Computer Graphics World

Edition 2 2020

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62 cgw e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 2 0 One immediate adaptation involved a remote workflow due to the at-home restrictions. As a result, the animators had to get used to communicating remotely through Zoom and WhatsApp. They also relied heavily on Teradici technology to log in to the Proof studio network aer the OpenVPN they had been using was unable to handle the added workload. "The process went extremely well. The IT guys rebuilt our infrastructure to enable us to work from home, something we never really did before, so we could work on some other shows we had going prior to The Blacklist," says Coglan. The team also had to ensure that the final output was void of all the shot information that appears on visualizations. "Logging and tracking that information without the HUD that we usually depend on was a new process for us," says Perrin. Additionally, they used Apple's ProRes video compression format for the final export, which is not very common in the feature-film world. One of the biggest changes came in the workflow, as the project schedule for The Blacklist had to be greatly compressed, which led to more overlap among the departments – asset building, R&D, layout, animation. "There was no time to wait for one department to finish before we put it through to the next," explains Coglan. "So, for a long time, the producers had to look at grayscale characters that didn't look anything like their respective actors." Because the imagery for The Blacklist was so heavily stylized, that meant redeveloping the asset pipeline, and all of the Maya-based shaders and lighting rigs the group typically used had to be revised to achieve the toon look and the hatch lines. The artists still used Maya for the animation and most of the ren- dering, along with Maya, Pixologic's ZBrush, and Adobe's Substance Painter (formerly from Allegorithmic) for texturing and sculpt- ing. They also used Adobe's Aer Effects for the warped transitions from live-action to animation. An Adobe Photoshop filter was used to toon-ify the backgrounds. Characters with Character To create the characters, an asset builder at the London location pulled as many of the bodies, clothing, and other items from its generic character libraries as possible, and then built the remainder within Maya. While that was ongoing, proxy versions of the characters (grayscale stand-in mod- els that didn't resemble the actors) were employed for the animation, to get a feel for the scenes, since "we were literally building everything from the ground up," says Perrin. There were no storyboards – the animators had to do all the staging themselves. Later, using detailed cast information (photos, body measurements, and so forth), the modelers continued the character builds so they resembled the respective actors. The finished models were then sent to the Atlanta-based studio to be toon-ified and hatched; the hatching was oen augmented with hand-drawn lines on the main char- acters' faces, as it's a look that requires a degree of finesse, notes Perrin. Aerward, the models were passed back to the London team, where the client signed off on them and they were placed into the scenes. The scenes progressed at different rates, with some in the animatics stage while others reached final animation. "And [the producers] understood that. Oen they were still looking at their hero characters in grayscale, but they trusted that every- thing would look right at the end. They knew what to look for – shot design, story progression – with the details to be filled in near the deadline," Perrin points out. Initially, the animators weren't going to incorporate much lip sync, but Coglan and Perrin determined they could use Proof's previs rigs to do some basic work in that regard. "The rigs were not set up to do full- on facial lip sync, but the animators were doing the lip sync as they were going along anyway, so all we had to do was switch it on in the end, which pleased the Blacklist group," says Coglan. Meanwhile, the audio files were recorded by the actors themselves from their homes. The artists also had to toon-ify the back- grounds. Although, the hybrid production enabled the producers to be more flexible with the planned environments. "When John and JB (Jon Bokenkamp) committed to do- ing the comic-book [style], they committed completely; it inspired them to get a little more exotic with some of their locations and play with things they perhaps hadn't thought about when they had the restraints of shooting [the DC-based show] in New York," says Perrin. "All of a sudden, a scene that took place in a dimly lit apartment was now at the Washington Mall, which was a big build for us." There were more crowd scenes, too, and even one sequence wherein a helicopter lands in a forest clearing as the accountant attempts his getaway. While some scenes enabled the artists to flex their creative muscle, other scenes that had already been filmed required them to translate those physical locales into CGI, which they did with the help of blueprints, drawings, and even references in past episodes. For instance, the artists built the medical facility where Liz's grandfather lies in a coma using set drawings from the crew. "They had already filmed some shots in that location, so it was important for us to match the continuity as we transitioned to the comic-book world," says Perrin. It's not easy to transition production on dime, but that is exactly what the actors, producers, crew, and Proof animators did when faced with the sudden shutdown. And, they were able to find a successful solution thanks to the use of computer graphics, even embracing the flexibility the medium provided in terms of action and storytelling. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of CGW. In addition to characters, Proof also matched live-action environments.

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