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DIRECTOR DENIS VILLENEUVE MAINTAINS A GROUNDED APPROACH TO EPIC SPACE SAGA DUNE October 26,2021

By KEVIN H. MARTIN

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures.

The Atreides’ ornithopters incorporate the articulated wings described in Frank Herbert’s novel. Production opted for the flapping wings to flutter like an insect in flight.

The villainous Harkonnens arrive at Arrakeen, their ships offering a distinct contrast to the Atreides’ Ornithopters in both configuration and flight mode.

After failing to secure interest from 20 book publishers in his epic Dune, novelist Frank Herbert managed to convince the car manual gurus at Chilton Press to get his book into print in 1965. A science fiction novel dealing with concepts ranging from the nature of messiahs to ecological concerns, Dune rapidly burgeoned from underground cult classic to a huge and sustained success worldwide. Even so, the property resisted adaptation to the big screen for some time, despite attempts by Arthur P. Jacobs, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott. Ultimately a theatrical version directed by David Lynch debuted, but proved to be a critical and financial failure, foiling partially-written sequels.

Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve was a fan of Herbert’s landmark tome and when the possibility of a new and decidedly more faithful adaptation of Dune arose, he committed to it, bringing along with him a number of his past collaborators, including Production Designer Patrice Vermette, Editor Joe Walker, Special Effects Supervisor Gerd Nefzer and Visual Effects Supervisor Paul Lambert.

An Oscar-winner for Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Lambert recalls that even before pre-production began in earnest, an enormous design phase had been undertaken. “Dune is such a massive project, with so many worlds to visualize,” he acknowledges. “So Denis and Patrice spent the better part of a year coming up with concepts. Usually that process just serves as a springboard for the final designs, but Denis was so happy with the initial artwork that it really served as a template for other departments. The work was just so strong, with such defined ideas – there were some tweaks down the line, but really it was very close. Sets were built with these same colors and textures, and visual effects created and executed these images in a similar faithful way.”

While the Lynch film had featured rather grand and ornate production design by Tony Masters, this project reflected the filmmaker’s own tastes. “Having worked with Denis previously, I knew that things had to remain grounded,” confirms Lambert.

The Atreides’ ornithopters incorporate the articulated wings described in Frank Herbert’s novel. Production opted for the flapping wings to flutter like an insect in flight.

“[Director] Denis [Villenueve] was so happy with the initial artwork that it really served as a template for other departments. The work was just so strong, with such defined ideas – there were some tweaks down the line, but really it was very close. Sets were built with these same colors and textures, and visual effects created and executed these images in a similar faithful way.”

—Paul Lambert, Visual Effects Supervisor

“No wild pullbacks and moves that didn’t have some basis in how cameras are actually moved, and we tried to build as much as possible on most of our sets rather than encasing actors within a blue box. Trying to keep things grounded, we didn’t go for a big showy effect. We tried to avoid anything too FX-y, even when the ships fold space. In fact, the shield effect is based on past and future frames in the same shot, plus some color changes, so it isn’t like we’re adding or inventing, just using what was actually there. While there wound up being around 2,000 visual effects shots, realism was the word throughout.”

While the majority of work was handled at DNEG Vancouver and DNEG Montreal, an in-house crew was also formed for the production. “I think it is very valuable to have offices close to the director,” says Lambert, “as it facilitates the fleshing out of ideas, which in turn affects and improves the shooting process. The in-house unit wound up doing hundreds of the simpler shots, plus we did a few shots with Rodeo FX up in Montreal. They have Deak Ferrand, a fantastic artist who is one of the fastest conceptualists I’ve ever seen. He’s also a good friend to Denis, having worked on Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 as well.”

When production began in Budapest, Lambert assigned a scanning crew from OroBlade to LiDar parts of Wadi Ram, where later location shooting would take place. “That helped with the wides of Arrakeen,” he reports. “Our beautiful wides of the city are actually from helicopter views scanned into the computer. We built that CG world around those real terrain elements.”

For backlot work in Budapest, sand-colored screens were used instead of blue or green, allowing a more naturalistic Arrakis-desert coloration to reflect onto the performers. Natural light was employed whenever possible. “For some massive interiors, we had to come up with creative ways to light the scene,” Lambert reveals. “We connected two separate studios with a tarp across the roof, which had a specific shape cut into it allowing sunlight to come down into part of the set. We could only shoot at a certain time of day with this tarpaulin because the hole permitted sunlight to illuminate the interior just right for a couple hours only, but it really sold the reality of the environment with natural lighting beaming down into our stage sets.”

Close collaboration between VFX, camera and art departments led to a unique approach for interiors requiring set extensions. “Because of the scale involved, the question was often, ‘how high do we build this?’ Traditionally, you would have green or blue up above, but that compromises the lighting for the whole view. I suggested that we consider what the actual tones and shapes would be going up in frame when we did the VFX. So during the shoot, we’d place a particular colored form up there. If there were structural elements, like crossbeams, that were supposed to be up there, we’d represent them simply as well. DP Greig Fraser loved this, because he was able to light it like he would a fully-built set. We’d build a very cheap version, through which he could light as he desired.”

A 400-ton crane was used to fly the larger 13-ton ornithopters in the desert. For landings, separate concrete pads had to be poured for the 12-meter mockup and its somewhat smaller cousin. CG wings were added for takeoffs and landings.

For scenes involving the many aircraft seen in the film, a mix of full-scale vessels and CG craft were created. “Seen from a distance, the ornithopters look like insects,” says Lambert, “but as you get closer in, you can feel the power of these flapping wing aircraft. The Atreides’ dragonfly-like craft is a thing apart from the others. When the Harkonnens strike at Arrakeen, their ships come down looking like they have inflatable wings, and sport a very intricate and detailed look. For some of the shots of full-scale craft shot on location, we might add CG wings, but most of that was actually captured in-camera.”

SFX Supervisor Gerd Nefzer had his teams begin prepping long before shooting in order to have time to transport huge containers holding the ornithopters and supporting equipment to Aqaba. “The containers for Jordan arrived slightly late, so that made it very tough to get everything ready for each shooting day,” Nefzer acknowledges. “It was a huge challenge to get the ornithopters ready. Altogether we had two large ornithopters and a smaller one on location in the desert. The big one weighed maybe 13 tons and was 10 or 12 meters long, so making it look as if it could maneuver took a lot of power. We had one scene with the big ornithopter landing in the desert and then taking off. That needed a 400-ton crane, so a special road had to be built to accommodate transport.”

Nefzer used various gimbals, plus an overhead flying rig hung from a crane. “Our two computer-controlled motion bases had to function on location,” he says, “because our DP needed real sunlight and could not create that look on stage. That meant pouring a concrete pad for the thopter. Then we had to invent a drive file in order to maneuver the ship to follow the path of the sun in the sky for continuity. The large base was rated for 20 tons and the smaller thopter used a six-ton base for sandstorm scenes. We tented the smaller base with wind machines and tons of dust flying around in there, including soft stones, so that the view through the cockpit would really look like it was flying through a sandstorm. It could rotate 360 degrees so that the actors could be upside-down. We had four six-wheel drive trucks from the military so we could mount and drive our big wind machines around into position. As always, Denis tries to get as much as possible in-camera, but on some very wide shots, there just weren’t enough machines. But the part of the shot that we could handle practically – the area around the actors, because you get such a greater sense of believability with performers having to lean into the dust as they move instead of just pretending against greenscreen – was the basis for how VFX went about completing things, matching to the look and density of our sandstorm. Paul Lambert always asked for as much practical as possible to have something to match – ‘even if it is just a few meters’ he said one time – and then he filled out the rest of the shot beautifully. I think this is the right way to make movies these days, instead of just automatically.”

To convey the sense that the mockup was really up in the air, the team used an idea also employed on The Rocketeer, choosing a high-up locale that allowed cameras to shoot down on the airborne object. “We found the tallest hill in Budapest and put a gimbal atop it,” says Lambert. “That gave us a horizon. We surrounded the gimbal with what we affectionately called the dog collar, a 360-degree ramp that went all the way around the gimbal, again sand-screen colored. Rather than extracting the characters and then matting behind them, we were able to just augment the properly-hued backgrounds using some of the tremendous aerial photography done earlier.”

The large backlot in Budapest was used for a crucial moment in the attack on Arrakeen when the palm trees burn. “Denis wanted about 25 palm trees in two rows,” Nefzer states. “With the shoot scheduled over two nights, we had to build the trees and their leaves so they could be burned over and over. We started by taking the bark off actual palm tree trunks, which wasn’t easy, since there are 20 layers. We cut a slot inside to get our gas/alcohol piping inside, along with fire protection sheets, and then reassembled it with the barks back on in proper order. We laser-cut 280 leaves from sheet metal, then added our gas pipes beneath. We had to bend all of them by hand so they looked real, then color them before connecting them to the trees. Nearly every leaf had its own control, so Denis could get various levels of fire, all controlled by 20 technicians. A pair of 1,500-gallon propane systems steamed the liquid, which utilized five miles of hoses.”

DNEG Vancouver and DNEG Montreal handled the majority of Dune’s 2,000 shots, though an in-house crew took on additional work, as did Rodeo FX.

In addition to the spice exported throughout the galaxy that is found only on Arrakis, the planet is best known for its massive native life, the sandworms. “The worms are dinosaur-like creatures that have been cruising through the desert protecting the spice for thousands of years,” says Lambert. “They are not very agile, taking something like a mile to stop and turn, with deeply textured looks. The design showed great articulation, kind of like an accordion. While it isn’t all that animated, the sandworm does have interesting textures, which include solid plates between the fleshy parts.

The worm sifting through sand was difficult to get right. A lot of the time, we were seeing more the effect of the worm’s passage than the worm itself, as there’s not much existing reference for things that big in the desert. I did request that production detonate some explosions out there to see how the sand gets disturbed, but given that we were shooting in the Middle East, that kind of thing could be mistaken for an attack and was frowned upon!”

Time-intensive renders for the sims used to produce the organic sand passages were just the nature of the beast for the sandworm scenes. “Even so, there’s often some aspect with simulations that doesn’t look quite right,” allows Lambert. “So occasionally there is paint involved, since otherwise there’d be days and days more waiting to run the simulation again. Fortunately, we started worm development straightaway, so there was time.” To sell the disturbance in live-action scenes, Nefzer built a 12-ft. square plate atop a vibrator. “When it was activated,” Lambert reveals, “you would actually start sinking into the sand. We used that for shots of Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Gurney (Josh Brolin) when the worm attacks the sand crawler. This largely in-camera solution was what we then copied to extend out beyond the foreground to the rest of the frame, whenever they went wider.”

Visual challenges ranged from epic ground battles to massive space-going vessels.

A year of close collaboration between director and production designer resulted in conceptual art so detailed that it could be used as a guide for construction by SFX, VFX, costuming and art departments. The Arrakeen city conveys both an expansive and realistic lived-in look.

Terrain surrounding the city of Arrakeen was based on scanned-in aerial plate photography from the Middle East location shoot

Partial sets erected on the Budapest backlot were often augmented with CG set extensions.

The worm ingests both vehicles and unfortunate humans. The sandworm design featured a mix of textures that included armor-like plating and fleshy segments, which facilitated a range of accordion-like articulations.

Conspicuous consumption of the local spice has the side effect of turning eyes blue over time. “The eyes were handled by our in-house unit, says Lambert. “The attention of a viewer automatically gravitates to the eyes, so when you have something very pronounced, it can become very distracting. We didn’t want super-glowy eyes, and strove to keep something of the original tones of the actors’ actual eyes. So if you had one actor in shot who had brown eyes and another who had lighter-colored eyes, the blue effect would be customized to look different for each of them. It wasn’t about a covering effect from the sclera to the iris either, there was a lot of fine detail, and it took a while before Denis approved an overall look with which we could proceed. Then, on occasion, the matter of going too subtle became an issue, because the look might be minimized depending on the camera angle and how light struck the eye. Denis did point out a few times whenhe couldn’t actually tell that the character was supposed to have the blue eyes, so we adjusted in those instances. Paul and Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are in transition for a large section of the movie, so the color had to change as the spice affected them more and more.”

Looking back on the project, Lambert still marvels at the opportunity. “When I was first contacted, there was no hesitation on my part,” he laughs. “I mean, we’re talking about Dune here! And in the hands of someone like Denis, I have a very good feeling about how audiences will really feel transported to these worlds.”
Trailblazing: Forge a Path Where One Does Not Exist October 19,2021

Ellen Poon grew up in Hong Kong in the 1960s in a film-going family. Her creative aesthetic was highly influenced by the combination of British and Chinese cultures. A world-renowned expert in visual effects and animation, Ellen is a founding member of MPC’s Computer Graphics department. During her tenure at Industrial Light and Magic, she was the first woman to be made Visual Effects Supervisor. Ellen has a passion for Chinese film projects and has won two Hong Kong Film Awards for her work on Hero and Monster Hunt. Her filmography includes Jurassic Park, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Jumanji, Frozen and Raya and The Last Dragon. Ellen advocates for increased diversity and inclusion as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Executive Committee.

