Prometheus 1st trailer

The 1st official trailer for Prometheus, the movie I am working on, has been released. Watch it big and with sound!:



I am enjoying tremendously working on this film. I had never been this excited on any of the projects I have worked on previously. And this is not to belittle those projects, but rather to show how strongly I feel for Prometheus. I had the great chance to work in a Ridley Scott movie before, on Robin Hood, so I feel incredibly fortunate and happy to have that chance a second time, and this time in such a special film.

Can't wait to see this one in the cinema!

fxpodcast: Greg Butler on Harry Potter 7 Part 2

In this fxpodcast, Greg Butler, MPC VFX Supervisor, discusses the work we did on the last Harry Potter movie:

More specifically, in minutes 5:30 to 14:00, he talks about the FX work done by my team: creating the river of fire and fire creatures in the Room of Requirements sequence.

New FX Reel 2010

My new FX Reel, updated with work done during 2010 for:

- Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood"
- "Chronicles of Narnia 3: Voyage of the Dawntreader"


FX Reel 2010 - Mayec Rancel from Mayec Rancel on Vimeo.

John Carter trailer

What I am working on these days:

The Vestigial Diskette

Nowadays, most applications that have a button for the "save" function, use a floppy disk (or diskette) for its icon. Even in some cases, like the shareware program Total Commander, the iconic diskette represents the whole application.

I find it interesting that we will soon reach a situation where most, and eventually all, the people using those applications will have never seen a physical diskette or know its purpose (already, many of the actual younger users would be clueless if you asked them). The diskette icon will become an abstract representation with no meaningful connection to the "save" or "load" functions that it represents, a shadow of an obscure and primitive technology whose nature and purpose was lost in the mists of aeons past...

I wonder: Will the diskette icon remain for many years to come as a vestige of the primordial age of computers, or will some new standard representative icon eventually replace it?

What do you think? Should it stay? Should it go? What would you propose as a good alternative and timeless iconical representation for "save" and "load"? Do you remember the "Age of the Diskette" with nostalgia or with a sense of liberation? Or maybe you don't know what a diskette is, what it was for, and what I am rambling about... go ahead and share your thoughts in the coments.

Python: Hamiltonian Cycles in a graph

This is a follow-up to this other post , where I presented a python program to find Eulerian paths in a graph (more specifically, the iconic "Bridges of Königsberg" one, although the program could easily be adapted to any other arbitrary graph).

A few weeks ago, I made a variation on that, and wrote a program to explore all possible paths in a graph, to try to find any existing Hamiltonian cycles. The purpose of this was to solve a mathematical challenge by spanish newspaper "El País".

This is the graph presented for the challenge, and solved by this program:

In a graph (a series of vertices connected by edges), the basic difference between an Eulerian path and a Hamiltonian one, is that the Eulerian path is one that walks through every edge exactly once, whereas the Hamiltonian walks through every vertex exactly once. Also, the difference between a path and a cycle is simply that the cycle ends at the same place where it started, whereas the path can start and end in two different features of the graph. So, although the problems are different, the apparent similarity is what made the adaptation of the code fairly easy. The main difference was considering the additional condition of seeing the path end where it started, for a positive result.

The solution, by the way is... that there is no solution. There are no possible Hamiltonian cycles in that graph, although there are several Hamiltonian paths (not starting/ending in the same vertex).

If anyone is interested, you can find the python code here:

hamiltonianCycle.py

This could easily be adapted for any other graph, by modifying all the "Zones" and "Bridges" declarations at the beginning of the code.

Can you think of any interesting other uses/variations for this program?

new trailer: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt.2

This new trailer came out last Wednesday, showing some more of the work we have been doing for this last episode in the series. Congratulations to all the friends and colleagues, in all facilities, who are now giving their sweat and blood to finish this one off with full on awesomeness! I'm dying to see this one on the big screen...