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THE EXPENDABLES: Wes Caefer – VFX Supervisor – Worldwide FX

Par
Vincent Frei
-

Wes Caefer is a self-taught artist. He oversaw several projects at Worldwide FX. THE EXPENDABLES is the second collaboration between Wes and Sylvester Stallone with RAMBO.

What is your background?
My formal training is from the US Military and Emerson college in Boston. But the bulk of my knowledge about visual effects is self taught and learned on the job. This is a slow way to learn some things and I don’t know that it could be done this way anymore. I learned as the digital age was growing so I was able to pick it up as it developed (and I’m sure there are some gaps).  I’m sure that it would be best to get a lot of the basics from a school since there is so much to learn.

How was your collaboration with Sylvester Stallone?
THE EXPENDABLES was the second film that I had done with Stallone. I had also supervised RAMBO. I have to say that he can be challenging. But in a good way. I have flown alien fleets, made giant spider and miniature robots and all manner of wild things but Sly would throw something at me that would make me stop and say, Gee. How am I going to do that? All the time remembering that we have to maintain a level of realism that is not required on something like a giant squid movie.  People will go along a bit with something that they have never seen before. But this is the sort of thing that everybody knows what it should look like. They have seen airplanes. So if our airplane looks wrong, even slightly, we have failed.

Can you tell us what WWFX did on this movie?
Easier to say what we did not do. There are well over 1,000 shot in this movie that we did. Not just the ones you would expect like the palace being destroyed which was a mixture of miniature and digital FX). But carloads of things you would not expect. Like fixing continuity issues and removing lighting equipment from the tunnels where it was so tight it wa impossible to light without catching the equipment on camera. We also removed stunt pads that kept our stunt team out of the hospital and added 1,000s of muzzle flashes.

What did you do on the opening sequence?
The boat at the beginning was built on a stage in 2 pieces. The top half was next to the bottom half so we had to marry those two. And of course the muzzlle flashes, knifes, lasers and some of the thermal vision was real and some of it was us treat regular footage to look like thermal.

The movie includes several models. How did you decide what would be made model or CG ?
CG was the way to go for nearly everything since we did not know what was going to be required it just gave us the flexibility to make the model do whatever we needed. But the palace falling down was a building. That needed to be realistic and Sly and I both agreed that all that tiny detail and randomness that a crumbling building would have is still better done real. Real is always better if possible. Sly said as good as the CG is these days, it still has a kind of « CG » look to it when it comes to this sort of thing.

What did you do on the car chase?
We added bullet holes as they were formed and there were practical holes in the glass after that. But in editing Sly felt that it was not clear this was bullet proof glass and wanted to see the slugs stuck in the glass so we added the little dark spots to every hole in every window for every shot in the sequence. Some of the holes weren’t there at all and we added them. Muzzle flashes of course and put a human face on the dummy that was in the passenger seat of the first car that crashed. All the interior shots of people reacting and such was bluescreen. And we added glass breaking from the windows in the rear window that gets shot out and the car that gets hit by the truck. I might add that there was not time to shoot plates for the bluescreen that was outside the windows of the cars in the chase. I did not know how I was going to get what I needed because there was no getting around it and there was just no time to get any of these plates. I rented 3 Iconix HD cameras and attached them to the camera car for most of the chase. Then I has something that I could use that actually covered all the same terrain and car movements that the picture car was making. They were small enough that they could not be seen so I did not even have to remove them in post.

About the matte-paintings on the island. How did create them and what was your references?
The island was built from footage we shot in Brazil. We did manipulate these a lot as Sly really wanted fewer building and poorer looking dwellings. We also had to remove or change any signs that we could read as the island Sly invented speaks Spanish.

Did you created a model version of the plane or a CG one?
There was a real plane and a CG one.

Are you involved on the shots in which Jason Statham is on the front nose of the plane?
They actually got Jason to be in the front of the plane. But we are still involved. There was a rubber band keeping his glasses on that we erased. The plane never had guns on it (partly because this was a kind of last minute idea that Sly had) so we added them later. And Sly wanted this place to be much less populated and poor so we removed boats from the water and houses (also our production trucks) from all the terrain they are flying over. We also shot some stuff of him in front of bluescreen but I think there is only one cut used in the final cut. Most of it he is really in the nose of that plane.

Can you explain us what you did on the final sequence? What have you increased in this sequence?
In that final sequence, we brought the palace down as I explained elsewhere. But the palace was not there at all. There was a real building in Brazil that we got a few shots in front of (that needed extensions as it was not as big as the one Sly wanted). Then the rest was shot in New Orleans. So every shot in the end that show the palace or anything outside the fence we had to put it there and every explosion and muzzle flash needed to be put in or enhanced. The bullet hits are all us and every knife that gets thrown is us. We put the blades on the helicopter and removed the stunt pads. We added blood and wounds and bullet holes in bricks and trucks. We moved explosions from where the really happened to where Sly wanted them and we changed the speed of a great many things. There really isn’t much in the last reel that we did not tocuh in one way or another. Even that goodbye at the plane was us. They shot that on a stage just the doorway part of the plane then we added the CG tail of the plane and the plate of the dock behind.

How did you create the flames on Steve Austin?
The flames were all done in Maya but we had to match move animate a Steve Austin shaped particle generator. There were also layers of lighting effects and color correction. This was one of the toughest sequences in the whole film.

How did you distribute the work between the two branches of WWFX (One is in Louisiana and the other one in Bulgaria)?
We had just opened the facility in Louisiana. So I tried to send them the less challenging stuff to give them a chance to get up to speed and settle in like all the bluescreen work in the car and airplane windows. By the end they were doing some of the very complicated work too and that was assigned to them because the Bulgaria crew already had a full workload and the guys in Louisiana were up to anything by that point.

What was the approach of Sylvester Stallone about the visual effects?
Stallone’s approach to visual effects goes like this. « Wes. Come here. » And before you say anything, the answer is, « Yes. »

What are your softwares?
We use Digital fusion mostly for the compositing and Lightwave and Maya for the 3D elements and animation. All the particle work was done with Maya.

How many shots have you done and what was the size of your team?
WWFX has around 200 people in Bulgaria and another 60 in Shreveport Louisiana. I had everybody working on this for part of the time and most of them for most of the time. There were over 1,100 shots in the final cut but that is misleading. We finished a couple hundred more and worked on more than that. We could not wait for a final edit before we started work and the edit changed daily. Sometimes to include more of our work because once he saw how it looked, Sly thought it was cool and wanted more. And some things that we had finished were no longer in the film because Sly had taken another take of the same scene for performance reasons or it was just out of the film all together.

Is there a shot that prevented you from sleeping?
It was the stuff that was unplanned that prevented me from sleeping. The fight with Steve Austin for example was supposed to be just a stuntman lit on fire for real. Once we got into editing, they felt that the sequence was not as dynamic as the character deserved. But some of the action that was shot during the fight before he was on fire could make it better. But he was not on fire. I knew this would be time consuming to get it right and the decision to do it this way came very late.

Also the palace coming down was not exactly according to plan. We had planned to do it as a miniature. That seemed the best and easiest way to get the level of realism that we all wanted (especially Sly). But Sly had a number of clips of controlled demolition of hotels in Las Vegas being imploded and stuff like that. So we talked about it and it was clear that he wanted the building crumbling in on itself and that there were small flashes followed by crumbling in section in a specific order with lots and lots of dust clouds almost like 9/11 footage. So I got Fantasy II and Gene Warren Jr. to build and shoot that miniature and we got Joe Viscosil to blow it up. It was going to be fairly clean as I knew that Maya could do the dust clouds just fine and I wanted Sly to be able to determine what could be seen and what was obscured. We cut it is and he lives with it for a while. Then he turns to me and says, « It needs fire. » Now I have something that makes me lose some sleep. Literally. The bulk of this work was being done in Bulgaria and I was in the editing room in L.A. So I am up all night working with the artists that are 11 hours ahead of us and getting continuing to work a full day in L.A. getting the feedback on what we had done during the night.

What did you keep from this movie?
I learned a great deal of course. One useful thing I can tell you is that because of the nature of VFX work, no matter what they ask, you can do it. That is what we do. But you should not say ‘Yes.’ Directors and producers stop listening after they hear ‘Yes.’ So if the answer is, ‘Yes, but that will take a team of 5 about month and a half.’ They have stopped listening after ‘Yes’ and did not hear about how much of your resources would be eaten up by this. I now instead answer something like, ‘That would take a team of 5 people about a month and a half. But yes. We can do that. Then they actually think about how badly they need it and if they go ahead, are not surprised at how long it is taking.

