TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT

Gasket Studios partnered with Best Buy in-house advertising and editorial company Butcher Edit to help create a co-branded Best Buy and Samsung spot that lands buyers in the middle of HD television football action. For this immersive experience Gasket designed and executed visual effects and huge crowd populations in Chicago Bears Soldier Field where the Best Buy game unfolds.

“The ultimate goal was real game feel and authenticity, with the precision and detail you expect from HD,” says Gasket Studios Creative Director Greg Shultz. “Without a motion control camera and only a five hour shooting window with the talent, we knew that using a single, live action plate replication was not going to work for the stadium crowd. We had to develop a multiple effect strategy that could stand up to the most discerning eye.”

This meant extensive preproduction discussions with all parties involved do develop the best approach for the spot. Teaming with Director David Ramser and DP N. Thomas Sigel, our plan was to use a mixture of live action crowd plates on location, individual green screen fans shots and digital 3D animated crowds. With strategy in hand, the Gasket team then went to Soldier Field to supervise the visual effects. Over 65 plates were shot, with Gasket tracking the material multiple ways to ensure a seamless process in post.

Above, you can see the the visual effects breakdown for each shot. We have the starting plate that is just the live action footage of Devon Hester from the Chicago Bears in an empty stadium, followed by a hand rotoscoped alpha of Hester, then the Gasket crowd animations, which are then tracked into the scene. Finally the alpha is applied, final matching, color correction to the crowd, blur and other atmospheric effects are added in the final composite.

We shot crowd and sideline footage both at the live action shoot with our HD camera as well as a shoot back at Gasket Studios. These plates were used in the foreground where 3D characters might have looked less than real. The crowd animations were added behind the live action to fill out the background empty seats.

We were lucky enough to work with N. Thomas Sigel, the Director of Photography, who has vast experience with visual effects on some of our favorite movies, including the recent Superman and X-men blockbusters. So while some people were flocking to see the star of the spot Devon Hester, we were more interested in the fellow looking through the camera lens. However Devon did give us an autographed t-shirt. Go Bears!

Original shot is on the left above. Final shot is on the right above with a brand new jumbotron and a stadium filled with people all the way up through the box seats.

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Why only 2 seconds of Transformers 2 has had 3 months to complete

About six months ago, Michael Bay approached Digital Domain, the Academy Award winning special effects company behind movies like Benjamin Button, Titanic , and the The Fifth Element, with a last minute request. He needed a closeup.

Digital Domain was already working on some secondary characters for Transformers 2 while George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic building the main robots like Optimus Prime. Yes, Transformers 2 had such a big budget that DD was hired just to ride shotgun.

One key moment of DD's handiwork depicts the transformation of a girl named Alice—played by actress Isabel Lucas—into a lethal robot. The main shot, seen above, uses digital techniques like advanced particle simulation (physics) to tear 10,000 pieces of skin away from a girl's body—the kind of high-concept graphics that require lots of software know-how, and computers to do incredible amounts of heavy lifting. It was the sort of shot that showcased everything DD could do.

When Michael Bay saw it, he found it lacking.

After watching an early edit of the movie, Bay had decided that although the wide shot of Alice was nice, the film was missing a close-up—he wanted 40 frames of the girl's face as she began transforming.

The close-up wouldn't take as much as the full-body master shot. Instead of 10,000 pieces of skin, only about 50 had to move. But because of time, budget and manpower constraints, this animation had to be done the old-fashioned way—working by hand. It meant that five guys would spend the next three months of their lives on less than two seconds of the finished film.

Computer graphics supervisor Paul George Palop walked me through their process of crafting the "very, very painful" 40 frames.

The goal sounded simple: Transform this closeup of a human into a closeup of a robot. Alice's face would begin to shatter away, revealing a gruesome creature underneath. But to model in 3D over digital film takes some prep work. To make the effect look real, the guys would need to map the 2D film original shot into digital 3D space. Then they could add all the neat robot stuff.

First, the DD team cut out all of the background and extraneous objects (including Shia LaBeouf's head), isolating the female figure. It's the first step of a classic technique known as rotoscoping, a trick that predates Disney, in which animators overlay cartoon characters and other animation on top of live action backgrounds. (Now that CG has blended humans and cartoons, it's probably safe to say that there isn't an FX-heavy movie made now that doesn't involve some kind of rotoscoping.)

With the basic 2D work done, DD used a laser scan of Lucas' figure to create a perfect 3D map. The rotoscope plate was then laid over this map, allowing the animators to work with real image depth and geometry. We don't have that exact shot, so we stole a still from the later wide shot to make the point. On the right, you have the 3D body scan model. On the left, you can see the 3D applied to the 2D figure.

One artist worked solely on the little skin plates that cracked away around Alice's mouth. Each of these 50 or so pieces was hand-animated, frame by frame, to create the short effect. But to enhance the illusion of movement, artists applied extra texture to the tiles along with some displacement mapping to each tile's edge, which essentially complicates the square shape into an array of small triangles. (See how they look all jagged in the version on the right?) One the 3D-animated shapes were laid out, they had to be naturally lit, lest the girl's skin look unnatural before she transformed completely into a metal monster.

In the meantime, the exact movements of the human Alice head needed to be applied to the newly animated robot Alice head, so that any movement from the former could be copied instantly in the latter.

