Hasta La Motion!

PlayStation has teamed up with Nike Basketball and NBA All-Star Paul George on a special collaboration for his next signature shoe drop. Introducing the PG-2 “PlayStation” colorway!

Available globally on February 10th, 2018. For more information on the release, download the Nike SNRKS app. https://www.nike.com/launch/

Film : Death Wish
Quand il ne sauve pas des vies, Paul Kersey, chirurgien urgentiste, mène une vie de rêve, en famille, dans les beaux quartiers de Chicago… Jusqu’au jour où tout bascule. Sa femme est sauvagement tuée lors d’un cambriolage qui tourne mal… Sa fille de 18 ans est plongée dans le coma. Face à la lenteur de l’enquête, il se lance dans une chasse à l’homme sans merci.

Stars : Bruce Willis, Vincent D’Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue, Dean Norris, Kimberly Elise

Avec la nouvelle Forerunner 645 Music, accompagnez vos efforts en musique. Cette montre de running GPS peut stocker jusqu’à 500 chansons et intègre la solution de paiement sans contact Garmin Pay™, pour que vous n’ayez plus besoin d’emporter votre téléphone et votre portefeuille. Optimisez votre entraînement avec la fréquence cardiaque au poignet, l’analyse de votre foulée (Running Dynamics) et des fonctions de suivi des performances.
En savoir plus : https://buy.garmin.com/fr-FR/FR/p/612476

In the summer of 2007, Paramount Pictures ran a teaser trailer for an unnamed film with the release of Michael Bay’s Transformers. It featured a group of New York friends at a party who suddenly witness a massive explosion and then see the head of the Statute of Liberty careening down a city street.

That teaser, which went majorly viral, was of course later revealed to be for the Matt Reeves’ monster movie Cloverfield, produced by J.J. Abrams. Eventually the ‘found-footage’ film released in January 2008 would go on to be a huge hit. But there were two fascinating things about that intense teaser; the first is that it was filmed largely while the production was still in prep as a test-bed for the hand-held VFX requirements of the movie.

The second fascinating fact was that, although the majority of the visual effects for the final film were handled by Double Negative and Tippett Studio, the visual effects for the Statue of Liberty head teaser were done by Hammerhead Productions (a fact even mentioned in the official production notes).

It’s certainly not unusual for a different studio to tackle teaser trailer shots or for shots and elements to change from teaser to final – in fact, it happens regularly simply because these teasers need to get out there, quickly. But it is interesting to see what the differences were between the original teaser (above) and the final scene from the film (below).

Now, on the tenth anniversary of Cloverfield, and as a brand new viral marketing campaign for a third Cloverfield film directed by Julius Onah (once known as God Particle) gets underway, vfxblog revisits the original film’s teaser and the final Liberty head VFX from the film.

Directors and filmmakers often have enough work on their hands in just making their films without having to think about any promotion or marketing materials, including teaser trailers. In the case of Cloverfield, the teaser trailer served as both a major ‘tease’ about a mysterious film project and a test for actually achieving the kinds of visual effects that would be required for the mostly hand-held film.

Reeves explained more about the origins of the teaser trailer in a 2008 post-release interview with Rotten Tomatoes.

Well we had a twelve-week prep which is already very short for a movie of this size with all of its visual effects, but it was out of necessity for the amount of time we had to deliver the film. At that point, when we started, we didn’t have a script still. Drew and I had been meeting on weekends – he was writing on Lost during the week – and he was basically off during the first eight weeks of that prep writing the script while we were making the teaser trailer. We spent the first eight weeks of our twelve-week prep basically just making the teaser trailer.

And it became a kind-of think-tank workshop to try and figure out how to make the movie because we were shooting a handheld visual effects movie which is very unusual. Initially our visual effects people came to us and said, “Maybe you need to shoot this on Steadicam,” and I said, “If this movie is going to feel authentic to the people it’s being made for, they’re going to smell Steadicam in a second, we can’t do that.” So we used the teaser trailer to learn how to do that, but as a result we were only shooting the movie about a month after that so when the teaser trailer came out on July 4th we’d only been shooting for about a week and a half.