What is your next project?
I am right now supervising the VFX for TRESPASS. Joel Schumacher is directing and it stars Nicholas Cage and Nicole Kidman.

What are the 4 movies that gave you the passion of cinema?
I have loved « monster movies » since as far back as I can remember. I caught 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH when I was very young and solidified and already established need to work in film. Then KING KONG (1933 of course). FRANKENSTEIN and 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?
– Worldwide FX: Official website of Worldwide FX.
– fxguide: Article about THE EXPENDABLES on fxguide.

// THE EXPENDABLES – WORLDWIDE FX – VFX BREAKDOWN

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2010

Update to the interview of Paul Franklin for INCEPTION

Par
Vincent Frei
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New interviews are being prepared, but until then, here is a new link to the interview of Paul Franklin for INCEPTION.

This is a podcast of Paul Franklin at the Apple Store in London, click here to see it.

ITF 2010 conference of Douglas Trumbull

Par
Vincent Frei
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To make you wait until new interviews, here’s the video of a VFX legend, Mr Douglas Trumbull:

It was a conference for the symposium Imaging the Future 2010 (for which I help as a consultant) that took place in Neuchatel, Switzerland in July.

A big thanks to Michael Vust of NIFFF for this video.

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE: Adrian de Wet – VFX Supervisor – Double Negative

Par
Vincent Frei
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After several years at London Computer Film Company, Adrian de Wet goes to California at ESC Entertainment to work on THE MATRIX RELOADED. Back in London, he worked for many studios such as Framestore, MPC and Double Negative, that he joined in 2007.

What is your background?
After graduating in Fine Art I began my career at London’s Computer Film Company, spending 8 years working on numerous feature films and commercials, before moving to ESC Entertainment in California to work on the Wachowski’s MATRIX RELOADED. After returning to the UK I was Framestore compositing supervisor on two HARRY POTTER films (Azkhaban and Goblet of Fire), among other projects. I was then hired by MPC as 2D supervisor on POSEIDON and as VFX on-set supervisor on the TV series ROME. I joined Double Negative in 2007. Before working on SORCERER’S APPRENTICE I was digital fx supervisor on Guillermo del Toro’s HELLBOY II.

How was your collaboration with director Jon Turteltaub and production VFX supervisor John Nelson?
From day 1 of preproduction the collaborative process was in full swing. Jon Turteltaub was always very receptive to other people’s ideas. From the initial meetings in New York, through to principal photography, and continuing into post, there were constant discussions between Jon Turteltaub, John Nelson, and the team at Double Negative. Of course, in post, Jon Turtletaub and John Nelson were in LA and we were in London, so we made full use of cinesync, which is a tool for visual communication which enables one to write on media files that are played back in sync. Most of our creative development was done using this method of collaboration.

What are the sequences made by Double Negative?
We were responsible for around 380 shots over 14 sequences. The sequences were:

– Fantasia (FS): Dave uses magic to bring the mops, sponges etc to life so they can clean up the lab. It all quickly gets out of control and pandemonium ensues.
– Dave’s Lab (DL): Dave fires up his Tesla coils and they spark noisily and brightly.
– Tesla sing (TS): To impress Becky, Dave uses resonance to make the Tesla coils produce musical notes and therefore play tunes
– Merlin’s Circle (MC): Balthazaar Blake uses magic to burn the Merlin’s circle into the floor of dave’s lab. Also he unfolds the pocket Encantus.
– Training « B » (TB): Balthazaar trains dave in the use of fireballs and vacuum spheres. Also the Tesla coils strike dave.
– Training « C » (TC): Balthazar trains Dave in the use of Plasma as a weapon.
– Drake’s Parasites (DP): Horvath kills Drake Stone by using the parasite spell.
– Abigail (AM): Horvath kills Abigail by using the Parasite spell
– Veronica Fusion (VF): Veronica saves Balthazaar by fusing with Morgana’s soul, Balthazaar locks them in the Grimhold for eternity.
– Quick Rug (QR): Balthazaar sinks into the magic quick-sand rug in drake’s apartment.
– Morgana Birth (MB): Horvath releases Morgana/Veronica from the Grimhold.
– Battle Begins (BB): Morgana / Veronica casts fiery energy to form the pentagram over lower Manhattan from which the Dark Energy rises.
– Wall Street Bull (WB): Horvath brings to life the bronze Wall Street Bull which charges around trying to kill Balthazaar.
– Final Battle (FB): the final showdown between Spectral Morgana and Dave.

What references and influences have you received from the director for the magical effects like plasma?
We got a verbal brief from the director (Jon Turteltaub), which was that it had to look real and it had to be based in physics, rather than look like traditional, cinematic « magic ». He was keen that it did not just look like a « cool visual effect ». John Nelson fully agreed with this in principal but added that it should, however, also look « special ». He sent us a large amount of reference of natural phenomena such as lightning in clouds, plasma, slow-motion lightning, fire etc.

How did you create these magical effects?
For the plasma balls we started by looking at images of « real » plasma – there’s quite a lot of it on YouTube – which is a real physical entity: it’s actually ionised gas, which can be created in a microwave oven (albeit dangerously). What these reference videos showed us was that when plasma is created it only lasts a few seconds before it dissipates due to instability. It also looks like a super-bright hot blob, and is therefore pretty much burned out and flat in exposure. We started out matching this real look in cg, but we ll agreed that it wasn’t particularly compelling to look at. But at least our starting point was in the physical realm, which we embellished with more detail, more instability, and a few more particulate and fluid elements such as cg smoke and dust. All the glows, lens flares, flickering and additional interactive light were mostly controlled in Shake (although a fully 3D environment lighting pass was supplied to compositing to dial in to taste). We gave the plasma ball a solid, hot core and made sure that it didn’t get too buried in the glow, which tended to make it look soft, and added, on a few intermittent frames, some small static electricity discharges to add further detail.

What is the system used by the director of photography to simulate the magical effects on the actors and the set?
The director of photography, Bojan Bazelli, employed the use of portable LED lights which were very bright but small enough to fit into the actors’ hands. We used various different colour temperatures depending on what the effect was: a fireball was cooler and redder compared to the blueish heat of a plasma ball. These interactive lights were invaluable for integration of the cg into the plate.

Did you create previz for some sequences?
The biggest previz requirement was for the Fantasia sequence which I will go into more detail about below. We also previz’d parts of the end battle: namely the fiery energy traveling across NY, the pentagram in the sky over manhattan, the plasma ball fight between Morgana and Dave.

Can you talk more about the famous Fantasia sequence and its brushes. How have you designed and create it?
Right from the start of pre-production meetings JT impressed upon us the need for the Fantasia sequence to be worthy of the original animation. We started previzing the sequence back in January 2009. JT gave us a few story beats as a starting point and we started storyboarding from there. Working closely with John Nelson, we produced a library of characters and a library of actions which we then put into previz, under the leadership of our animation supervisor, James Lewis. Eventually we had a previzzed sequence that was around 9 minutes long – around 3 times as long as it should have been, so we had to make some brutal cuts.

John Turteltaub is all about character and comedy. He would constantly remind us that rather than the mops and brooms just animating and floating around, we had to somehow get across the idea that Dave had given them life, and that they were imbued with character and personality. We spent a lot of time rigging the props to enable our animation team to animate with expression, and we carried out lots of character studies of each object to decide what kind of movements it was capable of. For example, the mop rig had a slider control to decide what percentage of the mop head was a dynamic cloth simulation and what proportion of it was keyframe animated.

As we approached principal photography the sequence began to take shape in previz but it still was not entirely locked down and finished. During the shoot we had puppeteers wearing green lycra suits controlling real mops and brooms: particularly where they are interacting with Dave. Most of the real ones were left in (after we cleaned out the green guys), but in post it soon became apparent that there were not enough props in the scene, there was not enough chaos. So most of the mops, brooms and sponges that you see in the final sequence are cg.

Have you used real fire and water or is it all CG?
For fantasia, even though the sfx guys flooded the set successfully with ankle-deep water, most of the water splashes from the props are cg, and in the shots where Balthazaar disperses the water, all the water and all the props are cg.

