Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1522701
Stefan Bredereck: That, for example, was 100% compositing work. There was a lot of 2D tracking and trickery involved. The way Steve [Pugh] and the Shadows team shot it was really beneficial, but it was also obviously a lot of work to make it look convincing. Then there are other effects that are clearly CG driven, like any kind of gore enhancement where we simulate stuff like blood. We have about half the artists in CG, and we also have a lot of generalists so that people can take on multiple tasks. Fred Pienkos: I think the Baby Colin stuff that we did was a perfect example of production and post-production coming together. We've done a lot of face replacements in the past. Some of them are oen shots that weren't expected to be visual effects shots, so they were sort of an aerthought. And face replacements can be hard when you're not taking into account lighting and things like that. In some of the scenes with Baby Colin, they were in nightclubs with flashing strobing lights. Steve [Pugh] and Production took very careful care in shooting those elements with similar moving lights on Colin's face so that we could time that with what the child actor was doing to really make it look believable and sell that he was the char- acter in all of those scenes. How do you utilize Fusion Studio for your work on the series? Fred Pienkos: We use Fusion for all of the prep and all of the color workflow for the different cameras that they use. Fusion is our main tool for ingestion and in production, taking that all the way through delivery. It's our main compositing system for every shot on the show, and we'll be using the internal 2D tracking and all of the keying and compositing—all of the tools and macros that we've written to add to the suite of tools. Fusion is obviously very easy to customize, so we're always writing plug-ins or macros—or Fuses—to make the compositors' lives easier, to save them time and to help with conti- nuity from shot to shot. Stefan Bredereck: A good example is for the CG department. When we get a render out of our CG pipeline, we're using mostly Houdini and Redshi. We have hundreds of EXRs on disk with mul- tiple buffers. We have basically one thing in Fusion that we created that allows you to select what version you want to load, and it loads every buffer and pre-comps it correctly. We even created our own photographic exposure tool. Basically, what we're doing in Redshi, we can do in Fusion. It's not destructive, because it only reads the metadata of the rendered images and information, puts that in there, and then we can tweak it. Even junior compositors or people that switched from Nuke and are a little bit green in Fusion can, with one click, have a pre-comp of all CG layers, and it's deeply integrated thanks to the pipeline team. So CG artists, that maybe are not day-to-day compositors, can do a pre-comp and show the supervisor something, and it obviously also saves a tremendous amount of time when you don't have to manually load the layers in, deconstruct them, and put them back together. It's literally three clicks. Fred Pienkos: That macro meticulously caters to the CG depart- ment and how they expect the layers to be merged. When those el- "Baby Colin" required a full head replacement on a child actor. a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 4 c g w 1 1