Hasta La Motion!

As an Honorary Society, VES has led the way in promoting the incredible work of VFX artists but so far no one has stood up to lead the way on the business side of our business. No one has been able to speak out for unrepresented artists and facilities – or the craft as a whole – in any meaningful way.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the state of the visual effects industry is unsettled. Artists and visual effects companies are working longer hours for less income, delivering more amazing VFX under ever diminishing schedules, carrying larger financial burdens while others are profiting greatly from our work. As a result, there has been a lot of discussion recently about visual effects and its role in the entertainment industry. Many feel VFX artists are being taken advantage of and many others feel that VFX facilities are operating under unsustainable competitive restraints and profit margins. There have been calls for the creation of a VFX union to represent artists’ interests while others have pushed to create a trade organization for VFX facilities to better navigate today’s economic complexities.

As globalization intensifies, the process of creating visual effects is becoming more and more commoditized. Many wonder if the current business model for our industry is sustainable over the long term. Indeed, multiplying blogs are questioning why artists are forced to work crazy overtime hours for weeks or months on end without health benefits and VFX facilities are forced to take on shows at a loss just to keep their pipelines going and their doors open (they hope).

As good as we are at creating and manipulating amazing and ground breaking images, VFX professionals have done a terrible job of marketing ourselves to the business side of the industry. In short, no one has been able to harness the collective power of our efforts, talents, and passions into a strong, unified voice representing the industry as a whole.

VES may not have the power of collective bargaining, but we do have the power of a voice that’s 2,400 artists strong in 23 countries — and the VES Board of Directors has decided that now is the time to use it. We are the only viable organization that can speak to the needs and concerns of everyone involved in VFX to meet the challenges of a changing global industry and our place within it.

The work we do helps a lot of people make a lot of money, but it’s not being shared on an equal basis, nor is the respect that’s due us, especially considering that 44 of the top 50 films of all time are visual effects driven(http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegross).

For VFX ARTISTS (NOT computer geeks, NOT nerds), we do not receive the kind of respect that measures up to the role visual effects plays in the bottom line. And that’s expressed in a number of very obvious ways:

Credits – we are frequently listed incompletely and below where we should be in the crawl.
Benefits – in the US, you likely do not have ready access to health care. Or a vision plan. Or a pension plan. Outside the US, unless you’re a citizen of a country with national health care, you likely do not have health care coverage either. Or have the ability to build hours for your pension. Or are eligible to receive residuals. On a UNION show we are the ONLY department that is not union and therefore not receiving the same benefits as everyone else on the set.
Working conditions – if you are a freelancer (it’s generally agreed that almost half of all visual effects workers are freelancers), because you are not covered by collective bargaining, you may be forced to work 70 – 100 hour weeks for months on end in order to meet a delivery date. And for that privilege (in the U.S.) you will also likely be considered an Independent Contractor and have to file a 1099 – and then pay the employer’s share of the tax contribution.

Many small to medium-sized VFX companies around the world are struggling to survive (or have gone out of business – (RIP Café FX, Asylum, Illusion Arts and many others). By now almost everyone in the industry is familiar with the quote from a few years ago by an unidentified studio executive that if he ‘didn’t put at least one VFX company out of business on a show, he wasn’t doing his job.’

The concern exists at every level of the VFX chain — artist, facility and studio – how the impact of a “Fix” would affect the industry. Would it drive work elsewhere? Would it cut into the dwindling profit margins of VFX companies and put them out of business? Would it make VFX artists unhireable?

No matter one’s perspective, the interests of VFX artists can no longer be ignored.

In the coming weeks and months, VES will shine a spotlight on the issues facing the artists, facilities and studios by way of editorial pieces in the trades and VFX blogs, virtual Town Hall meetings, a VFX Artists’ Bill of Rights and a VFX CEO’s Forum (for the companies that actually provide the jobs that everyone is working so hard to safeguard).

There are solutions and we will find them.