Almost all of the fire in our vfx shots is CG, namely:

– The Merlin’s Circle fire when Balthazaar burns the symbol into the floor of Dave’s lab.
– The fireballs, vacuum sphere, flames etc when Balthazaar trains Dave in the use of fireballs.
– The ring of flames on the floor when Balthazaar walks across just before he trains Dave is the use of Plasma.
– Almost all the fire and embers (fiery energy) that is cast by Veronica/Morgana and travels down the streets of Manhattan.
– The fiery pentagram over Manhattan.
– Morgana’s torrent of fire in the Final Battle (which Dave defends using a vacuum sphere).
– The ring of fire cast by Dave which brings Balthazaar back to life after the final showdown.

Can you tell us about the shooting of the scene of the bull’s attack and how did you create it?
We shot this scene at the bowling green location at night. As a placeholder for the bull we used a couple of c-stands with a rope in between that matched the bull’s proportions. For a lighting reference we created a fifth-scale miniature of the bull with matching colour, texture and reflectance, and we placed this where the bull would be and ran a few seconds of footage of it for every shot.

The flip cars were both sfx rigged (although we replaced a few shots with a cg car to get the right deformation and destruction) and we enhanced them all with explosive glass / debris, and even put an airbag inflating in one.

Meanwhile, back at Double Negative, the challenge was to create a creature that looked like the bronze Wall Street Bull statue but could also run and charge like a bull, and at the same time look mean, angry and muscular. We started off with a lidar scan of the bull statue and tried to rig that, and quickly found that the actual statue, rather than being an anatomically correct bull, is more a piece of expressive art: for instance it is leaning heavily over to one side, which meant that when we tried to make it run, it ran with a limp. Also if you look at it straight in the face it appears to be smiling rather than sneering, which meant we had to change its expression to prevent it from looking comical. Another rigging challenge was the muscularity of the bull. It is supposed to be bronze, metallic, rigid – so we tightened up the muscles and did not allow stretching, compression or jiggle – but that made it look like a tin robot with badly constructed joints – so we had to find a compromise between a rigid metal bull and a more natural, muscular bull.

Have you had to reconstruct some sets in 3D?
We built a fully textured 3D version of Dave’s lab using tiled hi-res HDR photography and lidar data. This aided with clean up on a few shots and was essential to get accurate camera match-moves.

About the final sequence, all these particles effects should have blow your render times?
If i remember correctly, the simulations for Morgana’s torrent of fire were the longest running processes on the Final Battle. The smoke trails from the plasma balls were also quite heavy. For Spectral Morgana herself, I think she was averaging at around 6 hours a shot.

How did you create Spectral Morgana and her effects?
The brief from JT was that Spectral Morgana should be unlike anything we’d seen before but still be compelling. It was important to the story to get across the impression that no matter what Dave throws at her, he cannot kill her, because she can shape-shift or dissipate to avoid plasma. This is where the idea came from for the particle sim, for her to move like a « shoal of fish » rather than a regular, hard-edged 3D creature. So we started by making an accurate body track of Alice’s performance, which included a cloth track for her clothing. Then we would use that 3D volume to create our particle sim, with particles swarming around, leaving the main group, swirling back in and remaining part of the swarm. We tried to match the motion and feeling of large shoals of fish, particularly in the shot where Dave tries to throw a plasma ball at her and she opens up to let the plasma fly through.

We encountered a few issues when we swapped out Alice for a particle sim. One was that we lost a lot of detail in her face and therefore her performance became unreadable. To address this we rendered various levels of « tightness » of simulation: the tightest being particles that stuck most to the original surface of the body track and the loosest being the ones that moved furthest away. Then these levels of particle motion could be dialed in to taste. Another slight problem was that Spectral Morgana looked a little thin if she consisted of just a particle layer, so we incorporated a core layer which consisted of a seething mass of worm-like lampreys to add an extra level of density. We also added in some flickering internal light to represent her « spectral » energy which helped to give her volume.

Was there some shots that prevented you from sleeping?
Initially we were all a bit daunted by the sheer volume of work required in the fantasia sequence, and the fact that it had to do justice to the original Disney animation made it seem like a mountain to climb. But we found that when we really got in to it it was fun, exiting, and satisfying: because at least you know what it has to look like at the end of the day. Unlike Spectral Morgana. So I think if there were any shots that stopped me sleeping it was probably some of the creative development of Spectral Morgana, because that really was a journey into the unknown.

What was the size of your team?
I think our crew size reached approximately 250 artists, spread over 12-18 months.

What did you keep about this experience?
1. Preparation is the Key.
2. Insist on shooting what you need.

What is your next project?
Spending time with my family. Next project not until much later in the year.

What are the four films that gave you the passion for cinema?
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, BRAZIL, THE SHINING et ALIEN.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?
– Double Negative: Dedicated THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE page on Double Negative website.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2010

Update to the interview of MPC for PRINCE OF PERSIA

Par
Vincent Frei
-

[lang_fr]Un nouveau lien a été ajouté à l’interview de Stéphane Ceretti pour PRINCE OF PERSIA:

–MPC Breakdown: Breakdown VFX pour PRINCE OF PERSIA.[/lang_fr][lang_en]A new link was added to the interview of Stephane Ceretti for PRINCE OF PERSIA:

–MPC Breakdown: VFX Breakdown for PRINCE OF PERSIA.[/lang_fr]

TOY STORY 3: Simon Christen – 3D Animator – Pixar

Par
Vincent Frei
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[lang_fr]Quel est ton parcours ?
J’ai grandi à Berne, en Suisse. Au cours dans mes années du lycée, j’ai décidé de poursuivre mon intérêt pour l’infographie et d’essayer d’en faire une carrière professionnelle. J’ai eu la chance d’être de pouvoir m’inscrire à l’Academy of Art University de San Francisco et de commencer ma formation d’animateur 3D. Après 4 ans d’études, j’ai obtenu mon diplôme et j’ai été accepté comme stagiaire à l’animation chez Pixar. Après le stage, j’ai travaillé comme fix animateur sur RATATOUILLE. Je n’aurais pas pu demander une meilleure introduction pour travailler dans l’industrie. Cependant, mon contrat se terminait après ce projet, donc ma femme et moi nous avons déménagé à Los Angeles, où j’ai commencé à travailler comme animateur pour Disney sur BOLT. C’était génial de passer une année et demie en Californie du Sud et d’apprendre une nouvelle expérience d’un autre studio et dans une autre ville. Pendant ce temps, je suis resté en contact avec les gens de chez Pixar et lorsque l’occasion de retravailler chez Pixar s’est présentée, je l’ai saisie. Je suis retourné chez Pixar au milieu de la production de UP. Depuis lors, j’ai travaillé sur TOY STORY 3 et je travaille maintenant sur leurs prochains projets.

Comment t’es-tu retrouvé sur Toy Story 3 ?
Après avoir terminé mon travail sur UP, j’ai travaillé la promotion des ressorties de TOY STORY et TOY STORY 2. C’était génial de travailler sur certains de ces personnages classiques. Une fois que TOY STORY 3 fut prêt pour la production, j’ai rejoint leur équipe d’animation et nous y avons travaillé pendant un peu plus d’un an.

Quels personnages as-tu animés ?
Comme la plupart des animateurs de Pixar, je n’ai pas animé juste un ou deux personnages. J’ai été capable d’animer de nombreux personnages, certains plus que d’autres. C’était un véritable plaisir d’avoir l’occasion de travailler sur des personnages aussi définis. Je pense que mon personnage favori à animer était Lotso. Ce fut est un tel plaisir de l’animer. J’ai animé ses derniers moments dans le film, où il essaie de s’échapper, mais il est ramassé et attaché au camion. Ce fut une série vraiment amusante de plans.

Avez-vous des contraintes pour le style d’animation pour faire correspondre ce troisième film avec les deux autres TOY STORY ?
Les rigs des personnages ont tellement changés depuis les deux premiers films que c’était un défi d’essayer de correspondre au même style d’animation. Woody, Buzz et toute la bande ont de telles caractéristiques et des comportements si spécifiques, que nous devions essayer de les imiter afin que l’on sente qu’il s’agissait des mêmes personnages. Avec n’importe quelle suite, vous avez la chance d’avoir beaucoup de référence pour obtenir de l’inspiration, mais aussi les limites afin de ne pas aller trop loin.