Starting out, I wanted a mentor, but couldn’t find anyone because computer graphics was in its infancy and there was no one in the field like me. What I’ve learned: when you are trying to forge a new path – for the industry and yourself – you need people who are kind and supportive in your corner. Mentors don’t need to be offering something tangible, like a job; they need to offer guidance, especially on how to navigate the microaggressions that women and minorities experience in our industry. To maintain focus, you need to have a very strong compass. Know who you are, what you’re trying to do,and maintain a sense of professionalism.

Ellen Poon, Visual Effects Supervisor/Visual Effects Producer

“Bold leaps are life defining moments; take them when you have the chance.”

Being the first woman to be named VFX Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic was a great privilege and a huge responsibility. I felt the weight of representing all women, all minority women, and the need to be not just good – but excellent. I’ve seen how implicit bias manifests – the looks of disbelief from crew and clients that I could be a supervisor, or the unknown quantity that many people find hard to accept because there are just so few of us. It is harder to get work as a female supervisor, but the obstacles have increased my resolve to do well in this business and prove them wrong. For people starting out, this environment can be discouraging, so I am committed to sharing what I’ve learned.

As an artist in a position to lead others, it’s important to stay deeply connected to your craft. It takes budgets and pipelines to make our shows run, but to feed my artistry, I need to be creating at my workstation and imagining out loud. Technology changes nonstop, and to be a good supervisor capable of selling it into a project, you must keep your hands dirty.

Do not be afraid to dare greatly and listen to your inner calling. While working at ILM, a lot of great films came out of Hong Kong, China and Asia. I felt like I had a role to play in making these movies, as well as a connection to helping the business go further technologically in my hometown, the place that shaped me. I pursued the chance to work with the best Asian filmmakers on Hero by quitting my job at ILM to follow my passion. Bold leaps are life defining moments; take them when you have the chance.

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SHINING A LIGHT ON ‘WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS’ October 12,2021

By TREVOR HOGG

Transplanted from the streets of Wellington, New Zealand to Staten Island, New York, the television adaptation of What We Do in the Shadows returns to FX for a third season. The mockumentary about vampires Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Colin (Mark Proksch) and their Latino familiar Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén) trying to cope with drudgery of everyday life as well other supernatural beings has not lost its satirical bite. Supervising the over 1,000 visual effects shots for the 10 episodes produced by WeFX, Spin VFX and Maverick is Mohammad Ghorbankarimi (See), who founded Toronto-based WeFX during the pandemic.

More articulation was given to the Nadja doll, which is a combination of digital effects and puppeteering. (Images courtesy of FX Network.)

“The whole idea of Nadja’s spirit going into a doll that comes to life, talks and has a personality was a hit in Season 2. The writers brought it in more for Season 3, and we’ve made the doll a lot more agile. We had a full CG Nadja doll but only use the portions that change, from mid-nose down to the chin and cheeks. We animate that and track it back onto the actual on-set doll. The eyes, head and neck movements are done practically by puppeteers.”

—Mohammad Ghorbankarimi, Visual Effects Supervisor

Comedic timing had to be kept in mind when creating the visual effects. “I have never done visual effects for comedy before, but the timing is as important as when a stand-up comedian appears onstage and performs a joke,” notes Ghorbankarimi. “Usually, you have to have the effect long enough for the viewer to digest it, but when it’s comedy we’re using the shortest amount to bring the joke and emotion out.

“When I came on board,” continues Ghorbankarimi, “I watched the movie and series at least 10 times to familiarize myself with everything. What I’m trying to do is repeat the same thing but bring a little of my own touch into it. The whole idea of Nadja’s spirit going into a doll that comes to life, talks and has a personality was a hit in Season 2. The writers brought it in more for Season 3, and we’ve made the doll a lot more agile.” Video reference was shot of Natasia Demetriou to get a sense of her movements, facial expressions and timing. “We had a full CG Nadja doll but only use the portions that change, from mid-nose down to the chin and cheeks,” he adds. “We animate that and track it back onto the actual on-set doll. The eyes, head and neck movements are done practically by puppeteers.”

Set extensions were created for the exterior shots. “Half of the main vampire house was built in the parking lot of the studio and the rest was extended in CG,” states Ghorbankarimi. “Because we’re not shooting on location this season, the neighbor house was added in CG. A lot of trees were added. On the other side of the stage there is a car dealership that we had to paint out. There are almost no set extensions for the interiors unless something breaks or doesn’t work as intended. In Episode 302, someone smashes into and demolishes a wall. We also did those kind effects for the interiors. The sets are beautiful. The way that DP D.J. Stipsen lights is painterly. So much design, talk and time has gone into every single room and location.” The plate photography is treated differently than the final image. “By the time it is fully graded and is on TV,” he says, “you don’t see some of the details because it’s so dark, but when you’re working the details are kept vivid and visible with a brighter plate to make sure that all of the details are there.”

The exterior of the digital asset for the vampire mansion.

The actual mansion composited with the digital asset.

The Cloak of Duplication allows the wearer to shapeshift into someone else. “It is one of the coolest new effects this season,” laughs Ghorbankarimi. “The body motion of the two actors has to be similar. Usually, we go from a much shorter actor to a much taller actor. We came up with this particle system in Houdini. The cloak creates this particle, the particle grabs the body, the body transforms the particle and rotates around. By time the cloak is on the shoulders, the taller actor stands up, pushes all of these particles aside and walks out. The fabric is match moved in Maya to generate the particles, and the two bodies inside are matched moved to collide with the particles. The particles are getting color from the environment. You’re mapping color from the actor’s outfit into the particle. We used Nuke to composite it all together. It’s very believable how they spin around like a twister and convert from one person to another.”

Kristen Schaal portrays The Guide from the Vampire Council. “The Guide can shapeshift from human to smoke and vice versa,” explains Ghorbankarimi. “She doesn’t become like real smoke that blows in the air and dissipates. We came up with this idea that the smoke is fully controlled so she can bring the smoke back to her body or dissipate it away based on the action that she does. There is a shot in Episode 301 where as The Guide is climbing a building and she needs to grab onto things. She can bring back the smoke and have it shape into the body part that is needed like a hand. When she wants to look around, the smoke comes together to make an indistinguishable human shape. Every time The Guide wants to land, she jumps into the location. We animated the CG character that drives the smoke, and the moment that the foot hits the ground, the gravity and dynamics drive the smoke from that point on. It is an elaborate effect.”

Kristen Schaal portrays The Guide from the Vampire Council who has ability to shapeshift from human to smoke and vice versa.

The idea was that smoke is fully controlled so The Guide can bring the smoke back to her body or dissipate it away based on the action that she does.

The Cloak of Duplication allows the wearer to shapeshift into someone else.

A special particle system was created in Houdini for the transformation caused by the Cloak of Duplication.

“I come from a film background and try to come with ideas that are mostly done practically because nothing is more real than real things,” remarks Ghorbankarimi. “This season we did use Unreal Engine and LED panels for one of the episodes. The assets were built in advance, and we did real-time playback. It worked phenomenally. There was a lot of interactive light. It made a complicated episode into something that was doable. The Cloak of Duplication effect is so cool and funny, especially when Nandor is transforming into another character and mimics how that person sounds and talks. The big challenge is making sure that you are elevating, not degrading the show. It’s one of the best sets that I’ve been on. Everybody knows what they’re doing and there are no surprises on set. It’s a well-designed machine.”

For the Wolf-Bat to be believable it was important to get the anatomy correct.

“I come from a film background and try to come with ideas that are mostly done practically because nothing is more real than real things. This season we did use Unreal Engine and LED panels for one of the episodes. The assets were built in advance, and we did real-time playback. It worked phenomenally. There was a lot of interactive light. It made a complicated episode into something that was doable.”

—Mohammad Ghorbankarimi, Visual Effects Supervisor

The Wolf-Bat makes an appearance in Episode 303.
ZOIC STUDIOS AND THE LESSONS LEARNED FROM ITS LED WALL October 6,2021

By IAN FAILES

An overhead lighting rig is installed on the LED wall stage.

If there’s one thing changing the way that physical production and visual effects interact right now, it’s the rise of LED walls, also known as LED volumes.

LED walls form part of the shift to virtual production and real-time content creation, and have gained prominence by enabling in-camera VFX shots that don’t require additional post-production, offering an alternative to bluescreen or greenscreen shooting, and helping to immerse actors and crews into what will eventually be the final shots.

Several production houses and visual effects studios have built dedicated LED walls and associated workflows. Some rely on bespoke LED wall setups, depending on the needs of the particular project. One company, Zoic Studios, even embarked on a project to install a LED wall inside existing studio space and use it to further the crew’s understanding of virtual production.

How did Zoic do that exactly? Here, Zoic Creative Director and Visual Effects Supervisor Julien Brami breaks down the process they followed and what they took away from this new virtual production experience.

A HISTORY OF VIRTUAL PRODUCTION AT ZOIC

Zoic’s foray into LED walls is actually part of a long history of virtual production solutions at the visual effects company, which has offices in Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver. In particular, some years ago the studio developed a system called ZEUS (Zoic Environmental Unification System) that could be used to track live-action camera movements on, for example, a greenscreen stage and produce real-time composites with previs-like assets. The idea was to provide instant feedback on set via a Simul-cam setup, either a dedicated monitor or smart tablet.

Zoic Studios Creative Director and Visual Effects Supervisor Julien Brami reviews a real-time scene on a laptop.

“FTG [Fuse Technical Group] lent us an LED wall for about three months, and it was really exciting because they said, ‘We can give you the panels and we can do the installation, but we can’t really give you anyone who knows how to do it. You have to learn yourself.’ So it was just a few of us here at Zoic doing it. We each tried to figure everything out.”

—Julien Brami, Creative Director and Visual Effects Supervisor, Zoic Studios

When Brami, who has been at Zoic since 2015, began noticing a major shift in the use of game engines for virtual production shoots on more recent shows – The Mandalorian, for example, has of course brought these new methods into the mainstream – he decided to try out the latest techniques himself at home using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. “I’ve always been extremely attracted by new workflows and new technology,” shares Brami. “I mostly work in the advertising world and usually the deadlines are short and budgets are even shorter, so I’m always looking for new solutions. I’d been looking to employ real-time rendering in a scene as a way to show clients results straight away, for example.

“So,” he adds, “I first started doing all this virtual production stuff in my own room at home using just my LED TV and a couple of screens. What’s amazing with the technology is that the software is free. I just had a Vive controller and was tracking shots with my Sony DSLR. As soon as I saw something working, I called [Zoic Founder and Executive Creative Director] Chris Jones and said, ‘I think we need to do this at scale.’”

Zoic Studios tests the LED wall that was set up at its Culver City, California location.

A hand-held test-shoot against an LED wall environment.

The LED wall, provided to Zoic on loan from Fuse Technical Group, gave the visual effects studio a chance to test several shooting scenarios.

The LED wall, a ROE Black Pearl 2, was 28 tiles wide and 8 tiles high.

An on-set tracking system utilizing Vive controllers allowed for camera movement and real-time re-adjustment of the imagery on the LED wall.

“The panels create light, but not strong enough to get shadows. So, you can have an overall global lighting and the value’s just right on the character, but there is no shadow for the character. That’s why we wanted to also have practical lighting. We used the DMX plugin from Unreal, which would send information for correct intensity and color temperature to every single practical light. So, when you move in real-time, the light actually changes, and we can create the real cast shadows on the characters.”

—Julien Brami, Creative Director and Visual Effects Supervisor, Zoic Studios

‘WE NEED TO LEARN IT’

With an Epic MegaGrant behind them, Zoic partnered with Fuse Technical Group (FTG) and Universal Studios to create a LED wall at their studio space in Culver City. It was a big leap for Zoic, which predominantly delivers episodic, film and commercial VFX work. Subsequently, the studio launched a ‘Real Time Group’ to explore more virtual production offerings and use Unreal Engine for visualization, virtual art department deliveries, animation and virtual production itself. “What we said was, ‘We have the time, we have the technology, we need to learn it,’” relates Brami, in terms of the initial push into LED wall filmmaking. “FTG lent us an LED wall for about three months, and it was really exciting because they said, ‘We can give you the panels and we can do the installation, but we can’t really give you anyone who knows how to do it. You have to learn yourself.’ So it was just a few of us here at Zoic doing it. We each tried to figure everything out.” The LED wall setup at Zoic was used for a range of demos and tests, as well as for a ‘Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare’ spot featuring YouTuber Preston Blaine Arsement. The spot sees Preston interact with an animated Gundam character in a futuristic warehouse. The character and warehouse environment were projected on the LED wall. “That was the perfect scenario for this,” says Brami.

