Melancholia_vfx_breakdown

Crystal ball gazing – some possible futures in Visual Effects

Visual Effects is the creation and manipulation of moving images in post-production. It ranges from adding a simple title to creating an entire world like Pandora in Avatar.

Any film can benefit from VFX – there is no need to go to the expense of taking your unit to New York or renting a helicopter when both the city and the aircraft can be digitally created and added to foregrounds filmed at your convenience. Why hire 300 junior actors for a crowd scene when VFX can multiply 50 as required?

Everything we do in VFX depends on computing power. What’s possible depends on the cost and speed of processors and memory.

In 1965 Gordon Moore, who went on to found Intel, predicted the exponential growth in possible processor density that continues today. Simply put, he said that the available power of computing will double every two years. This has held true ever since.


For VFX it means that over time the impossible becomes possible, difficult things become easy and expensive things become cheaper.5

Currently we think about the spatial resolution of an image – how many pixels make up a frame. Images 2000 pixels across are being superseded by images 4000 pixels across, with four times the amount of data of course. Another doubling in resolution (quadrupling the size of the data set again) will give us image detail equivalent to the maximum the human eye can resolve.

Where film currently leads digital acquisition is colour depth or latitude. Better image sensors and faster processors will give us new cameras that match celluloid in this respect – with a commensurate increase in the size of the data set.

The entire path of a movie image, from shooting to the viewer, will eventually be as digits with no compromise in quality.

New file formats will be introduced to store and move that data around. Creative decisions will not have to be committed before the next process in the production chain can occur, as all the data that goes to make up a shot, a scene or, one day, a complete movie will remain live and adjustable until the director or perhaps the viewer decides exactly what they want to see.


Entirely new camera technology will ultimately revolutionise acquisition.

Lytro in the US are prototyping a lens and sensor array that collects light data from a scene in a way that it can be used to reconstruct the geometry of a shot later – the way light falls in 3D space is recorded and understood as a mathematical model. Focus doesn’t matter to the pure numbers and can be set in post-production. Right now there is a consumer level prototype but in a few years when the technology is applied to movie cameras there is the possibility of a total game changer.

Object recognition techniques are being researched and that research condensed into algorithms that take advantage of greater processor speeds. Computers will be able to intelligently isolate an object in a scene without the need for green screen or rotoscopy. Software will understand the volume that an object occupies, giving us the ability to relight and otherwise manipulate it.

We will be able to calculate and recreate backgrounds that are hidden behind foreground objects by detecting patterns and referring to an experiential library. Similar techniques will let us see the back of an object – the side turned away from the camera. Eventually this will be possible for the most complex thing in a shot, a human.

Techniques are being developed that can reconstruct a 3 dimensional model of a face from a library data set, a collection of mathematical relationships and a still photo, then animate that face at will. A recognisable and convincing character on screen will be created from a snapshot of an actor who has since aged or retired.

The study and analysis of human form and movement that is happening in other fields, for example medicine and security, is giving us spatial and behavioral models that will allow better and faster creation of crowds and armies of virtual humans that act like real people without having to be animated frame-by-frame and character-by-character. Ultimately CG actors will have believable facial expressions.

The interaction between human skin and light is incredibly complex, and we’ve all been observing it since birth, so we can easily spot a fake. New mathematical techniques supported by massive processing power will bring us closer to being able to make a digital human that is indistinguishable from the real thing.

Right now we can put a small Computer Graphics (CG) person at the back of a scene and the viewer will have no idea that he isn’t real. Placing him in the mid-ground, closer to the camera, is possible but time consuming and expensive. In the future we will be able to create convincing people in close-up.


Rather than spend large budgets on building complete sets of physical scenery, filmmakers will only need to construct just enough of a real environment for the director and actors to interact comfortably with. The un-built parts will be created in CG, in real time so the complete shot can be watched live on set as it is blocked and recorded. The designer and DoP will be able to make changes after the scene is in the can (or in the memory bank).

We will develop more sophisticated mathematical models of physical things like explosions, the deformation of metal in a car crash, the way water splashes. It will become cheaper and easier to create many more events in CG than shoot them for real.

The lines between movies and computer games will blur. Games will become photo real, stories and assets will be shared between the mediums and viewer interactivity with films will become possible. The audience will decide whether to passively sit and be told a story or to participate in it and influence the plotline and outcome.

Golden Globes Gets Animated

Golden Globes Gets Animated



Grabbing Best Animated Feature nominations today for the 69th Golden Globe Awards are the five studio films you could count on: Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin from Weta Digital (Dec. 21); Aardman/Sony’s Arthur Christmas; Pixar and John Lasseter’s Cars 2; DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots; and Gore Verbinski’s Rango, the front runner and ILM’s first animated feature. Gnomeo & Juliet’s “Hello Hello” from Elton John and Bernie Taupin was nominated for Best Original Song.

