Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/786156
www.postmagazine.com 5 POST BITS & PIECES FEBRUARY 2017 "We had many scenes across the series of people driving in and out of Buckingham Palace, and it's not possible to get access to film at the actual location," Turner explains. Thus, an archway set piece was built on the backlot of Elstree Studios for cars to drive through, and the artists added the rest. "The first series only covers a short period of time across the '40s and '50s, so the model was a much dirtier version of the palace than the one we know now, as the palace was very dark with dirt back then," says Turner. Nevertheless, the artists had to make the palace as photoreal as pos- sible, taking their own photos and using Enwaii to build the model. They then re-projected the photos onto the model and added 1950s post- war dirt and grime. Still, covering the building in dirt without it getting lost in the grime was hardly easy, and it needed to be realistic to the peri- od while still being recognizable as Buckingham Palace. There were also many digital set extensions, such as Downing Street. One of the more difficult extensions was for a BOAC DC-4 plane, which had to feel three-dimensional. "We saw it from many angles, and at times we got very close to it, so the level of detail needed to be very high. Also, shiny silver aircraft needs to reflect the light believably," Turner adds. The DC-4 was used in multiple scenes across the series. The team took a good deal of detailed photo reference of a real DC-4 in South Africa and used that to build a 3D model using Maya and Enwaii. They then re-projected those photos back onto the model as textures, and add- ed additional detail on a per-shot ba- sis using digital matte painting done in Adobe's Photoshop. Furthermore, the model was rigged so that it could take off and land, which it did in a handful of shots. CROWD-PLEASING Crowds are ever present in the series. One of Us did not use digital doubles for this work, but instead used digital crowd replications. The group devised an in-house 2.5D tool in Nuke that was a card generator, giving the artists a choice of crowd elements and letting them deter- mine the costume, angle, resolution and actions. While the overall effects were not difficult, what made them compli- cated was the scale of the work. There were four different directors across 10 episodes, and the shoot- ing schedule and post schedule overlapped significantly. This meant the artists often were pulled in two directions at the same time. "The number of shots and the huge amount of data became a challenge when juggling multiple episodes at once," says Turner. It's not every day that a studio gets such a royal assignment. As a matter of fact, One Of Us typically works on films, and although this was an episodic production, they ap- proached it as a feature film. So, the expectations for high-quality work were exactly what the group is used to, and the crew was able to trans- fer its film experience directly to the project. And the result? Award- winning. — By Karen Moltenbrey (Karen Moltenbrey is Chief Editor of Post's sister publication, CGW.) Buckingham Palace archway Digital set extensions