The wall was made up of around 220 panels. Zoic employed a Vive tracker setup for camera tracking and as a way to implement follow-focus. The content was pre-made for showing on the LED wall and optimized to run in Unreal Engine in real-time. “We had the LED processor and then two stations that were running on the set,” details Brami. “We also had a signal box that allowed us to have genlock, because that’s what matters the most. Everything has to work in tandem to ensure the refresh rate is right and the video cards can handle the playback.” There were many challenges in making its LED wall setup work, notes Brami, such as dealing with lag on the screen, owing to the real-time tracking of the physical camera. Another challenge involved lighting the subject in front of the LED panels. “The panels create light, but not strong enough to get shadows. So, you can have an overall global lighting and the value’s just right on the character, but there is no shadow for the character. That’s why we wanted to also have practical lighting. We used the DMX plugin from Brami. “When you shoot on location, you may have the best location ever, but you don’t know if next year if there’s another season whether this location will be there or will remain untouched. Now, even 10 years from now, you might want a location in Germany, well, we can come back to the same scene built for virtual produc-tion. Exactly the same scene, which really is mind blowing.”

Thoughts on an LED Wall Future

Arising from his LED wall and virtual production experiences so far, Zoic Studios Creative Director and Visual Effects Supervisor Julien Brami believes there are many advances still to come in this space.

One development Brami predicts is that there will be more widespread operation of LED walls remotely, partly something that became apparent during the pandemic. “All of this technology just works on networks. My vision is that one day I can have an actor somewhere in Texas, an actor somewhere in Germany, I can have the director anywhere else, but they all look at the same scene. As long as it can be all synchronized, we’ll be able to do it. And then you won’t need to all travel to the same location if you can’t do that or if it’s too expensive.”

Another advancement that Brami sees as coming shortly is further development in on-set real-time rendering to blend real and virtual environments. “This is going to be like an XR thing. You shoot with an LED wall, but then you can also add a layer of CG onto the frame as well – that’s still real-time. You can sandwich the live-action through the background that’s Unreal Engine-based on the wall and then add extra imagery over the wall.

“Doing this,” Brami says, “means you can actually create a lot of really cool effects, like particles and atmospherics, and make your sets bigger. It does need more firepower on set, but I think this is really what’s going to blend from an actor in front of a screen to something that’s fully completed. You could put in a creature there, you can put anything your space can sandwich. I’m really excited about this.”

LED panels with a 2.8mm pixel pitch made up the wall.

Zoic Studios has ultimately established a ‘Real-Time Group’ at the studio to handle virtual production and real-time game-engine solutions to VFX work.

Filming the ‘Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare’ spot featuring YouTuber Preston Blaine Arsement, left.

Preston Blaine Arsement performs on the LED wall set.

An Unreal Engine view of the Gundam character for the ‘Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare’ commercial.

The video village, or ‘brain bar’ area of the LED wall stage, during filming of the Gundam commercial at Zoic.

“We know how to create VFX and we know how to create content and assets, we just need to get more involved in preparing this content for real-time on LED walls, since the assets need to run at high frame rates…”

—Julien Brami, Creative Director and Visual Effects Supervisor, Zoic Studios

THE STATE OF PLAY WITH ZOIC AND LED WALLS
It became apparent to Zoic during this test and building phase that a permanent build at their studio space may not be necessary, as Brami explains. “We realized a couple of things. First, this tech-nology was changing so fast. Literally, every three months there was a new development, which meant buying something now and having it delivered in three months means it would be obsolete. “Take the LED panels, for example,” adds Brami. “The panels we had at the time were 2.8mm pixel pitch. The pixel pitch is basi-cally the distance between LEDs on a panel, and these define the resolution you can get from the real estate of the screen and how close you can get to it and all the aberrations you can get. When we started shooting, 2.8 was state-of-the-art. But then we’ve seen pixel pitches of 1.0 appearing already. Everybody has seen the potential of this technology, and the manufacturers want to make it even better.”

This meant Zoic decided that, instead of buying an LED wall for permanent use, to utilize the loaned wall as much as possible for the three months to understand how it all worked. “Our main focus then became creating really amazing content for LED walls,” states Brami. “We know how to create VFX and we know how to create content and assets, we just need to get more involved in preparing this content for real-time on LED walls, since the assets need to run at high frame rates, etc.”

Already, Zoic has produced such content for a space-related project and also for scenes in the streaming series Sweet Tooth, among other projects. Indeed, Zoic believes it can take the knowledge learned from its LED wall experience and adapt it for individual clients, partnering with panel creators or other virtual production services to produce what the client needs. “So, if they need a really high-end wall, because everything needs to be still in focus, we know where to go and how to create a set for that,” says Brami. “But if they just need, let’s say, an out-of-focus background for a music video, we know where to go for that approach. “I love where it’s all going, and I’m starting to really love this new technology,” continues Brami. “The past three years has really been the birth of it. The next five years are going to be amazing.”
DEEP-DIVING INTO REAL-TIME CAN OFFER A CONTENT CREATOR INSTANT BENEFITS October 6,2021

By IAN FAILES

Images courtesy of Aaron Sims Creative, except where noted.

A concept for the Demogorgon creature in Stranger Things by Aaron Sims Creative (ASC). (Image copyright © 2016 Netflix)

Aaron Sims, founder of Aaron Sims Creative.

Aaron Sims Creative (ASC), which crafts both concept designs and final visual effects for film, television and games, bridging both the worlds of practical and digital effects, has long delivered content relying on the long-standing ‘traditional’ workflows inherent in crafting creatures and environments. But more recently, ASC has embraced the latest real-time methods to imagine worlds and create final shots. In fact, a new series of films ASC is developing are using game engines at their core, as well as related virtual production techniques.

The first of these films is called DIVE, a live-action project in which ASC has been capitalizing on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine for previs, set scouting and animation workflows. Meanwhile, the studio has also tackled a number of commercial and demo projects with game engines and with LED volumes, part of a major move into adopting real-time workflows.

So why has ASC jumped head-first into real-time? “It’s exactly in the wording ‘real-time,’” comments ASC CEO Aaron Sims, who started out in the industry in the field of practical special effects makeup with Rick Baker before segueing into character design at Stan Winston Studio, introducing new digital workflows there. “You see everything instantaneously. That’s the benefit right there. With traditional visual effects, you do some work, you add your textures and materials, you look at it, you render it, and then you go, ‘OK, I’ve got to tweak it.’ And then you go and do that all again.

Sims paints on a puppet used during the filming of Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

“You build it, and you can go with your team to this virtual world and go scout out your world before you go make it – we never really had that luxury in traditional visual effects. We can build just enough that you can actually start to scout it with a basic camera, almost like rough layouts, and then use Unreal’s Sequencer to base your shots, and work out what else you need to build.”

—Aaron Sims

“But with real-time, as you’re tweaking you’re seeing everything happen with zero delay. There’s no delay whatsoever. So, the timeframe of being able to develop things and just be creative is instant.”

The move to real-time began when ASC started taking on more game-related and VR projects, with Sims noting they have now actually been using Unreal Engine for a number of years. “However,” he says, “it wasn’t until COVID hit that I saw some really incredible things being produced by artists and other visionaries who were coming up with techniques on how to use the engine for things beyond games. That’s what excited me, so I started getting into it and learning Unreal in more detail to help tell some of our stories. Then I realized, ‘OK, wait, this is more powerful than I expected it to actually be.’ On every level, it was like it was doing more than I ever anticipated.”

The other real benefit of real-time for Sims has been speed. “The faster I can get from point A to point B, I know it’s true to my original vision. The more you start muddying it up, the more it becomes something else and the less that you can actually see it in real-time. You’re just guessing until the end. So for me it’s been fascinating to see something that’s available now, especially during COVID when I’ve been stuck at home. It’s made it even more reason to dive into it as much as I can to learn as much.”

Over the past few years, ASC has regularly produced short film projects. Some have been for demos and tests and some as part of what Sims calls the studio’s ‘Sketch-to-Screen’ process, designed to showcase the steps in concept design, layout, asset creation, lookdev, previs, animation, compositing and final rendering. Sims has even had a couple of potential feature films come and go.

DIVE is the first project for which the studio has completely embraced a game engine pipeline, and is intended as the start of a series of ‘survival’ films that Sims and his writing partner, Tyler Winther (Head of Development at ASC), have envisaged.

“The films revolve around different environment-based scenarios,” outlines Sims. “This first one, DIVE, is about a character who’s put in a situation where they have to survive. We’re going to see diving and cave diving in the film, but we wanted to put an everyday person into all these different situations and have the audience go, ‘That could be me.’”

The development of the films has been at an internal level so far (ASC has also received an Epic Games MegaGrant to help fund development), but still involves some ambitious goals. For example, DIVE, of course, contains an underwater aspect to the filmmaking. Water simulation can be tricky enough already with existing visual effects tools, let alone inside a game engine for film-quality photorealistic results.

“It’s very challenging to do water,” admits Sims, although he adds that the technology has progressed dramatically in game engines.

Unreal Engine rendering of the DIVE cave environment.

An Unreal Engine screenshot of one of the cave environments for DIVE. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

Underwater divers in the film. ASC has explored live motion capture to help bring the divers to life. (Image courtesy Epic Games)

Men In Black character Mikey, in reference maquette form, was one of the characters Aaron Sims worked on at Rick Baker’s Cinnovation for the 1997 film.

“Instead of just previs’ing the effects shots, we’re previs’ing the whole thing so we can see how the film plays. It helps the story develop in a way that is harder to just imagine while you’re writing it.”

—Aaron Sims

“I thought, ‘Let’s do the most difficult one first, which is water.’ We have other settings in the desert and the woods, which we have seen more of with game engines, but water is hard.”

To help plan out exactly what DIVE will look like – including what physical sets and locations may be necessary – the ASC team has been building virtual sets first and then carrying out virtual set scouting inside them. “You build it, and you can go with your team to this virtual world and go scout out your world before you go make it – we never really had that luxury in traditional visual effects,” notes Sims.

“We can build just enough that you can actually start to scout it with a basic camera, almost like rough layouts, and then use Unreal’s Sequencer to base your shots, and work out what else you need to build.”

That virtual set scout resembles previs, to a degree, continues Sims, while allowing the filmmakers to go much further. “Instead of just previs’ing the effects shots, we’re previs’ing the whole thing so we can see how the film plays. It helps the story develop in a way that is harder to just imagine while you’re writing it.”

This year, ASC helped Epic Games launch its announcement of early access to Unreal Engine 5. The new version of the game engine incorporates several new technologies, including a ‘virtualized micropolygon geometry’ system called Nanite and a fully dynamic global illumination solution known as Lumen.

ASC’s work on a sample project called Valley of the Ancient, available with this UE5 release, showcased that new tech, along with what could be done with Unreal’s MetaHuman Creator app and what could be achieved in terms of character animation inside Unreal (these include the Animation Motion Warping, Control Rig and Full-Body IK Solver tools, plus the Pose Browser).

“I can’t speak highly enough about the tools,” comments Sims. “It’s become definitely a new medium for me. I haven’t gotten this excited since my days of starting in the ‘80s on makeup effects.

“It wasn’t until COVID hit that I saw some really incredible things being produced by artists and other visionaries who were coming up with techniques on how to use the engine for things beyond games. That’s what excited me, so I started getting into it and learning Unreal in more detail to help tell some of our stories. Then I realized, ‘OK, wait, this is more powerful than I expected it to actually be.’ On every level, it was like it was doing more than I ever anticipated.”

—Aaron Sims

“Unreal is able to take in a lot more geo than you would expect,” adds Sims. “A lot more than you would be able to in Maya or some of these other programs, and it’s able to actually interact with the geo and even animate with the geo at a higher density that you normally would be able to.”

One aspect of the real-time approach Sims is keen to try out with DIVE and the related survival films is in shooting scenes, especially with LED volumes. Typically, volumes have served as essentially in-camera background visual effects environments or set-piece backgrounds, or for interactive lighting. ASC is exploring how this might extend to some kind of creature interaction, since the films will feature a selection of monsters.

“It’s still early days,” says Sims, who notes the different approaches they have considered include pre-animating, live animation and live motion capture. “We’re R&D’ing a lot of this process because, in terms of what’s on the LED walls, we’re still working out, how much can you change it? People are of course used to being able to be on set with a puppeteered creature that interacts with an actor and lets you do improv. Right now, we’re trying to create tools to be able to do that.”

While he is immersed in the world of game engines right now, Sims is well aware that there are many developments that still need to occur with real-time tools. One area is in the ability to provide ray-traced lighting in real-time on LED volumes. Because of the intensive processing required, fully photoreal backgrounds on LED walls are still often achieved with baked-in lighting.