Peux-tu nous expliquer comment étaient les rigs ?
Les rigs que nous utilisons chez Pixar sont très bien développés et c’est un plaisir à les utiliser et animer. En fait, je n’en sais pas trop sur l’aspect technique des rigs car les riggers ont tendance à cacher leur structure sous-jacente. Quand nous recevons les personnages définitifs, ils sont composés de milliers de contrôles à animer.

Comment se passait la collaboration entre les animateurs et les riggers ?
Je n’étais pas vraiment impliqué dans ce processus, ce sont les leads animateurs qui s’occupent de préparer les rigs avec les riggers au moment de la préproduction. Une fois que tous les animateurs ont rejoint le projet, les rigs sont solides et prêts pour être animés.

Avez-vous utilisé les vidéos des acteurs quand ils étaient l’enregistrement de la voix de leur personnage ?
Non, pas sur ce film.

Peux-tu nous dire combien de secondes vous animez en une semaine ?
Cela varie, bien sûr, en fonction de la prise de vue, mais en moyenne je dirais que nous faisions autour de 80 à 90 images, donc un peu moins de 4 secondes. Si vous obtenez un paquet de plans, parfois, je préfère tous les bloquer à la fois. Dans une semaine comme cela, je n’anime pas dans le détail. Une fois que le blocage est approuvé, vous pouvez affiner et finir un couple de plans assez rapidement. Cela dépend aussi du nombre de personnages présent dans le plan. Quelques plans dans TOY STORY 3 avaient jusqu’à 200 personnages. Avec autant de personnages, cela diminue forcément le nombre d’images animées à la fin de la semaine.

As-tu rencontré des difficultés ou des problèmes inattendus ?
Chaque film a ses propres défis. Et celui-ci n’était pas différent. Un grand défi était de rester fidèle aux personnages et d’essayer de prolonger le travail qui avait été fait par les animateurs sur les films précédents.

Quel était le personnage le plus complexe à animer ?
Je ne dirais pas qu’il y avait un personnage qui était plus compliqué que les autres. Cependant, il y a eu un plan qui a été vraiment difficile pour moi, j’animais le plan au début du film où la mère filme le jeune Andy en train de jouer avec Wooy et Mr Patate. Puis vient Molly qui détruit un pont et quelques jouets. C’était un sacré défi, car le plan est réellement long avec de multiples personnages, et il implique des déplacements de physique avec des animations crédibles d’enfants. En fin de compte, c’était vraiment un plan amusant à faire et je suis content de la façon dont Molly fait tout tomber.

Comment étiez-vous d’animateurs à travailler sur ce film ?
Nous étions environ 80 personnes dans le département d’animation, y compris les animateurs, les leads, les fixers et tout le support technique.

Que gardes-tu de cette expérience ?
Cela a été un privilège incroyable d’être capable d’animer tant de personnages iconiques. J’ai beaucoup appris des vétérans de l’animation, certains d’entre eux ayant déjà animé sur TOY STORY et TOY STORY 2. Cela a également été très agréable de travailler avec le réalisateur, Lee Unkrich. La plupart des réalisateurs chez Pixar sont soit des scénaristes soit des animateurs. Lee a cependant un passé de monteur et nous, en tant qu’animateur, nous avions l’aperçu dans un tout nouveau monde quand il faisait la critique de nos plans.

Quel est ton prochain projet ?
Je crois que je vais travailler sur CARS 2. J’espère que je pourrais aussi un peu animer sur BRAVE.

Quels sont les quatre films qui t’ont donné une passion pour l’animation et du cinéma ?
Pour être honnête, je ne suis pas sûr que ce soit mon intérêt pour les films qui m’ait conduit dans cette industrie. Je pense que c’était pour moi plus la fascination des images générées par ordinateur. J’étais vraiment intéressé les images 3D et je jouais pas mal avec 3D Studio Max. Et éventuellement, je pensais à devenir un artiste 3D. Ce ne fut que j’étais inscrit à l’université que j’ai découvert que j’aimais l’animation comme une vraie passion.
Cependant, j’ai vraiment aimé LE LIVRE DE LA JUNGLE, MONSTERS INC. et THE INCREDIBLES alors que j’étais à l’école.

Un grand merci pour ton temps.

// EN SAVOIR PLUS ?
– Pixar: Page spéciale TOY STORY 3 sur le site de Pixar.[/lang_fr][lang_en]What is your background?
I grew up in Bern, Switzerland. During high school I decided to pursue my interest in computer graphics and try to make a professional career out of it. I was fortunate enough to be able to enroll at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and start my education as a 3D animator. After 4 years of studying I graduated and was accepted as an animation intern at Pixar. After the internship I worked as a Fix Animator on RATATOUILLE. I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to working in the industry. However, my contract was up after the show, so my wife and I relocated to Los Angeles where I started working as an Animator for Disney on BOLT. It was great spending 1.5 years in Southern California and getting to experience a different studio and city. During that time I stayed in contact with people at Pixar and once the chance presented itself to go back, I took it. I returned to Pixar during the middle of production on UP. Since then I worked on TOY STORY 3 and I am now working on upcoming projects.

How did you get involved on Toy Story 3?
After wrapping up work on UP I worked on some promotional work for the re-release of TOY STORY and TOY STORY 2. It was awesome to work with some of the classic characters. Once TOY STORY 3 was ready for production, I joined their animation team and we worked on it for a little over a year.

Which characters did you animate?
Like most animators at Pixar, I didn’t animate just one or two characters. I was able to animate many of the characters, some more than others. It was a lot of fun having the opportunity to work with such established characters. I think my favorite was to animate Lotso. He’s such a fun character to work with. I animated his last moments in the movie; where he tries to sneak away, gets picked up and tied to the truck. That was a really fun series of shots…

Do you have any constraints for the animation style to match the third film with the two other Toy Story movies?
The character rigs have changed so much since the first two movies, it was a bit of a challenge to try and match the same animation style. Woody, Buzz and the whole gang have such established characteristics and specific behaviors; we had try and match them so they really feel the same. With any sequel you have the blessing of having a lot of reference to get inspiration but also the limitations of branching out too far.

Can you explain how were the rigs?
The rigs we use at Pixar are very well developed and a pleasure to work with. I actually don’t know too much about the technical aspect of the rigs as the riggers tend to “hide” the underlying structure. We just get the finished characters with sometimes thousands of controls to animate.

How was the collaboration between the animators and the riggers?
I wasn’t really involved in this process as the lead animators usually figure out the rigs along with the riggers in pre-production. Once the full force of animators joins the show, the rigs are solid and ready to be animated.

Did you use the videos of actors when they were recording the character’s voices?
No, not on this show.

Can you tell us how many seconds do you animate on a week?
It varies depending on the shot of course, but on average I would guess around 80 to 90 frames; so a little less then 4 seconds. If you get a chunk of shots, sometimes I like to block them out all at once. In a week like this I won’t hand in any animation. Once the blocking is approved you can then polish and finish a couple shots fairly quickly. It also depends on how many characters are in a shot. Some shots in TOY STORY 3 had up to 200 characters. The frame amount obviously drops with that many models.

Did you encounter some difficulties or unexpected problems?
Every show has its challenges. And this one was no different. One big challenge was to stay true to the characters and try and live up to the great animation people have done on the previous movies.

What was the most complicated character to animate?
I wouldn’t say there was one character, which was more complicated than the others. However, there was one shot that was really tricky for me; I animated the shot in the beginning of the movie where the mom is filming young Andy playing with Woody and Mr. Potatohead. Then Molly comes stumbling in, knocking over a bridge and some toys. It was a challenging shot as it was really long, with multiple characters, involving some difficult physical moves, with toddler and children acting. In the end it was a very fun shot to work on and I am happy with how Molly stumble turned out.

How many animators worked on it?
We were around 80 people in the animation department including animators, leads, fixers, techs and support staff.

What do you keep from this experience?
It was an incredible privilege to be able to animate with such iconic characters. I learned a lot from the veteran animators, some of them having already animated on TOY STORY and TOY STROY 2. It was also great getting to work with the director, Lee Unkrich. Most directors at Pixar are either Story guys or animators. Lee however comes from an editing background and so we as animators got a glimpse into a whole new world when he was critiquing our shots.

