Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/40055
friends a little boy. They provided about 900 shots in total for the film, which was shot on Red and Sony F23 cameras. Ac- cording to Stodolny,"This is something else compositors need to educate themselves about — digital camera technologies, be- cause it's no longer just matching film grain, it's matching digital noise and other effects of digital filmmaking," says Stodolny. Another trend that he sees is on the compositing software side of the business. "Most software companies are competing to find new ways to manipulate 3D renders in post," reports Stodolny."To provide our artists maximum flexibility and to decrease iterations of CG renders, our in-house de- velopers created tools allowing artists to spend less time in the CG package and more time refining their final image. For ex- ample, rather than having to go back to ren- der to do fine lighting changes, we have tools allowing us to alter color, falloff, volu- metric and even texturing in our lighting all from within our compositing packages." While Arc has been using Fusion for its feature animation work, the studio has begun using Nuke as well for some of its live-action integration projects like Camelot, a TV series for Starz."Due to the architecture of each of these packages we're now able to use helpful tools in both programs, opening up options to all of our artists," he says. Arc itself has created its own trend: about three years ago, its lighting and com- positing teams joined as one to give the lighting artists the control of bringing their shots through to final picture. "However, even on complex productions requiring compositing specialists, our lighters, who are familiar with using Fusion, build their beauty passes within Fusion and Maya and then hand it off to our newer Nuke composi- tors."They employed this workflow on the 3D stereo film Dolphin Tail, for which they created a CG dolphin. It's due out this fall. Stodolny, who worked as a stereo com- positor on Beowulf for Sony, says Arc saw the stereo trend developing and prepared. Gnomeo & Juliet was released in stereo, but Enhancing reality Much like fashion trends throughout the past decades, vi- sual effects in the movie and commercial industry tends to ebb and flow with the times and eventually will come back to a new and improved version of itself. In the early '90s we used CG a lot more "invisibly" in order to achieve something the creative leads were just not able to accomplish effectively with live action alone. We used compositing to integrate the CG into the live action with so much attention to detail that viewers almost couldn't understand how the effect was done. I remember working on an By DAVID A. ELKINS Lead Flame/VFX Supervisor Manic, NY www.nycmanic.com Aurora spot where the Statue of Liberty sprouts to life after seeing a beautiful car on a ferry.She put down her torch and walked into the East River to pick up the car. "How would the statue look when her foot came off the pedestal? It wouldn't be green and oxidized would it? It would still be that orange copper color since no air had gotten at it yet, right?" These are the kinds of questions we would ask,and we'd turn to compositing to make these important subtleties a reality.The CG had to look real, or photoreal as we more often say in the industry.CG was used much more as a tool in order to achieve impossible feats — feats we could not achieve all within the camera, but it had to be composited to look like it had been. As CG evolved into much more of an art form in it- self, commercials and movies were being made entirely in CG. Compositors still had the job of integrating all of the elements so the final product looked filmic, even though it was clearly not shot on film. Companies like Pixar and DreamWorks kicked out an onslaught of fantastic CG movie series like Toy Story and Shrek.The commercial in- dustry followed with fully-CG spots. I think this is what made the stereoscopic trend possi- ble — a return of the 1950s-style 3D, where viewers got to feel the movie around them while they watched, except nowadays it really works! Simply put, it is like a slight ad- justment to the final render, and then rendered again, so two slightly offset renders could be projected simultane- ously to create that 3D effect. Despite a small handful of spots that I know of, I don't think the stereo experience in commercials is that prevalent. In fact I have only worked on one or two in the last five years. It is in movies like Avatar that this effect was most effective in my opinion, where it really created a sense of an environment while watching the movie and not just added as a cat-jumping- out-of-the-shadows moment. Avatar is also representative of the trend that the "in- visibility" of CG in spots and film really isn't all that im- portant.CG rendering has become so good that cre- atives almost want it to be known it is being used, and they think up ideas that can't be done without it. However, there are still many creatives out there that again use CG and rely on compositing for achieving their creative visions by enhancing live action with these tools. On a Smuckers spot (pictured) we worked on here at Manic,we used Flame and CG to create falling snow and snow covered lawns in order to make the Norman Rock- well-esque winter wonderland our clients wanted.A sec- ond Smuckers spot was shot where the grass hadn't been as prolific as the creatives wanted;we corrected this in Flame by "invisibly" adding a lush green field. www.postmagazine.com August 2011 • Post 33 continued on page 46