Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/283421
www.postmagazine.com Post • March 2014 17 THE THIRD FLOOR LA's The Third Floor (www.thethirdfloor. com), with satellite offices in Montreal, Lon- don and Australia, does previs and postvis for an expanding client base, including feature films, commercials, pitches, theme park attractions and video games. "Using software that mimics video game engines, we are able to make previs that looks close to rendered animation," says previs lead Shoghi Castel de Oro. Viewport 2.0, the high- performance scene view tool in Maya, "mim- ics a lot of video game engines for realtime reflections and shadows that we used to fake by stacking up [video] cards before." Maya is enhanced by proprietary tools and "a huge suite of tricks," Castel de Oro reports. "We have really talented people on our pipeline team who have written soft- ware for playblasting our scenes — that's our form of rendering — and creating characters, and sourcing and reusing assets. You don't need to keep modeling the same things a million times; we have a huge asset library to pull from." The Third Floor recently did previs and postvis for RoboCop, focusing on the climactic battle scene between RoboCop and the 209 mechs. As previs lead, Castel de Oro set up at Wildfire Studios, where editorial was done and which acted as home base for VFX supervisor Jamie Price and VFX producer Gayle Busby. He worked off site as well. Castel de Oro researched the characters in the original RoboCop films and video games before he began the final sequence, which he describes as "a hot and really intense mech scene. "They wanted to see if the scene would look stronger if there was more contrast between wide and close camera angles and if RoboCop would have more robotic or fluid movement in combat," he explains. "I did a pass where RoboCop did fluid t'ai chi- esque dodging moves — even a roll. They liked it, but decided they wanted it to look more like RoboCop was using the mechs' mechanical movements against them — essentially using the mechs as shields the whole time." Castel de Oro worked on the battle scene over a three-week period using Maxon Cinema 4D assets provided for RoboCop and the mechs. Live-action plates had been shot on location, and he received a scan of the featured building, "which helped a ton in tracking." His final passes looked like a mix between polished animation and pose-to- pose, stop-motion animation, he says. His previs was so successful that it was folded into the final VFX by animators who refined movements and altered cameras a bit as rigs changed, "but overall the scene remained the same," Castel de Oro reports. "Sometimes your previs ends up as exactly what you see on-screen. Even when it doesn't, it's so much fun to do! At Third Floor we focus on both the technical details, what we call tech-vis, and the cre- ative feeling of the sequence," he says. ZOIC Culver City, California-based Zoic Studios (www.zoicstudios. com) finds previs is increasingly used to help "everyone" on the set of a production with big action and VFX sequences. "It's a good tool for directors, DPs and actors," says Zoic VFX supervisor Sallyanne Massimini. "Previs can help guide actors' performances." That's the case on the new CBS series, Intelligence, for which Zoic is the main VFX vendor and has done previs for almost every episode. Working with the script and armed with an Apple iPad, Massimini teams with a story- board artist, the director, and executive pro- ducer and show creator Michael Seitzman to create CG animated previs of shots, which are viewed on-set. Maya is the main modeling and animation software for previs, combined with internal pipeline tools. Zoic also deploys its proprie- tary virtual production pipeline, Zeus, using Prevision to render virtual backgrounds in realtime. "When shooting on a smartstage, with a greenscreen, we use Zeus to allow the direc- tor and actors to see live composites track- ing with the virtual environments on a moni- tor feed the day of the shoot," Massimini explains. "We can also use Zeus in conjunc- The Third Floor provided previs and postvis services for a key scene in the new film RoboCop. Previs C M Y CM MY CY CMY K pdf-no-bleed-has-crop-and-trim-fmc-20th-annivesary-one-third-based-on-v5-fixed-again.pdf 1 2/19/2014 2:40:54 PM