INDUSTRIAL LIGHT & MAGIC
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American Academy Award-winning motion picture visual effects company that was founded in May 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company, Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when Lucas began production of the film Starwars. ILM originated in Van Nuys, California, then later moved to San Rafael in 1978, and since 2005 it has been based at the Letterman Digital Art Center in the Presidio of San Francisco. Lynwen Brennan, who joined the company in 1999, currently serves as ILM’s President and General Manager. In 2012, The Walt Disney Company acquired ILM as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm.
Lucas wanted his 1977 film Star Wars to include visual effects that had never been seen on film before. After discovering that the in-house effects department at 20th Century Fox was no longer operational, Lucas approached Douglas Trumbull, famous for the effects on 2001 A Space Odyssey. Trumbull declined as he was already committed to working on Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but suggested his assistant John Dykstra to Lucas.
Dykstra brought together a small team of college students, artists and engineers who became the Special Visual Effects department on Star Wars. Alongside Dykstra, other leading members of the original ILM team were Ken Ralston, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, Steve Gawley, Lorne Peterson and Paul Huston.
This is where it all began for me as a kid growing up, with the team Lucas had put together, visual effects were about to change forever.
In late 1978, when in pre-production for The Empire Strikes Back Lucas reformed most of the team into Industrial Light & Magic in Marin County, California. From here on, the company expanded and has since gone on to produce special effects for nearly three hundred films, including the entire Star Wars saga, the Indiana Jones series, the Harry Potter series, the Jurassic Park series, the Back to the Future trilogy, many of the Star Trek films, Ghostbusters II, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Terminator sequels, the Transformers films, the Men in Black series, Wild Wild West, most of the Mission: Impossible films, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, *batteries not included, The Abyss, Flubber, and also provided work for Avatar, alongside Weta Digital.
In addition to their work for George Lucas, ILM also collaborates with Steven Spielberg on most films that he directs, and for many that he produces as well. Dennis Muren has acted as Visual Effects Supervisor on many of these films. Apart from flashy special effects, the company also works on more subtle effects – such as widening streets, digitally adding more extras to a shot, and inserting the film’s actors into preexisting footage – in films including Schindler’s List, Forrest Gump, Snow Falling on Cedars, Magnolia, and several Woody Allen films.
ILM began creating computer-generated imagery when they hired Edwin Catmull from NYIT in 1979. John Lasseter worked on computer animation as part of ILM’s contribution to Young Sherlock Holmes. The Graphics Group was later sold to Steve Jobs, named Pixar and created the first CG animated feature, Toy Story. ILM is currently the largest visual effects vendor in the motion picture industry, with regards to workforce, with more than 500 artists. It has one of the largest renderfarms currently available with more than 7500 nodes.
Today we see outstanding results of what ILM are capable of with the involvement of most major blockbuster movies over these twenty odd years.
Luxo Jr. is a 1986 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The two-minute short film revolves around one larger and one smaller desk lamp. The larger lamp looks on while the smaller, “younger” lamp plays exuberantly with a ball but doesn’t pick up the knack of correct handling. “Luxo Jr.” was Pixar’s first animation after Ed Catmull and John Lasseter left Industrial Light and Magic’s computer division. It is the source of the small hopping desk lamp included in Pixar’s corporate logo.
PIXAR
Pixar Animation Studios, or simply Pixar (/ˈpɪksɑr/, stylized as PIXAR), is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio is best known for its CGI-animated feature films created with PhotoRealistic RenderMan, its own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the computer division of Lucasfilm before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986 with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion, a transaction which made Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder. On December 21, 2012, Pixar Animation Studios became the Lucasfilm’s partner company since The Adventures of André and Wally B.. Luxo Jr., a character from an early Pixar film, is the mascot of the studio.
This was possibly one of my favourite Pixar shorts when they first started off.
Pixar has produced fourteen feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995), and its most recent being Monsters University (2013). All of the films have received both critical and financial success, with the notable exception being Cars 2, which, while commercially successful, received substantially less praise than Pixar’s other productions.All fourteen films have debuted with CinemaScore ratings of at least “A-“, indicating a very positive reception with audiences. The studio has also produced several short films. As of December 2013, its feature films have made over $8.5 billion worldwide, with an average worldwide gross of $607 million per film.Both Finding Nemo and Toy Story 3 are among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time, and all of Pixar’s films are among the 50 highest-grossing animated films, with Toy Story 3 being the 2nd all-time highest, just behind Disney’s Frozen, grossing over $1 billion worldwide.
