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46 cgw e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 2 0 very much hand-in-hand with editorial and the effects-room postvis, which is obviously a quite complicated and involved process because it involves spending money on things that might not even make it into the cut, but has to be good enough for people to make informed decisions about." In some instances, the company will do final shots, especially if it is an environment and within the company's strengths, where- by it will do final matte paintings, as they did on the Netflix dystopian sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror. "We're not looking to be a post house," says May. "We're purely there to serve and help facilitate productions or post houses to get them through design or tricky prob- lems, whether it's an animation problem or [involving] previs storytelling." Embracing Real Time According to May, he had been looking at VR and game engines for some time as way to explore a space. He used the real-time technology to build the night club for "San Junipero" (Season 3 Episode 4) of Black Mirror. "Rather than just doing a few visuals and white-card modeling, I went the extra mile and built a VR experience that the director and producers were able to look at and experience firsthand," he says. May began exploring this medium further, examining the use of game engines beyond gaming applications. "His Dark Materials is full of complicated challenges. The show has a good budget, but with the ambition of the show, that budget is quickly stretched. So, you have to come up with creative solutions and find ways to resolve situations, and this is oen the tech- nology that can do it for you," May says. While filmmakers like James Cameron and Jon Favreau have been using virtual cameras to scout locations for some time now, the process up to now has been out of the cost range for television. But, Unreal has opened up that access to far more people. Nevertheless, the integration of Unreal Engine into the process called for a retool- ing of Painting Practice's pipeline. When the company began its work with the engine, it had difficulty getting the different soware to communicate, whereas now there are more scripts and plug-ins available to make the process easier and more automated. For the most part, Maxon's Cinema 4D serves as Painting Practice's backbone – "It's great for previs and postvis, for effects work," notes May. In addition, the facility employs the Adobe Creative Suite, along with Adobe Aer Effects, and Premiere for editing and Pixologic's ZBrush for complex environment and character designs. The group also uses Frame.io for collaboration as well as delivery, archiving, and referenc- ing, along with Quixel products (Bridge and Mixer) and PureRef, freeware for making giant art boards. Worlds and Characters In essence, Painting Practice's Concept team for His Dark Materials on Season 1 (Season 2's release date is still pending) worked with the environments and crea- tures teams as well as with the production designer to help determine what the worlds and characters would look like. They would then review that with Framestore and Rus- sell Dodgson, VFX supervisor. "Sometimes the directors wouldn't come on board until late in the process, and we'd need to plan a lot of the sequences. So, it was my job, really, to have a go at making those sequences, with various outcomes and different tone levels," May explains. "Then when the directors would start, we would show them a bunch of things. Some- times they would like the ideas or the prin- ciple, or they wouldn't necessarily like all the cameras or the speed or tone. It would be a hit or miss, but a lot of the time we got it quite close, and then we'd make the chang- es. But, it is really important and essential that the directors have creative ownership of the sequences so they can shoot some of that previs; otherwise, [the work] becomes null and void." As May points out, there were many instances on Season 1 where the work paid off and was used shot-for-shot, and other times when it was used but was filmed a bit differently although the elements and beats were the same; alas, there were even times when everything changed, particularly when there were script alterations. One of the particularly challenging sets Painting Practice had to design for His Dark Materials is Trollesund, the main port of Lapland in the world of Lyra Belacqua, the story's heroine. For this, the team made a A look at a smoke-filled scene of Bolvangar. Painting Practice uses real-time tech to aid design and vis for His Dark Materials.