We want the studios to make a respectable profit. We want facilities to survive and thrive in this ever changing fiscal environment. And we want artists to have high quality jobs with the commensurate amount of respect for the work they do on a daily basis. Therefore, VES will take the lead by organizing meetings with all participants in our industry in which we will make sure that all the issues discussed above are put on the table.

We are the VES and the time to step up has arrived. VES 2.0 is here and ready to lead.

If you’d like to share a comment with us you can contact us at eitherleadership@visualeffectssociety.com or through the leadership forum on the VES website at: http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/…adership-forum.

Stay tuned!

Eric Roth
VES Executive Director

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To create the effect, a variety of plaster forms simulating Simon Cowell’s legs, torso and head were detonated at high speed (1000-1500 fps) and shot on the Zoic Studios Stage.

A week later on a London sound stage, high-speed principal photography captured multiple angles of Simon Cowell, both static and spinning on a turntable, against an all-black environment with heavy backlight.

Additionally, Simon Cowell was 3D scanned to provide high-resolution textures for the eventual 3D model of his full body. Autodesk’s Maya was then used to fracture and explode the 3D model.

The compositing challenge was to integrate all the live-action elements from the explosion shoot, principal photography, and CG passes of Simon’s fracturing shell, individual body parts, and various “X” shapes, to create the illusion of Simon being formed from the ground up. The results were premiered during the Super Bowl and online via social media.

Zoic is an award-winning Digital Studio involved in producing high-end visual effects and animation for feature films, episodic television, commercials, videogames, and interactive media.

Spanning from visual effects, to live action production and specialty shooting, Zoic Studios’ imprint can be seen on “V”, “Human Target,” “Fringe”, and “True Blood”, spots for ESPN, Killzone 2, Mountain Dew, NASCAR, and Tour de France, as well as numerous gaming projects for EA, Activision, Pandemic and Sony. Zoic Studios has offices in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

TOOLS
Autodesk Maya & Flame
Autodesk’s Fracture-FX Plug-In
The Foundry’s Nuke

CREDITS
Client: FOX Broadcasting Company
Joe Earley, President, Marketing & Communications
Michael Vamosy, SVP, Design
Brian Dollenmayer, SVP, On Air Promo Creative
Dean Norris, SVP, Marketing & Special Projects, Special Ops.
Barry Alexander, VP, On Air Promo Creative
Justin Owens, VP, Broadcast Design
Julio Cabral, Creative Director, On Air Promo Creative
Golareh Safarian, Director, Special Projects & Production, Special Ops.

Production Company (US): Three (ONE) O
Executive Producer: Elaine R. Sibert
Director: Norry Niven

Production Company (UK): Park Village Productions
Executive Producer: Nikki Chapman
Senior Producer: Kate Phillips
Line Producer: Mikey Levelle

Visual Effects: Zoic Studios
Creative Director: Andrew Orloff
VFX supervisor: Doug Ludwig
CG Supervisor: Andy Wilkoff
Executive Producer: Gina Fiore
Head of Production: Barbara Genicoff
VFX Producer: Erin Hicke
Compositing Supervisor/Flame compositor: Chris Irving
Lead Compositor: Jon Chesson
Compositor: Johnny Renzulli, Rodrigo Dorsch
3D team: Lochlon Johnston, Chris Barischoff, Eric Rosenthal
VFX coordinator: Andrew Gilson
Zoic Stage – Production manager: James Turek
Zoic Stage Special Effects Supervisor: John Stirber
Zoic Stage – Director of Photography: Barry Walton
Zoic Engineering and Render Support: Saker Klippsten, Mike Romey, Paul Ghezzo, An Dang, Jason Bueno, Ramzi Daouk and Marshall Huffman
3D scanning Company: 4Dmax
3D fracture software provided by Fracture-FX

RELATED LINKS
www.zoicstudios.com

‘It is about escapism (explain the directors).* This is our invitation to our audience to enter another world.* We wanted to create a 360 pan around massive, epic landscapes populated by movie iconography. The journey takes us through a range of emotions – in a similar way that a movie would do. It’s a peek into movie moments.’