What is your next project?
I believe I’m moving onto CARS 2. Hopefully I will also get to animate on BRAVE as well.

What are the four films that gave you a passion for animation and cinema?
To be honest, I’m not sure if it was the interest in moving pictures that really got me into this industry. I think for me it was more the fascination for computer graphics in general. I was really interested in 3D graphics and played around in 3D Studio Max. Eventually I wanted to become a “3D guy”. It wasn’t until I was enrolled at University that I discovered that I like animation as a specific major the best.
However, I really love THE JUNGLE BOOK, MONSTERS INC. and THE INCREDIBLES while I was in school.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?
– Pixar: Dedicated TOY STORY 3 page on Pixar website.[/lang_en]

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2010

INCEPTION: Paul Franklin – VFX Supervisor – Double Negative

Par
Vincent Frei
-

After beginning his career at Digital Film and MPC, Paul Franklin helps to the creation of the studio Double Negative in 1998. Since then he has supervised projects such as THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN and HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX and has supervised all the movies of Christopher Nolan since BATMAN BEGINS. In the following interview, he talks to us about his work on INCEPTION.

What is your background?
I originally studied sculpture at university in the 80s which is where I first started experimenting with computer graphics. I combined this with the student theatre and magazine work that I was doing at the time which then lead me into film making and animation. I worked in video games for a while as an animator/designer and then moved into film and television in the early 90s. In 1998 I helped to set up Double Negative VFX.

How was your collaboration with Christopher Nolan with which you have already worked on BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT?
Chris is a fantastic director to work with – he is very demanding, always pushing you to raise the bar in every area, but he also gives you a lot of feedback and involves you in the creative discussion which makes you feel a part of the whole movie making process. Chris told me at the beginning of INCEPTION that it would be an all-consuming experience, and he was right!

Can you explain how you created the sequence in which Paris is folded over itself?
Returning to the Paris environment, Ariadne, played by Ellen Page, demonstrates her new-found ability to control the dreamworld by folding the streets in on themselves to form a giant « cube city ».

The Dneg vfx team spent a week documenting the Paris location where main unit was scheduled to shoot. Seattle-based Lidar VFX Services did a great job scanning all the buildings and then delivering highly detailed data from which Double Negative built a series of Parisian apartment blocks. It wasn’t possible to get above the buildings so the Dneg VFX modellers sourced photographs of typical Paris rooftops to fill in the missing areas. We implemented the new pertex texture mapping techniques in Renderman to allow the CG team to avoid the laborious UV coordinate mapping that is usually associated with models of this type. The final folded streets featured fully animated cars and people – anything that’s not on the flat in the final images is CG.

How did you created the impressive scene of the cafe in Paris?
Early on in INCEPTION, Ariadne is taken into a dreamworld version of Paris by Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. When Ariadne realises that she is actually dreaming she panics and the fabric of the dream starts to unravel, disintegrating violently and flying apart in all directions.

Special Effects Supervisor Chris Corbould created a series of in-camera explosions using air mortars to blast light weight debris into the Paris street location. Whilst giving an extremely dynamic and violent effect on film, the system was safe enough that Leo and Ellen were able to actually sit in the middle of the blasts as the cameras rolled. Director of Photography Wally Pfister used a combination of high speed film and digital cameras to capture the blasts at anything up to 1000 frames a second which had the effect of making the turbulent debris look like it was suspended in zero gravity, giving the impression that the very physics of the dreamworld were failing.
Starting with a rough cut of the live action, the Double Negative VFX animation team used the in-house Dynamite dynamics toolset to extend the destruction to encompass the whole street. The compositors retimed the high-speed photography to create speed ramps so that all explosive events started in real-time before ramping down to slow motion which further extended the idea of abnormal physics. As the destruction becomes more widespread the team added secondary interaction within the dense clouds of debris to sell the idea of everything being suspended in a strange weightless fluid medium.

What did you do in the scene in which Ellen Paige turns large mirrors on a bridge in Paris?
Ariadne continues her exploration of the limits of the dreamworld by creating a bridge out of the echoing reflections between two huge mirrors.

We had scouted a bridge over the River Seine in Paris (Bir-Hakeim bridge which had been previously featured in LAST TANGO IN PARIS) which had a really interesting structure: a Metro rail deck overhead with a pedestrian walkway underneath framed by a series of cast-iron arches. Chris wanted this bridge to reveal in an interesting way as part of Ariadne’s playful exploration of her new-found ability to control the dreamworld. During preproduction we worked up various concept animations of the bridge assembling itself in a blur of stop-frame construction, but it always ended up looking slightly twee and overly-magical – Chris was interested in something elegant that, whilst simple in concept, would defy easy analysis by the viewer. In an early discussion I mentioned that from certain angles the arches resembled the infinite reflections generated by two opposed mirrors – Chris thought that this was an interesting idea and eventually asked the question « what could you do on set with a really big mirror? ». I got together with Special Effects Supervisor Chris Corbould who got his team to build an eight foot by sixteen foot mirror that could be swung shut on a hinge, effectively forming a huge reflecting door. Dneg then got to work on a series of animations that explored the range of what we might be able to get in camera with this rig and we arrived at a series of camera setups which then formed the basis for Chris and Wally’s shooting plan. This gave a great start for us in VFX, but as big as the mirrored door was (it’s size being limited mainly by weight as it was already up to 800 Lbs) we still needed to do a lot of work. The compositing team set about removing the support rig and crew reflections and then adding in the infinite secondary reflections as well as the surrounding environment. The result is a series of shots so subtle in their execution that you’re not really aware of any digital intervention until the very last moments of the sequence. In fact most of what you’re looking at is digital with only the actors being real – even their reflections are digital doubles in many cases.

Were you involved on the extreme slow motion and what did you do on them?
We shot slow motion using both the Photosonics 4ER (which uses standard 35mm film) and the Phantom digital camera. Slow motion photography involves a trade off between speed and quality – the faster the camera runs (and thus the slower the resulting image) the lower the quality of the picture. We came up with a solution to this by shooting at as high a frame rate as possible whilst still maintaining the quality and then slowing the footage down even more in post using various respeed tools inside Dneg’s in-house version of Shake. Some things were impossible to shoot slow motion, such as the falling rain in the wide shots of the van coming off the bridge, so instead we created all of the falling rain as VFX animation.

Can you explain to us the shooting of the train that attacks the heroes? What have you done on this sequence?
The train is pretty much all in camera, in other words we really had a full size train on the street crashing through the cars. Special effects and art department built the shell of the train on a truck body – Double Negative then removed the truck’s wheels and added metal train wheels. The fractured road surface was created in CG and additional work was done in compositing to add shadows to the building facades, increasing the overcast rainy-day look.

How was the shooting of the amazing corridor fight and how did you create this sequence?
The « spinning corridor and hotel room » sequence was all in-camera. Chris Corbould’s special effects team built a huge rotating set to create the effect of Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the sub-security guards running over the walls and ceilings. The same principle applied for the scene inside the spinning hotel room. The only VFX work was a simple removal of a camera rig from the background of the final shot in the sequence.

How did you created the zero gravity effect?
The zero-g look was achieved through the use of cleverly designed stunt and special effects rigs which were then removed digitally by Double Negative in post. For the zero-g fight, where Arthur grapples with the security agent a vertical version of the hotel corridor set was built and the performers were dropped into it on wires with the camera filming them from the bottom end of the set. For the most part the actors hid their own wires, but when they became visible they were painted out with CG set extensions being used to fill any gaps that were left in. Much of the rest of the zero-g sequences, such as in the elevator shaft, was achieved on a horizontal set with Joseph Gordon-Levitt being held in a special « see-saw » rig or suspended from a small crane. Once again, Dneg removed all the rigs and repaired the backgrounds where necessary.

Did you created digital doubles for the corridor and zero gravity sequences?
The only digital double work in the zero-g sequences is a brief moment when Arthur is tying up the sleeping dreamers where we replaced the heads of two of the stunt actors with CG heads of Cillian Murphy (Fischer) and Ken Watanabe (Saito). Everything else is done with real people!

During the sequence in the mountain. Was the landscape real or is it all CG?
The landscapes are all real save for a small bit of terrain at the base of the Fortress when seen in the wide shots. The location of the snow scenes (Kananaskis County in Alberta, Canada) was absolutely spectacular – the only thing we had to do was add the digital Fortress in the wide shots and paint out the odd building in the background.

