Kris writes: First of all, great site, I've followed the site daily during the Kong production, and even now, after everything has settled down, I keep following.

But not everything has settled down. This weekend I attended IBC, a super large conference by and for the media industry. The whole topic is the creation and delivery of content, be it television, websites or film! One of the biggest stands was Apple, that talked about their Final Cut Pro software packet, including Shake. They showed a heap of movie posters of recent films that used Apple Shake, and one of them was Kong, next to Star Wars and others. They then said they had original files from one of these movies to demonstrate how they did everything. I was very curious to see what movie it would be. Of course you know what movie it was, else I wouldn't be writing to KiK. Yep, it's King Kong. They showed our all-time-favorite Ape King, sitting on stage in New York. They then gave a small demo, and showed how they did everything, even recreating the shot for us, right in front of our own eyes.

small Quicktime video1 (handheld)
small Quicktime video2 (handheld)

That alone was something very cool and unique, but after the demo, I saw a Crew Member working on one of the new MacPro's, and it had an incomplete version of the shot, but also some other demo items in the same project. He then had to go, and left me to, well.. play with the original WETA source files of the theater scene!

The original unfinished shot
Collegue of mine working on the shot

And well, some 10-15 minutes later, we came up with a Dancing King Kong, moving over a large Lagoon.I wanted to take the footage home, but rendering and storing it would probably be too big, and, I doubt apple would let me hook up my iPod and take home their files on a show like that. So a picture will have to suffice. [Photo]

I don't know if it is newsworthy with eum, all the Apple product placement, but well, if it is good enough for Peter ;).

Greetings from Belgium,
Kris