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VFX for Films VFX sorcery in tune with original photography By David Heuring sequence from Fantasia, with Nicolas Cage cast as 1,400-year- old sorcerer Balthazar Blake.The film is filled with over-the-top visuals as Blake and his nemesis Horvath (Alfred Molina) do bat- tle with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. John Nelson, who supervised visual effects for the film, drew on his background as a cinematographer in developing the film’s visuals.“Coming from camera taught me a great deal about light and how it functions in a volume,” says Nelson.“So many effects today are not just hard objects, but are volumetric. I find that the closer I am to the photography, the better. I’m not demean- ing what people who sit at the computer do, because they do a tremendous job, but being close to camera takes it out of an ar- tificial world and helps you understand how it all works to- gether, which makes things more immediate and organic.” Tony Clark also brings a cinematography background to his A work. Clark is one of the founders of Rising Sun Pictures (www.rsp.com.au) in Adelaide,Australia, which contributed some 70 shots to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Rising Sun’s shot list included parts of the final climactic battle sequence, scenes in which char- acters escape through a “mirror wand,” and another scene where Horvath creates smoke that “searches” for his prey. The work was done at 2K resolution using images scanned from the original 35mm negative.“Film is a fantastically high lati- tude environment,” says Clark.“When you’re looking at a scene that involves a couple of super-hot street lights,and you want to create a shadow on the inside of one of those streetlights, you can grab the exposure and drag it down until the rest of the scene has gone completely black. But you discover that there is still detail being held in the uppermost highlights.That’s a great medium, and you don’t really get that shooting on electronic formats like the Red camera because they clip off very quickly at about 7 stops.” Clark agrees that the technology of VFX have come a long way since Linwood Dunn,ASC, and John P. Fulton,ASC, made the optical shot into an art form.“There’s a wonderful aspect to the older crafts like cinematography and visual effects, whose practi- tioners value sharing and disseminating knowledge freely,” he says.“For me, the accessibility of people and their willing- ness to share craft have been the most startling and fantastic aspects of what we do.” DELAIDE, AUSTRALIA— The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a comic adventure from Disney, based loosely on the classic the zombies.“As the infection spreads, the city lights go out block by block,” describes Berardi.“We keep pulling out to a cosmic view of the Earth, all in full stereo 3D, and you feel like you are literally in a starscape looking at this planet.Then we push back in and play with the idea of getting vertigo as we drop the camera back through, right back into the Shibuya Crossing four years later, kind of like a timelapse.We designed the shot to have you feel like you were falling from space, through clouds.” Mr. X used Autodesk Maya to model, rig and animate the shot, then ported every- thing into Side Effects Houdini for shader work and lighting.They render in Render- Man or Mantra, depending on the look they are after, but they did use V-Ray for render- ing full CG zombie shots. Houdini was also used for all effects work, including water and explosions. Photoshop was called for matte paintings. Matchmoving is via 3D Equalizer and PF Track, and compositing was done in Nuke.The Foundry’s Ocula package helped with the stereo work, and Iridas FrameCy- cler DI was used for stereo dailies. Another challenging sequence was the de- struction of Tokyo, says Berardi. It starts off in the underground Umbrella facility as thou- sands of clones attack Wesker, who runs the corporation.“He escapes in a military plane — a super-charged, super-armed Z22 Os- prey that we created digitally. I think we achieved photorealism, but the design of the plane is really fun.The hangar is CG and he remotely detonates the facility and the entire Tokyo City Center and escapes just in time. It really takes the audience for a ride.” According to Berardi, Anderson wanted to take the action to a new level to try to heighten the audience experience.“What we achieved was an audience experience that feels like you are playing a first-person videogame, and the dimensional experience where the images are kind of wrapped around you kind of help with that.” SORCERER’S APPRENTICE For Disney’s Sorcerer’ s Apprentice, starring Nicolas Cage, Santa Monica’s Asylum (www.asylumfx.com) provided 500 shots, which is just a bit above average for the vi- sual effects house. But what made this job more challenging, according to visual effects supervisor/GM Phil Brennan, was “every shot was complex, and almost all involved some amount of CG.” Most of the film’s effects involved magic, and almost all were one-off effects, he says. “Major effects would take place over one, two, three, maybe five shots, but would be 28 Post • September 2010 www.postmagazine.com Phosphene (www.phosphenefx.com) in NYC created VFX featured in the opening sequence of the action film Salt. The studio altered the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea for the scene in which Angelina Jolie’s character is released as part of a prisoner exchange. The studio created concrete structures at the checkpoints using The Foundry’s Nuke, Autodesk 3DS Max and Adobe After Effects CS4. The studio relied on PCs with Intel Xeon Processors running Windows XP 64-bit and Windows 7 64-bit. used only once.We’d have to put a huge amount of time into developing the look and all the technical aspects of every differ- ent effect.” There were a lot of transitional effects in the film, people turning into other people, cars morphing into other cars, characters turning into smoke and later in the film the smoke reforms back into the character again, one person is formed from butter- flies, another is formed from cockroaches… but it wasn’t as if Asylum could borrow one effect from another. “Every time it hap- pened, it happened in a different way,” ex- plains Brennan. To create the look of the Horvath (Al- fred Molina) character forming out of cock- roaches, Asylum worked out a basic con- cept, the basis of which came from the script and the director, Jon Turteltaub.“Here you need to start with a single cockroach and by the end of the sequence you have a person. Before even worrying about how the cockroaches would look, we had to come up with behavioral simulations.These were developed by one of our lead FX artists,Theo Vandernoot, using Houdini.” They started off getting the concept down.“We were somewhat constrained by the physical limitations,” says Brennan.“We had a very short amount of time and a short number of shots to have all these cockroaches — without them running at a ridiculous speed — climb on top of each other and form something over six feet tall. continued on page 41