Post Magazine

January 2012

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were going to die anyway, you'd have to try something crazy." Still, the chief concern for the animators was telling the story. "George [Lucas] would pull back the cool factor on a shot to make sure it was serving the story, and [director Anthony] Hemingway was of the same mind- set," Kavanagh says. THE DETAILS Previs was done at Skywalker Ranch with a variant of ILM's in-house zViz animatics software, which created "an amazing tem- plate for the whole movie," he says. In fact, animators used some of the previs files to animate the film's opening title sequence. The balance of the movie's animation was done with Autodesk Maya. ILM tapped proprietary Zeno software with its rigid dynamics engine to enable planes to break apart in hundreds of pieces when they were hit. Animators were careful to por- tray destruction accurately, revealing the inner structure of the aircraft at times. "The fuselage was not only built of lightweight aluminum but parts of it were wrapped in fabric so we used cloth simulations on the rudder, for example," Kavanagh explains. "We got as detailed as that." A typical dogfight featured a dizzying num- ber of elements in total — "the CG planes, multiple layers of smoke both practical and CG, clouds, [bullet] tracers, impacts that were shot practically or with CG debris, and fire created as full volumetric simulations," says Cooper. The dogfights proved challenging on a number of levels: "On the one hand, when you start with a filmed background, it's easy to augment a shot building on the visual cues already in the plate; on the other hand, when you're working entirely in CG, you can do anything and that means that your options are limitless." Nevertheless, he notes that the most dif- ficult aspect of these shots for the composi- tors was not their complexity but the need to make the shots look real to audiences. "How compelling is the shot? Do audiences feel in jeopardy?," he asks. "It's not as easy to latch onto that." Part of the process of making the planes look real involved degrading the images. "We always go to great lengths to add photo- graphic schmutz, lens flares, glints, reflections," Cooper says. "We dirty it up!" All of the aerial destruction included digital pyro effects crafted with custom fluid simula- tions. "With the planes moving at such high speeds it was difficult to simulate fire with practical effects," Hammack explains. "We have developed some pretty advanced tools for realistic fire, but it was a new challenge to attach fire to planes traveling at 200-300 mph. A lot of the dynamics that fluid simulations are built on start to break down at high speeds. So we had to develop new techniques, new ways to do them in a realistic way." ILM used off-the-shelf software "when it made sense," says Cooper, but wrote its own code for fire simulations, explosions and air- craft shaders. "We use [The Foundry's] Nuke for compositing but we've done a lot of extension work to make Nuke perform bet- ter in our pipeline, to give us better through- put and the ability to share assets across dis- ciplines," he reports. Hammack cites ILM's ability to do "high- speed destruction" as an important skillset to carry forward. "It's always been difficult to plan for [high-speed destruction] because it's not what the tools were built to do. By adding this capability, we have another weapon in our VFX arsenal of destruction." A sequence that involved the Airmen straf- ing a German train as it races for the shelter of a mountain tunnel — created by Pixo- mondo's Berlin office and supervised by Bjorn Meyer in their LA office — afforded the opportunity to go beyond the previs. "It was originally designed as a wreck that happened as the train traveled away from camera and off into the distance," says Hammack. "But we were able to propose a more exciting sequence that serves as a nice ending to that particular section of the film. The majority of the sequence before the destruction featured an actual vintage train shot just outside Prague. But once the planes start to destroy it, it becomes digital as did the landscape. Pixomondo did a fantastic job." Digital set extensions were required for both American and German air bases, which were practical locations that needed to be populated with aircraft, vehicles, hangars and other structures, pilots and crew. "The production designer came up with a certain amount of set dressing for the American bases — maybe two rows of tents and the other 400 had to be done digitally," says Hammack. "But you got an idea of spatial relationships [from the set pieces], and we established how large the base would be. We relied on historical foot- age and the first-hand accounts of the sur- viving Airmen to give us the right feeling." The Airmen's destruction of a German air base was an especially powerful sequence. "We were able to find an open air field and mock-up planes and added blue plywood plane silhouettes to do pyro and practical explosions around," Hammock explains. Then UPP in Prague took over with digital set extension adding "all the buildings, crowds, the planes on the field — which looked great in what was a relatively long sequence." Animators at ILM and some vendors used an extensive amount of motion capture to obtain data for a huge cast of digital doubles in the air base scenes — people doing everything from smoking and chatting to driving trucks and taxiing planes on runways. "We didn't want to keyframe that," says Kavanagh. "There are hundreds of people in some establishing shots. We wanted them to blend in and the best way was to go to the mocap stage for a day with a shopping list of activities." The whole data management aspect of wrangling so many VFX shots was a mam- moth process in itself. "Any hour of the day somebody somewhere in the world was working on the show," says Cooper. "We had never done this volume of work with outside partners who ran every shot through us as managers and VFX supervisors," notes Hammack. "We had to communicate in an efficient way and remotely supervise their work," often with virtual meetings. "That's the way things are going — work- ing across continents," observes Cooper. "You want to take advantage of the top talents around the world." He adds. "You can get easily jaded working on one action movie after another, but the historical relevance and cultural importance of Red Tails was not lost on us." www.postmagazine.com Anthony Hemingway (right) on set with actor Cuba Gooding Jr. George Lucas jumped in to direct reshoots after Hemingway moved on to his next project. An enormous cast of CG planes were used, including P51 Mustangs and German Messerschmitts. Post • January 2012 21

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