What does this mean for Oscar? I think it’s a race between Rango and Tintin with the other two or three spots wide open. But don’t be surprised if one of the 2D indies sneaks in, such as A Cat in Paris.

“To make a movie so far afield from the norm was very gratifying,” admits Hal Hickel, Rango’s animation supervisor. “It’s hard to buck the trend but we’re so thrilled to be getting such a great response. And it was a great fit for us to work in a world that had such a photographic and textured look. The freedom not to be in that live-action box was new and exciting and it was helpful having Roger Deakins come in and show us that we had all these lighting options. We looked at There Will Be Blood, and liked the solutions they came up with for those hot, dusty exteriors.

“Where do we go from here? We’re dying to do another one, with or without Gore. In fact, I’d prefer to do something else that’s completely original. We can do so much more.”

For director Chris Miller, Puss in Boots provided an opportunity to do something totally different from the Shrek world and was a liberating experience. “It’s reflected in the movie,” Miller adds. “Guillermo [del Toro] came aboard at a great time for us. It was fated in a way. It was surreal when he asked to participate and helped us achieve the story we wanted to tell. We’ll see if there’s an appetite for the cat to come back.”

“I’m just delighted that the brilliant craftsmanship, hard work, and dedication of the team who made Arthur Christmas has been honored by a Golden Globe nomination,” remarks director Sarah Smith. “Thank you to the HFPA; we hope the movie gives Christmas pleasure!”

The Golden Globes will air live on Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012 at 5:00 pm PST on NBC.

15 Compete for VFX Oscar Race

15 Compete for VFX Oscar Race
The list of films qualifying for the VFX Oscar has been narrowed to 15. Not too many surprises. All of the usual suspects are there, with the likely contenders consisting of Captain America: The First Avenger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Hugo, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
The Tree of Life happily made the cut for its spectacular birth of the universe sequence, yet Anonymous did not for its superb virtual recreation of Elizabethan London. Also, The Adventures of Tintin was overlooked. Then again, it’s competing in the animation race, which was probably a major factor.
The films are listed below in alphabetical order:
• “Captain America: The First Avenger”
• “Cowboys & Aliens”
• “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2″
• “Hugo”
• “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”
• “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”
• “Real Steel”
• “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
• “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”
• “Sucker Punch”
• “Super 8″
• “Thor”
• “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”
• “The Tree of Life”
• “X-Men: First Class”
In early January, the members of the Academy’s Visual Effects Branch Executive committee, who selected the 15 films, will narrow the list to 10.
All members of the Visual Effects Branch will be invited to the annual bakeoff to view 10-minute excerpts from each of the 10 shortlisted films on Thursday, Jan. 19. Following the screenings, the members will vote to nominate five films for final Oscar consideration.
The 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012, at 5:30 a.m. PT in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2011 will be presented on Sunday, Feb. 26, 2012, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center, and televised live by ABC. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, one of the surprise hits of the year as well as a surprisingly terrific reboot (it’s made quite a few 10 Best lists), arrives today on Blu-ray (Twentieth Century Fox Home Ent.). Weta Digital and Andy Serkis combine to make Caesar an extraordinary achievement in digital acting. It’s the favorite to take the VFX Oscar, and I call Serkis “The Man of a Thousand Digital Faces” in my TOH column at Indiewire. Fox is rightly giving him a best supporting actor Oscar campaign, though he’s clearly the heart and soul of the movie, directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Rise is certainly a reference quality Blu-ray; it looks sharp and sounds thunderous (sound editing/effects are also Oscar contenders) with lots of bonus feature that I haven’t had time to check out yet. For instance, there are 11 deleted scenes and I’m hoping the death of Franco’s scientist is among them, along with several featurettes such as “Breaking Motion Capture Boundaries,” “The Genius of Andy Serkis,” and “A New Generation of Apes.”


“We rewrote skin, muscles, fur, and eyes one more time to do them a little bit better,” admits Joe Letteri, Weta’s senior visual effects supervisor, who also oversaw The Adventures of Tintin. “But I think making the performance look as realistic as possible is still the main thing that we accomplished.”
Weta placed the performance capture actors out on location or on set with the other actors. Rather than using reflective optical markers for motion tracking, they developed an active LED system with infrared lighting that allowed Weta to work in a variety of conditions and match the cinematography.
Weta also developed a new facial muscle system still in progress that delivers better capture and animation, particularly for secondary motion. “It’s a problem that’s not easily understood because the facial muscles don’t behave like the other muscles in the body,” Letteri adds. “They are not so bound by the skeleton. But on a face they’re moving other muscles around and other tissue, and there are deep embedded layers that have an impact on what kind of shape they do, which is really complex and why in the end we wind up sculpting a lot of these things.”