A look at a DIVE spider creature in an Unreal Engine scene. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

Working out how to realize underwater environments for DIVE has involved significant experimentation from ASC.

The underwater world of DIVE will be populated with sea creatures – large and small – and divers.

Test rendering of one of the strange underwater creatures to be featured in DIVE.

For the early release of Unreal Engine 5, ASC was involved in crafting the Valley of the Ancient demo project featuring a character called the Ancient One. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

One of the other new tools used by ASC for the Valley of the Ancient animation was the Full-body IK (FBIK) Solver in Unreal Engine. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

The Ancient One’s animations were authored by ASC in the Unreal Editor using Control Rig and Sequencer. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

“You’re seeing all the results instantly [in real-time]. So, as you’re tweaking it you’re not accidentally going back and doing it again because you forgot that you did something before because you’re waiting for the rendering process. And that’s just the rendering part. The camera, the lighting, the animation all being real-time is another component that makes it just so much more powerful and exciting as a filmmaker, but also a visual effects artist.”

—Aaron Sims

“This means you’re not getting the exact same interaction that you would if it was ray-traced in real-time,” says Sims. “But with things like Lumen coming, it’s likely we’ll get even more interactive lighting that doesn’t need to be baked.”

Sims also mentions his experience with the effects simulation side of game engines (in Unreal Engine the two main tools here are Niagara for things like particle effects and fluids, and Chaos for physics and destruction). “There’s a lot of great tools in Unreal for creating particle effects and chaos or destruction. But a lot of times, you’re still having to do stuff outside, say in Houdini, and bring it in. I’m hoping that that’s going to change.”

For DIVE’s underwater environments, in particular, ASC has been experimenting with all the different kinds of water required (surfaces, waves and underwater views). “We’re also creating our own tools for bubbles and all that stuff, and how they’re interacting, clumping together and forming the roofs of caves – all in-engine, which is exciting. I think it’s just the getting in and out of the water that’s the most challenging thing.”

Despite the push for real-time, Sims and ASC of course continue to work with traditional design and VFX tools, and they are also maintaining links to a practical effects past for DIVE. Makeup effects are still a key part of the film.

“If there’s a reason to do practical, I say still do practical,” states Sims. “In certain situations, the hybrid approach is usually the most successful because of the fidelity of 4K and everything else that you didn’t have back in the ‘80s. You could get away with grain and all of that stuff back then.”

Still, Sims is adamant that real-time has changed the game for content creation. He says that right now there’s such a great deal of momentum behind creating in real-time, from the software developers themselves through to all levels of filmmakers, since the technology is becoming heavily accessible, and something that can be done almost on an individual level.

“I mean, you’re seeing all the results instantly. So, as you’re tweaking it, you’re not accidentally going back and doing it again because you forgot that you did something before because you’re waiting for the rendering process.”

“And that’s just the rendering part,” notes Sims. “The camera, the lighting, the animation all being real-time is another component that makes it just so much more powerful and exciting as a filmmaker, but also a visual effects artist.”
THE PROGRESSION OF DESIGN WITH OSCAR-WINNING VISIONARY DOUG CHIANG October 6,2021

By TREVOR HOGG

Images courtesy of Doug Chiang.

Doug Chiang, Vice President and Executive Creative Director, Star Wars, ILM

A photo of Doug Chiang taken before his family moved from Taiwan to Michigan.

The Chiang family in Michigan in 1968. From left: James, Doug, Sidney, Lisa and Patricia.

Even though the Coronavirus pandemic confined Doug Chiang to home for most of 2020, for the Vice President and Executive Creative Director, Star Wars at Lucasfilm, there was not a lot of family time. “I still couldn’t talk to them much because I was busy!” This is not surprising as he is the visual gatekeeper of the expanding Star Wars franchise, whether it be films and television shows, games, new media or theme parks.

The space opera did not exist in 1962 when Chiang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. “We moved to Dearborn, Michigan when I was about five years old. I remember the home we grew up in Taiwan, the kitchen and bedrooms. Before getting into bed, we had to wash our feet because of the dirt floors. We actually had pigs in the kitchen.”

Arriving in Michigan during the middle of winter introduced the five-year-old to snow and the realization that he didn’t quite fit in, as Asian families were a rarity in Dearborn and Westland where Chiang attended elementary school and high school.

“Our parents always encouraged us [he has an older brother Sidney and younger sister Lisa] to assimilate as quickly as possible, but as a family we were still culturally Chinese. I was your classic Asian nerd. I didn’t talk a lot, was quiet and looked different. I was picked on a lot, but the saving thing for me was that I quickly developed a reputation for being the class artist. I found that as a wonderful escape where I could create my own worlds and friends, so I drew a lot.”

Along recreating the world-building of Star Wars, Chiang had to factor in health and safety measures when conceptualizing the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme parks.

“Star Wars had a huge impact on my generation. That completely defined my career goals in terms of what I wanted to do. I was starting to learn about stop-motion animation. When I saw The Making of Star Wars with Phil Tippett doing the stop-motion for the chess game on the Millennium Falcon, it all connected together. That’s when I went down to the basement of our home and borrowed my dad’s 8mm camera, tripod and lights, and started to make my own films.”

—Doug Chiang, Vice President and Executive Creative Director, Star Wars, ILM

A passion for filmmaking developed as a 15-year-old upon seeing the film that would launch the franchise that he is now associated with. “Star Wars had a huge impact on my generation. That completely defined my career goals in terms of what I wanted to do. I was starting to learn about stop-motion animation. When I saw The Making of Star Wars with Phil Tippett doing the stop-motion for the chess game on the Millennium Falcon, it all connected together. That’s when I went down to the basement of our home and borrowed my dad’s 8mm camera, tripod and lights, and started to make my own films. All trial and error. You’re discovering things by accident. I love that aspect of it.”

A newspaper ad caused the aspiring cinematic talent to enter the Michigan Student Film Festival. “I won first place and that gave me a lot of encouragement. It gave me connections to one of the founders, John Prusak, who would loan me professional tools.

That became the start of my quasi-filmmaking education. When I came out to UCLA for film school it was a lot more of the same. A lot of it was self-driven. After I made one of my experimental animations called Mental Block, I made this film in 10 weeks, where I took over the little dining room of our dorm. I entered it into the Nissan FOCUS Awards and got first place. Winning a car as a sophomore was great! My goal was to direct films, but I realized that everybody in Los Angeles wants to do that, so there’s virtually no chance. I could do storyboards well so that was going to be my foot into the industry. One of my first jobs out of film school was doing industrial storyboards for commercials.” A fateful job interview took place at Digital Productions, which was one of three major computer graphics companies in the 1980s. “I was hired on the spot to design and direct computer graphics commercials. That was my first introduction of combining film design and art direction with this new medium called computer graphics.”

Chiang made a series of short films with Star Wars being a significant influence.

A big thrill for Chiang was being hired by George Lucas to be the visual effects production designer for the Star Wars prequels.

A showcase of the different tools that Chiang utilizes to produce his illustrations.

Joining ILM was an illuminating experience for Chiang. “I always thought of the design process as one seamless workflow. ILM was different in that we were doing post-production design, so the art department was specifically for that. The films that I worked on, like Ghost, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Forrest Gump, were all post-production design. While I was at ILM it started to evolve where we could participate in the pre-production design. It wasn’t until I started working with George Lucas when he hired me to head up the art department for the prequels in 1995 that I realized that was the way George had done it all along back with Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie.

“I was one of the first people onboard while George was writing Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” Chiang continues. “I had been learning Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie, and got their style down. When he told me that we were going to set the foundation for all of those designs, and aesthetically it is going to look different, that threw me for a loop because I felt like I was studying for the wrong test. My goal was to give him the spectacle that he wanted without any of the practical limitations. There were enough smart people at ILM like John Knoll to figure all of that out. It was world building and design in their purest form. I remembered it terrified ILM because they hadn’t developed anything of that scale. The Phantom Menace was the biggest film at that time at ILM with miniature sets. There was a huge digital component, but that was mostly for the characters.”

In 2000, Chiang established DC Studios and produced several animated shorts based on the illustrated book Robota, co-created with Orson Scott Card, which takes place on the mysterious planet of Orpheus and was inspired by his robot drawings. He would then co-found Ice Blink Studios in 2004 and carry on his collaboration with another innovative filmmaker, Robert Zemeckis, which resulted in Chiang receiving an Oscar. “Death Becomes Her was fascinating because the story is about the immortality potion, so our main characters can’t die. It was figuring out, ‘How do you achieve that?’ Real prosthetics can only go so far, and we had never achieved realistic skin in computer graphics before. It was a huge risk to try to combine the two. Forrest Gump was all about subtle adjustments to the reality of the world to create powerful dramatic images. Bob’s films can be complete spectacle like The Polar Express, and you have to lean into that sensibility. Bob doesn’t have a specific filmmaking style. He goes with what works best for his storytelling.”

Chiang collaborating with Model Supervisor Steve Gawley in 1997 on Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

Chiang was able to meet his film idol, Ray Harryhausen.

A dramatic action sequence in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is the pod race.

On the set of The Mandalorian making sure that everything is visually correct.

A detailed cockpit layout for a Naboo ship that has an artisan aesthetic.

For Chiang, the key to creating effective concepts, such as for the Monopod, is choosing shapes that can be quickly understood by the audience.

Zemeckis developed such a strong level of trust in Chiang that he hired him to establish ImageMovers Digital, a ground-breaking performance-capture animation studio. “It was almost a perfect collision with all of my experiences, because I had that strong computer graphics experience working with Digital Productions, I had the strong foundation with ILM for post-production design, and then I had the pre-production design with George Lucas. ImageMovers Digital became this wonderful test-case where we had an opportunity to build a new company from scratch and create a new artform. We were taking a huge risk because the difficulty of that challenge equated to bigger budgets because of the sheer amount of time and the number of people that it takes. Literally, tools were being written as we were going. Those four years were a highlight of my career. It was a culmination of all that history of learning, having Bob as the visionary to drive all of that, and the support of Disney. It was sad for me [when it was closed by Disney in 2010] because we were right at the point of breaking through to having the right tools to make that big transition for success.”

Production on The Force Awakens saw Chiang join Lucasfilm to shepherd the expansion of the Star Wars universe. “Working with George Lucas for seven years, we established a logic in terms of how designs evolve in the Star Wars universe. It’s marrying the design history to our actual history. The prequels are in the craftsman era – that’s why the designs from Naboo are elegant and have sleek artforms. The shapes in the original trilogy become more angular and look like they came off of an assembly line. George always considered Star Wars to be like a period film where we do all of this homework and only 5% of it ends up onscreen, but all of that homework informs that 5%.” Believable fantasy designs need to be 80% familiar and 20% alien, Chiang learned. “I learned specific guidelines from George. When you design for the silhouette, draw it as if a kid could draw it. The other one is designing for personality. Certain shapes are very emotive, and if you can design with that in mind, and on top of that put in color and details, it’ll be more successful. The way your brain works is that you’ll see the shape first which will tell you right away, ‘Is it friendly or bad, and what it’s supposed to do.’ In the end, the details don’t inform the design but can make it better.”

Conceptualizing and constructing the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme parks situation in Disneyland and Disney World has been a whole other level of design for Chiang. “Film sets exist for weeks and we tear them down while theme parks exist for years, so the materials have to be real and there is no cheating. On top of that, you layer in the whole health and safety component because you’re going to have people wandering through these environments unsupervised. We’re trying to layer in what makes Star Wars special. For instance, the whole idea of no handrails is a real thing in Star Wars. You obviously can’t do that. The aesthetic part was just as challenging because we wanted to create a design that fits seamlessly with our films. One of the things that I didn’t realize is the sunlight quality in Florida is different than Anaheim. You have to tune it to take in account the cooler light in Florida. On top of that, there are hurricanes in Florida whereas you have earthquakes in Anaheim. The WDI engineering team are amazing artists in their own right.

“There was a period of time where films became CG spectacles because the audience hadn’t seen anything like that before,” observes Chiang. “What I find interesting now is that got boring because it became too much sugar. Now I see the pendulum swinging back to where, what is the best technique for the film? One of the great things about working with Jon Favreau on The Mandalorian is precisely that. I don’t know what the younger generation will think because they have grown up with video games where they’re completely immersed in digital spectacle.”

The Mandalorian duo of Din Djarin and Grogu aka Baby Yoda through the eyes of Doug Chiang.

Chiang examines the Pod Hanger miniature constructed for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

Virtual production works best with filmmakers who know exactly what they want, Chiang explains. “What’s different about what we’re doing now with StageCraft and the volume is we’re bringing a good percentage of post-production work upfront so it involves all of the department heads collaborating to create a seamless process. Virtual production is transforming filmmaking into a fluid process, which is in some ways what computer graphics did when it first became available as a tool. The world building has to be complete before we actually start photographing the film. But it’s not unlike what I was doing with George. When I think back to what George, Robert Zemeckis and Jon Favreau were doing, they’re of the same mind. We were all trying to create a technique to better tell stories and to make the most efficient process to create visual spectacle onscreen.”