The studio has earned 27 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, and eleven Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Since the award’s inauguration in 2001, most of Pixar’s films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, with seven winning: Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, and Brave (with Monsters, Inc. and Cars being the only two just being nominated for the award). Up and Toy Story 3 were the second and third animated films to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (the first being Beauty and the Beast). On September 6, 2009, executives John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich were presented with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Biennale Venice Film Festival. The award was presented by Lucasfilm founder George Lucas.
Early history
Pixar was founded as The Graphics Group, which was one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm that was launched in 1979 with the hiring of Dr. Ed Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), where he was in charge of the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL). At NYIT, the researchers pioneered many of the CG foundation techniques—in particular the invention of the “alpha channel” (by Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith); years later the CGL produced an experimental film called The Works. After moving to Lucasfilm, the team worked on creating the precursor to RenderMan, called REYES (for “renders everything you ever saw”); and developed a number of critical technologies for CG—including “particle effects” and various animation tools.
In 1982, the team began working on film sequences with Industrial Light & Magic on special effects. After years of research, and key milestones in films such as the Genesis Effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and the Stained Glass Knight in Young Sherlock Holmes, the group, which numbered 40 individuals back then, was spun out as a corporation in February 1986 with investment by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple Computer. Jobs paid $5 million to George Lucas for technology rights and put them and $5 million cash as capital into the company. A factor contributing to Lucas’ sale was an increase in cash flow difficulties following his 1983 divorce, which coincided with the sudden drop off in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi. The newly independent company was headed by Dr. Edwin Catmull as President and Dr. Alvy Ray Smith as Executive Vice President. They were joined on the Board of Directors by Steve Jobs who was Chairman.
Initially, while awaiting the consequences of Moore’s law, that would reduce the cost of computing a film, Pixar was a high-end computer hardware company whose core product was the Pixar Image Computer, a system primarily sold to government agencies and the medical community. One of the buyers of Pixar Image Computers was Walt Disney Studios, which was using the device as part of their secretive CAPS project, using the machine and custom software (written by Pixar) to migrate the laborious ink and paint part of the 2-D animation process to a more automated and thus efficient method. The Image Computer never sold well.In a bid to drive sales of the system, Pixar employee John Lasseter who had long been creating short demonstration animations, such as Luxo Jr., to show off the device’s capabilities premiered his creations at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics industry’s largest convention, to great fanfare.
As poor sales of Pixar’s computers threatened to put the company out of business, Jobs invested more and more money and took more and more ownership away from the management and employees until after several years he owned essentially all the company for a total investment of $50 million. Lasseter’s animation department began producing computer-animated commercials for outside companies. Early successes included campaigns for Tropicana, Listerine, and Life Savers. In April 1990 Pixar sold its hardware division, including all proprietary hardware technology and imaging software, to Vicom Systems, and transferred 18 of Pixar’s approximately 100 employees. The same year Pixar moved from San Rafael to Richmond, California.During this period, Pixar continued its successful relationship with Walt Disney Feature Animation, a studio whose corporate parent would ultimately become its most important partner. In 1991, after a tough start of the year when about 30 employees in the company’s computer department had to go (including the company’s president, Chuck Kolstad),which reduced the total number of employees to just 42, essentially its original number,Pixar made a $26 million deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was Toy Story. At that point, the software programmers, who were doing RenderMan and CAPS, and Lasseter’s animation department, who made television commercials, some 3-D Stings for Nickelodeon, and a few shorts for Sesame Street, was all that was left of Pixar.
Despite the total income of these products, the company was still losing money, and Jobs, still chairman of the board and now the full owner, often considered selling it. Even as late as 1994, Jobs contemplated selling Pixar to other companies, among them Microsoft. Only after learning from New York critics that Toy Story was probably going to be a success and confirming that Disney would distribute it for the 1995 Christmas season did he decide to give Pixar another chance.He also began then for the first time to take an active direct leadership role in the company, making himself its CEO. The film went on to gross more than $361 million worldwide.Later that year, Pixar held its initial public offering on November 29, 1995, and the company’s stock was priced at US$22 per share.
