Gnomon - The Making of White Swan

In this three disc set, the entire production process of making the music video White Swan is revealed. Winner of “Best Music Video” at hdfest, White Swan is a unique collaboration between students from the Gnomon School of Visual Effects and director Sil van der Woerd. This set breaks down step-by-step the process for integrating live action footage with complex digital sets to create an imaginative world inspired by the music of singer Lolly Jane Blue.

Each disc explores a particular phase in the production's pipeline from concept to final compositing. Sil begins with a discussion of early explorations and the pre-production process, and he's followed by the students as they cover their particular responsibilities for the production. Sil and the students cover many technical subjects including motion tracking in Boujou, compositing, rotoscoping and keying in After Effects, previsualization, modeling in ZBrush, texturing in BodyPaint, digital sets, animation and effects in Maya.

This set hopes to inspire and educate anyone who dreams of creating their own live-action production that incorporates dynamic visual effects.

01: Birth of an Idea - Intro with Sil van der Woerd
02: The Making of: Pre-production
03: The Making of: Production
04: Edit
05: Red Cine
06: Post-production Overview
07: Boujou Motion Tracking
08: Modeling/UVs/ZBrush/Blend shapes - Intro with Josh Herman
09: Library & UVs
10: Shot Assembly
11: Intro Scenes Modeling
12: UV’s in Maya
13: UV’s in Headus
14: ZBrush
15: Blend shapes
16: Modeling digital sets - Intro with Rajbir Dhalla
17: Intro B final all combined
18: Intro A 01
19: Intro Shot D and marking menus
20: 33 and 34
21: Texturing - Intro with Melissa Altobello
22: Intro to BodyPaint
23: Painting in BodyPaint demo
24: Shot 26 - Sculpting and projection

01: Lighting - Intro with Evaldas Cesnavicius
02: Master scene lighting
03: Cut away
04: Advanced lighting & rendering - Intro with Devon Fay
05: Overview of Why
06: Intro A Breakdown
07: Final Gather optimization
08: Mental Ray BSP Optimization
09: Mental Ray Portal Light
10: Working with Render Layers
11: Shot 34 Breakdown
12: Painting cotton candy - Intro with Jorik Dozy
13: Cotton candy
14: Brushes
15: Light and material
16: Composition and painting demo
17: Breakdowns
18: Outro
19: Cotton candy animation - Intro with Wei-Chuan Hsu
20: Lattice animation
21: Dynamic curves
22: Advanced cotton candy projections - Intro with Jake Raymor
23: Matte and 3D construction
24: Problems with castle interior

01: Dynamics Rain/Coal - Intro with Jason Burton
02: Creating a rain system
03: Creating a coal waterfall
04: Working with python
05: Particle, Fluid & Sprite Clouds - Intro with Tefft Smith
06: Final shot video
07: Particles
08: Fluids
09: BA shader
10: Sprites
11: Geometry shader
12: Rotoscoping - Intro with Michael Cacciamani
13: Contents test
14: Techniques
15: Tracking
16: Shot 27 Black and White
17: Shot 37
18: Compositing - Introduction with Sil van der Woerd
19: Compositing 02
20: Compositing 03
21: Compositing 04
22: Compositing 05
23: Compositing 06