Post Magazine

36 Post • October 2008 www.postmagazine.com like paint, wire and rig removal, to set exten- sions, greenscreens and replacement shots. Prichard is an ar tist by training who fo- cused on the traditional skills of drawing and painting, which have been incredibly helpful, he says, with his compositing work. "Being able to compose things and draw- ing the eye to a certain location or assigning different values — maybe you're darkening down one side of the frame to help show- case the talent on the other side of the frame — those are definite skills I picked up from my fine art background… Rolling your sleeves up and focusing on the little details is really important as well." Prichard and team did some crazy com- positing work on Zohan that tapped into his whole skill set. He was most happy with how a challenging neon shot came off. "Neon's one of those things where if you don't do it right, you just notice it. We kept doing the pass and doing it and doing it, and something just wasn't right. So we took a day and went downtown and shot a bunch of references of neon in San Francisco and brought it back to the of- fice and really star ted to break down why neon looks the way it does." Ar tist Kirstin Bradfield was the compositor on that shot and using that refer- ence she realized that red neon looks different than green neon, which looks dif- ferent than yellow neon." The "neon shot" takes place in New York City — the camera flies through a window into a restaurant. The window glass had been removed and Orphanage compositors had to replace it, complete with reflections of cars, people and that neon sign.They created the elements and put them into the 3D pipeline, first doing a non-lit pass.The hand-off between the 3D ar tist and com- positor was tricky since there were 10 or more passes, which the compositor had to mimic. This is where Foundr y's Nuke, their compositing tool, was vital. The Orphanage recently incorporated Nuke into its pipeline and within that they are now creating "smart tools" like oPasses, which automatically im- por ted those passes and auto assembled them the way the TD had originally wanted. "We've been developing this tool on two shows — Iron Man (Paramount Pictures, 2008) and Zohan — and it was just a huge gap that we needed to put some develop- ment on. Now it's a tool that's around for the rest of our shows and commercials are benefiting from it," says Prichard. Their other main compositing challenge was a "really hairy" rig removal — they actu- ally replaced the entire torso of an actor swimming, complete with splashes and water elements, to help integrate the scene. There were difficult paint shots and set ex- tension work, like a shot at the movie's open that has matte paintings of Tel Aviv in the background. All exterior shots were in New York City; at one point production closed down Times Square. Many shots were cov- ered with multiple cameras to minimize the number of takes and save time, so rigs had to be removed when the shots were meshed together. There were face replace- ment shots where actors' faces were placed atop contor tionists' bodies, who were putting themselves into pretzel positions (Zohan apparently had some skills). In addition to Nuke, they used Adobe After Effects on shots that had multiple lay- ers and required much mapping. RE:Vision's suite of plug-ins like RE:Flex, ReelSmart Mo- tion Blur and Twixter helped change the tim- ing of a character's action. In one fight scene, the director wanted several layers of the The Orphanage's Alex Prichard: the studio handled 230 shots for Zohan, including rig and wire removal. Working on his own stuff when he has free time helps inspire PrimeFocus's Theo Groeneboom, who created Digger in 3DS Max and Fusion. The Art of Compositing

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