Pixar built a new studio in Emeryville which opened in November 2000.
While some of Pixar’s first animators were former cel animators, including John Lasseter, they also came from stop motion animation and/or computer animation or were fresh college graduates.A large number of animators that make up the animation department at Pixar were hired around the time Pixar released A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. With the dearth of Los Angeles-based animators willing to move their families so far north, give up traditional animation, and try computer animation, Pixar’s new-hires at this time either came directly from college, or had worked outside feature animation. For those who had traditional animation skills, the Pixar animation software (Marionette) is designed so that traditional animators would require a minimum amount of training before becoming productive.
I could simply watch these breakdown videos by Pixar everyday, they simply amaze me.
Future Productions
Inside Out. From director Pete Docter (Up, Monsters, Inc.) and producer Jonas Rivera (Up), the inventive new film will take you to a place that everyone knows, but no one has ever seen: the world inside the human mind.” Reportedly, the film setting is “the brain space of a little girl. Anger, Sadness, Disgust and Joy are some of the main characters” and characters/emotions are designed as dynamic figures “made up of particles that actually move.”
The Good Dinosaur. The Good Dinosaur will be released on November 25, 2015. It was going to be co-directed by Bob Peterson and Peter Sohn. Bob Peterson was removed from the project, and is currently developing another film at Pixar. A new director has yet to be announced.
WETA WORKSHOP
Weta was born as RT Effects in the back room of Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger’s Wellington flat in 1987. From this humble base of operations, Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger supported the emerging local film industry with a range of services in special effects, creature work, prosthetics and make-up effects. Over the years, Richard and Tania have also diversified Weta’s scope of interest into a range of other creative enterprises, including collectibles, children’s television and intellectual property development. All of these endeavours have allowed the team at Weta Workshop a unique perspective, experience and desire to tackle any creative challenge.
” Weta Workshop is a multi-award winning conceptual design and physical manufacturing facility servicing the world’s entertainment and creative industries”
Weta Workshop houses a range of disciplines under one roof – including conceptual design, weapons, armour & chainmaille, specialist props, vehicles, specialty costumes, models & miniatures, special makeup & prosthetics, public art & displays. The design team is an artistic engine that has worked with some of the most creative minds in the industry, including Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings Trilogy, King Kong) and Andrew Adamson (The Chronicles of Narnia). Most recently, the team has engaged with directors James Cameron (Avatar), Steven Spielberg (The Adventures of Tintin) and Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) for their film projects. At the moment, the Design department is heavily engaged with Peter Jackson on The Hobbit.
Weta Workshop offers a comprehensive design service that includes 2D conceptual illustrations, 3D conceptual design, 3D-sculpting (both traditional and digital), model making and idea-generation sessions. One of the principles of Weta’s design philosophy is world-design, where by the designers adopt the mindset of creating entire worlds with their own internal consistency, as opposed to designing specific items in isolation. This helps bring a universal reality to the work produced, with each item having being conceived of thoughtfully and within the context of the rest of the world it exists in.
This approach has yielded clients with a fertile source of inspiration and brought many a memorable character, prop, weapon, costume, culture, environment or effect to the screen. Guided by the experience and inspiration of Weta Workshop director Richard Taylor, the design team enjoys engaging clients in creative discussion to expand ideas and enhance the design brief to give them the most value and visual impact for their specific project’s needs.
FRAMESTORE
British visual effects company based near Oxford Street in London. Formed in 1986, it acquired (and subsequently merged) the Computer Film Company in 1997. The company works across several different areas of the media: feature films, commercials, music videos, feature animation and digital.
Framestore and CFC’s achievements in film and television have been recognised throughout the industry, with CFC being awarded two Scientific and Technical Academy Awards, and 14 Primetime Emmys. Framestore was also nominated for Oscars in 2007 (Superman Returns), in 2009 (The Dark Knight) and again in 2010 (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1). Tim Webber was the VFX supervisor on Gravity (2013), and the techniques involved in the film realized by Webber and the Framestore team took three years to complete.