They made Caesar more human because they wanted him to look a little more intelligent than the rest of the apes and to stand out among them. “You could see it in his eyes: we made the irises a little smaller so you get a better idea where he’s looking; the muzzle is slightly smaller; and the forehead is shaped a little bit more like a human’s.”
The shock of recognition in Caesar’s eyes when he realizes how and why he must lead the revolt is Letteri’s favorite moment. To achieve this Weta made a new model that more realistically captures movement in and around the eyes and how they are affected by different lighting conditions.
They’ve signed Serkis to continue his Caesar pantomime, and I can’t wait to see how they evolve the story in the sequel, as it eventually dovetails into the original’s time-warp journey with Taylor.

Breaking Dawn - Part 1: Bella's Baby

Breaking Dawn - Part 1: Bella's Baby
John Bruno breaks down the VFX highlights of the penultimate Twilight, directed by Bill Condon.
After 30 years in the industry, John Bruno has never witnessed anything quite like the Twilight fan hysteria: screaming from the first shot of the movie to vampire sex to the wolf battle to the reveal of the baby and Bella's "rejuvenation."
In fact, the production VFX supervisor says Breaking Dawn -- Part 1 is not your mother or sister's Twilight: it's a hardcore drama about Bella's pregnancy from hell. And director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Chicago), who had never done a VFX-intensive movie before, wanted it as real and as visceral as possible with Bella withering away to almost nothing during the course of her pregnancy and the extraordinarily excruciating childbirth for the last 40 minutes.
"We call it 'Bella's emaciation,' and it's worse than Rosemary's Baby," Bruno suggests. "Part of what happens is she gets pregnant immediately and the baby starts drawing nutrients from her body. She has to drink blood so the baby will quit killing her. So she looks like a concentration camp survivor by the end of this, which is shocking to everybody. At one point, we had her looking far worse than she looks now, and it was the studio that questioned how far we wanted to go. But it works quite well."
To achieve Bella's look required a combination of old school and digital techniques. Legacy Effects provided the practical with appliances to Kristen Stewart's face (sunken eyes and larger ears) and neck at normal weight and Lola was called upon to make her look emaciated with CG enhancement. Having previously achieved an effective weakling to superhero transformation for Captain America, Lola set about finding the proper technique for this situation. "With Kristen's permission, they let us take it pretty far," Bruno adds."
They did a makeup test on the actress and made her progressively thinner-looking in three stages. It worked and Bruno showed it first to Condon and then to Stewart, and they both signed off on it. In the end, though, they needed to also film the traumatic scene where Bella's giving birth and she's lost 30 pounds. So they shot it with the aid of a puppet or full-size maquette (which is revealed and manipulated from her neck down).
Meanwhile, the baby is born dramatically and super strong and that was done with a puppet and a three-week-old baby covered in a combination of strawberry jelly and Philadelphia cream cheese that's supposed to be blood. Plus there's a CG baby at the end and you see it rapidly progress from one year all the way up to 18. "Lola progressed actress Mackenzie Foy's 8-year-old face and we kept playing with this for three months," Bruno continues. "And her family supplied us with shots of her as a baby all the way through 8. We'd do a face and then ask how old she looked here. And if she looked too old, then we had to come back.
"So there was a lot of experimentation. It was very specific in the book that this had to be a beautiful baby emerging as a beautiful woman. You're seeing 18 years into the future and this all had to happen in a minute-and-a-half. That was another complicated thing that came out quite well as a set-up for the final movie."


The wolves are back as well.


"It was very complicated and Lola did the blend and the sizing and in the end people couldn't tell if it was the puppet or Kristen," Bruno continues. "We didn't do a digitally replaced head, but a technique similar to Social Network, where you had the digital double with the actor's face mapped onto it. We didn't quite go that far except for the end where she has to be the size of the puppet. Once she starts getting thinner and thinner, in phase three we have the actual puppet collapse and we tracked Kristen's face onto it. And it looks like Kristen because it's the right size.
"Once we got to the puppet size of about 65 pounds, that's where it got difficult. There are around 90 of those shots and she's got blood and sweat on her face; and we kept thinning her out. By the end, we add her entire torso to it or her shoulders and arms; and we take her legs and arms. This technique of blending this full-size, photorealistic 'puppet' was so effective that Stephenie Meyer loved watching it on set."
Prologue designed the very stylized inner reworking of Bella's body when she's transformed into a vampire, which was then taken to a realistic level in collaboration with Lola. There are three sequences: Jacob running as a werewolf, Bela changing from the inside and the initial design of Jacob imprinting.