Finally, all of the pieces were composited, rendered and placed on a newly drawn background. You'll notice that beyond the obvious visual effects, artists beefed up Alice's figure a bit. They rebuilt the end of her left arm and, while they were at it, added a bit more lift in the back of her hair. Even with a blockbuster megamovie deadline, there's always time for last-minute styling.
After all of this meticulous work—three months of effort from digital effects masters—audiences everywhere got a bonus 40 frames of remarkable robotic transformation. Ironically, one of the movie's chief complaints would be its length.

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Making A CG Rain

When shooting a stormy scene, you don’t have to wait and hope that your local weather station would announce that lower pressure is building and there’ll be a coming thunderstorm. You can opt to shot even with the sun shining brightly and then later add CG effects to make the sunny weather a bad one.

The article “Making a CG Rainstorm with After Effects Plug-ins and Automated Rotoscoping” discusses the latter option. Based on a commercial for BMW, it shows how a scene shot in sunlight is transformed into a fierce rainstorm.

When making this commerical, several techniques were employed. Rain and falling stones are generated by the plugin Particular. One can use it to render 3D particle simulations directly in After Effects. To postprocess the filmed BMW the team used Motor, a popular rotoscoping software by Imagineers.

Making a CG Rainstorm with After Effects Plug-ins and Automated Rotoscoping

Koreans doing rotoscoping

This is clip from the Korean film, “Life is Cool”. This is a story about three best friends falling for the same woman and traces the respective dating styles of a goofy playboy, reckless Romeo and hopeless romantic. This movie has an adult sense of humor that would make you want to hang out with your old buddies.

Life is cool was done through rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is tracing a live action sequence frame-by frame. Although shooting this movie took about a month only, the post production process took two years. A total of 140 rotoscoping artists completed the roto job.

Director Choe Ik-hwan (“Whispering Corridors 4: Voice”) brings “Life Is Cool,” South Korea’s first rotoscoped film. In this HD film project by CJ Entertainment, local production company DNA, which whipped up animation and graphics for “The Animatrix,” creates hip visuals for a friendly love story.

Director Choe Ik-hwan draws his inspiration from Richard Lanklater’s film, “A Waking Life”, a rotoscoped movie about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state.

You can read the press release for “Life is Cool” here.

Pixion VFX adds punch to Golmaal Returns

This festive season, Golmaal Returns, the sequel to the popular comedy flick Golmaal opened to audiences all over. Adding to box office success of the movie is the visual effects and CG work conceived and executed by Mumbai-based VFX major Pixion.

Directed by Rohit Shetty, the film stars Ajay Devgan, Tusshar Kapoor and Arshad Warsi, reprising their roles, and Shreyas Talpade in the role originally played by Sharman Joshi. Kareena Kapoor, Anjana Sukhani, Amrita Arora and Celina Jaitley were new additions to the cast. Produced by Dhillin Mehta under the Shree Ashtavinayak Cine Vision banner, the film released on October 29, 2008.

Pixion’s mandate for Golmaal Returns included close to 425 VFX shots, right from green screen shots, CG insertions, CG environment creation, Wire/Rig Removals, Multi Plate Composites and Sky Replacements, with around 55 artists chasing a tough deadline of three months.

Interesting Shots:
Songs: The Title sequence and the song ‘Tha Kar Ke‘ involved extensive work by Pixion. There were as many as about 125 shots in both these songs alone. As the actors were standing, sleeping on the bikes, all bikes in the songs were rigged to a great extent.

Sleeping act on a moving bike: The studio had to show as if the bikes were running by themselves without any support. High resolution pictures were taken of the bike from all the angles for texture references. In couple of the shots the studio recreated the whole bike in CG and composited it seamlessly photo real. These were multi layered composites with as many as 20 plus layers.

Yacht sequence:
There is a three minutes yacht sequence which was completely shot against green screen and Pixion had to recreate the sea environment. Green screen was replaced by CG sea and sky taking care of the horizon, perspective and scale. There was lot of match moving involved in this sequence.

The requirement was to show it as a fantasy sequence in the film. So, there are CG dolphins flying all over the yacht. Even the colour scheme was desaturated with little blue tone to make it look like a moon-lit fantasy sequence.

Pixion team has worked on digital sky replacements in the film which again involves extensive match move, rotoscopy and seamless compositing.

Creative challenges:

Pixion VFX Supervisor Naveen Paul said, “As we were totally involved from the preliminary stage, we were more organized in terms of planning of a particular VFX shot. Our team was actively involved in the VFX shoot supervision too.”

“Rohit Shetty, the director, is very talented and has made sure that he conveyed his visual requirements in depth. He was open to ideas and always encouraged us which helped us to give in our best. We first made a storyboard on some of the complicated sequences for his approvals and value additions. Later, we presented him with rough animatics and accordingly planned the shoot which further eased our final execution,” he added.

Experience and other confronts:
Added Naveen, “It’s been a great experience working on Golmaal Returns. We had a very short deadline on this project. It was quite challenging to complete the shots in time keeping quality as the highest and only priority.”

Added Pixion CEO Naresh Malik,“It takes a lot to convince a director, cinematographer or producer that we have it in us to be able to deliver his mind’s vision. We are fortunate to have a very healthy, trust based relation with the team of Golmaal Returns lead by the director. We have had, in the past, an opportunity to be associated with him on another film and we look forward to working together again. We thank the entire team of Golmaal Returns for the honour that they bestowed on us by allowing us to be a part of their film.”