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DI Gallery Full service post facilities in Santa Monica and Hollywood offering: YCM Separations Digital Intermediates Audio/Video QC Sound Transfers Optical Soundtrack Negatives B&W Film Processing www.ntaudio.com VFX FOR FILMS [ cont. from 28 ] They had to move and pile on top of each other quickly enough to form the correct shape and still have sort of believable motion.“We went through all forms of iterations of hidden streams of cockroaches pushing it up from underneath, but none of it looked correct,” he says.“So we just had to bite the bullet and simulate all these hundreds of thou- sands of cockroaches — each one of which has to know about the other ones so it could react appropri- ately to them. It also had to look interesting, but ulti- mately become the shape of Horvath at the end.” The artists studied cockroaches and their natural behavior — they tend to pause and change direction — and mimicked those movements. Multiple layers of simulations were added on top of each other to get to the point where there was the correct basic shape. “Once the simulation was worked out we have a per- son’s shape built out of cockroaches, but that still has to resolve into an actual person,” explains Brennan. “The material qualities of a cockroach are shiny, slightly translucent in places and those qualities over time have to transition, so when each cockroach gets to its final place it has the correct color and texture quality of the material it is going to turn into.The last phase is complex geometry transformations within Houdini.They all had to melt together geometry-wise to blend into a CG version of the person.” Another of the many difficult effects involved a Chinese parade dragon that turns into a real dragon, thanks to Asylum and CG.“That transition took place over five shots,” reports Brennan.“Each one of those was like a one-off in itself. So we have a shot where it’s mainly about the head, the body, the legs. It was important to the director story-wise that it should be “The dragon transition is a big combination of Maya and Houdini — we have rigs and blend shapes and cloth simulations in Maya, and we have lots of clever Houdini math that goes on top of that to do further geometry and texture transitions.We can render it in our standard Maya/RenderMan pipeline with everything else that might be in the scene. All the parade confetti and much of the building destruction is CG and has to interact with the dragon.” Asylum got involved fairly early in the process and worked with the film’s VFX su- pervisor John Nelson.“We supervised our stuff alongside John,” concludes Brennan, who also credits Asylum’s Bret St. Clair (CG supervisor) and Jason Schugardt (additional VFX supervisor). The American: Modus FX provided a variety of visual effects shots for the film, including removing rain from a scene and rebuilding a tower damaged by an earthquake. clear that when the one dragon was transforming into the other, the people that were carrying the dragon were becoming part of it.That affected the design of the creature itself.” In terms of workflow, Asylum’s pipeline is flexible, allowing them to easily move geometry and other pa- rameters back and forth between Maya and Houdini. www.postmagazine.com THE AMERICAN Three-year-old Modus FX, located out- side Montreal, completed all of the 125 vi- sual effects shots for George Clooney’s lat- est, The American, directed by Anton Cor- bijn. It follows an assassin who takes one last job in Italy, which is where the film was shot… in the city of Castel Del Monte. This full-service visual effects studio, co-founded by former Hybride supervisor Yanick Wilisky, currently September 2010 • Post continued on page 42 41 Nucoda grading and finishing solutions from Digital Vision have been used extensively by the world’s leading post pro- duction facilities for film and television content.