Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/283421
18 Post • March 2014 www.postmagazine.com tion with CG-animated previs." Intelligence, which shoots on Stage One at the Disney lot in Burbank, follows this process. As the VFX studio for the show, Zoic will take such shots all the way to finishing. "We optimize our virtual sets so they will play back in realtime on the shoot day. In post, we refine the textures and geometry of the optimized sets, making it as detailed and photoreal as possible," she says. "So when we get the actual plates, we can place them against our new CG renders of the final background and seamlessly integrate them in comp." Massimini works with the show's DP, Sid Sidell, on lighting tests prior to the shoot so "the optimized model seen on-set has the directional lighting he intends to use and he can light the actors to match. Once we get the plates back we do a secondary, interac- tive lighting pass to integrate the elements further, but there's already a cohesive look." She reports that actors really respond to previs. "They huddle around my iPad to look at shots. They're amazed to see a stadium full of people here and a forest over there." Zoic uses previs on set for TNT's Falling Skies and ABC's Once Upon a Time and Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. It's also being used more and more for commercials, says Massimini, including on recent spots for St. Ives and Toyota's Prius. MPC Although it has done in-house previs for projects for a long time, MPC Film (www. moving-picture.com) now maintains a dedi- cated previs business out of its Los Angeles office and deploys the process worldwide. "Our entire workflow is predicated on the idea that our previs will be used in a finals pipeline — ideally in our London, Vancouver or Montreal facilities," says previs supervisor Duane Floch. "Regardless, the goal is for our work to be used as a cost-saving, first phase of final VFX work." Previs gives way to postvis when MPC Film's previs animation is composited into live-action plates to determine if a VFX shot will work. "Postvis is essentially the layout phase of the VFX shot," says executive direc- tor Julian Levi. "If done within the proper constraints of VFX, it will be in line with the workflow for VFX and deliver economic advantages to the production." "For Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters we folded a lot of our postvis for the third act into the VFX pipeline in London," Floch reports. "We worked in lockstep with our London VFX supervisor and layout team." MPC's previs department has developed proprietary tools to work with Maya and Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. For Maya, in particular, the company has written tools that facilitate naming conventions, data- base organization, character rigging, anima- tion import and export, and crowd and destruction workflows. "We're a huge company that works with a lot of proprietary software for VFX and have a lot of assets and resources at our disposal," Levi notes. "We have a dedicated development team that's constantly taking tools we have and adapting them to work in the previs environment so there's no need to create everything from scratch." He says previs is used for "the big tent pole VFX projects," such as the upcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Different lev- els of previs aid different stages of a produc- tion starting with traditional previs for block- ing based on the script and storyboards. "It doesn't necessarily have to look polished — just enough to tell the story," he explains. Then comes "pitch vis," which "fine tunes the animation and rendering, and adds more refined audio so the director has a fairly polished product to show the studio," Levi continues. Next is "tech vis," which can, among other things, help decide crane or bluescreen placement in a VFX shot. "We work closely with the production team and incorporate all the exact dimensions and layouts into the 3D previs world so they can more efficiently plan the shoot," says Levi. "Actually, we follow the philosophy of tech vis in all our previs," Floch notes. "We won't do anything in previs that can't be done in the real world on the day of the shoot." Levi agrees. "We stay true to scale and don't cheat on camera moves and lenses. We take a real-world approach to make the shot work. Ultimately, we're another depar tment, like grip, production design and ar t. We're another resource to bring the director's vision to the screen." MPC Film does previs and postvis from its office in Los Angeles and travels its talent and "previs-in-a-box" technology to loca- tions around the world when needed. "We can set up our computers and ser ver anywhere and integrate with pro- duction's own ser vers and network to share data with all depar tments," says Levi. "Ideally, we're close to editorial, so we can feed them previs and postvis as they're cutting the film." Ron Frankel and the team at Proof provided previs and postvis for The Hun- ger Games: Catching Fire. Previs