Registration is now open for the new July09 Term of fxphd, the most in-depth visual effects training you can find. This term I’m joining Mike Seymour in teaching a course on DSLR cinematography, for which Mike, John Montgomery, and I traveled to Japan to train our lenses on some of the most tantalizing and notoriously film-unfriendly settings on the planet.
The double-chin is due to either the awkward pose or all the amazing food we ate—possibly both.
Here you see me hand-holding my Canon 5D Mark II with Mike’s Canon 70–200 f/2.8L IS in Tokyo’s teen fashion capital, Harajuku. This ill-advised activity is made somewhat more tolerable by the funky support rig I’ve created by bending my Gorillapod GP8 (the badass metal one — coolest thing I’ve added to my kit in months) into an outrigger that lets me support some of the lens’s weight with my focus-pulling arm.
Mike has a couple of updates (first, second) on his Dean’s Blog, and there’s a terrific “o-week” video (right-click to download) that provides a sneak peek at some of what we shot and how we shot it, as well as teasers for the amazing array of other classes in the term.
If you can’t tell, I’m a (somewhat biased) fan of fxphd. Mike, John, and their worldwide team of professors give you the good stuff, the likes of which I’ve not seen anywhere else. If you want to learn visual effects from real artists working in the field, fxphd is the place to do it.
Complete course listing for the July09 term here.