Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/394837
www.postmagazine.com 25 POST SEPTEMBER 2014 FEATURE SONY IMAGEWORKS What were Imageworks' VFX contributions to the film? "Coming in fairly late in the game, we totaled something like 88 shots in the whole movie. There was some spill over work that needed to get done — it was like a 911 situation. "We just kind of dove right in. This work was very 3D and the bulk of our shots mainly lived in the engine room of the Dark Aster, the big ship, and we had to kind of build this fully-3D atmospher- ic engine room where these guys have hand-to-hand combat. "What's tricky is trying to establish a rapport rather quickly [with the studios already working on the film] because they've been at it for at least a year, and the director maybe two years or longer, and we have to dive in and start speaking the language. That actually ended up be- ing very easy to do for so many reasons. For instance, Marvel, and James Gunn the director, were extremely receptive to us. Also, on some shows you work on, you're always asking for the data and it's hard to get it because they're under the gun. But in this case, they barraged us with all of the necessary data we could possibly need. We got the post visualization mod- els of the engine room and we basically re-built it. But at least we had a starting point. We had about two months to do the work and we just dove right in and started building in 3D, a full-blown engine room with moving parts, everything." What tools did you use to build the 3D models? "Maya. We're all compositing in Nuke, and a lot of places use RenderMan for rendering, and we use Arnold. In these kinds of things, where there was a lot of shared data with MPC, because they created Groot, they were rendering Groot, and they needed to render Groot in our environment. "The standardization of the tools helps immensely. But nevertheless, every facili- ty has its own proprietary stuff, plug-ins, whatever, and so that, when the data exchange happens, all of that stuff has to be dumbed way down into some kind of bare bones model in Maya that you can load up anywhere and that's the kind of tricky stuff with it." In what format was the data you were working with when you received it? "Well, with Marvel, you get the plates. The first order of business in all shows is color space — you have to figure out the color space they are working in. The color pipe- line that they were using, color grading, etc., was very similar to when we worked with them on Captain America. "But still, color is an 800-pound gorilla in the room because every camera has its own color space, the file format and the resolution and all of that. You com- bine that with color grading, you have to get what's coming out of the camera neutralized to get it into a proper color space, and then you have to color grade it based on what the desired color se- quence needs to be. It's a challenge but also necessary. "The trick with this stuff is not so much about getting enough money to do it, but getting enough time to do it. As nonlinear as we have become with our processes, we had to build a full-blown engine room and with only about two months, we had to be very careful because every calendar day mattered. And we're sitting there go- ing, 'the models have to be done on this day, then we have to start the texturing and then we have to do the shading' and it's hard to add texture when you don't have a model. "So anyway, there's all this different order of events. But really, if I can be im- pressed by my own facility, that was the part that amazed me, that the guys were able to jump on things and stack and coordinate as quickly as they did." Can you talk more about the engine room? "We ended up having a lot of back and forth with James, the director, on the look of the engine room, but at a certain point, we just needed to try and get into his head as quickly as possible and go, 'OK, I have a feeling this is what he's looking for,' and that's what comes from the experience of doing this a long time. We had a lot of great conversations, talking about things like, 'There's a cer- tain level of danger in the engine room,' so that means we need dangerous spin- ning turbines. You want to get the overall impression and the best way to do that is to run something through the pipes, so in some ways, actually doing some of this 911 work where you move really fast you get to the finish line quicker. Because the only way to know if you have the right thing is to push it through the entire pipe, comp it, put the foreground charac- ters in, do it in a number of shots, get a feel for what kind of architecture is in this room that you're seeing over the course of whatever it is, 70 shots, and then see if it's good." Imageworks created a fully-3D environment for this action sequence (shot against greenscreen) in the engine room of the Dark Aster spaceship. CONTINUED ON PG 46