How did you created the avalanche?
The avalanche is for real. The special effects team collaborated with the local mountain patrol to trigger avalanches with strategically dynamite charges. We added the Fortress in the background and the little falling figures on the cliff face, but otherwise it’s all the real deal.

How was the collaboration with New Deal Studios?
New Deal are a great bunch of guys. I’ve worked with them directly before on LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN and of course on THE DARK KNIGHT and Double Negative’s relationship with New Deal goes right back to PITCH BLACK, our first movie in 1998. Ian Hunter, New Deal’s VFX supervisor, did a fantastic job with his team, creating a sixth scale version of the central section of the Fortress and then rigging it for a dynamic collapse and pyrotechnic destruction.

Can you tell us about the sequence at the edge of the ocean. How did you created this city that is falling apart?
The Limbo City shoreline is, perhaps, the scene that has the most obvious symbolism of any of the dream environments. The sea represents Cobb’s subconcious mind and the city is the mental construct that he built within it – having once been beautiful and pristine, the city is now mutating and crumbling back into the subconcious sea, symbolising Cobb’s state of mental collapse. Chris wanted the city to take on the aspect of a glacier, slowly sliding out into the sea with giant architectural « icebergs » splitting off and drifting away in the water.

During pre-production both Art Dept. and VFX worked on concept designs for Limbo City devoting particular attention to the decaying shoreline. However, even after several weeks’ work we weren’t getting anything that Chris felt happy about – everything was just a little bit too literal. We discussed the idea of Limbo having started out as an idealistic modernist city that has started to collapse back into the sea of Cobb’s subconsciousness. We started with the basic concepts: a city of modern buildings and a glacier. We took a simple polygonal model of the glacier, built from photographic reference, and developed a Maya-based space-filling routine that populated the interior with basic architectural blocks with the height of each block being determined by the elevation of the glacier at that point. We then began to develop a series of increasingly complex rules that added street divisions or varied the scale of the buildings or added damage, all determined by samples taken from the glacial model. After each new rule was added we reviewed the resulting structure and then refined the process.

Once we had reached a certain level of complexity our VFX art director developed a series of paintings from the CG renders provided by the procedural system and these then fed back into the development of the rules. In this way we arrived at a city layout that had familiar features such as squares, streets and intersections, but which had a totally unique structure that felt more like a natural landform – a cliff being washed into the waves with architectural « icebergs » floating out to sea. The VFX animation team then used Houdini to create the collapsing architecture which was primarily referenced from natural history footage of glaciers rather than from building demolitions, adding giant splashes with Dneg’s proprietary Squirt fluids system. The hero shot from the sequence, featured in many of the online trailers, was developed from a helicopter plate that we shot with the INCEPTION aerial unit in Morocco – that’s actually Leo and Ellen walking through the waves. The final look of the city shoreline was created by using lots of reference of derelict housing developments as well as bomb damaged buildings in Iraq and other war zones.

Can you explain the final sequence and its gigantic city that mixed old house and skyscrapers? Was it all shot in front of a greenscreen?
We shot inside the actual house (an early 20th century « craftsman house » in the San Gabriel valley in Pasadena California) and used the location for both the scenes in Cobb’s memory and Limbo. For the Limbo shots we built a large greenscreen, supported on a platform, outside of the windows. The cityscape was created from the same CG setup used for the scenes of Cobb and Ariadne walking through the deserted city. Great attention was paid to the compositing with a lot of time spent on getting the depth of field and exposure right.

How was shot the top? Was it CG or real?
The top was shot for real, there was no CG for it.

How long did you work on that show?
I first read the script in February 2009 and then started on the show properly in April of that year. Our final delivery was at the end of May 2010 – so, in all about 13 or 14 months.

How many shots have you done and what was the size of your team?
We worked on 560 shots of which 500 are in the final film. In total we had about 230 people working on the visual effects over the duration of the show.

What is your next project?
Right now I’m taking a bit of a break – we’ll see what comes later this year!

What are the four films that would have given the passion of cinema?
My favourite films are not necessarily visual effects films, but they all feature visual innovation and take a rigorous approach to story telling. I love David Lynch’s films, in particular THE STRAIGHT STORY which I think is a powerfully emotional film about a very singular man’s journey across rural America. My favourite film is Alexander Korda’s 1940 version of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, which features some of the earliest use of bluescreen – I love its totally consistent sense of fantasy and powerful drama and it also looks absolutely incredible. That film, perhaps more than any other, is what got me interested in making films and visual effects myself.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?
– Meet the Filmmakers: Podcast of Paul Franklin at the Apple Store in London.
– Double Negative: Dedicated INCEPTION’s page on Double Negative website.
– fxguide: Paul Franklin’s podcast and New Deal Studios work on fxguide website.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2010

JONAH HEX: Ara Khanikian – Lead Compositing – Rodeo FX

Par
Vincent Frei
-

Ara Khanikian evolves in the midst of visual effects of Montreal since nearly 10 years, he has gone through many studios like Buzz Image, Hybride or Rodeo FX. He has worked on projects such as THE FOUNTAIN, 300, THE X-FILES, TERMINATOR SALVATION or TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE.

What is your background?
I studied 2d/3d animation in 1999, worked freelance for a couple of years, then joined the team at Buzz for about 5 years, did 2 years at Hybride, and then joined the team at Rodeo FX around 2 years ago.

How was the collaboration with the director and production VFX supervisor?
We had a very good relationship with the director and vfx supervisor. We would touch base very regularly using video-conferencing and cinesync sessions to discuss the progress of the shots.

What did Rodeo on this show?
Our workload changed a lot over the period of time that we worked on this project. We, initially, were awarded around 20 shots, and it obviously included a fair amount of matte paintings composited with greenscreen footage. We had some shots where we had to create CG crows. Some hero ones that occupied a large portion of the screen and also large flocks, We also did a lot of tests and r&d for cg fire and smoke that would be used to enhance live action elements. Unfortunately, for story-telling purposes, these shots never made it in the final cut of the film. We ended up delivering 5 shots. They’re the shots where Jonah Hex arrives at Independance Harbour, Virginia. We created 2 matte paintings and CG crows for these shots.

Can you explain to us the creation of a matte-painting shot from scratch to final image?
We always start with research, we like getting a lot of photographs. We’ll go out and take photographs of anything and everything that could help us, we’ll get visual references from movies and paintings. We usually even shoot practical elements like smoke and fire, crowd elements, flags, etc etc.. anything that will help us take a shot to the next level. Then we do some concept work and try to nail the overall mood, the basic layout of the matte painting and, of course, the lighting and composition. We present it to the director and when he’s happy with the result, we start with the actual matte painting work. In our pipeline, the matte painters will usually work in Photoshop while the matte painting TDs start prepping a 3d scene with the correct camera infos and start the modeling that will be used for the camera projections. Once that’s approved, it gets rendered and handed off in a couple of hi-rez layers to the compositor where it gets composited with all the other elements for the shot, which usually involves practical elements (like smoke, fog, and anything that would give more life to the shot). In one of our shot, we even had crowd and people walking around, shot on greenscreen that would be used to populate the streets of the matte painting.

What are the references that gave you the director?
For this project, we looked a lot at old photographs of New-Orleans. The style and architecture of that city was a great match to what the director wanted to see. We also photographed some of the older buildings in Old Montreal that looked great because of the moody dimmed lighting that’s present there.

Have you done CG crows?
Yes, we did. All the crows in our shots are CG. They were all done in XSI and rendered with Mental Ray in openEXR. We worked with another Montreal based facility for the crows. We had 2 hero shots of crows where we would see them « up close and personal ». These 2 crows were hand-animated and they look and feel really awesome. We also used a more procedural approach for the flock of flying crows that we added in another shot.

Did you used lots of 3D projection for your mattes?
It depends. If the shot is static or has very slight camera movements, we usually don’t need to do any 3d projections, the matte painting is simply exported to the compositor who will take care of the tracking. For some other shots, we will need to match-move (usually in 3d-equalizer), create a 3d scene, and then use camera projections.

What was your margin of creativity on this project?
We actually had a lot of creative input on our shots and the director was very open to our suggestions.

How long have you worked on this movie and what was the size of your team?
We worked for about 3 months, and our team varied between 5 and 10 artists.

