Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/3788
24 Post • October 2009 www.postmagazine.com E F F I C I E N C Y At the time of this interview, Rony Sous- san had just finished working on the VFX- heavy 2012 from Roland Emmerich. He set up what he calls a rebel unit within the main production facility, Unchar ted Territories, lo- cated on the Sony lot. They distributed all the film's effects. "It was just myself and Ryan Smolarek, and we knocked out about 240-250 shots. We had incredible success working outside the pipeline. Basically, I created a pipeline within their pipelines," explains Soussan, who says finding ways to do things efficiently is one of the things that inspires him. Soussan's proprietar y software UCT_Submission (coded by Chris Reid) was sent out to all the visual effects houses working on 2012. "This way we could col- lect the shots the vendors wanted to submit and verify their integrity, package it and send it to our ser ver, which automatically put it into the dailies and tracking system. With just a press of a button the shots ended up in our screening room." And this was impor tant because there were 13 vendors working on 1,400 shots; imagine all the notes and versions involved. "Before we did this there were several peo- ple tracking vendor submissions," he says. Soussan believes his love of efficiency evolved from owning his own shop and from understanding that the only thing that matters is what audiences are going to see. "Why waste time on something that won't be seen?" he asks incredulously. "The audi- ence doesn't care that 12 people wrote custom code to make rain. They just care, does it look wet?" He notices the little things in daily life and admits to driving his wife nuts on occasion. "She sees me watching how the water sprays from the sprinkler head and knows what I am doing," Soussan chuckles. "I am driven by things I see and interact with ever y day, and I wonder how it would be represented if I had to rebuild it in a com- posite. It star ts with a 3D background, un- derstanding light and color and mixing and texture. When I look at a composite I feel it in the same manner and say, 'It's really just that and this, so why bother building all those things if that's all we're going to see.'" Soussan loves keeping it simple and points to the work recently provided for 2012 as an example. He and Smolarek provided breath and snow for a mountain sequence — these were being bid out as particle shots to a number of vendors."I ended up doing all the snow and breath using very simple com- posites, building on the theory that we only needed to see what was relevant for each shot, without the need to develop a com- plex particle solution that mimics exact phys- ical proprieties of snow, or cold breath. Those are things that inspire me, just coming up with faster and shor ter ways of doing things without sacrificing the results." The visual effects super visors, Marc 2012: "You don't need to put all these people on location. We can take pictures of the Parliament, shoot the actors in a parking lot and put them together," says Rony Soussan. THE ART OF COMPOSITING