Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1501110
www.postmagazine.com 18 POST MAY/JUNE 2023 "It would take over a year to model something that complex," Williams notes. "So we used a sort of city-builder technology." The team repurposed several of the internal city builders they had developed for other projects, applying a new set of rules for the Arête's unique structural components. "Since it's a full-sized 360 spaceship, there's no flat plane to put the buildings on — you're actually putting everything onto a very complex surface," Williams explains. "We started by modeling a sort of 'block-o-matic' version of the ship." Next, the team applied textures to define specif- ic areas, adding details such as machinery and oth- er industrial elements. Half of the ship is covered in a distinctive red-glass material, which became a major component of the complex surface build. "Once we had built a very blocky version of the glass, we used a piece of software to break that up into hundreds and hundreds of panels of glass with different shapes on the backs," Williams notes. The surrounding city is visible through sections of the glass, which required additional levels of compounding detail. "The whole ship is covered in detail, and then on top of that, there's another pass that's done with the city builder on top of that detail to add even more detail," Williams continues. "There's a city builder pass that's done on top of the glass to add antennas and little brackets and everything, so it turned into this very complex build." A stitch in time Wētā helmed the effects work for a pivotal battle sequence onboard the Arête, stitching 18 shots together to create an epic "oner" sequence show- casing the heroics of the Guardians. "The biggest challenge of the oner wasn't all the CG that we put into it — we replaced probably half of that shot with digital assets," Williams explains. "The thing that was so challenging about the oner was the timing. You're trying to keep as much of the plate as possible, but none of the shots are even remotely close on their stitch. So, it's all done with CG blends." The oner follows a precedent set by other mem- orable sequences in the Guardians of the Galaxy series — it's set to music, with each key moment rhythmically synchronized to achieve an exhilarat- ing effect. "A lot of the accents and beats in the choreogra- phy of that scene are to the music, to the rhythm," Cozens explains, "so, we worked out a click track, and figured out character choreography. We did that in a very rough state to get the ideas in the storytelling bought off on, and then had to problem solve all the stitching challenges in parallel while the performance work was being done. You'll see each character's got his or her hero moment in there. Once that was working with the choreography, we went into technically solving all the stitches." The sequence's various speeds and timings added even more layers of detail for the team to manage. "The filming was done at 120fps and needed to be output in variable speeds, but internally we needed to push it out at realtime so we could sim cloth and things like that," Cozens notes. "We had all these different time spaces that we needed to jump through, as well as maintaining the overall edit and choreography." "We camera tracked at 120, we roto'd at 120, ev- erything was done at 120 so that for anything that changed, we didn't have to go back and rebuild everything," Williams adds. "But the thing that was hard was every time we changed anything about any shot, it ran the jeopardy of changing the stitch — so it would unwind. It wasn't like you were just changing a shot — you were changing the neigh- boring two shots as well." The oner sequence required close collaboration between the VFX team and the stunt team. "I think Stephane [Ceretti] and Wayne [Dalglish], the stunt coordinator, did a really wonderful job of making the shoot very successful," Cozens recalls. "We still had some very difficult stitches, where we had hero shots of Quill or Mantis right full-frame, in-camera, in the middle of a stunt at a stitch point, so we had to rebuild those performances and then graft back on elements of the plate." Shattering a behemoth While building the Arête, the Wētā team also had to anticipate its impending destruction — unfolding in spectacular fashion by the end of the film. "There are explosions all over the surface of it, and eventually it just shatters into a thousand piec- es. We had to make sure that our system account- ed for that," Williams explains. "We had to work with effects to make sure wherever they were going to blow up this incred- ibly-complex model, they could de-instance that area so they could do destruction on it and still publish it back to us," Williams recalls. "Then we would take what they de-instanced, delete it and then import the effects model in. So there were a lot of moving parts that had to be honored to make sure that they came out the back end." Cozens and the animation team suggested fracture points where the ship would come apart. Next, the team took each of those points and built them as breakaway models with city-built interiors, complete with exposed floors and machinery. "We've got a lot of destruction in the third act that needs timings and compositions to be under- stood before the modeling work can get going," Cozens notes. "We do an initial pass in animation, and visualize destruction elements and timings for things in order to inform how those things get up-res'd and how they need to work. On top of the character work, we're also building and visualizing the destruction of different elements." The destruction of the Arête was one of Wētā's biggest challenges. Wētā's responsibilities included character work.