Post Magazine

S T A R T R E K of chances to be super creative on this show — more so than most of our projects. J.J. Abrams gave us the chance to design these se- quences for him at the animatic level." Abrams "had his ideas during the early animatic sequences, and those became kind of place-holders that told the story — but now he really wanted to make it excit- ing." One VFX sequence place-holder card with a de- scription could easily grow into three shots. T E C H N I C A L D I R E C TO R S TDs do lighting and par ticle effects, DiComo says, volumetric rendering for digital explosions, digital clouds, and weapons like laser fire. ILM's "creature department" TDs, led by sequence super visor Jay Cooper, do a lot more than creature work (creature-rigging and enveloping, cloth and hair simulation). One huge task — destruction — was not about creatures at all.They also specialize in rigid sim- ulation — taking a spaceship and breaking it into a bunch of bits and making it do the right physics in col- lisions, etc. A B O M I N A B L E Creature shows have long been ILM's bread and butter — dinos, dragons, you name it, it's slithered or stomped out the shop's doors. But now, DiComo says, even more is expected. "There's no such thing as a 'simple creature sequence' anymore. Ever ything is turned up to 11 all the time." For instance the abom- inable creature that attacks Jim Kirk on Delta Vega, the ice planet, interacts with its icy environs. "When it puts its foot down it kicks up snow and ice and debris. If it smashes into something, we're creating digital chunks of snow, down to the smallest par ticulate of ice cr ystals and a dusty, fine snow so it looks like it's really in that environment." ILM's proprietary Zeno package does all their cam- era tracking, lighting, rendering and effects simulation, rigid sim, hair sim, cloth sim. And ILM's R&D team builds in new functions and tools as needed. Eddie Pasquarello is an associate VFX supervisor at ILM who also served as a compositing supervisor on Star Trek, and he says the VFX and compositing depar tments really worked hand in hand given the complexity of the shots. Compositing on Star Trek was done entirely in Apple Shake. (Not the free version that comes bun- dled with Final Cut.) Roger Guyett shot Kirk's challenging visit to Delta Vega, on the elevated parking lot of Dodger Stadium, using environmentally safe shredded paper as snow. Despite the LA location, "it was overcast, really cold, you could see your breath and the paper got wet, so it really felt like snow," Pasquarello says. A compositing question (and therefore a shooting question) here was whether or not to shoot falling, blowing "snow" in the scenes. "We used some practical snow, some ren- dered snow and we actually had snow in-camera. It was a true hybrid and we had a rule book" of shots that either did or did not have snow blowing. "Most of the stuff we shot was Kirk doing his stuff — landing, being chased by the creatures [a second beast joins in], falling down the mountain. It was a neat set, but it did open a lot of compositing challenges. There was some bluescreen in it, and snow, and adding an infinite horizon by Digimatte [ILM's environ- ments department] was huge." Conny Fauser supervised compositing on this se- quence and "she was spot-on amazing." J U M P P L AT F O R M Kirk and cohor ts descend to a giant drill platform known at ILM as the "jump platform" in order to contend with bad-guy Nero. They get down there the hard way — in a kind of extreme bungee-cord jump from a high altitude, except without the bungee. That sequence and the ensuing mar tial ar tistry actually make up about one third of the com- positing work on the film, Pasquarello says. "That was supervised by Jay Cooper, as a TD, and Francois Lam- ber t was the comp sequence supervisor.That was an incredible challenge." Like the Delta Vega ice-planet sequence, the jump platform was filmed by Guyett with the top level of the Dodgers' parking lot standing in for the platform. "Roger brought back some amazing stuff to work with. The platform was par tial and we had to create the entire platform." Depicting the heroes' precipitous jump required a lot of atmospheric smoke. A N A M O R P H I C J.J. Abrams and DP Daniel Mindel shot Star Trek with an anamorphic lens. If you work at ILM, you know there's a cer tain look to an anamorphic lens flare. And if there's the sun or a star in the corner of a synthetic ILM shot — or when the Enterprise passes in a beauty shot and its lights strike the virtual lens — the compositors have to replicate all the complexities of light dancing across such a lens. "There are all these different layers to the lens flare that we have to repli- cate digitally," DiComo says. ILM's Todd Vaziri analyzed what anamorphic lenses do and all their different proper ties so they could be used in simulated shots and they call the resulting program "Sunspot." Vaziri was a sequence super visor whose job was to overlook all the sequences and make sure that ILM's shots were "correct to the film" — that they matched. "He takes great, great pains and it shows," says Pasquarello. "That was one of our compositing coups that I feel made a difference here — finishing touches that help our shots blend with the live ac- tion that J.J. gave us." PA I N T Pasquarello cites ILM's paint depar tment, headed by Beth D'Amato, and their "intense, intense" roto- spline and paint work on sequences such as the jump platform. "A roto-spline is the articulated matte that's done on keyframes," Pasquarello says. "If I have Kirk and I need to isolate him and put a new background behind him, they'd use roto-splines and follow his shape and let the computer procedurally fill in the middle frames. In some cases you have to ar ticulate every frame — like if there was debris from an explo- sion and we had to put something on the middle." Star Trek's explosions in space have a new look, but there were additional key effects that needed updat- ing — the director's vision of what "warp speed" should look like, for instance, or how a "transpor ter beam" appears. Still, Abrams gave ILM "a ver y loose blueprint and a lot of rope" creatively, Pasquarello says, to realize these shots. "He knows exactly what he wants, but gives you enough room to create that. We just watched the film," Pasquarello said a month before its premiere, "and I'm blown away by it. It was really, really intensely rewarding to be trusted with that authority." [ cont. from 15 ] 48 Post • May 2009 www.postmagazine.com mer. HVS's in-house team did hand-keyed animation for the bulk of the alien and human creatures; RES provided deaths and many other motions for the humanoid characters. RES recorded the actors' motions with Vicon Blade software. "We were able to display realtime kinemat- ics that allowed the animators to watch the character models reacting and moving in realtime," Lapekas ex- plains. "This technology allows the session director greater control over the motion capture actors dur- ing the shoot." After the motions were captured, the data was processed using Blade and then expor ted to a 3DS Max .bip. "The team at HVS simply imported the .bip and adjusted the motions for final game implementa- tion," he says. By working closely with the Advanced Technology Group at HVS, RES integrated realtime motion cap- ture playback directly into the Quantum game en- gine. This enabled the creative teams to view charac- ters interacting within the game environment on multiple platforms. RES also created all the game cinematics using Maya, 3DS Max, After Effects, Photoshop and Pre- miere. Some of the cinematics featured on-screen characters that were modeled, rigged and textured in 3DS Max and Maya. With this, RES integrated a joint- driven facial rig known as the Stop Staring Facial Rig. Voiceover files were supplied to animators who hand keyed the lipsync and facial expressions atop the base motion capture movements. The videos were en- coded using RAD Game Tools' Bink software, which is required for playback on Nintendo Wii. "The production had a variety of challenges, one of which was last-minute script and design changes that often occur in game development," Lapekas points out. "These changes prompted additional voiceover sessions causing some work to be redone. But, fortu- nately, the voiceover changes were limited to only a few characters, and the impact was very minimal." After providing premium motion capture and ani- mation content for The Conduit, RES is now in devel- opment with several other game developers and film studios. [ cont. from 30 ] M O T I O N C A P T U R E

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