*Empire video for Creed

American band Creed was lured to Toronto recently to produce the video for its chart-burning My Own Prison song, coming for the director and staying for the post and effects.

Empire Entertainment handled about 10 effects shots for the high-budget, high-concept video, shot in Toronto and directed out of Black Walk by much-discussed video director Stephen Scott.

The song recently reached number two on the charts and is in regular rotation on mtv – a first for Black Walk.

Empire handled the video’s effects with a combination of its Mac-based compositing and graphics software including Adobe After Effects and Electric Image as well as Alias for modeling.

Empire visual effects supervisor Heidi Matijevic describes the look of the clip as a sort of Kafka/1984/12 Monkeys tableau with scenes including robots flying through the air and a rotating screen cube flashing images on its surfaces.

Scenes were created using a mix of practical and cg effects, green-screen elements and compositing. Empire used Adobe After Effects to add film grain to cg environments to match original footage and composited several multilayered visuals.

The videoscreen cubes, shown throughout the video, were shot on green screen and composited onto a backplate with Ultimatte, then viewscreen inserts were motion-tracked. Animators then added a reflective layer to the inserts to mimic a glass monitor using visual information from the originally shot green-screen plate of the viewscreen.

The shop’s Hollywood system was used to allow the capture of D1-resolution images.

Empire, which creates effects for ytv’s Deepwater Black space youth series, had worked with Black Walk previously on a Crash Test Dummies video and the companies teamed up again for this import project.

Scott has been widely recognized in Canada for video prowess, capturing best director and best video honors at this year’s MuchMusic Awards.

*Ryerson, W.F. White DOP courses

After launching the Professional Cinematography Course series in September, Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic University, in conjunction with national equipment supplier William F. White, will offer four of the five courses beginning in January.

The series of courses and workshops was designed to train aspiring and established cinematographers and directors at various levels. The 12-week courses being offered are Camera Assistant, Camera Operator/Advanced Camera Assistant, Advanced Cinematography, and Advanced Camera Light for Film and Video.

Intensive one-week courses will also be offered in the spring. Courses are open to advanced film students specializing in cinematography, iatse applicants and junior members, or professionals looking to upgrade skills. A large portion of the courses consists of hands-on training at White’s facility in Toronto.

In addition to the partnership with White, Ryerson’s cinematography course series has received support from the International Photographers Local 667, iatse, Arriflex Canada, Panavision Canada, l.a.-based Kino Flo, Kodak Canada and Toronto’s Medallion pfa.

*Bill and Goliath

Toronto’s own idea guy and multimedia maven Bill Sweetman recently made the front page of Entertainment Weekly online, taking a position in principle against the unsavvy Web ways of major studios.

The incident surrounds Miramax Films and its lack of prescience in registering domain names for Websites on current film titles. Multimedia consultant Sweetman registered the domain name Scream2 (a process that entails paying a $100 fee to the keeper of the Web names, Internic), in anticipation of the Dec. 12 release of the Miramax film of the same name.

Visitors to www.scream2.com will find copies of an e-mail discussion between Sweetman and the vp of interactive marketing at Miramax, who requested Sweetman sell the company the domain name for $300. Sweetman declined, not for financial gain, he says, but to make a point that movie producers ‘don’t get it.’

Companies like Miramax, he says, which spend thousands of dollars on sites to support films, have no excuse for not registering names when they know movie titles well in advance of the public. The official Website address for Scream2 is www.dimensionfilms.com/scream2.

*Side Effects celebrates its 10th with a gift

Misissaugua’s Living Arts Centre has launched a Silicon Graphics lab stocked with nine 02 workstations, and Toronto’s Side Effects Software has donated its Houdini 3D animation software for use in the lab.

Opened at the end of November, the lab is available for rent to animators and students for training or assembling demo reels, for corporate training, and for Houdini animation training and upgrade courses.

Side Effects also recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with a seasonal soiree and is gearing up to attend cgix, Europe’s answer to siggraph, and to launch Houdini 2.5 in February.

*Puppet Works training at Seneca

The 3D Digital Media Centre at North York, Ont.-based Seneca College has become North America’s first training facility for the Puppet Works motion capture system. The Puppet Works system, from Toronto’s Puppet Works is a reconfigurable electro-mechanical puppet whose movements can be linked via software to a computer model, with the motions of the puppet driving the animation.

*TWN site a winner

The Weather Network has captured top Website honors from the Advertising and Design Club of Canada, winning a Gold Award for Interactive Design for its English and French sites. The sites, which record 10,000 visitors a day, were judged on design and ease of usage.

*Sony wide-screen demos

Sony of Canada is demonstrating a portfolio of 16:9 wide-screen products for video acquisition in standard format. The products will adapt to different tv industry recording formats and to producers and broadcasters, who will use the products in digital sdtv, dtv and wide-screen applications.

In other Sony news, the company has partnered with four new resellers across the country to focus on the film and entertainment markets. Sony has established relationships with Toronto’s Helios|Oceana, Westech in Calgary, Montreal-based Datrox and Ottawa’s Hardware Canada Computing.