Filmmaker IQ

Digital media has become the new celluloid - but how much do you know about this medium? Watch this primer on digital data storage and get caught up on the basics of the backbone of every modern filmmaker's workflow.

There are a lot of ways to make the screen bleed - in this course we dissect the history of fake blood from its origins in the Theater to modern recipes for making characters bleed on screen.

A lot goes on under the hood when you press "REC" - check out the fascinating science behind film and electronic camera sensors.

No camera could be complete without a lens - the glass technology that brings the world into focus. Dive into the history of the lens from it's early beginning as a fire starting tool to the plethora of modern designs.

With a grounding in science and history, we now dive into the properties of camera lenses and explain the features of the modern camera lens for photography and cinematography from, Focal Length, Aperture, Primes vs. Zooms as well as some specialty features.

How much space in front of the lens will be in focus? That question defines Depth of Field - but this simple concept has lead to a staggering amount of confusion in today's multi-format camera environment. Through some fundamental scientific demonstrations, we will clarify concepts like circle of confusion and lens equivalency.

How a director stages a scene dramatically affects the story - in this experiment at YouTube Space LA, we take a boilerplate police detective script and shoot it five ways with five different types of blocking to demonstrate how direction and acting can really change the feel of a scene.

How do we get a glorified adding machine to generate a photorealistic image? Find out as we explore the processes developed over 40 years of intensive computer science research which now bring amazing Visual Effects to the silver screen which include Rasterization, Ray Casting, Ray Tracing and the Rendering Equation.

How do we create and pose CGI characters? In this companion course to our "Science of Rendering Photorealistic CGI" we walk through the steps we use to create, pose and render our mascot using 3D Studio Max, V-Ray as well as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.