The visual effects for Cloverfield would ultimately be supervised by Kevin Blank, Eric Leven (Tippett Studio) and Michael Ellis (Double Negative). But given how quickly the teaser was required, the VFX for the Liberty head shots – based on plates filmed on the Paramount backlot – were handled by Hammerhead Productions, which worked on three shots, as detailed on their website.

If you look at the teaser and compare it to the Liberty work done for the final film by Double Negative, there’s certainly a couple of differences, and clearly DNEG had more time to add in more detail. This is explained by Ellis and DNEG CG supervisor David Vickery in an interview they did after the film’s release with Studio Daily.

Here’s Ellis on the kinds of things DNEG was able to add to the Liberty head shot for the final film.

Hammerhead [Studio City, CA] did the original shot. But they only had a couple of weeks to do it, and I don't think anyone was very happy with it. We reworked the shot, rebuilt the head, changed a lot of things about it, made it much more dynamic, and we also knew that [director] Matt [Reeves] wanted to focus on the head for quite a long time. In order for it to stand up to that scrutiny, we had to put a lot of work into it. We spent a long time creating the model itself, and then painting all the dust and the debris and the erosion and burnished copper showing through. We also spent a long time creating smoke sims and dust and debris thrown up from it as it goes by. We didn't use any practical elements for that. It was all simulations for the dust and dirt to make it work properly in the scene.

And Vickery provided more detail about just how much work went into the Liberty head.

It was one of the first shots we started work on, and pretty much the last one we finished. It's obviously such a massive American icon that everyone who saw the shot in any sort of working state had an opinion of how it should look. "Make the head a little bit bigger!" We got to version 70 or 80 of the shot by the time we got to the end of it. We painted and repainted the textures over and over again. It didn't matter how finished we thought it was. It always needed one more tweak to make it the perfect shot that it needed to be.

...

We started with Hammerhead's geometry. We got that, and then we found some amazing reference on the Internet, these huge 4K and 5K wide black-and-white stills of the Liberty head when it was being cleaned a few years ago, with scaffolding up all around it. We were able to see how all the panelwork was welded in places and riveted in others, and also the rivulets of grime – even after it had been cleaned it was obvious that it had weathering for a hundred years. As with all these things, there's a certain amount of creativity. When we started out, we built it perfectly to scale. But I think it's only about 11 ½ feet from ear to ear. And we put this in our scene and rendered it and everyone thought it was tiny. People were saying, "Ah, you can have 15 people standing in the crown!" I don't think that's true. People imagine it being bigger than it is. So it ended up being about 50 percent bigger than reality. By the time we chucked it down the street and bounced it off the walls and bent the crown and the spikes, it occupied a much smaller space anyway. But it was a really challenging shot for us, and really rewarding.

I have to say I distinctly recall seeing that teaser and loving it, and then later seeing Cloverfield in a packed theatre 10 years ago and everyone being absolutely buzzed afterwards – the film is a wild ride (I also remember thinking, ‘Those roto, tracking and matchmove artists are AMAZING…’).

So, I can’t wait to see what the next Cloverfield instalment has to offer. In the meantime, check out my earlier interview with visual effects supervisor Luke McDonald who oversaw the work on the ‘second’ Cloverfield film, 10 Cloverfield Lane.

And, finally, here’s a neat VFX featurette from the original Cloverfield DVD with a ton of making of footage from both DNEG and Tippett Studio.

NY VFXWAALA VFX supervisor Ranadheer Reddy

Last year, the occasion of Diwali witnessed a deafening din in the crackers’ tinnitus with the release of Golmaal Again, the fourth in Rohit Shetty’s slapstick comedy franchise, as Ajay Devgn and gang were back with a new set of shenanigans. The movie was a commercial success at the box-office while its funsies served to sweeten the festivities.