A Ravinak that inhabits the frigid planet of Maldo Kreis attacks the Razor Crest.
EFFECTS TEAM ADDS THE BIZARRE AND SURREAL TO SUPER-CRAZY DOOM PATROL October 6,2021

By TREVOR HOGG

Robotman (Brendan Fraser), Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero), Cyborg (Joivan Wade) and Elasti-Girl (April Bowlby) spend some quality time with one another. (Photo: Bob Mahoney/HBO Max)

No strangers to the DC Universe on the small screen are Encore Hollywood Creative Director & Visual Effects Supervisor Armen Kevorkian and Encore Hollywood Visual Effects Coordinator Gregory Pierce, who have worked together on Supergirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, Titans and now the third season of Doom Patrol. A group of misfits who have acquired superpowers through tragic circumstances are brought together by Dr. Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton) to form a dysfunctional family that battles the forces of evil with unconventional methods. Each of the 10 episodes has approximately 100 to 200 visual effects shots created by Encore VFX and were divided among facilities in Burbank, Vancouver and Atlanta, based on scenes and expertise. The second season was shortened to nine episodes because of the coronavirus pandemic, which had a ripple impact as the narrative carried over to Season 3 as well as the need to work remotely. Kevorkian notes, “It’s a different world for how we shoot things, but it was nice to get back out there.”

Outrageous storylines and characters are a trademark of the action-adventure-comedy. “One of the things that make Doom Patrol different is that it’s creative in terms of how it’s written, how the characters are developed and the situations that they find themselves in,” remarks Pierce. “All of the effects work that we have to do has to be photoreal because this is a photoreal show, but at the same time there is a lot of surrealness to it. A lot of times with our visual effects work, we don’t know exactly what this will look like because it never happened in real life. But we still have to ground it within the scene. Some of the scenes are clearly written with an idea in mind as to how they should look, and those are related to us during the prep meetings before shooting.

Elasti-Girl (April Bowlby) extends her fingers to dramatically increase her reach. (Image courtesy of HBO Max)

“All of the effects work that we have to do has to be photoreal because this is a photoreal show, but at the same time there is a lot of surrealness to it. A lot of times with our visual effects work, we don’t know exactly what this will look like because it never happened in real life. But we still have to ground it within the scene. Some of the scenes are clearly written with an idea in mind as to how they should look, and those are related to us during the prep meetings before shooting. Other things we have more freedom to experiment with and try new things.”

—Gregory Pierce, Visual Effects Coordinator, Encore Hollywood

Other things we have more freedom to experiment with and try new things.”

Ideas from the comic books are reimagined to fit into the real world. “The writers come up with kookiest ideas where you go, ‘Holy shit, we’re going to do that!’” laughs Kevorkian. “Jeremy Carver [Showrunner] and Chris Dingess [Executive Producer] are great to collaborate with to bring those things to life.”

Over the three seasons, there are not many reoccurring visual effects, reveals Kevorkian. “One of the things that has remained the same since Season 1 is the negative spirit, the entity that lives inside of Larry Trainor [Matt Bomer] and comes out, because it tells the story that it needs to, and looks good visually,” states Kevorkian. “We do have the shield that Cyborg [Joivan Wade] brings up, and the arm cannon when it reveals itself and goes away. Once you do something like that it’s the same methodology but shot in a different way. There are digital doubles for all of the characters. When we can’t do something practically for Robotman [Riley Shanahan] then we’ll do a CG version.”

Encore VFX is currently using a pipeline that utilizes Houdini and RenderMan. “We’ve landed on different and new technologies, especially for our CG characters,” notes Pierce. “We’re doing a lot more simulations on them. We’re trying to push the boundaries for what we can to do to add some dynamics to these characters. During the end of last season and into this season we’ve been doing more motion capture, in particular for [new character] Monsieur Mallah as it helped to give him more of a presence and grounded in a scene.”

April Bowlby portrays actress Rita Farr, otherwise known as Elasti-Girl. “We still do face drooping when she feels nervous and is not in control of her power,” remarks Kevorkian. “We’ve done a few gags where she is able to stretch out to confront someone or grab something from a distance. The general idea of what is happening to Rita is the same – it’s just putting her into different situations. Some of the stuff that she will be doing this season like manifesting into her blob self is a completely different methodology.

When it comes to Cyborg (Joivan Wade) and Robotman (Brendan Fraser) there is a heavier reliance on practical effects for their characters. (Photo: Bob Mahoney/HBO Max)

The plate photography, animation and final lighting of the Moonscape encounter in Episode 301 between Dorothy Spinner (Abigail Monterey) and the Candlemaker (Lex Lang). (Images courtesy of HBO Max and Encore VFX)

“In Season 1, we did butt monsters, which are butts with arms, and they’re making a comeback this year in a bigger sequence. I’m excited to bring them to life because that’s not something you get to do every day. The butt monsters speak to the comedic factor of the show along with being terrifying as well. It’s the most fun that we had animating and coming up with different things that they’ll be doing.”

—Armen Kevorkian, Creative Director & Visual Effects Supervisor, Encore Hollywood

It was challenging to make it seem seamless, but was also fun to do something different with that character. None of it is procedural. If she turns into a blob in a container, she comes out and forms into a person that takes a lot of blend shapes and morphing. It’s figuring out how to do go from CG cloth simulations to real cloth. The biggest challenge has always been Rita doing something that we have to reimagine how we’re going to do it. If I send back shots at all they’re usually Rita shots.”

“Dorothy Spinner [Abigail Shapiro], the daughter of Dr. Niles Caulder, has these imaginary characters that she manifests which have to exist in the real world, such as the Candlemaker [Lex Lang],” explains Kevorkian. “He premiered last season and there is a little bit of him in Season 3. In Season 1, we did butt monsters, which are butts with arms, and they’re making a comeback this year in a bigger sequence. I’m excited to bring them to life because that’s not something you get to do every day. The butt monsters speak to the comedic factor of the show along with being terrifying as well. It’s the most fun that we had animating and coming up with different things that they’ll be doing. There was one moment where the Doom Patrol interacts with one or two of them. We sent our model to props which did a 3D print of one so that the actors could touch it.”

Introduced is the Sisterhood of Dada, which consists of five bizarre supervillains with the ability to act as chaotic as the Dadaism art movement. “There is a lot that we’re creating for that storyline, for example, Dada birds,” states Kevorkian. “This season we also have a gorilla character from the comics called Monsieur Mallah that wears a beret and has a machine gun. There are a few images out there of him. He actually speaks and appears in a few episodes. We started from scratch to avoid any similarities with Grodd [from The Flash]. We built a model and whole new muscle and fur systems for him. The final ADR determines the animation. The facial anatomy doesn’t translate one-to-one with a human, so we have to cheat certain things to make it visually correct. I was never worried about Monsieur Mallah – he looks great.”

Research is guided by the scripts. “If something gets mentioned in a script, like a character, I will do research to see if it’s something that really exists,” remarks Kevorkian. “I will always use that as my starting point. I will go ahead and conceptualize something and send it over to Jeremy, who knows exactly what he wants and is very specific. It makes our process easier knowing that Jeremy has a vision of what we’re creating. If we’re in sync, sometimes we get first-pass approvals. There are times when he chimes in and says, ‘You need to adjust this to tell the story about.’ We’ll have one or two rounds of notes and get there fairly quickly. That adds to the quality, because we’re not going back and forth on things that slow you down.”

“We’ve landed on different and new technologies, especially for our CG characters. We’re doing a lot more simulations on them. We’re trying to push the boundaries for what we can to do to add some dynamics to these characters. During the end of last season and into this season we’ve been doing more motion capture, in particular for Monsieur Mallah as it helped to give him more of a presence and grounded in a scene.”

—Gregory Pierce, Visual Effects Coordinator, Encore Hollywood

Ideas from the comic books are re-imagined to fit into the real world, such as the Candlemaker. (Images courtesy of HBO Max and Encore VFX)

A majority of the storyboards, previs and postvis are created by Encore VFX. “They do have storyboard artists in Atlanta to work with directors on sequences,” states Kevorkian. “Encore VFX does all necessary previs and concept art of creatures. At times, some of the concepts that we have to match come from the art department because it’s something they’re going to build practically. Postvis is done with stunts.” An emphasis is placed upon location shooting. “The greenscreen is used for environments that do not exist and need to be created,” adds Kevorkian. “Most of the world building involves digital augmentation. For example, last year we did a scene where Dorothy is on a lunar surface. The art department built part of a set for the lunar surface that had crystals which popped out of the ground. We built our own version based on that for the extensions that we did.”

Cyborg (Joivan Wade) watches Elasti-Girl (April Bowlby) working on controlling her powers. (Image courtesy of HBO Max)

Visual effects have a close partnership with stunts and special effects. “Stunt Co-ordinator Thom Khoury Williams always has great ideas and works with our ideas,” remarks Kevorkian. “All of those sequences usually come out the way that we prepped them so there are not surprises when we get into editorial.” Doom Patrol definitely has its own visual style, he observes. “Maybe it is a bit retro with some of the equipment that you see on set. The look of Robotman is from the comic books. He’s not your shiny 21^stcentury robot, but something you could have built in your garage. The show definitely has an older feel, so we try to stay within that same world.” Kevorkian found everything was challenging in an exciting way. “I’m excited for people to see Monsieur Mallah and the butt monsters that come back in Episode 304. Each episode is unique, so it will be different things for different people when they watch this season. Doom Patrol is not repetitive. Every season is its own thing.”
CREATIVE CO-EXISTENCE AT THE INTERSECTION OF ANIMATION AND LIVE-ACTION October 6,2021

By TREVOR HOGG

Part of the comedic appeal of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were the surreal cut-out animation segments created by Terry Gilliam. (Image courtesy of Python (Monty) Pictures Limited)

The line between animation and live-action has blurred so much, with visual effects achieving such a high fidelity of photorealism, that cinema has become a seamless hybrid of the two mediums. This is an achievement that British filmmaker Terry Gilliam (12 Monkeys) finds to be more problematic than creatively liberating. “If you’re watching Johnny Depp on the yardarm of a four-masted pirate ship sword fighting somebody else, there’s no gravity involved! Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner understood gravity. Modern filmmaking is so artificial now. It’s not real people in real situations.”

Gilliam began his career creating animated segments for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “I was limited by the amount of time and money that I had to do what I did, so it became cut-outs.” Animation at its best is showcased in Disney classics Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he says. “I love the animation done by the Nine Old Men [Walt Disney Productions’ core animators, some of whom later became directors] because it was such hard work and required an incredible understanding of people and animals.

“The problem is that live-action and animation are becoming one in the same,” observes Gilliam. “As George Lucas got more successful and had more money, it became more elaborate. Rather than have three spaceships flying around you could have a thousand. It becomes abstract at that point. You don’t have what you had when two people are fighting to the death.” Live-action is where Gilliam will remain. “People keep asking me why don’t I make another animated film, but I don’t want to. I like working with actors who bring their own view of the world to the work. It’s not like working with other animators who you are directing to do this and that the way you want it. I want other people to be part of the process and take me out of my limitations and show me different ways of looking how a scene or a character could be played.”

Originally, The Drowned Giant was meant to be a live-action short by Tim Miller, before landing on Netflix. (Image courtesy of Netflix)

“Animation is, ‘Here’s the shot, let me animate within it and make that work.’ It literally only works for that angle whereas mine works for all angles, but I pick the one that looks the coolest.”

—Robert Legato, ASC, Visual Effects Supervisor

Even after making Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate, Executive Producer Tim Miller and his visual effects company, Blur Studio, have continued to produce and create animated shorts, in particular for the Netflix anthology Love, Death + Robots. “When you’re in the animation business you are a student of motion. You’re always trying to carve away at the artificiality of what you’re doing to find the reality that feels natural. I do the same thing in film,” says Miller. “I just use people instead of digital characters. I’m conscious of poses and silhouettes, the kinds of things that animators would think about. All of the time I would walk on set during Terminator: Dark Fate and say to Mackenzie Davies, ‘I need you to drop the shoulder and chin because it looks tougher. Stand a little contrapposto or three quarter because it makes a better silhouette.’ Coming from animation helps with making the transition to a film set because it’s working with groups of artists and having them not hate you.

“I rely heavily on previs and storyboards which allow me to figure out mistakes before they get expensive or impossible to correct,” explains Miller. “Every filmmaker will tell you that there is that special panic that you have on the day [you shoot] because you know no matter what your budget is you’re never going back to this place where you are. In animation you have this luxury of being able to return to any location to redo any shot you want, no matter where in the process you are. That’s a hard limitation to get used to if you’re making the transition from animation to live-action.”

