Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/19885
Cinesite effects Lord Voldemort and more L ONDON — Cinesite (www.cinesite.com) completed 93 shots for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, including Lord Cinesite gave Lord Voldemort a very special nose job using Maya, RenderMan, PFTrack and more. you edit scenes, lock the picture and that’s it. On a big visual effects movie “you have to semi-lock scenes.You ‘lock’ scenes to hand over to visual effects.”Those scenes come back and “then David and I work on it to- gether again and the movie evolves gradu- ally back and forth between visual effects and editorial.” The process takes months. “You have to wait for the effects to get put into the scene to understand the pacing and to get the scene to work properly,” he says. “When you get a scene back from VFX you might want to extend the scene because it’s so good or you want another shot. It really changes the dynamic of the scene.” Post supervisor Reynolds notes that they had over 5,000 feet of footage come in every day during principal photography.This kept the assistant editors — Hermione Byrt, Kate Baird, Alex Fenn, Adam Gough and Myles Robey — pretty b usy prepping rushes, cutting sound, syncing sound, trimming sequences and making select sequences. Edito- rial used Avid Media Composer Nitris DX sys- tems — 10 in total — distributed between the editors and assistants. The negativ e f ootage, Kodak Vision2 5205 and Vision3 5219 was scanned at Cinesite at 4K downrezed to 2K and turned into HDCAM dailies that were ingested every morning into a Baselight and graded by colorist Peter Doyle in collaboration with DP Serra for offline editing. “I’m really very lucky,” says Day.“I get re- ally well-graded rushes instead of a “one light” that one gets from the lab. It’s almost like the final grade.” FINAL THOUGHTS “I am very much from the, ‘I hope you don’t see the effects’ school,” says Burke. “I like to hide them in the stor y. A lot of peo- ple watch this film and go, ‘Well there aren’t many eff ects in it. ’ That’s good because there’s over a thousand effects in it, so apart from the very obvious ones they are not seeing them.” “I’ve never done something as big as hav- ing two films simultaneously,” says Day.“We were shooting for nearly 16 months, and I was getting [footage] in from Part 2 one day and Part 1 another day — all to do with the scheduling. By the end of the shoot I had both films assembled.A lot of footage and a lot of storytelling and a lot of scenes, but it’s very exciting. really. Certainly a challenge, but one I love doing.” Voldemort’s snake-like nose, the ghost of Dumbledore and a Patronus doe.The most challenging involved replacing Ralph Fiennes’ nose area with Lord Voldemort’s CG snake-like snout — which extended from between the eyebrows to the upper lip — using Maya, RenderMan, PFTrack, 3de and Nuke. It was important to maintain the integrity of the actor’s perfor- mance throughout the 46 shots.To achieve a very precise match- move of Fiennes’ vocal performance, Cinesite built a rig with three layers of animation controls.This enabled them to make full use of the 16 tracking markers attached to Fiennes’ head while still having the flexibility to animate the cheek, upper lip and nose areas as needed.They kept as many natural facial creases as possible while using CG skin textures to remove shadows of Fiennes’ nose. From a cyberscan of Fiennes’ head, Cinesite generated a very detailed displacement to achieve sufficient detail to represent small wrinkles and pores.Textures were generated using a set of pho- tographs shot with cross-polarized and non-polarized lights and lenses, which allowed Cinesite to extract highly detailed pore maps for bump and specular passes. Cinesite’s proprietary software csSkinShader,a multi-level subsurface scattering algorithm, was used to enhance the photorealistic look. Using Nuke allowed them to generate unwrapped texture maps, which made paint touch-ups to the live action — and small adjustments to the CG — much easier and quicker. For the shots featuring Dumbledore’s ghost, Cinesite used Maya, RenderMan and Nuke.They took a clean plate of the corridor in which he appears and a greenscreen plate of Sir Michael Gambon.They generated a digi-double from texture stills and a cyberscan of the actor, and match-moved and projected Gambon’s greenscreen performance onto the model.The digi-double was also used to drive particle simulations and colorize the particles so they could be blended seamlessly back onto the digi-double. Cinesite generated around 150 million individual particles as well as a model of the corridor in which the ghost appears to use for particle colli- sions. Nuke’s 3D pipeline helped them re-light the live-action ele- ments so that they fit perfectly with the corridor. The Patronus doe appears to Harry in the form of a light, which expands into a semi-formed creature of light. Cinesite generated a fully-rigged and groomed nearly photoreal animated CG doe using Maya.They used their own csFluidShader to achieve a volumetric effect and rendered it with multiple layers of animated 3D textures. Nuke was used to generate texture maps, which were projected and manipulated to form the shape and look of the doe.The various lay- ers were combined and blended to achieve an otherworldly feel. Other effects completed by Cinesite include a CG wreath of Christmas roses conjured by Hermione at Harry’s parents’ grave; rebuilding the set for Godric’s Hollow in CG; as well as 2D and CG set extensions, full CG environments and CG snow. High dynamic range digital stills were re-projected as textures and geometry rebuilt where necessary to extend the partial back-lot sets where the actors had been shot. Cinesite’s csPhotoMesh was used to reconstruct terrain information from photographs of Malham Cove in Yorkshire. Cinesite credits include 3D supe Holger Voss, 2D supe Andy Robinson,VFX producer Chloë Grysole and VFX coordinator Jane Ellis. www.postmagazine.com November 2010 • Post 19 PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES. IMAGES: JAAP BUITENDIJK