In the last 48 hours an amazing video has swept the net. The OK Go “This Too Shall Pass” music video – built and engineered by a creative geek group of mad scientists, art lovers, and inspired geniuses that collectively go by the name of Syyn Labs. As Adam Sadowsky, of Syyn Labs, was getting a haircut and about to go on national television as a result of the video’s enormous success, he spoke to fxguide’s Mike Seymour about the naive contraptions of sheer brilliance that make this Ok Go music video one of the most engaging viral videos of the year.

The video features a huge Rube Goldberg machine which is a deliberately over-engineered machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction as was the case in the “This Too Shall Pass” video from Ok Go’s new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. Ok Go shot to fame for their famous ‘dancing on treadmills’ video “Here It Goes Again” on YouTube

Watch “This Too Shall Pass” here in high res

Click through for more about the Rube Goldberg machine and about the band playing a rare acoustic set.

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We know many of you are waiting for the 5D MkII update to 24 P.
The date is Mid-March and the features will include:

The new firmware incorporates the following updates and benefits:

1) Frame rate now to include 24fps (cinema) and 25fps (PAL broadcast). Shoots a variety of frame rates, overcomes the need for compression/retiming

2) Movie shooting in shutter-priority AE (Tv) and aperture-priority AE (Av) modes. This allows users have greater creative control over the exposure and depth-of-field

3) Manual adjustment of sound recording levels (64 levels). This provides much greater creative control with the camera’s sound recording

4) Sampling frequency changed (from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz). Makes video and audio synchronisation easier

5) Histogram display for shooting movies in manual exposure

6) Fixes some bugs such as communication between the camera and the attached lens is sometimes interrupted after manual sensor cleaning

* source Canon.

The 8th Annual VES Awards were held tonight, Sunday, February 28th at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.

James Cameron was honored with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award and Ed Catmull with the George Melies Award for Pioneering. Avatar took a lot of awards with District 9 besting it in one category.

The awards will televised by the Reelz Channel (DirecTV channel 238, Dish 299 and other Cable Systems) Friday March 5th at 10pm Pacific and March 6th at 7pm Pacific.

Full list of winners follows along with a link to some photos…
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Congratulations to Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andrew R. Jones who took home the BAFTA for Special Visual Effects for Avatar. The Orange British Academy Film Awards rewards the best work of any nationality seen on British cinema screens during the preceding year. The awards took place on February 21, 2010 at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. Here is an interview with the visual effects winners from the BAFTA site.

The VES Awards are next weekend, February 28th, and the Oscars are March 7th.

The folks at Massive Software announced today that version 4.0 of Massive is now shipping. The release contains new Terrain Nodes, V-Ray rendering, new Stadium placement tools, and other improvements.

We’ll have the new release available soon on the VPN over at our sister training site fxphd.com.

For the full press release from Massive, click through….

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Red Centre 56 podcast out. This is our biggest show ever, with Red and Canon news, Jeff’s Heusser reports from LA on the February Red Day. And Shane Hurlbut ASC (Terminator Salvation DOP ) kicks down the door of the Red Room.

Click the more button below for a portfolio of images from Shane Hurlbut, and in itunes or on our podcast page you can download each week a comprehensive set of show notes pdf.

Visit the red centre page for direct downloads and RSS feed links. To be notified automatically and have the episodes downloaded in iTunes, subscribe via this link.
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Lee Stranahan is a Filmmaker, Writer, Photographer who writes for the Huffington Post. He has crafted an Open Letter To James Cameron. This is a must read: Open Letter To James Cameron: Fairness For Visual Effects Artists

Nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards® were announced early this morning by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For the visual effects category this means the field is now narrowed from seven to these three nominated films:

Avatar
Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones

District 9
Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros and Matt Aitken

Star Trek
Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh and Burt Dalton

Avatar and District 9 are also nominated for Best Picture. The Visual Effects branch of the Academy is made up of 290 members, 279 of which are active members and 11 are retired. Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2009 will be presented on Sunday, March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network beginning at 5 p.m. PT. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 200 countries worldwide.

A complete list of nominations in all categories can be found after the read more…
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The Life, a live action short directed by MJZ’s Rupert Sanders to promote the launch of Halo 3: ODST for the Xbox 360, features visual effects by Asylum as we follow Tarkov, an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, through training and a major battle sequence. Visual effects supervisor and lead compositor Rob Moggach tells fxguide how Asylum added elements and grit to the live action.

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Late last year, The Foundry announced a tech sharing agreement with Sony Pictures Imageworks which included access to SPI’s Katana 3D software. Since that time, there has been some discussion (even grumbling) on the net and mailing lists about The Foundry losing focus regarding the heart of Nuke: compositing. If you’ve watched some of the recent fxguidetv episodes, you’ve also seen how the 2D and 3D worlds are becoming closely entwined via 3D compositing techniques and tricks. The Foundry’s Head of Product Development, Richard Shackleton, tries to put the concerns to rest in a recent post on the company blog.

The Foundry also recently released a group of brand new Nuke tutorials on their website. Nuke experts Frank Reuter and Steve Wright cover introductory aspects of the software as well as individual nodes, python scripting, and various workflows.

For those of you who have been in seclusion for the last 3 years, we also have an ongoing Nuke curriculum over at fxphd.com. We have a total of five Nuke courses this term, including a new Nuke 6 course and a new Nuke cgi relighting offering.