Robert Legato used live-action camera techniques when making The Jungle Book with Jon Favreau. (Image courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures)

Tim Miller was conscious of poses and silhouettes when composing shots for Terminator: Dark Fate. (Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures)

Progression imagery for the scene when Violet creates a forcefield to shield her family from an explosion in The Incredibles 2. (Images courtesy of Disney/Pixar)

Michael Eames enjoyed collaborating with filmmaker Spike Jonze on Where the Wild Things Are. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

“The problem is that live-action and animation are becoming one in the same. As George Lucas got more successful and had more money, it became more elaborate. Rather than have three spaceships flying around you could have a thousand. It becomes abstract at that point. You don’t have what you had when two people are fighting to the death.”

—Terry Gilliam, Filmmaker

Miller references some things that need to be kept in mind when making the transition from live-action to animation. “You have to be able to recognize enough about your intentions, because it’s a while before you get to see the final shot. On the flipside, you’re not stuck in the continuity that you shot.” All of the high-end animation and visual effects companies have some level of customized commercial software like Houdini, Maya and 3ds Max, he points out. “Then you have Blender, which is a free open source and the whole animation community can contribute to it, and that is a game-changer.”

Collaborating with Brad Bird on both animated and live-action projects such as The Incredibles and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is Rick Sayre, Supervising Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios. “Brad is a special case because he had some live-action commercial experience, but is also keenly aware of cinematography and production design, all of the practical production principles. The other big thing that Brad had going for him is he’s a writer-director, and that can translate quite nicely into the live-action side.” Something that a live-action filmmaker has to get used to when transitioning to animation is that everything has to be intentionally planned out, says Sayre. “The happy accident or natural interplay on set, you have to create in animation. In traditional animation it is obvious what you’re producing is a frame. But in live-action you have to be conscious of that. The audience only sees what the camera sees.”

Previs is an animation process that has been adopted by live-action. “A lot of previs in live-action has become an enriched storyboard where you’re finding angles and figuring out what is the most exciting way to shoot this action,” remarks Sayre. “Almost every giant-budget genre picture now will have scenes that are entirely animated. In that sense you have these so called live-action films that are actually animated movies, like Gravity.” The blending of two mediums dates back to Fleischer Studios having animated characters walk through live-action sets. “Pixilation didn’t used to mean giant pixels. It meant that you were moving something a frame at time. That might be an actor on set appearing and disappearing with a cut or doing animation with a miniature. There is such a rich history of filmmaking being a hybrid art.”

“The reason I do previs is that I can’t draw,” admits Oscar-winning Visual Effects Supervisor Robert Legato, ASC (Hugo). “On the last film that I did with Michael Bay, I ended up doing car accident simulations. I don’t simulate for what would actually happen, but for what I want it to do. Then I figure out a clever way of shooting it as opposed to animate and plan every moment. After you piece the scene together, the shortest bridge is what you force the animation into being. People who are fluent in animation would rather animate the whole thing. I find it not working for me well because I’m steeped in live-action work. Even if the animation is probably correct, I question it because it wasn’t done with science, gravity, weight and mass, all of the various things that I factor in when I set up a gag or shoot. Animation is, ‘Here’s the shot, let me animate within it and make that work.’ It literally only works for that angle whereas mine works for all angles, but I pick the one that looks the coolest.

“What we did which I liked in The Lion King, and what Andy Jones [Animation Supervisor] did, was only make the animals do what they can do within the confines of the scene,” notes Legato. “The animals can jump and leap but couldn’t do it 50 times more than what was actually possible. You couldn’t stretch and squash the animation. You had to work within if you could train an animal to do that, it would do that. If you get them to move their mouth with the same cadence of speech you could almost shoot it live. That was the sensibility behind it. Sometimes we wanted to invent our own version of the movie as opposed to being a direct homage. When we ran into some problems, we went back to the old one, and it turned out that they had the same problem and solved it.”

The most widely known animation principles are the 12 devised by Disney’s Nine Old Men during the 1930s and later published in Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life in 1981. Focusing on five in particular that apply to live-action is Ross Burgess, Head of Animation, Episodic at MPC. “Within feature animation, the timing of a character is easier to manage as it’s fully CG and you can re-time your camera to fit the performance. In live-action, often you must counter the animation to the timing of the plate that has been pre-shot. It’s easier to exaggerate the character’s emotions or movements in feature animation. You are not bound to the ‘reality’ of a real-life environment. In visual effects, we use exaggeration slightly differently in the way that we animate our characters or anthropomorphize our animals. It’s all about the subtlety of a character and knowing when you have broken the ‘reality.’

Where the Wild Things Are is a hybrid of practical and digital effects when it comes to the facial performances of the animals. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Filmmaker Brad Bird has the ability to seamlessly shift from animation to live-action, whether it be The Incredibles 2 or Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. (Images courtesy of Disney/Pixar and Paramount Pictures)

“Drawing has become as important in live-action features as it is in CG animated features,” continues Burgess. “We use custom software that allows the animator to draw over work in dailies to make sure that a character or creature remains ‘on model.’ Animation principles [arcs, squash and stretch] are as important in live-action, and sometimes it’s easier and quicker to draw over the work and show the animator than to trial and error with Maya. A good pose is as important in visual effects. At the end of the day, we are all trying to tell the story in the easiest and clearest way possible. Clarity of pose is the most important ingredient when you’re trying to tell a story in under two hours. Appeal is everything, isn’t it? How much you can identify or love a character is steeped in how appealing the character is.”

From Where the Wild Things Are. Michael Eames views CG animation in live-action as part of the evolution of filmmaking that seeks to tell stories in the best possible way. (Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

The Netflix series The Crown relies on invisible effects work produced by visual effects vendors like Framestore shown here. (Image courtesy of Netflix)

“When you’re in the animation business you are a student of motion. You’re always trying to carve away at the artificiality of what you’re doing to find the reality that feels natural. I do the same thing in film — I just use people instead of digital characters. I’m conscious of poses and silhouettes, the kinds of things that animators would think about. … Coming from animation helps with making the transition to a film set because it’s working with groups of artists and having them not hate you.”

—Tim Miller, Visual Effects Supervisor/ Owner, Blur Studio

“A lot of the principles of animation and filmmaking boil down to having an aesthetic sensibility and a clear idea on how to best tell a story using sound and vision,” believes Michael Eames, Global Director of Animation at Framestore. “Animators often use exaggerated poses or actions in a performance to help put a particular story point across. Whether the look is stylized and perhaps extreme, or realistic and more subtle, the principle is the same – just more a matter of degree as to how you apply it. Thinking about stylized animation working in the context of live action, we recently did Tom and Jerry, which is a hybrid. We wanted to find a balance between a typically stylized, almost flat-looking classic 2D cartoon in an environment that is real. One technique we used to help marry the two worlds was to apply a directional rim light that connected to the direction of light in the real plate.”

For Eames, one of the best collaborative experiences with a filmmaker occurred during the making of Where the Wild Things Are with Spike Jonze. “They started out with a group of actors voicing the parts in the space that represented the environment. A given scene would play out in the film. Spike then selected those tracks and played them on set to the costumed performers, to drive their physical performance,” explains Eames. “The bit that didn’t work was the facial performance because it needed to be visceral and delicate. Animation came in and listened to voice recordings, watched the actors in suit, and added to the facial performance by replacing the entire face in CG. That was a perfect combination of three different things that led to one final result. When people complain about CG animation stealing away their thunder, it’s not that. It’s the evolution of filmmaking. Whatever it takes, as long as we’re serving the story in the best possible way.”
LENNY LIPTON: PROJECTING HISTORY THROUGH THE MAGIC LANTERN October 6,2021

By TREVOR HOGG

Images courtesy of Lenny Lipton, except where noted.

Lenny Lipton, Author/Filmmaker/Inventor

The cover of The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era by Lenny Lipton (Springer).

Louis and Auguste Lumière invented the film camera known as the Cinématographe that also functioned as a photo developer and projector.

A poem left in the typewriter belonging to Cornell University classmate Peter Yarrow, who would in turn compose accompanying music, had a huge impact on Lenny Lipton, as the song royalties for “Puff the Magic Dragon” have provided a lifetime of financial security. “It’s a weird story but true!” notes Lipton, who spent a decade-long odyssey of researching and writing his homage to cinematic innovators, titled The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era. Lipton is a kindred spirit, being a pioneer of stereography and founding the StereoGraphics Corporation in 1980, which two decades later was acquired by Real D Cinema. The physics graduate developed the first electronic stereoscopic visualization eyewear known as CrystalEyes, which has been used for molecular modeling, aerial mapping, and to remotely drive the Mars Rovers. “I saw 3D movies and comic books as a kid in the early 1950s which got me interested in the stereographic medium.

“When I approached Springer, I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” remarks Lipton. “I wanted a low-cost book that was one volume and had a lot of color. They sent me samples of their books that were beautiful. I found a great editor in Sam Harrison and we worked on the book together. I thought I was done, but you see the book differently when you’re starting to lay it out. No matter how smart you are there are things that you can’t envision. I kept finding things that I could fix and illustrations to be improved.

During the 18 months of working with Sam and the production department, I made 9,000 changes to the manuscript that were big and little. I’m a much better copy editor than a proofreader!”

Considered to be the inventor of special effects in movies, Georges Méliès is pictured in his studio located in Montreuil, France circa 1897.

“The Cinema in Flux calls upon my years of doing what I did. I became a self-taught filmmaker and an entrepreneur. I raised a lot of money for my company; I ran it, registered numerous patents, and had a lot of experience in product development. It was almost like I was training to write this. I do empathize with the inventors and their struggles. It is a book about inventors. I don’t know how anybody becomes an inventor. You’re probably wired that way at birth.”

—Lenny Lipton, Author of The Cinema in Flux

Appropriately, a Hollywood icon known for developing and producing technology to improve the theatrical experience wrote the foreword. “I’m closer to Douglas Trumbull than most people in the world in terms of our careers. I wished that he lived in Los Angeles, but we do see each other often. We are a lot alike.” There is a personal connection to the subject matter. “That’s the beautiful thing about it. The Cinema in Flux calls upon my years of doing what I did. I became a self-taught filmmaker and an entrepreneur. I raised a lot of money for my company; I ran it, registered numerous patents, and had a lot of experience in product development. It was almost like I was training to write this. I do empathize with the inventors and their struggles. It is a book about inventors. I don’t know how anybody becomes an inventor. You’re probably wired that way at birth.”

A color frame from A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès is compared to a hand-colored Magic Lantern slide.

Part of the motive to write The Cinema in Flux for Lipton was to correct a misconception about the history of cinema. “There has been a tendency in the past for film scholars to think that everything before Thomas Edison’s camera and the Lumières’ Cinématographe is prehistory. But I didn’t view it that way. The real start of what today we consider to be movies occurred on 1659 with [Dutch physicist] Christiaan Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern. Very rapidly people learned how to produce movies and do shows. I would define movies as the projection of moving images on a screen.” The origin of the book occurred during the week of Christmas in 2009. “I got invited to do a talk on stereoscopic cinema at La Cinémathèque française in Paris and was lucky enough to arrive at a moment where they were having an exhibit in their museum about the magic lantern and had demonstrations of the technology. At that time, I didn’t know I was going to write about it.

“I had no idea what the outcome would be,” admits Lipton. “The text is about 400,000 words and the book is 800 pages. I didn’t have an outline. I just headed down the road.” The historical narrative is divided into three eras: Glass Cinema, Celluloid Cinema, and Television and the Digital Cinema. “It didn’t occur to me to use that classification system until I had been working on the book for five years. I had a single Word file that was gigantic. It became a good way to write a book like this because I was able to easily search the whole file to avoid redundancies and put things in a proper order. I had one slim notebook with notes in it. I bought about 400 books. I can’t say that I understood the subject well. I needed time to digest it. I had to keep making mistakes and correcting them. I went to the Margaret Herrick Library, which is part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was fortunate to have access to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers digital library, in particular the journals that they began publishing in 1916. It’s a primary source, and every source has a bibliography where you get to more sources. The Library of Congress has about 50 to 60 years of motion picture periodicals. I also read about glass and celluloid.

By using his trolley camera for locomotion studies Étienne-Jules Marey pioneered the technique of performance capture.

Even the Lumière brothers were experimenting with 3D by creating viewing eyewear for their 35mm horizontal-traveling stereo format.

A Magic Lantern created by Ernest Plank circa 1990.

The ground floor of the West Orange, New Jersey lab belonging to renowned inventor Thomas Edison.

“There has been a tendency in the past for film scholars to think that everything before Thomas Edison’s camera and the Lumières’ Cinématographe is prehistory. But I didn’t view it that way. The real start of what today we consider to be movies occurred on 1659 with [Dutch physicist] Christiaan Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern. Very rapidly people learned how to produce movies and do shows.”

