Tempo: Red Giant's calling card

Tempo

Increasingly, the makers of visual effects software produce shorts to showcase their products. This week, it’s Red Giant Software’s turn to dazzle

In case you missed it, we recently featured a short, The Butterfly Effect, produced by Passion Pictures in conjunction with the release of Unity 4. It’s a humorous, well-crafted short that is also a proof of concept, evidence that (what is essentially) a game engine can be used to create professional quality 3D animation.

In the past, it would have sufficed to show demo videos, running through a few choice features of an effects product. This has apparently changed, as software makers take the natural next step and mount productions designed to entertain and impress.

Magic Bullet

This week, Red Giant Software, the company behind the popular Magic Bullet Suite (http:// www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/), steps up to the plate. No stranger to producing shorts, its past effort, Plot Device, made a big splash last year. Red Giant’s latest short, Tempo, follows in the same vain, providing Hollywood-style action wrapped tightly around a novel idea. A pair of scientists develop a handheld gun that can slow down or speed up time of a targeted object. Of course, this is the type of invention that bad guys want. What follows are five minutes of exhilarating fight sequences, slo-mo explosions, and at least one stunt I’ve never seen before.