Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1522701
ements come in through our pre-comp macro, it looks exactly how the CG department expected. The compositor can start from how the CG was intended to look, so that saves so much time. Let's dive into the memorable Season 5, Episode 5 hallway se- quence where Guillermo encounters and evades an elaborate series of deadly booby traps. How did your team approach the challenge of achieving the tone the client was seeking while bringing such a robust variety of effects to life on screen? Fred Pienkos: The client pretty much knew most of the gags that they wanted, but there are times when the VFX team can add to the humor of the shot. That's sort of the way the relationship with the client works—if it's funny and if it works, it's great. The challenge from a 2D perspective was that this shot was one long take, so we had probably 14 different areas where we needed to have effects interacting with the character. It took meticulous planning to break that out into segments that could be distributed amongst multiple artists. Stefan Bredereck: It was a total of 700 frames—more typically, an FX shot may be around 100 to 150 frames. We had flamethrowers, spears, electric sparks, electric arcs, a pendulum, flamethrowers, a springed wall panel, screwdrivers that fly through the air, spikes com- ing out, firecrackers, a baseball bat flying through the air, a guillotine, and then the rope at the end. So there was a lot of stuff happening! We were lucky to get an amazing temp from Steve [Pugh]. That showed us exactly what they wanted, and they just basically said, 'Make it look better, make it look cooler, and make it definitely more realistic.' Aer that, Fred and his team did all the 2D prep. We usually re- move the noise so that it's clean for tracking. Then we had to do a camera track of the whole sequence, so that we have one big layout for all the people to work in. Once we have this main layout, it's easy to distribute the workload amongst multiple artists and say, 'Okay, you do all the flamethrowers,' and so on and so forth. Then bit by bit, we made sure our Fusion setup could handle up- dates with frame range changes, which is another custom script that we did so that when, for example, a client decides to shorten or lengthen an effect within the sequence, it gets automatically and perfectly updated in the timeline, or we can insert new effects into that updated timeline dynamically and nondestructively. That's an- other thing we actually customized just for this show. This allows us to be really flexible and we can insert effects into such a long se- quence, and we only render the frames we need. Then it was all a bunch of different kinds of simulations, all done mostly in Houdini: fire simulations, rigid bodies, vellum—which is a grain simulation, electrical arcs, and particle simulations. I think the only thing that we didn't do this time was water, but I believe we had a blood simulation for a vampire wound in the same episode, so we did get our fluid sim in! We had one effect where they wanted to have lasers coming out of the knight's armor. That was actually a really cool effect, but because of time, they cut it. It may also have been cut due to comedic timing. If it's too much for too long, it might just not be as funny. Season 5 included a sequence that required a 700-frame FX shot.