It hasn’t taken long for the idea of pre-visualization to catch on as a tool in the commercial visual effects business. It’s only been around since the mid- to late 1990s, but today doing a pre-vis is standard operating procedure at the high-end effects houses that handle the most complex effects jobs, and it is certainly becoming routine at many other shops.
In most cases, when executives at effects houses refer to pre-vis, they mean a low-resolution version of a visual effect or an entire commercial that is used as a roadmap to streamline the production process by helping to time shots and block out camera angles and CGI elements. Pre-vis can also be done for an agency to test concepts and secure client approval.
Different effects houses started using pre-vis as the first step in the production process at different times in the ’90s. Generally recognized as the pioneer of pre-vis in commercials is director David Fincher, then with now defunct Propaganda Films, and now partner/ director in bicoastal Anonymous Content. Ed Ulbrich, senior VP/production and executive producer for commercials and music videos at Digital Domain, Venice, Calif., says the first time the company did a pre-vis with Fincher was in ’94 for the Rolling Stones’ video "Love is Strong," in which the band members were portrayed as giants towering above New York City streets.
"We had figured out every camera position," recalls Ulbrich. "We had three weeks to do that video, hundreds of shots and a massive amount of work. And you get Keith [Richards] and Mick [Jagger] and the guys for just a few hours. We had to maximize the time we had with them. That kind of pre-vis is critical."
Ulbrich says Digital Domain has been using pre-vis as a common tool in producing spots since about ’98. (Recent projects using pre-vis out of the shop include spots for Gatorade, Hewlett-Packard, BMW, Nike and adidas, including "The Long Run" for the latter, part of the "Impossible" campaign directed by Lance Acord of Park Pictures, New York, out of TBWA/180, San Francisco.) "It’s a highly evolved way of working whereby you solve a lot of the problems before you’re out there trying to figure it out impromptu on a location," Ulbrich explains. "As a process, a lot of times, we’ll create a pre-vis, send it to an editor and refine it. It’s a thirty-second spot, albeit in a kind of rough, CG form. But we can get that approved by an agency and its client. When we go to film, we now know we’re executing a plan that’s been approved. We know everything. The only thing left to resolve at the location is the performance."
Business Model
Alex Weil, partner/creative director at Charlex, New York, thinks of pre-vis as a job management technique. "I use pre-vis as a communication tool," he says, "so I can get everybody who is working on a project on the same page—my clients, their clients, the people who are working with me. We have a common goal. And pre-vis is part of my standard bag of tricks. I couldn’t imagine not doing it."
Pre-vis was a key element in the M&M’s spot "River of Chocolate," directed by Weil for BBDO New York. " ‘River of Chocolate’ is a job that was created using computer re-creation of more than three hundred thousand M&M’s," Weil says of the spot, which features a river of M&M’s moving in ripples and waves to the tune "Color My World." "It’s a very abstract idea. First, there was airbrush artwork, then motion storyboards to try to figure out what we were doing, and finally low-res pre-vis of what it was going to be. Imagine if I had to go straight to finish." The spot necessitated its own proprietary software to replicate the M&M’s, and also used Alias’ Maya and Next Limit’s RealFlow.
About a year ago, Charlex opened Launch, a separate New York-based company that does sophisticated 3-D animatics for agencies that need to use more than just conventional animatics to test concepts or obtain client approvals. To create the 3-D animatics, artisans use Eyematic’s FaceStation software to obtain facial motion capture data, which is then imported into Alias’ Maya for computer animation. Launch, under the aegis of VP/executive producer Mike Donovan, also utilizes Discreet’s Combustion and Adobe’s After Effects.
While pre-vis is a part of Launch’s offerings, Weil notes that a pre-vis from Charlex is not a pitching or testing tool. "You do a pre-vis for creative and economic reasons," he states. "A film director and his production company might want to block a film out before going on location. It gets expensive to shoot too many angles. You want to plan your shots."
Just last month, rhinofx, New York (part of the MVG family of companies), which has been doing pre-vis since the shop opened three-and-a-half-years ago, announced that it was, in effect, formalizing the pre-vis process. The shop is now officially offering agency clients 3-D pre-vis services. "Almost every job we do now involves a pre-vis," says Rick Wagonheim, partner/executive producer at rhinofx. "It will be a service we charge for. It is a service that we had built into our budgets before. We had to explain what it was, and cost consultants weren’t familiar with the process. By building pre-vis into the budget, it really saves time on set, saves time on post and ultimately [clients wind] up saving money."
Initially, rhinofx did pre-vis mostly for full-CG jobs that had already been awarded to the shop, but that evolved into also doing them for live-action spots containing effects and as a sales tool for jobs that rhinofx was bidding on. Pre-vis played a major role in last winter’s Cadillac spot, "Magic," directed by Nick Piper at Backyard Productions, Venice, for chemistri in Troy, Mich. "It was a live-action job with a lot of visual effects," Wagonheim says. "It was shot in the late fall and we had to make it look like winter. It was shot during the day and we had to make it look like night. The job was about seamless transitions, but nobody knew quite what it was going to look like or how to prepare for it. And it was a heavy location shoot."
