘Compositing’ in the special effects industry and is an entire discipline unto itself full of technical obscura and artistic wizardy. Nice and simple, just like colorforms. But colorforms are not animated and ideally our Porn Butcher episode is. So we do alot of things to create the illusion that the digital porn store looks alive in some way. We add in flickering neon tubes, a wavering red light in the porn booths, some subtle cigarette some, etc. We also adjust the coloration of our actor, brightening some of his colors while darkening others and blending the edge of him with background. Watch the video and see:

4. RENDERING

Rendering consumes a massive chunk of my life. When you have finished compositing your shot, it’s time to render the whole thing out. This means that for every second of footage your computer needs to crank out 30 individual flipbook style picture files. The more complicated the shot, the longer it takes to render out each individual frame. For this entire shot, which runs twelve seconds, it took about 4 hours to render. This was a very simple shot. If it had been twice as complex, it would have taken 8 hours to render. Three times as complex, 12 hours to render- and so on and so forth. While the shot renders, we have little to do other than watch the progress bar go across the screen. It’s best to save up all your renders for when you sleep - or have two computers. Since the Food Network doesn’t have a show where you sit and watch a turkey bake for hours on end I have not included a video to illustrate rendering. Sorry.

5. We’re done.

So there you have it, a gross oversimplification of the work that goes into producing a shot like this. I am frequently asked ‘how long did it take to make that shot?’ That’s a tough question to answer, because there are alot of a different steps that go into making any given shot. We could figure out how long it takes to write, shoot, capture and edit each shot. Those steps would be considered pre-production and production and it would be kinda silly to make those calculations - trust me on that. The post-production, where all the special effects happen, is probably what you’re interested in.

Since we use things like the digital porn set background in many shots, we would need to spread out the two weeks it took to make that background over all the shots it was used in. When you take that number, add in the amount of time spent doing the compositing of Step 3 and the time it takes to actually render out the finished shot it took about two whole days to create this tweleve seconds of footage.

There are something like 80 shots that total 6 minutes in Porn Butcher #0 (not counting the theme song at the end) and it took about 2 months, or 8 weeks to for me to make it. If you divide that up I average something like 45 seconds of footage a week. Not bad.

Is it worth it? This is the sort of thing I like doing with myself, so I say yes, but most people have no interest in spending that much time to create less than half a minute of a guy mopping a porn store. And that’s cool. Takes all kinds. Check back soon for a ‘Behind the Butcher’ that breaks down a more complicated shot so you can see all the fun that goes into creating something more exciting than a building.

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THIS IS NOT PORN: Porn Butcher #0 Sneak Preview
Uploaded by hviz

Sorry folks, this is not porn. Here’s the first preview of my new goofball comedy / horror web movie, Porn Butcher ! Porn Butcher follows the magical adventures of a lowly jizz mopper as he’s transformed into the heroic Porn Butcher by the Guardian Angel of Porn. The Butcher must penetrate the darkest depths of Porno Hell to battle demons that seek to ruin the joys of porn for all mankind. My friend Alex is starring as the Butcher while I handle the directing and special effects.

We’re going out on a limb and trying something new here. We’ve got bright comic book colors, ominus synth music and cartoony characters. There’s a strong story but we’re definately experimenting with where the visuals can go. In the end, it’s all for fun. We shot Porn Butcher in HD and I do all the post production at full resolution, so the campy ridiculousness looks about as good as possible for the internet. Music wise, my friend Lenny has cooked up an awesome theme song and a fantastic background score.

Porn Butcher #0 covers the origin of the Butcher and gets you up to date on the clandestine holy war raging beneath the pixels of your favorite porn that has called a simple jizz mopper to rise and become the savior of smut. The story continues next month with Porn Butcher #1, so keep an eye out. Enjoy!

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