MPC was involved from an early stage, developing the Directors’ vision with mood frames to create the right feel for each of the scenes. *The five main genres were represented by different landscapes; desert for western, space for sci fi, city for romantic comedy, country for period drama and ice for family. *

To unveil each of the genres, a 360 degree camera move was chosen, passing through the different landscapes. *MPC was responsible for creating fully CG environments and rebuilding live action shots, all in stereo.

‘This was a job that required very specific timings and planning from 3D previz – explains 3D Supervisor Duncan McWilliam – If we could prove all the permutations worked in a previz accurate to real world scale scenarios then we knew the shoot would work…..give or take! We spent plenty of time here checking and double-checking, it felt like a NASA project. So when we turned up on set and it all worked and cut together just right the sense of satisfaction was great.’

A stereo camera on a circular dolly track was used to capture the live action footage on each of the locations. *One of the main challenges was keeping the images sharp while moving the camera at a high speed. To achieve this, the footage was slowed to half the speed and later interlaced to avoid strobing.

Sourcing paired lenses and calibration after every transit was essential as the alignment had to be so accurate. McWilliam comments ‘If there’s once really big thing I’ve learned from the stereo VFX supervision, it’s make sure you take a LIDAR scan of every location. The old ways of running around measuring the set no longer cut it and to track stereo back at the post house is bloody tricky without know dimensions of nearly everything.’

2D Supervisor Matthew Unwin explains; ‘Tracking all the scenes in stereo with a 20 second shot plus transition duration was proving challenging.* Creative briefs were constantly being updated so the team settled to develop the matte paintings and assets for the cg scenes. Now with real plates we were able to update our previs edit and solve the transitional issues.

The scale of each scene was the same physically but the creative scale needed to be different. The brief was to have an epic scale but in scenes such as space-scape the scenes looked flat in stereo. An impressive epic painting in the distance was all very well but in stereo it required foreground elements. We had spaceships but added swirling motion trails and then a foreground canyon edge with interactive dust to solve the problem.’

Stereographer Chris Vincze explains; ‘As the stereographer on the project my job was to create a 3D stereoscopic environment that matched the directors’ vision, giving the landscapes an epic quality that matched the movie references. The challenge was to strike a balance between having enough depth in the scene to make the 3D interesting, while keeping the scale feeling right. I wanted it to feel like looking out of a window at a real landscape. The challenge was to maintain consistency of depth throughout five different landscapes which were shot in different locations and make it feel like one changing landscape, so I worked extensively with the previs team to set an interaxial distance (the distance between the two cameras) that would work over all the landscapes.’



During the shoot, Chris Vincze worked with the camera rig tech to ensure the minimal amount of rig alignment errors and make sure that everything in the scene fit into the ‘depth budget’ defined by our stereo camera set-up, so everything would be comfortable to watch in the final film.

After the shoot, the plates had to be corrected to balance out any remaining camera rig alignment errors, and any differences between the two lenses. They also had to be colour corrected to account for the difference caused by the mirrored 3d rig.

This process was done in the Foundry’s Ocula plug-in.

Keeping the right scale meant that almost everything was set behind the screen, so to enhance the 3d effect MPC worked with the directors and cg teams to add in additional foreground elements.

For example the light trails on the spaceships, dust clouds, butterflies and pigeons were all added in to balance the ‘depth budget’ and make the scene more interesting in 3D. This was especially important in scenes such as the spacescape where the buildings in the city were huge and distant, so you wouldn’t see any parallax difference or real depth in reality.

THE LANDSCAPES

The country landscape

The country scene was the first to be shot at the gardens of Blenheim Palace in England. Real conifers and bushes were placed to enhance the real transition and cast practical shadows over the picnicing family in a period drama scene. The landscape and lake was to be replaced.


Having found a city location which was to precede the country scene, the challenge was to find a New York street with specific criteria. Most of the dramatic locations have high towering buildings either side, which meant most of the action would be in shadow and not open to the countryside.

