ETEK L.A. Trip, 2009: Day 2

I'll write this up in more detail later, but here are a few quick hits from yesterday's tour. First, it was The Post Group, where we learned how a degree in Medieval Art History and Painting is actually quite helpful when you're trying to digitally add hair to an actor with a receding hairline, and got a peek into a small foley room, where the sound of feet stepping across a floor is performed by a man precisely stamping with one foot in a high heel:



Then it was on to Digital Domain, where we got to walk through the Frank Gehry-designed conference room, informally dubbed "the whale." We found out that a good portion of Brad Pitt's performance in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was actually a computer-generated facsimile of Brad Pitt's head, superimposed on the bodies of various older actors. We also got to see the trailer they developed for "TR2N," the upcoming sequel for "Tron," projected in 3D.








After that, it was Rhythm & Hues, which now has a policy of not allowing descriptions of the tour on blogs and facebook and such. I'll have to keep mum on that, but if you want a taste, you can always go to my blog post on the trip from last year.

We wrapped up the day in a Frank Gehry-designed structure on a much larger scale -- the Disney Concert Hall. CalArts has a theater in the building where we saw "Mosca and the Meaning of Life," a combination of live performance and animation, a collaboration between Christine Panushka and Alberto Araiza. The meaning of life was not, in fact, disclosed in the performance, but it was worth the effort nonetheless.