What was the challenge on this film and how did you overcome it?
One of the biggest challenges we had was a technical one. This film was entirely shot with an anamorphic lens and one of the shots that we worked on had a very wide angle lens that created a huge amount of lens distortion. The shot had a fairly complex and long camera move (I believe it was a 21 seconds shot) that showed Jonah Hex on his horse arriving on a bridge and the camera would gradually pull out and reveal the city of Independance Harbour, Virginia. Only part of this bridge was built on set and was filmed in front of a greenscreen. We created a CG extension to this bridge, the matte painting of the city and a flock of CG crows. Dealing with this much lens distortion in a big establishing shot with a lot of perspective and parallax change had its share of technical challenges. The matchmove and tracking were fairly complex because of this. In the end, it worked out beautifully.
We had also done a lot of r&d and tests on a sequence where Jonah Hex would get his face burned with a branding iron by his nemesis, Quentin Turnbull. We had to create a very hot looking branding iron, and fumes and smoke effects coming out of the tip and especially find a convincing look of Jonah’s skin melting as soon as the brand would touch his skin. It was very gory! His skin was melting and burning, smoke was coming out of everywhere! The director decided to go with a much more graphic look that looked a lot like the comic book for that whole scene.

What are your softwares?
For compositing, we used Flame and Nuke. The matte painting department mostly used Photoshop and Softimage|XSI.

What did you keep from this project?
It was a very interesting and fun project! It allowed me to discover the dark and mysterious universe of Jonah Hex which I really didn’t know.

What are your next projects?
We just finished our work on RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE, and are starting SOURCE CODE and THE IMMORTALS.

What are the four films that gave you a passion for cinema?
I guess I’m part of a whole generation that really got inspired by classics such as STAR WARS, E.T., CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, INDIANA JONES and BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogies.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?
– Rodeo FX: Official website of Rodeo FX.

////

Rodeo FX – credits list

Visual Effects Supervisor
Sébastien Moreau

Visual Effects Producers
Nina Fallon
Benoit Touchette

Visual Effects Coordinator
Josiane O’Rourke

Compositors
Ara Khanikian
Laurent Spillemaecker
Vincent Poitras
Simon Devault
Christophe Chabot-Blanchet

Art Director, Matte Paintings
Mathieu Raynault

Matte Painters
Frédéric St-Arnaud
Sithiriscient Khay

3D Artists
Jeremy Boissinot
Moïka Sabourin
Marilyne Fleury
Daniel Rhein

Camera Matchmove
Jean-François Morissette

System Administrator
Curtis Linstead

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2010

THE A-TEAM: Bill Westenhofer – VFX Supervisor – Rhythm & Hues

Par
Vincent Frei
-

AtRhythm & Hues for nearly 15 years, Bill Westenhofer has overseen many projects such as BABE, STUART LITTLE, CATS & DOGS, MEN IN BLACK 2 or THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. In 2008, he received an Academy Award ® for Achievement in Visual Effects for his work on THE GOLDEN COMPASS.

What is your background?
I’ve been working in the visual effects industry for over 15 years. I have a master’s degree in computer science from The George Washington University in Washington DC, specializing in graphics algorithms. My formal training is technical, but I’ve been drawing, painting, and animating on my own since I was very young. My current role as Visual Effects Supervisor combines both disciplines. I have to creatively direct the team of artists while helping to develop the technical approaches to achieve the looks we need.

How was your collaboration with director Joe Carnahan and production visual effects supervisor James Price?
From the start, Joe and Jamie emphasized the « fun » factor of THE A-TEAM. They wanted high energy, dynamic action which meant a lot of objects close to the lens and fast moving cameras. I thought our collaboration worked very well. We were able to bring a lot of ideas to the table and they likewise were great in crafting fun sequences and in helping us whenever an action or ‘gag’ wasn’t working.

What sequences have been made by Rhythm & Hues?
We worked on two sequences in the film: « The Tank Drop » and « Long Beach Harbor ».

Can you tell us about the design and the creation of the crazy freefall tank sequence??
This sequence was both the most fun and the one that caused the most « sweat » at the studio. The challenge was the sheer insanity of a tank falling through the sky and redirecting itself with its main gun. Whenever you push the believability of physics you run the risk of the whole thing falling apart. I really think we were able to walk the fine line in telling the story of what the tank was doing and yet maintaining just enough weight that it worked with a degree of plausibility.

The sequence was prevized before was came on board. The previs established most of the cuts that you see in the final product and nailed down the details of the action. R&H created several shots for a very early teaser trailer and based it very closely on this initial previs. Once those were out the door, we reconsidered the action with the ‘believability’ in mind and made the adjustments that finally made it into the film. It was interesting to see how your perception of whether something was working or not changed as the rendering of the clouds and the tank became more realistic. A lot of the early previs animation proved to be too ‘light’ with the tank responding too heavily to its main gun, for example.

How did you create so realistic clouds??
The clouds were, by far the most challenging part of the sequence for our R&D folks. We didn’t have any aerial photography and we knew we would be flying right up to and sometimes through the clouds. This meant we would have to create fully rendered volumetric clouds. The clouds were also going to be very important in the shots compositionally, and to provide a sense of speed, so we needed an efficient ways to visualize how they would work in the animation stage. The technique we settled on was to make a library of predefined cloud ‘caches’. Analogous to the pre-light stage in a regular 3D object (like the plane or tank), we setup turntables so we could adjust characteristics of each cloud – the amount of ‘wispiness’, design areas with smooth detail next to clumpy cumulus puffs, etc. This was designed in Side Effect’s Houdini. We then took these caches and made lo-res iso surfaces which were handed to layout artists who composed the ‘cloud landscape’. The iso-surfaces were lo enough to be interactive during the animation stage, and the animators, in fact, had the ability to add of move them to help the sense of speed, etc.

Once they got to the render stage, Cloud lighters placed scene lights to represent the sun, simulate bounce lighting from cloud to cloud and also simulate some of the complicated internal light scattering in the cloud. We did try to simulate that within the volume renderer, but it proved to be very expensive. To make up for that, one of our TDs, Hideki Okano, developed a tool to place internal lights where there would be the most internal scattering in a full simulation. He also developed a feature we called ‘crease lighting’ which mimics a phenomenon in cumulus clouds where the ‘creases’ between lumps are actually brighter than the lump because of an increase in water vapor density as you move in from the edges.

For the actual render, Houdini’s MANTRA delt with the actual cloud visibility calculations and was the framework for a ‘ray-march’ render. At each ‘march-step’, however, a custom volumetric calculator called « FELT » (Field Expression Language Toolkit) written by Jerry Tessendorf was used which had the ability to add additional multi-scattering terms. After initial renders, we had the ability to add more detail by ‘advecting’ the volume caches – increasing the ‘wispy’ quality. We also added realism by mixing clouds with different levels of ‘sharpness’ together, often within the same 3D space.

As a final touch, in a few specific shots where a plane passes through a cloud, we added the ability to animate the clouds from the plane’s airflow. This achieved the wing ‘vortex’ effects you see as it emerges from the cloud.

This sequence presents major challenges especially with particles and parachutes. How did you achieved them?
We used Houdini extensively for all sorts of explosions, missile trails, burning engines, etc. For the most detailed explosions we used Houdini’s fluid simulation with thermal heat propagation combined with traditional particle effects and a few flame cards. One relatively simple effect that was harder than it looked were the tracers. In animation, they simply used straight ribbons to suggest where the bullets should go from a story point. Once we had to realized them with more realistic ‘ballistic’ flight, our effects animators had to actually « aim the guns », leading the targets etc to achieve a similar effect. While a little bit of cheating was possible (bending their flight-paths for example), you could only push this so far before it looked wrong. The effects animators ended up with their own mini ‘shooting gallery’.

As for the parachutes, one of the effects I’m most happy with is a shot where you see the canopies being straffed by the aforementioned tracers. The effects artist worked with his « aim » until we were happy with the amount of impacts and the choreography of the bullet paths. He then created geometry markers that noted where each bullet entered and exited the canopy. This was handed back to modeling who punched varying sized tears in the right places. Finally, a « technical animator » went?back and animated impact waves to the surface that corresponded to the hits. It was a lot of hand work, but I thought it worked beautifully in the end.

