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October 2014

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www.postmagazine.com 36 POST OCTOBER 2014 ANZAC GIRLS ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA — ANZAC Girls, a six-part mini-series produced by Screentime, a Banijay Group company, for ABC-TV, was a rare television project for Adelaide visual effects studio Rising Sun Pictures (www.rsp.com.au), better known for its work on Hollywood blockbusters such as X-Men: Days of Future Past and Gravity. The first episode premiered on Australian TV in early August. ANZAC Girls is based on Peter Rees' book and tells the true story of five military nurses from Australia and New Zealand who served with Allied forces during World War I. Rising Sun Pictures was the sole VFX provider for the series. VFX supervisor Tim Crosbie, VFX producer Richard Thwaites and their crew worked hand in hand with directors Ken Cameron and Ian Watson, cinematographer Geoffrey Hall, and pro- duction designer Scott Bird to craft recreations of wartime environments, military vehicles and armament. Production of the series spanned three months at a number of sites in South Australia. RSP artists augmented practical locations with CG set extensions and matte paintings, and dropped in CG-animated warships, trucks, aircraft and trains. The RSP team went to considerable lengths to achieve historical accuracy. Crosbie and his crew shot photographs of buildings in Adelaide that were built pre-World War I and incorporated them into VFX environments. They also populated scenes with sol- diers, nurses, vehicles and environmental elements. Among the most ambi- tious scenes is the landing at Gallipoli, revealed from the point of view of two nurses. Shot in front of greenscreen, Maya and Houdini were used for CG; matte paintings were creat- ed in Photoshop and Nuke was used for compositing. MEXICO NEW YORK — Hooligan (http://hooligannyc.com) a creative post pro- duction boutique that specializes in artistic offline editing and visual effects, recently collaborated with New York-based design studio Karlssonwilker to create the anamorphic music video for Mexico, the title track from GusGus's ninth studio album via Kompakt Records. Experimenting with various 3D technology, including video game engines, Karlssonwilker transformed live-action footage of GusGus into spellbinding animations. The resulting abstractions hypnotically visual- ize the Icelandic quintet's anthemic dance track. Looking to expand on the video with an editorial eye, Karlssonwilker brought Hooligan into the fold after creating the renders and produc- ing a rough cut in Adobe Premiere. According to Hooligan editor Shane DeBlasio, embarking on the project with volumes of data-heavy footage, Hooligan had to clear the biggest hurdles early on. Converting the footage to Hooligan's system us- ing Final Cut Pro allowed DeBlasio to generate QuickTime movies, rather than deal with problematic individual source frames. COSMOS: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY CULVER CITY, CA — In a project spanning nine months, Baraboom Studios (www.baraboomstudios.com) served as previsualization supplier for Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, assisting in the design and execution of numerous complex visuals for the groundbreaking National Geographic Channel series, which recently won four Emmy Awards. The Los Angeles-based studio contributed to all 13 episodes of the series' first season, as the hub of a virtual production model, creating previsualiza- tions used in planning visual effects, set design, stage and locations shoots, and post production processes. Baraboom Studios' previsualizations were used in planning more than two dozen shots for the show's final episode where host Neil deGrasse Ty- son pays a virtual visit to the ancient city of Alexandria, Egypt. Baraboom used preliminary Sketch-up files provided by production designer Seth Reed and art director John B. Josselyn to produce — through the use of Autodesk Maya, and a host of proprietary software and in-house tools — 3D models of the city's legendary library. These models meshed with the live-action set and served as a planning tool for visual effects; a process known as post-vis. In addition, Baraboom built models of the city itself and mapped out complex camera movements with Gambos, to be used by the visual effects vendor for final renders. POSTINGS

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