A location was found with 1 storey buildings to one side. The shot would need to be flipped with all signage corrected. MPC setup a 3d previz of the shot using google maps for reference. Once signed off the tech rec was done with precise stills and measurements which was integrated into the evolving edit. The team headed to New York with the limitations of height due to mayors office restrictions. A specific tilt angle had been set and this was now slightly compromised. The choreography of the street we had about an hour to shoot with the correct light due to flaring and loss of long shadows for the noisier romantic feel of the genre.


The City


The cityscape was a real challenge due to the height regulation issue which we knew would come back to haunt us. The transition to countryscape looked like the street was below the level of the lake so we needed to provide a solution. In Nuke, all the buildings were projected around the street and the first two transitional shot structures. We were able to cheat the perspective and lower the buildings then create a European cafe lakeside scene with jetty. The lake was actually raised slightly to blend at the correct level.

In mono this is all relatively straighforward but in stereo all had to be checked constantly. However, recreating the entire scene enabled the creatives to develop a city for signoff while we were setting up the transition. A real wall structure was replaced in cg and added foliage, shot in country lake location on bluescreen with the correct lighting helped soften the structure.


The Desert


The shoot team carried on to monument valley, where an intense wrangling of horses over a huge distance was shot.

The move of the camera on a dolly track had to be done twice. Once linear for the loop and in-between scenes and secondly for a slowdown transition where the same linear entrypoint would transition to a move which slowed to a stop with a ten second living hold. *This meant choreography of action was crucial. That said wrangling a group of horses with these instructions with riders was rather limited. *Interactive dust and horses travelling close to camera were added.

The depth budget was tricky in this case as the foreground riders were pushed in stereo but then the buttes (rear canyon formations), which were 1km away, were flat. Slight depth was forced but then we were travelling into space-scape where the depth wanted to be in the distance. The foregorund elements were added in space as previously mentioned but the transitions we realised in each case had to be constantly tweaked for depth consideration.


The Icescape


The icescape and planetscape both were evolving creatively up to the end which was possible as they were completey cg scenes. The difficulty was solving the scale issues from the cg world to real world items which needed to feature. Over the transitions picnic people, fairies over cracking ice, a galleon ship , penguins to horses. These all had to work together both in the loop and in their individual genre holding scenes for 10 seconds.

‘*We were embarking on a project that we knew would be challenging both creatively and technically. So it was extremely important to us that we found a post house that was prepared to be collaborative from the word go.

Their knowledge & experience in the commercial & film world was crucial to help us provide an ident that has high production values. Every member of the team’s skills were utilised. It was testing. It was a pleasure working with MPC!’

Esther Wallace and Nick Tarte – Designer/Director



CREDITS

Client: Sky Network Marketing / Sky Movies
Agency: Sky Creative


Agency Producer: Sharon Kersley


Executive Creative Director: Clare McDonald


Creative Directors: Esther Wallace, Nick Tarte and Craig Marsh


DOP: Magnus Auggustenn

Post: MPC


Post Producers: Justin Brukman, Gen McMahn, Michael Stanish, Vittorio Giannini


VFX Supervisors: Matthew Unwin and Duncan McWilliam


VFX Team: Chrys Aldred, James Bailey, Jason Brown, Remi Cauzid, Maurizio De Angelis, Lacopo diLuigi, Michael Diprose, Dominic Edwards, Adam Elkins, Darren Fereday, Ahmed Garraph, Andreas Graichen, Michael Gregory, Liam Griffin, Alex Harding, Joey Harris, Richard Hopkins, Nicholas Illingworth, Spiros Kalomiris, Carsten Keller, Adam Leary, Duncan McWilliam, Jorge Montiel Meurer, Prashant Nair, Maru Ocantos, Vicky Osborn, Mikael Pettersson, Christophe Plouvier, Fiona Russell, Jim Spratling, Janak Thacker, Charlotte Tyson, Matthew Unwin, Fabio Zaveti



RELATED LINKS

www.moving-picture.com