Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1011494
e d i t i o n 3 , 2 0 1 8 | c g w 6 3 them since she's one of the good guys, but the blasters definitely had to sting." In addi- tion, Scanline developed the saddles on the giant carpenter ants that Ant-Man rides. "They went through phases of upgrading to revamp the shape, make them sleeker, and fit with Ant-Man's updated suit." The restaurant fight sequence was shot on a set in Atlanta with the stunt team. "A lot of the fighting was shot in-camera, but we replaced some performances com- pletely when the characters shrink and grow back to regular size," says Boskma. "Part of the Wasp's fighting style is to dodge a punch by shrinking rapidly then growing to normal size again." At one point in the action, the Wasp flies between the crystals of a giant chandelier that Scanline built – and destroyed – entirely in CG under CG supervisor Ryo Sakaguchi. "It tested the limits of our ren- derfarm," Boskma reports. "The chandelier was both highly reflective and refractive. Refractive crystal distorts images, and there are prismatic aberrations to the light. That asks a lot of a physics-based render engine to do. But the tech wizards in our pipeline department helped us find ways to render it." Scanline also did the look development of the macro kitchen environment and all the VFX involved in that scene, which featured a giant saltshaker, an exploding bag of flour, and a smashed CG tomato. The San Francisco Bay sequence posed many of the challenges that water-based visual effects oen present. Ant-Man emerges from the bay as Giant-Man, 90 feet tall. "He's initially mistaken for a whale by the passengers in a whale-watching boat," says Boskma. "He makes a huge splash, and we mimic a whale's tail with his feet. We used our proprietary water sim soware, Flowline, to help us convey the scale of the scene: the mist, foam, aerated water, emitting water versus displacing it. Ant-Man wears a reflective metal suit, and with water on top of that, it got pretty heavy render-wise." Scanline's tools included Maya for modeling and animation, and Chaos Group's V-Ray and 3ds Max for rendering. Giant Man falls unconscious at one point, makes an enormous splash, and sinks into the bay as bubbles rise to the surface of the water. When he hits bottom, he stirs up sed- iment. "If it were really the bay, it would be so murky underwater you'd never be able to see him," notes Boskma. "So we took some creative license to clean up the murky green bay water enough to tell the story." Scanline created a 360-degree digital underwater environment, including the underside of a pier and lots of vegetation. "There are degrees of murkiness that affect the way light scatters around, and in the shallow water, you see patterns reflected from the sky and sun – but we had to be careful it didn't look like the caustics from a swimming pool," he explains. "Very little is inanimate underwater," he adds. "The fish move, and everything – seaweed, pieces of rope – has a bit of a sway to it from the motion of the current." Topside, Scanline craed a high-resolution digital seagull with a complex working feather system. Additional Scanline shots in the film include creating a man-size ant that loves cereal, takes baths, and plays the drums in Scott's home. "We had to make this ant look more realistic but not monstrous," Boskma says. He also promises a glimpse of "a very colorful little world inside the Quantum Realm" for those in the audience who stay in their seats past the closing credits. "Those were fun shots that were highly original in their design," he says. – Christine Bunish SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO Rodeo FX worked on 70 shots featured in the new Columbia Pictures film Sicario: Day of the Soldado. Directed by Stefano Sollima, the film continues the story started in Denis Villeneuve's 2015 film Sicario. In the new release, a black ops team – helmed by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) – attempts to instigate a civil war among Mexico's violent cartels. According to Rodeo FX's VFX supervisor Alexandre Lafortune and producer Melanie La Rue, the studio was tasked with creating a range of visuals that spanned classic muzzle flashes and bullet hits, to blood and gore enhancement, to full-CG environ- ments. They also created numerous military assets, including Black Hawk helicopters and Humvees. But the studio's most intense work involved a two-minute-long sequence that appears early in the film. BEFORE AFTER