—Lenny Lipton, Author of The Cinema in Flux

“I understand this technology and tried to explain it in my own words to the reader,” notes Lipton. “The vast majority of quotes in the book have a historical importance that gives some insight into the inventor’s process and state of mind. Even when the inventor was lying, I thought that was interesting too.” The project provided an opportunity to recognize underappreciated contributions. “For the most part my account celebrates the best-known inventors who were by prior scholars attributed correctly.” There are certain controversial figures like Thomas Edison. “The problem with Edison is by inventing the phonograph, an electronical distribution system, a very good lightbulb, and the first motion picture camera, he invented modern entertainment, and there is no one who can take it away from him. The guy who is most overlooked is Theodore Case who essentially invented optical sound on film as it was used for almost a century. His technology was licensed to Western Electric which took the lion’s share of the credit.”

An overlooked contributor to the technical advancements of motion pictures is Theodore Case who invented optical sound on film.

Inventor Erich Kästner with his prototype of the ARRIFLEX 35 in 1937

IMAX co-founder Graeme Ferguson operating a 15 perf 70mm camera.

Some of the significant inventions were not intended to be applied to cinema. “The guys who were working on celluloid for film were thinking about photography and snapshots,” notes Lipton. “The most interesting example of a serendipitous invention that profoundly influenced cinema is Joseph Plateau and the phenakistoscope. It is like a zoetrope. It is a contraption that you can spin and has slits. You look into a slit, then into a mirror and see a moving image. That was invented in about 1832, and it had nothing to do with cinema and the projection of images. But for the next 50 years, inventors applied that discovery of apparent motion and the phenakistoscope technology to the magic lantern. Celluloid cinema, which was with us for most of the recent history of cinema, is a hybrid of the phenakistoscope and magic lantern. You can produce the illusion of moving images by properly projecting or presenting frames that are incrementally different. Another curious aspect was that Joseph Plateau was going blind when he made the discovery.”

The Cinema in Flux is an overview of the technological advancements in cinema. “It’s a sprawling subject,” observes Lipton. “Possibly any one of those chapters could have been turned into a book of this length, but I couldn’t do that. What we called cinema from the get-go included the projection of motion with sound and color.

Stanley Kubrick and Garrett Brown shooting The Shining with a Steadicam.

Different ways to present movies to audiences, such as utilizing a geodesic dome rather than a traditional flat theatrical screen.

A phenakistoscope disc was used to create the illusion of motion from still images

3ality stereoscopic rig was used to shoot Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

“The vast majority of quotes in the book have a historical importance that gives some insight into the inventor’s process and state of mind. Even when the inventor was lying, I thought that was interesting too. For the most part my account celebrates the best-known inventors who were by prior scholars attributed correctly.”

—Lenny Lipton, Author of The Cinema in Flux

By 1790, reasonably bright and decent-sized painted color slides were being projected that had narrators, musicians and sound-effects people. Without getting into esoteric disciplines like costume design, makeup and visual effects, I thought that the broad characteristics of cinema that existed from inception were motion, color and sound. Therefore, I needed to explore the evolution of those technologies through 350 years.” The advances in technology have caused the cinematic language to evolve.

Picture editing literally went from being a cut-and-paste process to footage being digitally shifted around inside of a computer courtesy of software programs such as Avid Media Composer.

A restored autochrome portrait of Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood, circa 1917-1918. (Image courtesy of George Eastman House/Charles Zoller/The Image Works)

“The most dramatic thing that I can think of is the advances in digital cinema, which has had a profound effect on motion picture production and exhibition.” The next major stage for cinema may well be the shift from audience members being passive to active participants, much like video games and virtual reality. “In the long run [that] technology will become feasible. In the short run I don’t know.”

As to whether inventors and their inventions are a product of the period in which they live, Lipton responds, “There is a current that runs through these inventors and maybe all inventors. There is an ornery tenaciousness to many inventors. Often when people invent something, their vision of how it will be deployed is different from the rest of the world. Edison gets credit for inventing the research lab, which is maybe one of his greatest inventions. The damnedest thing is after the research lab became part of corporate entities, they started calling inventors ‘engineers.’ In some cases, if a guy was highly qualified, he’d be called a scientist. Corporations would never call an employee an inventor, and there is a good reason for that. The term inventor implies ownership. Corporations don’t want inventors to have that. The idea of science as a separate discipline doesn’t occur until the mid-19^thcentury. Most of the people I write about in the early days, which until relatively recently, I describe as autodidact, people who taught themselves, or polymaths or both. Polymaths are masters of many disciplines. The idea of a specialty is a new idea. There aren’t many maverick independent inventors in the world.

“I have to tell you that if I wasn’t emotional and didn’t have strong feelings [about the subject matter], I couldn’t have written this book,” reflects Lipton. “I had to focus on the chemistry and the science because if you don’t have any of it then you don’t have movies. A lot of us in the motion picture industry don’t know the history of the technology, so I hope that the book will be a good read for them. It is a small contribution to humanity and human intelligence to be able to provide a book like this because I’m thankful of people who wrote the books, patents and articles; I believe in that tradition. I can only thank God that I had the wherewithal to do it. If we don’t support and help eccentric people who are working on strange projects then we will be less human.”
GAME ON: FREE GUY VFX ANCHORS BOTH ACTUAL AND SIMULACRUM REALITIES October 6,2021

By KEVIN H. MARTIN

Images courtesy of 20th Century Studios and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Video-game character Guy (Ryan Reynolds) squares off against an array of other gaming denizens. Guy’s growing awareness of his own nature, revealed by programmer Millie (Jodie Comer), fuels his desire to save his Free City pseudo-world from the game’s publisher (Taika Waititi).

The hero who wakes up to realize his existence is limited to a virtual or controlled-from-outside reality has become something of a staple in genre filmmaking, popularized by The Matrix and The Truman Show, to name just two such entries. While Free Guy treads similar ground, its protagonist Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is no world-class hacker or unwitting reality-show star, but just a bank teller, cheerfully plodding through a ritualized daily routine that involves his Free City surroundings – the setting for a video game of the same name – suffering massive devastation and violence. Once awakened to the situation, Guy must step up his own game to stop the program’s publisher from shutting down Free City permanently.

Director Shawn Levy has a long history with VFX-heavy projects ranging from the first two Night at the Museum installments to Real Steel and several episodes of the Stranger Things series, along with a remake of Starman in the works, plus he intends to re-team with Reynolds on a time-travel project for Netflix. To look after the VFX end of things, he chose Visual Effects Supervisor Swen Gillberg, whose past experience spans both real-world (Flags of Our Fathers, A Beautiful Mind) and fantasy environs (Jack the Giant Slayer and a trio of recent MCU features).

Gillberg joined Free Guy’s production team in December 2018, after the arrival of Production Designer Ethan Tobman. “Ethan had already done some design work on Free City,” Gillberg recalls. “But there was real evolution to things and, design-wise, it was a group effort going well into the next year to develop how things looked in this world. When our DP George Richmond came on, he had a great idea: shoot the real world on 4-perf anamorphic, but handle the gaming section with ARRI 65 and big, sharp spherical lenses to give them a very different look.”

Live action was accomplished in Boston between May and August of 2019. Direct Dimensions LiDar scanned most locations and set during the live-action shoot in Boston, which featured extensive practical work by Special Effects Supervisor Dan Sudick.

“There’s ‘Reality,’ which is present-day, supposedly set in Seattle. Then, inside Free City, you see our gaming world – a photoreal emulation of a real-world game – which is where most of the movie and most of the VFX take place. But there are also views of a lower-res Free City, as seen on monitor screens when real-world people, including the villain [Taika Waititi], who works in a gaming company, play Free City.”

—Swen Gillberg, Visual Effects Supervisor

Live-action was accomplished in Boston between May and August of 2019, with Gillberg’s old friend Ron Underdahl acting as lead for the bevy of data wranglers. “A company that I’ve used many times in the past, Direct Dimensions, LiDared pretty much everything,” he notes. “There were HDRs for every setup and lots and lots of panels to be done, so still photography was a big aspect throughout. Special Effects Supervisor Dan Sudick was handling floor effects, so the in-camera work was very solid.” Gillberg elected to work with a total of 11 vendors: Scanline VFX, Digital Domain and ILM Singapore were primaries, aided by Halon (which shared previs duties with DD), BOT VFX, capital T, Lola Visual Effects, Mammal Studios and Raynault VFX.

Unlike Tron and most other films exploring this dual-worlds concept, Free Guy actually required three levels of reality. “There’s ‘Reality,’ which is present-day, supposedly set in Seattle,” says Gillberg. “Then, inside Free City, you see our gaming world – a photoreal emulation of a real-world game – which is where most of the movie and most of the VFX take place. But there are also views of a lower-res Free City, as seen on monitor screens when real-world people, including the villain [Taika Waititi], who works in a gaming company, play Free City.

“There was a ton of work involved in making that video game version of the gaming world,” Gillberg relates, “and it had to really hold up when the camera pushes in past the real-world characters to the screen where we see versions of our Free City characters, before transitioning into Ryan and the other actors. It was a fine line for us to walk. While the game versions of their characters did have to be immediately recognizable and compelling, we didn’t want the video game versions of Ryan and the others to look too real, which meant maintaining some contrast between the video game versions and the characters themselves. So, we started that process by figuring out what the video game itself should look like. Did we want something looking more like Warcraft, or other games that are even more realistic?”

Levy’s input was often sought throughout look development. “Shawn wanted the game versions to be recognizable enough that the audience could empathize, even when we’re only seeing them on this gaming screen,” reports Gillberg. “I showed Shawn a range of video games, and based on that we settled on a look that was kind of a cinematic version of Grand Theft Auto. All of the movement of the characters would be at a full mocap level rather than canned animation.

Jodie Comer (Molotov Girl) and Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy.

Guy’s unvarying daily routine as a bank teller is disrupted when, after donning a special pair of glasses, the entirety of the ‘Bank Robbery’ gaming world set in Free City is revealed to him.

“There was a ton of work involved in making that video game version of the gaming world, and it had to really hold up when the camera pushes in past the real-world characters to the screen where we see versions of our Free City characters, before transitioning into Ryan and the other actors. It was a fine line for us to walk. While the game versions of their characters did have to be immediately recognizable and compelling, we didn’t want the video game versions of Ryan and the others to look too real, which meant maintaining some contrast between the video game versions and the characters themselves.”

—Swen Gillberg, Visual Effects Supervisor

This look brought with it more definition in the emoting talking faces. At first we were going to limit the talking to a simple hinged jaw, but that reduced emotional engagement. To keep a more compelling look, we enhanced the face rigs on the game. There isn’t much talking going on, so instead of head cams we did witness cams. The facial rigs were essentially keyframed, while the hand and body motion was motion-captured.”

In addition to handling all shots of the video game version of Free City, Digital Domain also took on some ‘actual’ Free City scenes. “VFX Supervisor Nikos Kalaitzidis oversaw all that,” notes Gillberg, “which included the opening oner plus a construction site. The real-world game programmers keep reprogramming the Free City environment to obstruct Guy’s passage, so he has to deal with obstacles like stairs moving around.”

Another impediment faced by Guy as he attempts to save the day was handled by Scanline VFX Supervisor Bryan Grill. “The villain decides to stop Guy’s orange car by squeezing the street in on both sides to crush the vehicle between buildings,” says Gillberg. Scanline was also responsible for all of the building destruction. “We went through a development stage to determine the right look for destruction in the video game world, which meant figuring out whether these collapsing buildings were just shells, or was there firmature? It took tons of artwork and iterations before finally winding up with something that has all the gravitas and real emotional impact of a genuine building collapse, but still kept a video game look to things. Pieces fall in a very naturalistic way, but then as they fall, they rotate around their own center of gravity and then kind of suck into themselves. That look for the debris, which also included a wire-frame kind of blue glow, kept it well away from 9/11 photorealism, but there was still enough weight to it that audiences would care when seeing this world being destructed.”

One early design concept that stuck postulated a ‘box’ outside of the gaming world. “This box was all blue skies and white clouds,” Gillberg notes, “so when the buildings blow up, you can see this blue sky behind them – even when the camera is up high looking down at the ground!”

“After we finished shooting, there were multiple huge pushes through the end of 2019 to produce really good-looking temps,” Gillberg says. “Shawn really wanted the test screenings to have decent visual effects in them, so we completed the screening VFX at a higher-[than-usual] level, but then would abandon those and go back to another approach for the real finals. DD was originally assigned to doing previs for the construction site sequence, but at that time lacked bandwidth, so they rendered all of their previs through a game engine in Unreal. This let us quickly evaluate the effects and how they impacted the story, so the screening process definitely led to a mix of lost and gained shots between the tests and when we completed our finals.”