The team had nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects at the 67th British Academy Film Awards, and an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects at the 86th Academy Awards. In advertising the team has also won all the major awards including Cannes Lions, British Television Advertising Awards, Clios, D&AD and many more. Other achievements for the companies include the delivery of its first feature animation project The Tale of Despereaux with Universal; the completion of Europe’s first digital intermediate for the film Chicken Run in 2000; contribution of scenes for the 2009 film Avatar, and the completion as a production project of four British feature films which opened in theatres between during 2009 and 2010.
Today Framestore delivers award winning images for feature films, television drama, advertising, console and online games, internet and mobile phone applications as Europe’s largest post-production house.
“We create our work by getting to know what you are aspiring to do with the images we are creating with you, by getting to know your business and its strategy, and by striving to always deliver images that delight and not only hit your brief but often exceed your expectations – those are the milestones we measure ourselves by.”
With more than 600 colleagues our team and skills range from computer science graduates, through to world class producers, CG artists who innovate in both production methodology as well as imagery, software developers and creators who have deep insight to how to apply often complex technology solutions to the creative process. We work with partner clients each year in most parts of the world, with colleagues often on location in over a dozen countries in any one year.
MPC having grown from a small startup to one of the global leaders in the industry over a span of 25 years. From a simple idea, a rough sketch, or a few words scribbled on a page, the studio has created endless feats of vivid spectacle that enthrall millions, whether through award-winning commercials, television or feature films.
Following World War Z, The Lone Ranger and Man of Steel, demand continues for the studio’s expertise, with its six worldwide offices currently working on no less than eight major motion pictures, including Godzilla, Maleficent, Guardians of the Galaxy and 300: Rise of an Empire.
Art direction
The role of the MPC Art department starts as early as the pitching stage on a project, with the team preparing concepts and reference material for studios and directors. “The Art department is made up of a core of artists highly specialised in character, environment and FX design. The Art department’s spread of work goes from pitching through to production and includes full designs of unique creatures and tiny environmental details. The Art department’s responsibilities change from show to show, with the work sometimes based on specific creature or object creation and at other times around mood and atmosphere.
“We don’t attach ourselves to the idea that a project is entirely our baby. We are part of team and work within the vision of the filmmaker.” However, it’s the nature of teamwork that makes the process so exciting “For me the fun parts are the brainstorms we do and working with the artists on the floor. The brief is our quest and we’re all on the road towards it together. It’s that moment, when you’re creating something new, and having fun, that can create the wow effect. When you team and the filmmakers are saying ‘wow’, you know you’ve made something awesome.”
Creating assets
Once the Art department has produced a vision from the director’s initial brief, the 3D part of the process kicks into gear – although, often, the two teams are found working in tandem. While the Art department works on the research phase, mood panels and mood boards – establishing the broad strokes of the film. Some conceptual work can also be completed in 3D. “We might have a big creature to work on, so we’ll fire up ZBrush or Maya to mock it up in a looser way. We’ll then go through the design process iteration with the supervisors, directors, studio executives and so on.
MPC’s Assets team works on the full gamut of objects, whether that’s a roaring dragon or a bookshelf. “We do the whole thing, from hero spaceships to the smallest of props. We even model low-resolution geometry for matte-painting work, or we’ll build things for effects, such as simulation meshes, so FX can run water simulations that collide against objects.”
Of course, the job has its exciting moments too, such as the creation of the Prometheus ship in the film of its namesake. “When we started, it was essentially a block model with additional lines drawn on top to suggest surface detail, as well as some paint studies to show what the logos would look like on the side, “However, a lot of details such as what sort of metal it was made from and which carbon materials to use was decided by us. For the build we had to consider the metals, plastics, dirt, dust, damage and so on.”
The team even considered the interior of the model, for when it is later blown apart. “We knew which parts needed to be destroyed and from what angle, so we knew that it couldn’t just be a hollow surface and that there had to be a form to it – some structure underneath. You always tailor the build to the context of the shot. In this case it was a slow-mo destruction shot, which is one of the hardest because you’ve got nowhere to hide.
It’s the challenge of the work that makes it so rewarding, though. “As challenging as the job can be, it’s a great culture to work in,” Newman explains. “It’s a balance of creative and technical thinking with cutting-edge technology. We’re forever using new gadgets, tools and techniques. Every day, every project is different.”
