Post Magazine

November/December 2022

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www.postmagazine.com 22 POST NOV/DEC 2022 OUTLOOK 023 is going to be a transforma- tive year for media production. Traditional 2D media production will make the jump to become fully spatial, and once that happens, content creators will never look back. Empowered by the growing avail- ability of LED walls, paired with high performance positional-tracking cam- eras, along with the endless possibilities offered by game engines, creatives are going to push the complexity of their visuals. We're going to see a wave of visual compositions that embrace dy- namic movement and blur the lines of physical production and digital pro- duction. And as that line shrinks, so will the line between live and pre-recorded performances. Volumetric capture provides the ability to capture humans in motion and then view that recording from any angle. We've seen this used in live TV broad- casts as early as the 2019 Billboard Music Awards (where Madonna danced with copies of herself). Since then, the visual quality of volumetric video has dramat- ically improved, while numerous profes- sional capture facilities have popped up around the world. But the real opportuni- ty for the adoption of volumetric video is coming from advancements in the tools. In the coming year, we'll see the introduction of new tools that will make volumetric video more accessible, and more applicable to digital artists. One of the big, new features will allow creators to take live performances and seamlessly loop those volumetric clips as back- ground performers in digital scenes. Plus, for scenes in an LED volume, artists will soon be able to automatically rig the characters. In short, artists will no longer need deep backgrounds in building com- puter graphics to create realistic, fully populated digital scenes. We expect to be very busy next year helping creators explore these new pipelines. Arcturus is the creator of HoloSuite, a capture-agnostic post production platform for volumetric video. VOLUMETRIC VIDEO BECOMES MORE ACCESSIBLE BY EWAN JOHNSON CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER ARCTURUS HTTPS://ARCTURUS.STUDIO CLOUD 've always wanted to be an artist, but growing up in Ecuador, it seemed more like a dream than reality. However, with the unwavering support of my mother, I was able to make it possible. Today I help other creatives realize their vision as part of FuzzyPixel at Amazon Web Services (AWS), an internal creative studio that produces animation while testing our products and services. Our 2022 short film, Picchu, was a concept that I put forth, and its creation helped illustrate how technology can enable purpose-driven storytelling. Picchu is a story about overcoming one's fears with strength and determina- tion to access education in an unequal society. I've always believed stories matter and can have a huge impact. With this in mind, our goal was to create a beautiful film that highlights the educational chal- lenges in Ecuador and inspires action. As the first project of its scope that I directed, Picchu was created entirely in the cloud using Amazon Nimble Studio. Using virtual workstations on AWS, this approach let us virtualize our workflow and allow all our artists to collaborate remotely from different locations around the world. As an artist, I want easy access to the best creative tools. I was able to start a virtual workstation and have everything I needed at my fingertips. We used both Linux- and Window-based virtual workstations that were connected to centralized cloud-based storage so that we could collaborate using the same data and environments. The open source tool Blender was our primary creative application. Additional tools included Autodesk Maya, Foundry's Nuke, Pixologic's ZBrush and Adobe's Substance Painter. Picchu assets are available on GitHub so that artists can test cloud-based workflows with produc- tion-grade assets. We created the film in nine months with a team of 23 artists all working remotely. Since its debut, Picchu has received more than 45,000 views online and earned the "Grand Prix for Video Craft Animation" at the 2022 LUX Awards. It was also recog- nized with "Best Director" at the Cannes Shorts Film Festival. The accolades are amazing, but the true prize is raising visibility for an important issue. I feel a responsibility to work with technology that can be used to create beautiful stories with social impact. With the accessibility of powerful cloud-based tools, other artists can follow the same path to develop and share their own purpose-driven stories. CREATING PURPOSE-DRIVEN ENTERTAINMENT BY AMARU ZEAS SENIOR ART DIRECTOR AMAZON WEB SERVICES HTTPS://AWS.AMAZON.COM I PRODUCTION 2

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