Last weekend, the Visual Effects Society (VES) held its annual Show and Tell, featuring some of the work nominated for its annual VES Awards, which this year will be staged Feb. 15 at the Hollywood Palladium.
These presenters, coupled with news from additional visual effects houses, underscore the commercial industry’s significant involvement in feature visual effects production.
All interviewed for this article agree that developing technology and processes are an enabler, allowing them to work more efficiently, faster, and with more creative options. Many also agree that with feature productions employing more and complex visual effects, they are also splitting the work among many houses, meaning that more boutiques can get involved in these jobs. And as always, sources emphasize that the assignments still always come back to talent.
Dennis Murren, eight-time Academy Award winner and visual effects supervisor at San Francisco-based Industrial Light + Magic (ILM), opines that the trend of using many visual effects houses for a large effects film will continue. “What is driving this is competition for price,” he says, adding that it also adds a level of security, as a production is not tied to one house if a problem develops with a vendor.
Among the films up for the coveted prize for outstanding visual effects in an effects-driven film is Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, directed by Andrew Adamson. This is a great example of a collaboration between multiple houses.
The film features 1,617 effects shots shared primarily by Los Angeles-based Rhythm & Hues, Culver City-based Sony Picture Imageworks, and ILM.
With a production of this magnitude, Bill Westenhofer, R&H’s visual effects supervisor on Narnia, relates that an efficient pipeline was key to supporting R&H’s 400-strong effects team. “The pipeline we set up was as important as the aesthetics side,” he says.
One of the film’s challenges was the creation of many digital characters. This included Aslan the lion, who is the central character, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, Mr. Fox, wolves Maugrim and Vardin, the faun Mr. Tumnus, the centaur Orieus, the minotaur Otmin, as well as bears, cheetahs, cyclops, hawks, leopards, tigers, unicorns and more.
The complex Aslan was created by R&H, and is up for the VES Award for outstanding animated character in a live action film. Development of Aslan lasted two years. Aslan’s rig utilized processes including a muscle system, dynamically driven skin shake, compression-based wrinkles, blend shapes and a dynamics-driven mane.
Among the innovations was a process to control muscle firing. Character riggers wrote software that would analyze Aslan’s motion over time and properly fire the muscle in anticipation of actions and relax them when the character came to a stop.
The team studied pictures and video clips of lion behavior, and even spent a day with a caged lion. Meanwhile the performance was modeled after Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, using frames of emotional expressions as the basis for the lion’s expressions.
Since several of the key digital characters were created at a sole vendor, there were instances where two or three of the facilities would have to work on the same shot. In the end, the production had to coordinate over 100 shared shots between the three lead facilities. Six of the shots in the film were worked on by all three houses.
Representatives from the three effects houses met with director Adamson’s team to determine who would be responsible for scanning and completing each shot. They also worked together on compatibility issues.
R&H additionally played a key role in realizing the film’s climactic battle scene, featuring Aslan’s 5,000 combatants against the White Witch’s 20,000-strong army. The sequence was achieved with motion capture and Massive, the artificial intelligence-based software used for crowd replication and developed for the production of The Lord of the Rings. In the commercial world, it was most famously deployed in a commercial by London and New York-based The Mill on Sony PlayStation’s “Mountain”–created by TBWA, London, directed by Frank Budgen of London-based Gorgeous–which went on to win the 2004 Cannes Grand Prix and a string of accolades. The spot concluded with a memorable shot of 146,000 digital actors forming a “mountain” of people in the center of a city. (Budgen works stateside through bicoastal Anonymous Content.)
“Massive allows [digital] characters to be able to come really close to the camera,” says Westenhofer, adding that Narnia was his first outing with Massive. “We could bring the Massive characters immediately behind the hero characters.”
R&H executive producer Paul Babb expects that Narnia will have an impact on the overall reputation of R&H, both for features and commercials. “It hasn’t changed the business yet, but people look at us in different way. [Before Narnia] some [only] saw us as the talking animals company–Now we are bidding on projects that we probably would not have been included in if not for this movie.”
R&H is one of the larger commercial effects companies, so it has the R&D resources, talent and tools to support feature work. But these days, small and medium sized effects houses are also playing in the theatrical world.
For instance, Zoic Studios in Culver City recently completed roughly 220 shots for Universal Pictures’ Serenity, a Joss Whedon film. And currently, it is finishing 12 spots for Cadillac, via Leo Burnett Detroit and directed by Sean Thonson of bicoastal/international MJZ. Zoic creative director/partner Loni Peristere noted that the spots had a “very fast turnaround, and one sequence required completely virtual backgrounds; we used technology developed to create virtual background for Serenity.”
Peristere says that companies of Zoic’s size (roughly 125) can now “develop proprietary and innovative tools that push the art of animation forward that can’t be developed in a [smaller] boutique.” But he points out that more advanced off-the-shelf software also enables talented individuals at boutiques to participate in feature production.
Also carrying a theme from the Narnia production, Peristere adds that communication is vital. “We have used video conferencing and share networks and shared dailies …. Faster bandwidth also really helps [create a] review process that is unique and unified; you can be in Australia and working with six different houses.”
Also working on features is the likes of San Francisco and Santa Monica-based effects and production house Ntropic, a boutique of 18 employees whose feature credits include The Matrix Revolutions, as well as commercials for such clients as Nissan, Mercedes, Coca-Cola and Kohls.
Ntropic’s most recent feature is Underworld: Evolution, the latest installment from director Len Wiseman, starring Kate Beckinsale, which was released last week by Screen Gems for Sony Pictures Entertainment and Lakeshore Entertainment. The film features roughly 500 effects shots; for 90 of them Wiseman returned to Ntropic, where he previously worked with creative director and senior visual effects supervisor Nathan Robinson and his team on Underworld in 2003.
Lead by visual effects supervisors Robinson and Andrew Sinagra, Ntropic’s work is largely a combination of CG and 2D effects.
Robinson says his company benefits from the fact that “technology has gotten faster, the cost of storage has gone down, and rendering power is increasing. He adds that the digital intermediate process is also prompting some new advantages. “We used to do a filmout to see a comp; we didn’t do that on Underworld: Evolution,” he explains. “We cut that process out of budget. Now with DI, there’s more latitude to tweak stuff.”
In generally, “the methodology allows us to get the product done faster,” he says, adding that this is also important on the commercial side of the equation due to the tight production schedules. “The nice part is that we develop techniques for features and use them in commercials, and [in turn] commercials feed features.
Robinson also points out that today there are more opportunities for visual effects houses to work on feature because there is more demand. “Everything is digital–removing a wire, taking out a tree; the number of [visual effects shots in a film] is growing.”