Compounding the difficulties was the fact that Piper is based on the West Coast, chemistri is in the Detroit area and rhinofx is in New York. "We were able to get still references," Wagonheim continues. "We were able to create some things ourselves and we were able to build a pre-vis that showed the director and the agency transitions, how things could work, what the timings would be. We were working with Nick very closely. Then we were able to present stuff as a team to the agency and the client. All the unknowns were pretty much eliminated before we got onto location, before any film was shot. For us, it’s part of pre-production now."
Problem Solving
At Los Angeles effects shop A52, managing director Rick Hassen uses pre-vis more sparingly, on about 25 percent of the company’s work. "There are a lot of variables," he says. "One is the director and his ability to communicate his vision thoroughly and our being able to know we can execute it."
Hassen will do a pre-vis when he’s faced with a difficult situation, such as with an upcoming BMW spot out of Fallon, Minneapolis, in which the car is shot outdoors in a single-shot, motion-control, time-lapse sequence. "We wanted to avoid shooting into the sun because we had to focus on the automobile," Hassen relates. "There was a very simple pre-vis. It consisted of using GPS information, position and dimensions of the rig itself, and software that will give you the path of the sun. It was more pre-vising the sun position than anything else."
Neysa Horsburgh, executive producer at Method, Santa Monica, says the studio does a pre-vis "when it’s going to be meaningful and the job requires it," but then she adds that because few visual effects jobs are routine these days, it’s required quite often. "It’s such a per-project thing," she says. "On some jobs it just doesn’t make any sense. If it’s a big compositing job, when there are many different layers you’re shooting, maybe you wouldn’t pre-vis that. We don’t want to talk the agencies or production companies into doing something that’s not going to be meaningful in the end."
One recent spot where it was meaningful was Sony PlayStation 2’s "Environment," out of TBWA/ Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, and directed by Kinka Usher of House of Usher Films, Santa Monica. "It was a bird’s eye view of a Navy SEAL trying to scout around his surroundings, looking for enemies," notes Method visual effects director Alex Frisch. "It was a one-shot deal where we were going through walls, up and down different buildings and surroundings, all done in live action except some CG transition we put in. We felt that pre-vis was really essential because every shot needed to be a certain amount of time on screen and then we had to design the camera move in such a way that they would fit in our design and occupy the screen for the desired amount of time. We physically surveyed the location—we took some measurements, took some digital photos—and with that physical data on hand, we were able to create the camera moves and the timing in a very precise way. We were also able to output the data to our motion-control camera that was used to shoot. That was like a back and forth between a 3-D CG camera in the pre-vis to a real camera on real locations with motion control. We also got back motion-control data to the 3-D camera. There was a full exchange of data that was very interesting."
At The Orphanage, San Francisco, associate visual effects supervisor Ryan Tudhope says pre-vis is just part of the way the company does business now, noting that it’s particularly prevalent in spots and music videos "where you want to keep things moving fast and keep your production schedule tight."
Last year, Tudhope worked on the PlayStation 2 spot "Consequences" out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, a commercial that used pre-vis to coordinate the building of a miniature, live-action photographs and CG directed by The Orphanage’s Stuart Maschwitz. The spot opens with a house that has been devastated by a tree branch during a storm and proceeds to use reverse time-lapse to trace the scene and the tree back to before it was an acorn.
"Stu wanted to be able to set up these camera angles and work out with the agency early on what this was going to look like before we had the miniature built," Tudhope recalls. "We built the miniature in the computer and we were able to lay it out and figure out exactly where our camera was going to be, how to frame it properly and then how we were going to incorporate the other digital effects, such as the digital tree and digital environment around that miniature. We went to the principal photography, and when we got the plates back everything was the way we expected it to be because of that early planning of how things were gong to be done. As a result, it was an extremely good project for us."
Tudhope points out that pre-vis have gotten more complex and sophisticated in recent years, developing from CG animatics to work that can be part of the finished product. "Now, we will set up our projects and from a computer graphics standpoint make sure that the work we do and the camera angles we set up translates toward the work we do down the line," he says. "That way, it’s all part of the same process and allows us to maximize our efficiency in the whole department."
Ulbrich concurs that pre-vis has gotten better, pointing to the work that Digital Domain did for David Fincher’s full-CG Nike spot "Gamebreakers" out of Wieden+ Kennedy, Portland, Ore. "Ultimately the pre-vis ends up becoming the finished commercial," Ulbrich says. "As we go through the process, it’s not, ‘okay, pre-vis is done now, let’s go forward.’ We keep taking the pre-vis and pretty soon it’s no longer pre-vis, it’s vis. Each step, it gets refined, so much so now that there is really no such thing as postproduction anymore."
