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s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 c g w 5 9 Seeing Through the Camera In a recent industry trade article, Rob Bredow, senior VP, executive creative director, and head of ILM, talked about the work ILM did for the Steven Spielberg film A.I. (released in 2001). He said a game engine was used to feed images to the greenscreen, and with the studio's tracking system, was able to give actors a refer- ence point within Rogue City, the movie's futuristic take on Las Vegas as the land of temptation. At that time, the engine was repurposed for Unreal Tournament. ILM has since created its own engine for bringing the digital components into the real world of film production. Now, much of the work game engines are doing in this realm is in conjunction with virtual cameras – tools that add a monitor, oen an iPad, that provides a look into the game engine at work. At FMX 2019, cinematographer Matt Workman revealed the work he has been doing to develop Cine Tracer in Unreal to enable filmmakers to block out scenes, try out lighting, and quickly build rough sets. He's using Cine Tracer to work on films with directors and DPs. It functions like a video game and, in fact, is available through the Steam store as an Early Access game. It includes storyboarding features as well as real-time scouting. As he develops the program, Workman is adding real-world cameras and lighting. It's important to stick with the language of cin- ematographers and use actual focal lengths, he says, because "a DP will think something is bogus if a strange focal length is offered." Essentially, Workman has made an appli- cation to streamline previs and production camera work, and he's shortcutting a lot of the DIY work that went into early efforts of using game engines for previs. Significantly, his tool, and others like it, are also helping bridge the work of cinematographers, visual- ization, and VFX. Some of the same synergy happened during the making of The Jungle Book. MPC has been on the front lines of virtual camera use and worked with Unity to adapt the en- gine for film use, giving director Jon Favreau the ability to interact with real-life and digital characters on the set. Unity Creative Director Adam Myhill, who joined the game developer shortly aer Jungle Book was released, developed Cine- machine to emulate real-world cameras and lighting within the Unity game engine. Unity acquired Cinemachine and further developed Timeline, which adds a timeline and provides interactive creation within the game engine. Girish Balakrishnan was lead technical director on Jungle Book at Digital Domain (prior to moving to MPC), which was responsible for the virtual production. Myhill, too, has a cinematographer's sensibility. His work has been to bring an understanding of the visual language of film to game engines, and cinematic literacy for game engines makes them more useful to the people making movies. It's a two-way street. Cinematic literacy also makes for more compelling game de- velopment and better animatics, the filmic sequences used to introduce game story lines and provide transitions. For film, the tools have to move, record, and present content in the same way that actual cameras do, Myhill points out. Audi- ences, he says, have been immersed in 100 years of cinematic language. People can feel it when it's not right, and that goes for those on the set as well as in the audience. Director Favreau has committed once again to virtual production for his current film, The Lion King (see page 4), for which MPC and Magnopus collaborated on the vir- tual production – MPC built all the real-time assets (characters, environments, anima- tion) for use in Unity and VFX; Magnopus built the multiplayer VR tools, including an AR/VR interface that enables the director, cinematographer, production designer, and visual effects supervisor to work together. Unity has been buying the technology that helps bring the game engine into production pipelines. Last year, the firm bought Digital Monarch Media, a company founded by virtual production developers Habib Zargarpour and Wes Potter. They developed the system used on Jungle Book, as well as Ready Player One and Blade Runner 2049. The two have also worked on games, including Ryse, Son of Rome, and Need for Speed. Over a period of 10 years, Potter and Zargarpour have been building and refining their virtual production system, which includes Expozure, a virtual cinematography environment built on Unity and Cyclopz READY PLAYER ONE USED VIRTUAL PRODUCTION TOOLS TO CREATE VIRTUAL PROPS, SETS, AND SO ON THAT RAN IN A MODIFIED UNITY.