Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545821
you need to disperse the heat. We went ahead and studied resorts in Palm Springs where seniors live, and looked at the infrastructure there. Pickleball courts, tennis courts, the lap pool, all of it. It's all in the town model, which is pretty incredible. How many VFX shots did your team work on, and were any tools especially helpful for the project? Tara DeMarco: We finished just under 1,200 shots. The one so- ware tool that we used—that a lot of teams use in prep, but that isn't always discussed—is we did build a version of the town in Unreal for virtual scouting. We used it alongside the art department and the camera department to figure out how tall the wall should be behind Sam's house, because we wanted to see the desert, but we also wanted to hide the Netflix fence. We wanted to minimize the visual effects work and keep it intentional rather than just clean up. So we spent a lot of time placing our cameras in this Unreal asset that Pix- omondo built, just trying to figure out: Where do we place the blue screens? How tall are the containers? How far back should they be? What amount of real access do we need? That was massively help- ful in the construction and set planning phase. Also it gave us a real visual reference for the directors and the showrunners to just say: What does it look like if we make that tall- er? What if we make it smaller? How about if we only see it from this angle? It really brought into focus what we wanted to spend our time on and what additionally we would need to build or not build. We did use a fair amount of scanning with iPads and we did pho- togrammetry with a little turntable booth in our office. So I definitely used Polycam and KIRI Engine to make assets for post-vis and to just test and make sure that our photogrammetry would work. We used Polycam to scan the sets for our pre-vis so that we could have the real set build and then animate our creature in it. So those tools aren't quite as common because they're like sort of cheeky fast on- set builds. As far as the soware that the vendors use, that seems pretty tra- ditional. It is Nuke and Maya. I'm a Flame artist, so I used a Flame license at home to do a little bit of compositing on the side. Was a large amount of pre-vis needed for the project? Tara DeMarco: We pre-vised every shot with the creatures, except for the finale. For the finale, we focused on pre-vis of the explosion moment with Blaine and Anneliese [the CEO of The Boroughs and his wife, played by Seth Numrich and Alice Kremelberg]. And then we pre-vised a little bit of the shadow work with the creature just to test what shadow we should make and where it should cast. That shadow was actually a 3D-printed miniature of our creature mod- el that was then mini-puppeteered to create the cast shadow on the wall. Another unlikely great use of a technology that was once a dream and is now a reality. Were there any other unexpected practical elements or spe- cial effects in your VFX workflow? Tara DeMarco: We wanted the fluid that gets drained from the back of Sam's throat to be real. So our special effects department