Building rigs
Rigging the models sent over from the Assets department is the next stage in the pipeline – a task that’s become increasingly complex with the rising expectations of audiences and filmmakers alike.
“Our involvement on a show can vary, but for a creature show we’ll normally be included reasonably early on,” says MPC global head of rigging Tom Reed, who has over a decade of experience at the company. “We can bring along ideas about anatomy or structure for a creature and start talking about how the limbs might move. We suggest ideas based on nature but from a technical perspective. We also work with modelling if face shapes are needed, or making sure topology is correct, or even mundane things like naming objects to ensure they’re pipeline-ready.”
It’s the creature shows that usually prove the most complex for the Rigging team. “Our muscle rigs are always very tricky, particularly with dragons and such,” explains Reed. “However, we’ve been doing muscle rigs for a number of years and we’ve got a good toolset that enables us to take things from previous features and add to them. Because we script everything, we’re able to build on the shoulders of our past work.”
One exciting early career moment that stands out for Reed is Voldemort’s nose – or lack thereof – in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “That was a difficult one. How do you replace Ralph Fiennes’ nose?” asks Reed.
“We worked with the Roto-prep department so they could work in key frames and then we’d project that back to clear out the back plate. We also worked with R&D on feature tracking, so we could track markers from the camera and project them back onto an object space. Then there was a rig that would follow those, which had basic distance measures between different trap points, which would then drive blend shapes. This was at the time we were starting to build the pipeline as well, so it was very exciting developing an efficient method. Things have moved on a great deal from those days, but it stands out as a project where I learned a great deal.”
The Rigging department works very closely with Animation, with a lot of back-and-forth between the artists. “Some of the more technical animators might rig something up with locators and constraints, then we’ll take that back, pipeline it, work on it and maybe develop some nodes to make everything work faster – that kind of thing. It’s all very collaborative,” Reed explains.
Although the rigging process is largely technical, there’s also a big focus on both the artistic and scientific facets of the role. “There’s a huge amount of research that goes into anatomy studies or locomotion,” says Reed. “For example, we got a paper from Cambridge University, which was produced decades ago, about rectilinear locomotion and how snakes stalk their prey. Also a palaeontologist from San Diego has given talks about the differences between carnivores and herbivores and why they walk the way they do.
“These are topics interesting not just for riggers, but for the whole gamut of artists involved in trying to make something real. Once those rules of nature are broken, it’s very easy to lose believability, no matter how good your subsurface scattering or muscle dynamics!”
Animating performance
Like the Art, Assets and Rigging departments, Animation’s involvement can start early in the pipeline at the pre-production stage. “You need to start establishing character movement and style at an early stage – sometimes before they’ve started shooting,” explains Greg Fisher, global head of animation.
“Pipeline-wise we obviously get assets made in the beginning and then there’s a lot of conversation between Rigging and Animation to develop the rig as we go along. Once the animation has progressed and we’re moving towards the end of the show, we start working on what is called technical animation, which is work such as muscle deformation and cloth.”
In terms of complexity within animation, Fisher cites Wrath of the Titans as one of the most challenging projects to date, featuring such creatures as the two-torsoed Makhai. “The challenge there is how you make something like that feel real anatomically and then translate that design into animation,” says Fisher. “There was a lot of back-and-forth about where to put the two spines, how they would merge together, how you would place the extra set of arms… It was quite a complicated process. What looks good as a still image might not necessarily work as a moving character.”
Despite the popularity of motion capture, the majority of MPC’s work remains key framed. “Wrath of the Titans was fully key framed,” says Fisher. “As an animator myself, it’s not that we don’t like motion capture – it’s a good tool – but animators like to key frame and give their creative input on their work. More often than not if you’re shooting motion capture, it’s before you’ve shot the movie. You may have good intentions for what you want to do for that specific shot, but when you put it in the movie three months later the director may not be happy with it, so you end up key framing it anyway.”
For Fisher, it’s the people, rather than the tools, that make MPC the master of animation that it is. “Animation is a creative medium, so it’s about that skill of the animator, rather than the technology they’re using,” he says. “What excites me is key framing, and bringing something to life by hand. That comes from your passion, your heart and your love for the art that you do.”