Packed with amazing visuals of hill-stations and grand sets, Mumbai-based NY VFXWAALA made sure the viewing was just as delightful an experience as it was hilarious. Around 100 artists from various departments worked in parallel to deliver 4300 shots in all, with Naveen Paul as the creative head. And one of the first things to catch a viewer’s attention was the picturesque landscape outside Devgn’s residence in the movie which VFX supervisor Ranadheer Reddy explains how it all came together. He says, “Gopal, the main character, was supposed to have his house near a railway station surrounding beautiful mountains. But in reality, it’s difficult to find such a location.”

“So we came up with the idea of constructing partial house set with the railway station reference to extend it later. Then as per the concept which was approved by the director, the sets were laid out. We took the references of Ooty railway stations and bungalows, before creating everything digitally – including the train,” he added.

Unlike its prequels, the latest Golmaal flick came with a sinister twist – their orphanage is apparently haunted by an impish spirit and our heroes will have to overcome their fears before unravelling some shocking secrets. Essayed by an earnest Parineeti Chopra, her character is out to avenge certain misdeeds of the past all the while throwing the lead quintet in a tizzy. Or rather, off a cliff!

Yes, one of the nervous moments in the film has Devgn and co. balance precariously on a cliff inside a jeep, and Reddy elaborates on the making of the amusing shot – “The scene was very important for the movie as it was turning point in the narrative of the story. The requirement was to show a jeep falling off a cliff in the midst of a thunder storm and it was difficult to shoot at an actual location. So we came up with a concept art and suggested to build a partial set in a studio. After the shoot, the entire location was digitally created.”

As the narrative wores on and Chopra’s character seeks redemption, that’s when the cream rises to the top. The theme gets darker and things murkier, for all the sins of the past catch up Niel Nitin Mukesh, the antagonist. A climax scene has him surrounded by an array of books levitating and then revolving as Khushi, the ghost, lays the final nail.

“The director wanted a supernatural effect to frighten the villain and bring drama to the climax. And since the scene was in a library, he suggested to use books as an element,” he revealed.

“All these floating books in the air, forming a lengthy path together was supposed to feel like a single character engulfing the villain and finally hitting him. Hence for this particular sequence, we made the entire library empty and filled with CGI books. Then to fit them in the environment, they were textured and lit accordingly.”

And that’s how one of the instrumental scenes of the film was shot! “We shot pictures of the books from the actual library for the reference,” he further added.

Filming across various sets in Hyderabad RFC is a challenge in itself, but the most dreaded one that Reddy feels was setting up the bungalow and orphanage side-by-side and pull off an Ooty. “For that, a huge set was constructed where we have to extend the set digitally and make it look like Ooty. That is the most challenging part of the movie for us to execute.”

Regardless, the scenes depicting the beautiful town in Tamil Nadu was apparently the best part to work on as it was a universal favourite among the crew, who also got to explore a lot of technical aspects in trying to re-create such serene surroundings.

Golmaal Again also features the kind of visual effects that wasn’t witnessed before in its earlier instalments, and Reddy gives a discernible assessment of it – “It was almost seven years since last Golmaal film released and since then, there have been lot of developments in VFX industry apropos of the approach, execution etc. Today, one knows no bounds with the aid of VFX as they can achieve whatever the director visualises.”

“So compared to previous Golmaal movies, this was bigger in scale and better in visuals as the approach was modified because of the technical advances available today and we are sure the next part of the Golmaal franchise will setup new benchmark in the series!” he reckons.

Some other important personnel to play a crucial role in VFX were compositing supervisor Intekhab Mahmood, line producer Sandeep Mane and production head Vinoth Ganesh.

NY VFXWAALA would later helm Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s beleaguered production Padmaavat, that’s finally cleared to release on Thursday, 25 January whilst also having a slew more projects on the plate. “We are also working on Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, RAID, Total Dhamaal, Junglee, Bal Thackeray biopic and also started with the pre-production of Tanaji and few other commercials,” he concludes.

The post NY VFXWAALA’s Ranadheer Reddy sheds light on ‘Golmaal Again’ visual effects appeared first on AnimationXpress.