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Persistence of Vision worked on six scenes for the latest Mission: Impossible film, including this shot of Tom Cruise hanging from the world's tallest building. and even the costume department. "It feels like we are a hub of a spoked wheel with all the of the other departments, rather than serving only visual effects." There are many processes that fit under the previs umbrella these days, and Dozoretz puts them into five categories: Designvis (designing what a space looks like); Pitchvis (helping get a project financed or greetlit); Previs (hard core storytelling); Onsetvis (realtime graphics so filmmakers don't see the green- screen when looking at a video tap); and Postvis,(essentially rough compositing and animation once the thing has been shot, for previews and more). In term of tools, Persistence of Vision primarily uses Autodesk Maya, a favorite of VFX houses, since they have to hand off data to these studios. Although they do write their own scripts for Maya, extending the software's capabilities. Other gear called on includes After Effects, Nuke, Z-Brush, Pro Tools, FCP and Avid. At press time, Persistence of Vision was busy at work on an upcoming VFX- heavy film they couldn't name and instead pointed to the recent Ghost Protocol (ILM was the main house) as an example of what they can do. The studio worked on six scenes in addition to prevising a few scenes in the Imax format. One of those scenes is the very recognizable one of Tom Cruise hanging on the side of the world's largest building. And, yes, that was really Tom Cruise, One of the big sequences prevised by The Third Floor for Journey 2: The Mysterious Island includes the lizard chase. not a stunt double, not a digital double. In order to pull this off, previs was essential for safety and getting the shot the director needed. The Persistence of Vision crew did their homework, spoke to the owners of the building, the helicopter pilots, Cruise himself and figured out how to shoot it safely, as well as how long the camera arm needed to be. The only real VFX shots for that scene included wire removals. Other notable scenes included the bomb that destroys the Kremlin, one where an SUV crashed into a river, the sand storm and ensuing car chase, and a sequence that takes place in an automated parking lot. "It was a round build- ing about 12 stories high, and they ended up building one story and half a pie slice of another floor. They determined how much to build based on our previs," explains Dozoretz. He sums up by emphasizing that most action and VFX-heavy films get previs these days. "A picture above a certain budget level will not get greenlit any- more without previs first. It's beyond, 'How do we execute the film?' It's used to decide whether to make the movie or not." THE THIRD FLOOR When we chatted with Patrick Smith, previsualization supervisor/artist at LA's The Third Floor (www.thethirdfloorinc.com), he had recently finished up previsualization work on Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, a follow-up to 2008's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Like Persistence of Vision's Dozoretz, Smith hammers home the reach of previsualization and how that reach, and even the definition of the term itself, has evolved over time. "It started out as practical tool, a blueprint that allowed the director to see his or her movie come to life in something that was more www.postmagazine.com Post • March 2012 17