Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/161463
VFX for Feature Films ILM created over 1,500 VFX shots for Pacific Rim. Foundry's Nuke and Adobe After Effects for compositing; Imagineer Systems' Mocha for planar tracking; Andersson Technologies' SynthEyes for 3D tracking; LightWave, Autodesk 3DS Max and Maya for animation; and LightWave, Cebas FinalRender and Mental Ray for rendering. PACIFIC RIM The ever-busy Industrial Light & Magic (www.ilm.com) created more than 1,500 VFX shots for Pacific Rim, a sci-fi film that honors kaiju and mecha genres while standing on its own as a unique film that director Guillermo del Toro has described as "operatic." Set in the near future, international soldiers pilot giant mecha called Jaegers in a battle against monster kaiju invaders who have arrived on Earth via a Pacific Ocean portal. ILM's San Francisco headquarters handled the majority of the VFX shots, with its facilities in Singapore and Vancouver contributing to the fight sequences. Ghost VFX in Copenhagen, Rodeo and Hybride in Montreal, and Base FX in China also crafted shots; Virtuos was tasked with asset building. "We did a variety of work — CG characters, matte paintings, set extensions and pure effects work," says ILM VFX supervisor Lindy De Quattro. Although del Toro's art department provided a starting point for the mecha and kaiju creatures, ILM's aptly named art director, Alex Jaeger, worked with model supervisors Paul Giacoppo and Dave Fogler, as well as De Quattro and her fellow VFX supervisor John Knoll to refine the final look of the characters. "We pulled reference footage of animals, from gorillas to crocodiles, to find weird eyes 18 Post • August 2013 and other component parts for the kaiju," which represent a wide range of species, she says. Del Toro also provided cultural references — from fine art, films and graphic novels — for inspiration. The kaiju are "definitely unlike anything we've done before," De Quattro says. "Each one is unique, and they all look, move and fight differently." ILM animation director Hal Hickel spent a lot of time "developing specific movements for each character so they'd be threatening and ominous" and not merely huge and silly. The crab-like Onibaba had myriad small inner claws that had to be functional in a fight, for example. On the other side of the fight card, del Toro didn't want the mecha Jaegers to remind viewers of Transformers, she notes. "We decided not to use any motion capture; we didn't want them to look or move in a human way. There had to be machines behind the action." So animators used vehicles as references, including a lot of US and Soviet WWII tanks, and Alex Jaeger determined where the mechanics of a piston or ball joint would provide the movement required. Like the kaijus, each of the Jaegers has a different personality. "They represent the countries on the Pacific Rim that have an emotional stake in the battle," De Quattro explains. "The American Jaeger is a bit of a cowboy with a wide-legged stance and a swagger in its walk. The Russian one looks like Cold War technology; the Chinese one is more agile and adept at martial arts." Battle sequences take place in Hong Kong and at the bottom of the sea. Although ILM started with real Hong Kong location footage the digital settings had to be amped up www.postmagazine.com in scale to accommodate the giant warriors. "They were so huge that they couldn't walk down the biggest street in Hong Kong without knocking down buildings," De Quattro notes. "So we split streets to widen them, if nothing else." Fluid sims were required for the ocean surface. With the Pirates of the Caribbean series and Battleship to its credit, ILM was "confident that we were in a good place with water," she quips. But fluid sims for vast expanses of water are still time consuming and expensive to do. Water was "art directed" to create giant waves "that were physically correct but would get out of your field of vision" and not block the action that followed. Del Toro considers the film's digital water its most exciting visual effect and has called ILM's water dynamics "technically beautiful but also artistically incredibly expressive." Digital rain played a big part in shots as well. "Everything was wet all the time," De Quattro says. "A lot of fights take place in the rain and a lot of those feature slo-mo sprays of rain flying off the surfaces of the Jaegers in a Raging Bull kind of slo-mo sweat moment. It really humanizes them." A pipeline for digital rain was developed to layer precipitation in shots, adding atmosphere and color, including the "beautiful super-saturated washes of rain" that del Toro wanted to show off the neon lights of Hong Kong. ILM didn't use quite so much of its inhouse software for Pacific Rim. Instead it tapped Side Effects Houdini for its rigid sims pipeline, The Foundry's Mari for texture painting, Nuke for compositing, Katana for lighting, and Arnold, Chaos Group's V-Ray and Pixar's RenderMan for rendering. ILM retooled its pipeline to accommodate the additional data per layer that the show's deep compositing demanded. De Quattro says it was fun working with del Toro, who proved to be an "inspirational" force. "He's such a fan of filmmaking, of the genre, of ours! His enthusiasm was very contagious — the whole crew caught it." During the production of Pacific Rim SIM Digital/Bling Digital in Hollywood (www.simdigital.com) handled the front-end workflow at the Pinewood lot in Toronto, providing camera support, DIT equipment, the Avid offline set-up and building out a custom data lab. "One of our permanent data labs was nearby, but they wanted their own data lab within the production offices, so we built a system tying together the data lab and dailies room for the offline and VFX editors," explains Chris Parker, chief technical officer for SIM Digital. "We also tapped