Digital Distortion

24/12/2024

Keep it epic, 2025!

28/11/2024

For those who saw the FREAKSHOW TRAIN music video I did and were curious to see the process behind using the new Magnetic Mask tool in Final Cut 11 to do the roto in it, I've recorded a fairly detailed tutorial walking through the process and talking about the best-practices I developed over the course of doing the 43 comp shots that were in there. Magnetic Mask is a very powerful new feature with a lot of different uses, but getting perfect roto with it still takes some time, especially if the foreground and background are hard to distinguish.
But the end results can be really good. So much so, I might start using FCP to generate mattes for a lot of my VFX shots, then do final compositing in After Effects or Fusion.
Here's the tutorial: https://youtu.be/mtpAu5N0yyU
And the final music video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNqWSicGz8U

We're excited to unveil FREAKSHOW TRAIN - the first single from CIRCU5’s upcoming second album, CLOCKWORK TULPA. If you’ve ever felt you don’t quite fit, cli...

27/11/2024

Rather proud of this music video for the band CIRCU5. The track is called "FREAKSHOW TRAIN" and it's their first single release from an amazing new album (coming out in March 2025.)

It was edited together using stock footage (from Storyblocks), some AI video (Midjourney/Runway ML) and some video footage from a studio shoot done by Lou Dommett Young. The footage wasn't shot on greenscreen so I had to roto everything. Luckily the new Final Cut 11 was released (with an AI-roto tool called "Magnetic Mask") just as I started doing that, and it worked so well I managed to crack through all 43 roto shots in less than a week! I also did the background tracking in FCP, which worked pretty well. Then blanketed it all in tons of Red Giant plugins to give it a stylised look (that helped hide a multitude of quick 'n' dirty compositing cheats!)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it! I'm hoping to do two more videos for this album before it releases - if this one gets enough of a reaction :)

CIRCU5 is:

Steve Tilling - Lead vocals, guitar
Mark Kilminster - Bass, vocals
Lee Moulding - Drums, vocals

Video credits:

Directed and edited by Dan Sollis (https://www.digitaldistortion.net)
Videography by Lou Dommett Young (https://dommettyoung.pic-time.com/por...)
Album art and design by Jennie Anderson (https://www.jennieanderson.co.uk/)

We're excited to unveil FREAKSHOW TRAIN - the first single from CIRCU5’s upcoming second album, CLOCKWORK TULPA. If you’ve ever felt you don’t quite fit, cli...

29/09/2024

Since I moved the Digital Distortion website to its new wordpress redesign, I've been a bit slack on updating it (honestly, it was so much easier back in days of basic HTML and Dreamweaver!) Anyway, I finally had a bit of a break and thought I'd update it with some content and make some VFX breakdown videos. This was for a job I did a couple of years ago, a short film called "The Dark Mountain."
I did some background replacement on 4 shots as well as other visual enhancements. And then also did a particularly cunning bit of image-wrangling trickery to re-rack a shot and extend the left side contents which included an actor in-shot! I don't know if the film ever got released or won awards, but it looked pretty good from the bits I saw. Anyway, here's the breakdown videos:
https://www.digitaldistortion.net/portfolio/the-dark-mountain/

30/01/2023

The new Photon tracing Kernel in Octane is very nice. Still takes a very long time to render an image like this if you include Scattering Mediums (fog) like this too. I do love the realistic treatment of light in Octane though

24/12/2022

Merry Christmas Everyone - and may 2023 shine bright for all!

20/12/2022

It feels like enough time has passed to reveal another high profile project we worked on this year. That is - the titles for BBC Studios and Events coverage of the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
https://vimeo.com/783027088
As you can imagine, this was handled with the highest levels of discretion and respect and it was a honour to be involved in this project.
The titles were designed by Paula Williams at Wonder Creative. And they were built and animated by Dan Sollis at Digital Distortion.
Additional credits are on the Vimeo Page.

11/11/2022

I recently completed the VFX work on this piece for COP27. A really cool project, working with some great people. And also my first proper experience working with Virtual Production (using a Volume).
Big thanks to Kamal and the guys at Samurai Productions, Alvaro Stocker - director extraordinaire, and all the guys at Lipsync who handled the conform and grade. And probably loads more I've forgotten!
Anyway - enjoy (and full credits on the Vimeo page)
https://vimeo.com/769109583

13/07/2022

Just got on the beta for DALL-E 2. It's an absolutely incredible, industry-changing piece of tech. I used it to create some cool imagery in the DD style (enhanced with a bit of post-processing in Photoshop and After Effects)

22/04/2022

Some fun experimentation with Irrealix's LoopFlow plugin in After Effects. Combining the cover of my favourite Floyd album with the ambient sounds of Conelrad (since I figured using any actual Floyd audio might be a risk!)
This is the plugin I used to create the looping flow: https://aescripts.com/loopflow/
And the music is "Charger Paris Mirage" by

26/12/2021

Wombo is pretty rad!

17/05/2021

Some thoughts from Dan on the upcoming Pro Apple Silicon machines
http://www.digitaldistortion.net/musings-on-the-unreleased-apple-silicon-pro-macs/