The sequence of the dock in Long Beach is another crazy sequence. Can you talk to us about the shooting of this sequence. Was it shoot entirely on a bluescreen or some part where shoot on the real dock?
Much of it was shot for real at a dock in Vancouver, Canada. For the most part, during the first half of the sequence you are seeing a real dock and a CG ship with containers. A few shots were added later and evolved as the edit came together and these were blue-screen set pieces with CG backgrounds created with photo-mapped geometry. One interesting bit involves the first two establishing shots of the ship on the water. Live plates were photographed (over the ocean and at the dock), but the task of perfectly matchmoving ship wakes and reflections proved so difficult that we ended up replacing the water completely. The digital water ended up being such a good match that it worked perfectly. Once the ship starts to explode, a lot of the shots were blue screen pieces with digital backgrounds.

The sequence turns to the massive destruction of the dock. How did you handle all these elements collide and destroy themselves?
Again we used Houdini for a rigid body simulation of the ship and containers. Once the rigid body sim was run, a damage pass was run to add gross deformations to the containers based on where they impacted with other objects. A fully detailed simulation of the damage proved cost prohibitive, so for the most part, wherever more specific detail was needed (or when the containers were close to camera), animators went back with deformation tools and blend shapes to hand craft the damage. Another detail was added when container doors opened and contents started to spill on the dock. This was also done with a combination of rigid body simulation and hand animation.

Weta Digital has also participated in this sequence. How was the collaboration?
In the original sequence, the ship is hit by the missile, lists, and the containers spill onto the dock. We then went back to have the initial missile hit trigger a series of secondary explosions that ultimately split the ship in half. Unfortunately for us (R&H) we didn’t have the capacity to take on the additional shots and effects work that it would require, so Fox asked Weta to step in and tackle those. We gave them all of our assets – ship, containers, dock gantries, etc and they created several new shots to depict the additional explosions. Once the ship starts to list, we had a few shots (even before the cut change) that were blue screen?shots of the actors, on the ground or hanging from partial set pieces.?For these we used our CG simulations, and photomapped environment. In a few cases, the new continuity required us to abandon aerial plates and make fully synthetic shots for some of the wides. Weta handled the majority of these, but in the few cases where we had done significant?work and the continuity impacts were manageable, we finished them.

How long have you worked on this project?
I actually came on the project in January, taking over for another supervisor who had to leave for personal reasons.

Was there something that prevented you from sleeping on this show?
Fortunately, the futon couch in my office allowed me to sleep well – hehe.
Actually, the hardest part was just working with the complex material in the ever shortening timeline of post productions. Studios want to see finished renders much earlier in the process than?ever before.

What was the size of your team??
We had about 120 artists on the show.?

What is your software pipeline?
We used Houdini and Mantra for much of the effects work. We also use Maya for modeling. The rest of the work was done in our?in house proprietary tools including our renderer ‘wren’ and compositing?software ‘icy’.

What did you keep about this experience?
This project pushed our pipeline which had been tailored for 3D character films. It showed where we needed?improvements – many of which are being implemented as we speak. The same goes for my career. This was a welcome change from digital lions and creatures and was a lot of fun. I’m very happy with the clouds and tank sequence in general, and many of the ship shots in the Long Beach sequence – especially the ones where the ship takes up part of the background looked absolutely convincing. There are of course the obvious effects work once the ship starts to explode, but I think people might be surprised there was work done in many of the ‘in-between » shots.

What is your next project?
Will let you know once I do (laughs).

What are the four films that gave you the passion for cinema?
STAR WARS and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK as a kid…
JURASSIC PARK was the one that made me rush out to California…
THE GODFATHER though is still one of my favorite films.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?
– Rhythm & Hues: Official website of Rhythm & Hues.
– fxguide: Complete article about THE A-TEAM on fxguide.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2010

PRINCE OF PERSIA: Ben Morris – VFX Supervisor – Framestore

Par
Vincent Frei
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After working several years at MillFilm on films such as BABE 2, GLADIATOR or LARA CROFT, Ben Morris joined Framestore in 2000 and participate on projects such as TROY, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and as visual effects supervisor on THE GOLDEN COMPASS and PRINCE OF PERSIA.

What is your background?
I studied at Art College and then did a Mechanical Engineering degree. Having left university, I joined Jim Henson’s Creature Shop designing and developing computer based Performance Animation Control Systems. I moved into CG during post-production on BABE 2 at MillFilm and moved to Framestore in 2000, where I have worked to the present day.

How was the collaboration with Mike Newell and the production VFX supervisor Tom Wood?
I really enjoyed working with both of them. Tom, in particular, was a very creative and inspiring VFX Supervisor to work with. He comes from a facility background and has a invaluable practical knowledge of how shots are put together.  He also has an great sense of design and visual style, which shows through in all the work he supervised on PRINCE OF PERSIA.

What are the sequences made by Framestore?
The Hassansin Vipers and the Sandroom at the end of the film.

Were there real snakes on the set or are they all in CG?
There is one brief shot of a real python at the beginning of the Hassansin’s Den sequence – all the Vipers are CG.

How did you create the CG sand?
(Answer by Alex Rothwell, Lead FX artist)
Before starting the work, we first need to be clear in our minds about how we thought that much sand would move. There was no reference for a moving body of sand the size of a football field so we had to imagine what we thought it would look like with the help of our concept artists and try and realize that. Fast moving sand exhibits some fluid like properties but there are also key aspects of the movement that are un-fluid like. We contemplated doing a lot of fluid simulation work to model the movement of the sand, but large simulations are extremely time consuming and are not as directable as other solutions. Above everything we wanted a system that could be exactly controlled by an artist reacting to the director’s or supervisor’s comments.

The whole sequence was blocked out by the animators using geometric surfaces to represent the sand’s surface, we were able to get most of the key movement of the sand signed off in this way before an fx artist became involved. Once the layout of the shot had been finalized we had a custom plugin in Maya that took the animated geometric surfaces representing the sand and were able to produce a flow of particles that replaced the geometric surface in the final render. The plugin was able to create particle movement that appear fluid like and was dictated by the gradient of the under lying surface. Any additional flow detail could be controlled via maps, allowing the artist to quickly and visually paint the sand flow direction, including any turbulence and spay. The number of the semi-simulated particles was increased at render time via a custom particle management system dubbed pCache. This system allowed us to generate the number of particles need to produce a convincing render without the overhead of the extra processing and storage. The sand artists were able to write shader like scripts that gave complete control over the up scaling process and could also be used to produce addition surface detailing and displacement. In some of the wide shots over a billion points are being rendered.

Can you tell us about the shooting of the final scene in which the sand flows into the void?
Dastan is a mixture of real Jake Gyllenhaal and the odd digi-double. Jake really threw himself into the challenge and worked very hard to do most of the stunts himself. It really paid off in post, as we only had to do one face replacement in the entire sequence.

Can you tell us about your collaboration with Double Negative for the Oasis sequence?
The collaboration worked very well. For a few shots we needed to animate and render Vipers which were caught in the time-freezing effect created by Dastan releasing the dagger’s sand. Both companies worked on the same backplates, some of which had ‘virtual’ camera moves created by DNeg. Once we got approval for element in the shot we would package up a bundle of data for Dneg (reference animated geometry, 3D render elements and the approved comp).

What was the biggest challenge on this show?
Creating the epic scale of the environment and destruction required in the Sandroom. We always referenced back to the early concept work created by our VFX Art Director Kevin Jenkins perfectly captured the ‘look and feel’ of the sequence before we started working on it.

How many shots have you done and what was the size of your team?
We worked on approx. 220 shots and completed 125 for the film. We had 60 crew working on the project over a period of 2 years.

Was there some shots that prevent you from sleeping?
We had a couple of trailer shots involving complex sand simulation and rendering which delivered pretty close to the wire, but that’s the great thing about trailers – they flush out all the bugs before final delivery.

What did you keep about this experience?
Working with Tom Wood was an absolute pleasure and our relatively small crew created some really outstanding visuals from concept design through to final delivery. So I guess we’ll all keep some beautiful pictures …

What is your next project?
I have started working on a great project with a very good director, but sadly I can’t talk about it right now.

What are the four films that gave you the passion for cinema?
STAR WARS, BLADE RUNNER, DUNE and DARK CRYSTAL.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?
– Framestore: PRINCE OF PERSIA dedicated page on Framestore website.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2010

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