Taika Waititi (Antoine), Utkarsh Ambudkar (Mouser) and Joe Kerry (Keys) in Free Guy.

Since post had not fully ramped up when COVID hit, there was a scarcity of finals as of February 2020. “That meant the bulk of the work had to get done during lockdown,” admits Gillberg. “But there were a couple of weeks when it looked like everybody would be going home, as there was a fair amount of pressure to shut the whole thing down. I lobbied heavily against that, feeling there was a good body of talented individuals already on board and that it would be a shame to lose them, so we didn’t ever completely stop. First off, it was a matter of coming up with different protocols in order to work from home. That involved many VPN tunnels into our server on the FOX lot, to establish encrypted links. We set up a screening room at Shawn’s house, which I could drive remotely. Being able to work straight through the heart of the lockdown pleased me greatly, as it let us all stay focused while still having a lot of fun, trying out lots of new ideas.”

While the live-action cinematography had relied upon a single real-world LUT and another pair for the virtual gaming world, the looks were refined significantly during digital grading. “We’d re-balance sequences while retaining the general tone,” says Gillberg. “In our final grade, I worked with George and colorist Skip Kimball, and we let the real world go toward more of a cool-blue feel while pushing the gaming world look to become even more colorful.”

Being free from the constraints of traditional reality for the Free City scenes proved to be a strange attraction for Gillberg and his collaborators. “We had this premise of being in a video game world where anything goes,” observes Gillberg, “and that was a ton of fun for us to play with. I’ll give you an example: we’d be doing reviews with Shawn and somebody would ask, ‘What does this scene need?’ And somebody else might say, ‘This scene needs a dinosaur!’ And the thing here is, we can add that without worrying about the character not reacting to it, because for this clueless bank teller, it is normal to see that crazy stuff happen constantly in this violent world. We got to put in all kinds of video game vehicles and characters from other real games for people to recognize.” That creative rush did have limits, however. “We pushed until I added a TIE fighter, at which point I got told, ‘Stop!’”

Live action in the real world was differentiated visually by DP George Richmond, who shot those scenes in 4-perf anamorphic, while Free City sequences were captured with spherical lenses using the ARRI 65. To create more of a distinction between Free City and the world outside, Gillberg worked with cinematographer and colorist Skip Kimball in the DI to create a more cool-blue monochromatic feel in the latter while pushing the gaming world in a more colorful direction.

Scanline’s work in destroying various buildings had to strike a balance between real-world impact and a video-game feel, with objects falling at a naturalistic speed while tumbling and vanishing in a showier way. The faux city’s design reflected the idea of a blue-sky-and-white-clouds box surrounding all, so when Free City is damaged, the ‘sky’ shows through beneath, even in views of the ground.

Homeves-admin2021-09-08T14:51:08-07:00

October 2021

Calendar of Events

Calendar of Events
Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
					1	2 Screening Screening – SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS in 3D (Montreal) Montréal
3	4	5 Screening VES New Zealand – THE TOMORROW WAR Miramar, Wellington	6 Screening Screening – EIFFEL (Paris) La Plaine Saint-Denis	7	8	9
10	11	12 Screening James Bond Screening on the biggest IMAX screen in Leonberg Leonberg	13	14	15 Event, Networking VES LA – Global SPEED Networking Series #3	16 Event, Networking VES India – Global SPEED Networking Series Event, Networking VES Australia – Global SPEED Networking Event Screening Screening – NO TIME TO DIE (Montreal) Montréal Event, Networking VES New Zealand – Global SPEED Networking Event Screening ADL – CANCELLED – BECOMING COUSTEAU
17 Conference VES Members Register FREE for VIEW Conference 2021 Screening VES NZ – The Electrical Life of Louis Wain Screening Miramar, Wellington	18 Conference VES Members Register FREE for VIEW Conference 2021	19 Conference VES Members Register FREE for VIEW Conference 2021 Screening ADL – NETFLIX – THE HARDER THEY FALL Screening Screening – NO TIME TO DIE (London) London Screening VES NZ – The Harder They Fall Screening Miramar, Wellington	20 Conference VES Members Register FREE for VIEW Conference 2021 Screening ADL – COMING 2 AMERICA	21 Conference VES Members Register FREE for VIEW Conference 2021 Party VES NY Fall Pub Night Brooklyn Pub Night Soirée Pub MTL – 21 octobre / MTL Pub Night – October 21st Montréal	22 Conference VES Members Register FREE for VIEW Conference 2021	23 Screening SYD – PASSING Screening Chippendale Screening Screening – NO TIME TO DIE (Toronto) Toronto
24 Screening SYD – THE FIRST WAVE Screening Chippendale Screening Screening – DUNE (Atlanta) Roswell	25	26	27 Screening SYD – VAL Screening Chippendale Screening VES-WA – No Time to Die Private Watch Party! Bellevue	28 Screening VES LA – Halloween Movie Night Santa Monica	29 Screening – NO TIME TO DIE (New York) New York	30 Screening SYD – CODA Screening Chippendale Screening Screening – NO TIME TO DIE (Los Angeles) Los Angeles
31 Screening SYD – ROADRUNNER Screening Chippendale

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Visit VFX Voice

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures.

The Atreides’ ornithopters incorporate the articulated wings described in Frank Herbert’s novel. Production opted for the flapping wings to flutter like an insect in flight.

The villainous Harkonnens arrive at Arrakeen, their ships offering a distinct contrast to the Atreides’ Ornithopters in both configuration and flight mode.

The Atreides’ ornithopters incorporate the articulated wings described in Frank Herbert’s novel. Production opted for the flapping wings to flutter like an insect in flight.

A 400-ton crane was used to fly the larger 13-ton ornithopters in the desert. For landings, separate concrete pads had to be poured for the 12-meter mockup and its somewhat smaller cousin. CG wings were added for takeoffs and landings.

DNEG Vancouver and DNEG Montreal handled the majority of Dune’s 2,000 shots, though an in-house crew took on additional work, as did Rodeo FX.

Visual challenges ranged from epic ground battles to massive space-going vessels.

A year of close collaboration between director and production designer resulted in conceptual art so detailed that it could be used as a guide for construction by SFX, VFX, costuming and art departments. The Arrakeen city conveys both an expansive and realistic lived-in look.

Terrain surrounding the city of Arrakeen was based on scanned-in aerial plate photography from the Middle East location shoot

Partial sets erected on the Budapest backlot were often augmented with CG set extensions.

The worm ingests both vehicles and unfortunate humans. The sandworm design featured a mix of textures that included armor-like plating and fleshy segments, which facilitated a range of accordion-like articulations.

Ellen Poon, Visual Effects Supervisor/Visual Effects Producer

More articulation was given to the Nadja doll, which is a combination of digital effects and puppeteering. (Images courtesy of FX Network.)

The exterior of the digital asset for the vampire mansion.

The actual mansion composited with the digital asset.

Kristen Schaal portrays The Guide from the Vampire Council who has ability to shapeshift from human to smoke and vice versa.

The idea was that smoke is fully controlled so The Guide can bring the smoke back to her body or dissipate it away based on the action that she does.

The Cloak of Duplication allows the wearer to shapeshift into someone else.

A special particle system was created in Houdini for the transformation caused by the Cloak of Duplication.

For the Wolf-Bat to be believable it was important to get the anatomy correct.

The Wolf-Bat makes an appearance in Episode 303.

An overhead lighting rig is installed on the LED wall stage.

Zoic Studios Creative Director and Visual Effects Supervisor Julien Brami reviews a real-time scene on a laptop.

Zoic Studios tests the LED wall that was set up at its Culver City, California location.

A hand-held test-shoot against an LED wall environment.

The LED wall, provided to Zoic on loan from Fuse Technical Group, gave the visual effects studio a chance to test several shooting scenarios.

The LED wall, a ROE Black Pearl 2, was 28 tiles wide and 8 tiles high.

An on-set tracking system utilizing Vive controllers allowed for camera movement and real-time re-adjustment of the imagery on the LED wall.

Thoughts on an LED Wall Future

LED panels with a 2.8mm pixel pitch made up the wall.

Zoic Studios has ultimately established a ‘Real-Time Group’ at the studio to handle virtual production and real-time game-engine solutions to VFX work.

Filming the ‘Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare’ spot featuring YouTuber Preston Blaine Arsement, left.

Preston Blaine Arsement performs on the LED wall set.

An Unreal Engine view of the Gundam character for the ‘Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare’ commercial.

The video village, or ‘brain bar’ area of the LED wall stage, during filming of the Gundam commercial at Zoic.

Images courtesy of Aaron Sims Creative, except where noted.

A concept for the Demogorgon creature in Stranger Things by Aaron Sims Creative (ASC). (Image copyright © 2016 Netflix)

Aaron Sims, founder of Aaron Sims Creative.

Sims paints on a puppet used during the filming of Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Unreal Engine rendering of the DIVE cave environment.

An Unreal Engine screenshot of one of the cave environments for DIVE. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

Underwater divers in the film. ASC has explored live motion capture to help bring the divers to life. (Image courtesy Epic Games)

Men In Black character Mikey, in reference maquette form, was one of the characters Aaron Sims worked on at Rick Baker’s Cinnovation for the 1997 film.

A look at a DIVE spider creature in an Unreal Engine scene. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

Working out how to realize underwater environments for DIVE has involved significant experimentation from ASC.

The underwater world of DIVE will be populated with sea creatures – large and small – and divers.

Test rendering of one of the strange underwater creatures to be featured in DIVE.

For the early release of Unreal Engine 5, ASC was involved in crafting the Valley of the Ancient demo project featuring a character called the Ancient One. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

One of the other new tools used by ASC for the Valley of the Ancient animation was the Full-body IK (FBIK) Solver in Unreal Engine. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

The Ancient One’s animations were authored by ASC in the Unreal Editor using Control Rig and Sequencer. (Image courtesy of Epic Games)

Images courtesy of Doug Chiang.

Doug Chiang, Vice President and Executive Creative Director, Star Wars, ILM

A photo of Doug Chiang taken before his family moved from Taiwan to Michigan.

The Chiang family in Michigan in 1968. From left: James, Doug, Sidney, Lisa and Patricia.

Along recreating the world-building of Star Wars, Chiang had to factor in health and safety measures when conceptualizing the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme parks.

Chiang made a series of short films with Star Wars being a significant influence.

A big thrill for Chiang was being hired by George Lucas to be the visual effects production designer for the Star Wars prequels.

A showcase of the different tools that Chiang utilizes to produce his illustrations.

Chiang collaborating with Model Supervisor Steve Gawley in 1997 on Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

Chiang was able to meet his film idol, Ray Harryhausen.

A dramatic action sequence in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is the pod race.

On the set of The Mandalorian making sure that everything is visually correct.

A detailed cockpit layout for a Naboo ship that has an artisan aesthetic.

For Chiang, the key to creating effective concepts, such as for the Monopod, is choosing shapes that can be quickly understood by the audience.

The Mandalorian duo of Din Djarin and Grogu aka Baby Yoda through the eyes of Doug Chiang.

Chiang examines the Pod Hanger miniature constructed for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

A Ravinak that inhabits the frigid planet of Maldo Kreis attacks the Razor Crest.

Robotman (Brendan Fraser), Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero), Cyborg (Joivan Wade) and Elasti-Girl (April Bowlby) spend some quality time with one another. (Photo: Bob Mahoney/HBO Max)

Elasti-Girl (April Bowlby) extends her fingers to dramatically increase her reach. (Image courtesy of HBO Max)

When it comes to Cyborg (Joivan Wade) and Robotman (Brendan Fraser) there is a heavier reliance on practical effects for their characters. (Photo: Bob Mahoney/HBO Max)

The plate photography, animation and final lighting of the Moonscape encounter in Episode 301 between Dorothy Spinner (Abigail Monterey) and the Candlemaker (Lex Lang). (Images courtesy of HBO Max and Encore VFX)

Ideas from the comic books are re-imagined to fit into the real world, such as the Candlemaker. (Images courtesy of HBO Max and Encore VFX)

Cyborg (Joivan Wade) watches Elasti-Girl (April Bowlby) working on controlling her powers. (Image courtesy of HBO Max)

Part of the comedic appeal of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were the surreal cut-out animation segments created by Terry Gilliam. (Image courtesy of Python (Monty) Pictures Limited)

Originally, The Drowned Giant was meant to be a live-action short by Tim Miller, before landing on Netflix. (Image courtesy of Netflix)

Robert Legato used live-action camera techniques when making The Jungle Book with Jon Favreau. (Image courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures)

Tim Miller was conscious of poses and silhouettes when composing shots for Terminator: Dark Fate. (Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures)

Progression imagery for the scene when Violet creates a forcefield to shield her family from an explosion in The Incredibles 2. (Images courtesy of Disney/Pixar)

Michael Eames enjoyed collaborating with filmmaker Spike Jonze on Where the Wild Things Are. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)