World-class FX
“At MPC, FX is whatever volumetrics is,” explains head of FX, Joan Panis. “That could be smoke, fire, water or particles such as dust. The landing of the Prometheus ship on LV-223 was a really nice shot using lots of these different volumetrics. We also created all the water works in the storm sequences in Life of Pi, and we created destruction effects, using our custom proprietary tools, in the Smallville battle in Man of Steel.”
MPC’s bespoke destruction tool is Kali, an impressive toolset developed for the hyper-kinetic VFX sequences in Zach Synder’s fantasy film Sucker Punch. It has been a mainstay in the studio’s pipeline ever since. “Kali is based on the DMM solver – a Maya plug-in – that we’ve incorporated in our own way,” states Panis. “Kali enables us to make bending, tearing and deforming objects that we couldn’t achieve with the traditional rigid-body systems.
“If you have a plank of wood, for example, then there are some very technical terms, such as Young’s Modulus, which inform how much the material will bend or strain before fracturing,” continues Panis. “We have all these attributes that we can change in the material. Wood doesn’t tend to stay bent once it’s bent, it will return relatively to its original form, whereas metal, once it is bent, remains bent and deformed. We can play with all of these attributes within Kali.”
Kali’s ability is particularly evident in X-Men: First Class, when Magneto tears a ship apart using two huge anchors. The tearing, snapping, bending and breaking of the yacht is an impressive feat indeed.
Flowline, Scanline’s hydro-fluid-simulation and fire-rendering software, is another popular choice in the MPC FX department. “We’re one of the only ones using this tool,” enthuses Panis. “It’s powerful in the sense that it enables us to create awesome volumetric effects.
“On Wrath of the Titans, for example, when Kronos comes out of the volcano you get these big, fiery plumes that are kilometres long. Flowline can handle these volumes well and still display all of the details. It enables us to get that detail very quickly. We also did the water on Life of Pi recently over at Vancouver and there’s the whole sinking of the Tsimtsum sequence. All of that was done with Flowline and the end result is really quite impressive.”
The final step
Doug Larmour, global head of compositing, details why it’s the details that ultimately matter most. “Compositing is an incredibly important part of the VFX process, particularly for MPC as we strive to create photoreal images,” he tells us. “In terms of how compositing works at MPC, it’s the final link in the chain. It’s the discipline that pushes a shot from being CG to looking 100 per cent naturalistic and photographic.
“It’s important to recognise that reality is not perfect,” he says of the compositing craft. “Reality is a multitude of imperfections that the human brain instantly recognises… For instance, if you look at Life of Pi, how much water is on that lens? How much do the lights smudge and arc? All of that additional work is what made it look so good and helped Life of Pi win an Academy Award for visual effects.”
An example of how these imperfections transform an image to perfection is when the eponymous Prometheus makes its landing on the alien planet of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic. “First the plate came in and we graded that to make sure there was a balance grade between all of the shots in that sequence,” Larmour explains.
“We then put a lead artist on what we thought were the key shots to drive the look for every other shot in the sequence. The Compositing team worked with the Environment team to build up the sequence exactly as the filmmaker requested. We graded the foregrounds at that point and waited until CG had a first version of an animation of the ship landing.
“We then did some work on the thrusters, as it was decided that, rather than the FX team working on them, the comp team could take over. The thrusters were a fire element that was wrapped around a cylinder and animated up and down. The environment and 2D lead on the sequence worked on trying to get the right amount of mountains in place, then the right amount of smoke and mist on those mountains. You only see about 30 per cent of the effects rendered for that shot. Everything else is from our vast library of 2D elements of smoke.”
If there’s one point that everyone at MPC agrees on, it’s that every day presents a unique challenge for the studio to undertake. Whether it’s transforming a crude scribble into a mythical creature, assembling a horde of undead killers or making the imperfect perfect, MPC is pushing to provide the very pinnacle of VFX excellence. “Everyone wants to have something on their reel that looks awesome,” concludes Larmour. “In feature film VFX I don’t think you get anyone who isn’t interested in what they do. At this level, people want to be the best effects artists they can possibly be.”
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