Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/24970
GRAPHICS FOR STEREO 3D “You have to see the work in a theatrical environment where it’s projected and you’re wearing polarized glasses like the movie au- dience,” says Taylor. He finds that the lessons learned from the Yogi Bear end credits were “more about design than the technology: the speed at which you move objects, the contrast range of objects, the amount of depth to build into scenes.This isn’t instinctual — it comes from trial and error.The more you experiment in designing for 3D the better you get.” At Yu + Co, Garson Yu was the creative di- PIC Agency created the opening sequence for Final Destination 4. Tron.“You have to be aware of the contrasts in very graphic sequences. Moving very bright images against a dark background can give you ghosting around the images, and after-imaging and strobing can be more ac- centuated depending on the speed you move from left to right.” Because the credits did not have rounded or shaded objects but, instead,“lots of planes of material going back in space,” care was given to make sure the graphic elements ap- peared dimensional, he says.“When you add a bit of texture, even very subtle texture or tonal changes, behind the elements all of a sudden you have 3D.” He believes that Peng’s biggest design challenge was the transitions from scene to scene. “You want to be clever and find movements to bring into negative space without being heavy handed,” he says.“We had to be very careful about edge violation in negative space so images didn’t fade or pop away. And because the characters were silhouettes they didn’t have a lot of dimen- sion, but the things around them did. So we had to let other things be more dimensional, which was kind of tricky.” The team at Yu + Co employed After Ef- fects for the graphics and Flash for the char- acter animations, in order to capture the flu- idity and naturalness seen in traditional cel animations, explains Peng. Animators worked on their own comput- ers in anaglyph to rough out sequences, then moved on to large 3D monitors requiring active shutter glasses to preview the 3D ef- fects and convergence. A series of approval sessions in the theater at FotoKem followed. 18 Post • February 2011 rector, Sarah Coatts producer and Sean Hoessli effects coordinator.The design team led by Peng featured Edwin Baker, John Kim, Daryn Wakasa, Etsuko Uji; the 3D stereo compositors were Stevan del George and Mark Velacruz; the After Effects team was composed of Jill Dadducci, Andres Barajas, Gary Garza,Wayland Vida, Alex Yoon; and the animators were Josh Dotson, Eddie Moreno, Noel Belknap, John Dusenberry, Dae In Chung, Ben Lopez and Pota Tseng. Jason Sikora and Latoria Ortiz handled the editorial. PIC AGENCY The stereo 3D storytelling that Holly- wood’s PIC Agency (www.picagency.com) did for the prologue and titles for the fea- ture My Bloody Valentine led to a recent as- signment for the fourth film in The Final Des- tination franchise. Their original brief for The Final Destination 4 main titles was to focus on the continuing premonitions the main character has of his friends dying in horrific ways. But creative di- rector Jarik van Sluijs suggested revisiting the grisly deaths of the previous films via an X-ray technique. The design team was faced with a big challenge, however: They couldn’t show clips of any of the actors in the first three movies. But recreating some of the death scenes using an X-ray tech- nqiue would “make fanboys happy” without revealing actors’ identities, he reports. They staged HD shoots for some elements and animated still photography for others, rotoscop- ing the results to give depth. In a tribute to their live-action recreations, at one point the designers were cautioned about including clips from the previous films in their titles and had to explain that the footage was their brand-new material, not original excerpts. To create this all-CG Lexus CT 200h and flying 3D type, Worlds Away used 3DS Max as its primary tool. The monochromatic main titles, stained with red blood spatters, show drills boring, www.postmagazine.com Van Sluijs does admit to one “old-school” 3D moment involving a premonition of a snake. “It reminds you of the 3D pick axe coming at the audience,” he laughs.“But for the titles we tried to subdue the elements coming out of the screen.We played with the typography a lot: It hovers just outside the screen and creates a lot of depth.” car parts tumbling, a light pole falling, pyro blazing and bodies suffering impalings and decapitations. All are depicted with an X-ray perspective that effectively conveys the hor- ror The Final Destination aficionados have come to expect. The titles would have been standout in 2D, but now PIC Agency had another dimen- sion to work with.“We had to determine how to do the 3D and make it beautiful, how to use all the gags and still tell the story,” says executive producer Pamela Green. “You know how you look at an X-ray and see scratches, dust and dirt?” asks van Sluijs. “We added them in one pass but they made everything look flatter because they accentu- ated the plane of the screen.We went back and did separate dirt passes — some deeper, some outside the screen, none on the screen level — so it felt like a real window.” The two virtual cameras in their software of choice, Autodesk Maya and Cinema 4D, “sync up with the software so we could con- trol convergence and 3D,” he points out.“We did some painting in Photoshop, composited in After Effects and edited in Avid.” The most important step was testing the titles’ convergence and pop-out effects. Al- though the designers were able to do that in-house, it was critical “to see the titles on the big screen,” says Green, a process that took place at FotoKem. “People usually have in-your-face pop-ups, and we’re against too much of that,” she re- ports.“We wanted to focus more on the de- sign elements.” PIC Agency also created the premonition sequences within the film and treated them rather “conservatively,” too.