[Oracle]

VFX308 - The Dancing Oracle!

Submissions Start: April 16th 2007
Submissions End: May 24th 2007
Voting starts: May 27th 2007
Winner Announced: June 10th 2007

The Challenge

VFX308 is all about putting your compositing and color correction skills to work, to win the love of the Spartans! (with a bit of matte painting to spice things up!) In the latest of the VFX Masters Series, we challenge you to recreate the scene of the Dancing Oracle at Delphi from Zack Snyder's amazing feature film, '300'. The Oracle was a woman considered to posses a certain prophetic wisdom, often spiritual in nature. She was consulted prior to all major undertakings such as wars and the founding of colonies and would slips into a trance and begins the process of interpreting the will of the gods through a dance.

As always you have all the creative freedom you like to put your spin on the scene, and to make life a bit easier for you we have supplied you with the footage to use for the dancing lady already cleaned up and ready to key!

You are free to blend in whatever source footage and effects you like to create your entry as long as its composited with the video we are providing (which you can also color correct and tweak as much as you like to set the mood). The winning piece will be the one that comes across as smoothly and professionally as possible!

As always you are free to use any Image editing, compositing and 3D tools to make it happen, and whatever else you can find. Its time to become resourceful, pull out all the stops and put in a really good, condensed effort. And most importantly, sharing is caring!!! Please dont hesitate to share with all of us any techniques you have used, uncovered new skills etc etc ...these VFXChallenges are here as a vehicle for sharing skillsets and techniques with your fellow VFXTalker!!! The learning process is never ending and we encourage you to help each other out where ever possible!

Source Material

To get you all started, here is some source footage!

VFX308 - The Dancing Oracle - DANCING GIRL- 57.6 Mg .zip

VFX308 - The Dancing Oracle - COMP SHOT .jpg

As always, all the help you will ever need can be found in the relevant Software Forums for your software of choice or the WIP Forum. We are trying to encourage an environment for peer/team learning! The more we help each other, the further we can push each other, and the better our VFX skills will become!

The prize's for this month:

1st Place: The 1st Place winner of each monthly VFX challenge will be taking home a hot new Intel based Mac Mini! With the new Mac Mini you can run Windows, OsX and linux all on one box thats powered by a blazingly fast Dual Core Intel processor!



2nd Place: The VFXChallenges continue with our fantastic sponsor cmiVFX. The team at cmiVFX have generously offered the 2nd place winner of VFX Monthly Challenges their choice of any single DVD training product including their BRAND NEW DVD SERIES ...



3rd Place: Pick up a years subscription to Cinefex Magazine! Cinefex is a quarterly professional movie special effects magazine. It is among the first dedicated special effects magazines ever produced, at a time where computer generated imagery effects were not as common. Cinefex is also among the very few magazines which do not advertise inside material on the cover, though an alternate edition with this feature is also in publication to conform to this guideline among magazine publishers.


This months challenge has been sponsored by the wonderful people over at Ribbit Films who have gratiously provided us with the source footage to be used for the dancing oracle! Please take the time to visit their website!

The VFXChallenges are sponsored by the fantastic people at Eyeon Software. Eyeon makes the Industry Leading Visual Effects software product, Fusion 5. Eyeon has been incredibly supportive of VFXTalk.com and of the VFX Industry in general...and the VFXChallenge Grand Master will be taking home a copy of Fusion at the end of the year!

Get to it guys and make it HOT!

VFXTalk.com Team

Useful Links

ALL VFXChallenge Global Rules can be found HERE
The VFXChallenge Leaderboard can be seen HERE
For VFXChallenge Questions and Answers go HERE
For The VFXChallenge Work In Progress forum go HERE

Feedback

We welcome all your input for the VFXChallenges...please let us know of any cool ideas, footage, elements that you would like to have featured in a future VFXChallenge by letting us know HERE

[icedeyes]

Great idea... I am focusing on another challenge at the time but this one has a great theme and i will try to participate if at all possible in the available timeframe...

[Dreamie]

Great challenge! I promise I'll spare some time for this..
Is there somewhere a link to the actual shot? A still frame doesn't show how it all moves in sense of timing and overall physical behaviors..

[cascatino]

Great footage, I think I'm in this time! ...well....I'll give it a try....

[srproductions]

It looks pretty sweet. I will probably give it a shot. Is it allowed to have a team?

[Paranoiker]

Originally Posted by Dreamie

Is there somewhere a link to the actual shot? A still frame doesn't show how it all moves in sense of timing and overall physical behaviors..

You can find the finished shot in the 300 Trailer.

Great challenge!!!

[hemkant]

wow i am in wonderful contest

[MartinL]

Ah this is soo awsome. Im so gonna try to get some spare time to this challenge

Although why is the clip already keyed? I think that we should get the source footage

[madcan]

wow very nice challenge... i couldn't participate on 307 but i am right into this one!

[ragecgi]

So, is the challenge to remake the EXACT shot as in 300?

OR

Is it to comp the footage with our own environment and have the oracle interact with that?

Just want to know exactly which before I throw my hat into this ring.

No problem either way

Thanks!

EDIT: I downloaded the source footage and now I'm assuming it is the latter, am I correct?

[karim]

greatt .. i didn't look at the footedge but i am in anyway

[3dtodd]

I'm with DGZ. Your announcement says, "Ready to key", when in fact it's already been keyed over black. Which doesn't help. Can we get the original greenscreen footage???

[jah]

nope - sorry - the footage is pre-keyed as is, but its not perfect and there is no alpha - its up to you guys to clean up the overspill. remember you only have 30 days to do the challenge in and we wanted you to focus on pulling the rest of the scene togeather...

remember you have big competition
http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/eyeon-i...eys-t9094.html

the idea is to come as close as you can and yet still be unique...

[farsheed]

is it nessecary for us to take the very clip that has been provided ?.. or can we have our own clip to play with ?

[3dtodd]

"...as long as its composited with the video we are providing..."

I think that's pretty specific, farsheed.