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j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 5 c g w 3 5 short film also called Pixels, which Kramer says included "very simple renderings of some cubed characters, and that's sort of where we started." For the big screen, the group added a lot more detail, includ- ing light emission, which also gave the characters more scale. "Our characters actually emit light. If you think of it like a CRT for video games, it's a lit screen on which [the characters] appear. So we wanted to bring that emissive light quality to our characters in the real world," explains Kramer. Imageworks partnered closely with other studios, including Digital Domain, and VFX Supervisor Marten Larsson, who completed CG work on the film's Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Centipede characters and scenes. Using a combination of Side Effects' Houdini, Autodesk's Maya, and The Foundry's Nuke, Digital Domain completed more than 360 shots. Kramer agrees that the characters themselves probably presented the biggest VFX challenge. C H A R A C T E R C R E A T I O N S "The characters were definitely the trickiest — they had to look like they did in the game because they're the iconic characters, right?" says Larsson. "At the same time, you want to have a balance so they look real enough so they are believable in the environment." Larsson uses Pac-Man as an example. "He's a sphere. If you make him out of boxes, you're actually looking at a flat sur- face," he says. "So the first thing we ran into was that he looked like a sphere but was reflecting like a mirror — giant reflections running across him that didn't really show the shape of the character." Another design challenge was the fact that all the char- acters were emitting light. "So we had to figure out how to make them emit light without completely flattening them out," says Larsson. Easier said than done, how- ever. Aer all, many of these are classic 2D characters. "If you make Donkey Kong look like Donkey Kong, well, we've really only seen what he looks like from the front. So if you nailed him from the front and he looks perfect, he still might look a little weird if you look at him three-quarters. That required a bit of back and forth design- wise," Larsson points out. Larsson, along with Kramer, was involved with the film in the early stages, working closely with Butler and helping out with tests, "trying to figure out what these very low pixel, flat, 2D characters would look like in 3D," says Larsson. An additional challenge was that many of the sequences took place during daylight hours. "We had a more difficult time conveying to the audience that these were light-emissive characters because the amount of light they are actually emitting is overpowered by the sun, so we had to figure out how to play that light energy in ways that would show up and would read in broad daylight," says Kramer. "If we were to light up our char- acters where every single cube on the character is emitting light, it just looks flat and shapeless, and it's very difficult to make that character feel like it's living within the environment." As a result, the crew ended up lighting only selective cubes. Kramer explains: "A cube would be bright right next to a dark cube, and it would emit light onto that cube and would turn off, then another cube would turn on by sort of dancing and moving the light around and lighting selective cubes and allowing most of the cubes to catch the natural light of the environment." A large part of the work com- pleted by Imageworks, using a combination of Solid Angle's Arnold, Maya, and Houdini, was in the DC Chaos scene, the final attack on Washington, DC involving all the characters. "We developed pipelines to destroy the city, which was fun because the destruction was different than you might see in other [disaster] films," says Kramer. "Everything we would do would pixelate or, what we would say, would 'voxelate' the environment. It's a term I use a lot because these characters are built out of these cubes, or voxels, which are basically 3D pixels. To attack something, they basically turn it into voxels." So, for example, when a Gal- aga drops a bomb on a building, some of it will be destroyed in a practical manner, but big sec- tions of it will just kind of cubify into voxels, and those cubes will then just fall apart and collapse. "We have another shot where Tetris comes down and sort of locks into a building, and once a line is complete, it destroys that section of the building and collapses on itself," Kramer says. "We had to develop a whole lan- guage for what that looked like." While Pixels is indeed another summer "destroy the Earth" film, it adds a unique spin with your not-so-average alien char- acters. Alas, eventually for the characters, it was game over. ■ Linda Romanello (lromanello@postmagazine.com) is the managing editor of Post Magazine, CGW's sister publication. DOZENS OF CG GAME CHARACTERS INVADE EARTH IN PIXELS.