kemple.us

1st Attempt at Green Screen

This semester I am taking a Special Effects and Compositing class. The last week we had an assignment that involved green screen footage. Basically what I had to do was key out all the green background, remove the tracking dots from the background, and add the 3D backdrop. The hard part is removing the tracking dots. There are times when they go right next to the person and then disappear behind, so you have to mask them out frame by frame. However, they are an essential part in getting the background to move with the footage. Now I’m ready to make my own Star Wars sequels Below is a picture of what the original footage looked like and then my final rendering. I also did some color grading to warm up the picture. There is no audio in the video.

Former Nintendo Employee Collection For Sale

A member on the racketboy.com forums has for sale a bunch of items from a former Nintendo employee. There are some really neat pieces available from employee items, store displays, and systems. I would have to say my favorite though is this Donkey Kong 64 promotional kit. The description says “This is a promotional kit sent to retailers for the release of Donkey Kong on the N64 game systems. The kit includes 4 t-shirts, 4 buttons, 4 plastic bananas, 1 memory foam banana, 2 scratch pads, 1 key chain, 1 video, 1 counter pad, 1 roll of stickers and 1 instruction sheet. In mint condition, never used.”

A few pics of the kit are below and the entire gallery of items can be viewed on photobucket

MSTAR Outage

Sorry about the site being down. This morning when we woke up I noticed the internet wasn’t working. I rebooted my router just in case that had something to do with it but no go. When I got to work I tried to get to the site and it was dead. I then tried going to the MSTAR website and it wasn’t working either. It went up finally around 2:00 so I took off the parking page and then it appeared to go down again. I finally got home from work at 3:30 and rebooted the router again and everything and still no go. Finally, around 4:00 everything appears to be back up.

Mail-Away: Bossk

Bossk was advertised on packaging as a secret action figure from The Empire Strikes Back. Nobody knew at first what the figure was going to be. Later on during the promotion he was revealed by a sticker placed on the packaging and also a T.V. commercial. The offer required 4 proofs of purchases and expired on May 31st, 1980. Bossk is considered actually the hardest of the mail-away figures to find with the original box, figure, and paperwork. He included a flyer like the Boba Fett figure describing his role in the movie which is pretty impressive considering you actually only see him for probably half a minute on screen.  Here is how the offer appears on cardbacks

Here is my Bossk with the box, figure, and paperwork.

They flyer included reads:

“Bossk is an alien bounty hunter — one of many commishioned by Darth Vader to seek out the Rebel Alliance. Darth summons Bossk, Boba Fett, and other strange bounty hunters (including a droid) to his command ship, Executor. Here Darth orders them to find the Millennium Falcon containing Han, Leia, Chewie, and C-3PO as they attempt to escape Darth’s vengeance.

Look for Bossk and more exiting action in the next Star Wars movie: “The Empire Strikes Back” this May.”

Finally here is the commercial which advertised the promotion.

Almost Here

The Takara-Tomy (Japanese Manufacturer of Transformers) website updated today with pictures of Metroplex. This usually happens just a few days before the release. If Amazon Japan is correct it will be released on Thursday. The entire list of the the encore Transformers reissues can be viewed at Takara-Tomy’s website at http://www.takaratomy.co.jp/products/TF/products/encore.html The Encore reissue line started a year ago and they have already released a few that many fans thought would never be reissued which include Sky Lynx, Omega Supreme, and Metroplex. I hope they have more goodies lined up in the future.