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www.postmagazine.com 46 POST JANUARY 2015 CONTINUED FROM PG 23 OSCAR PICKS CONTINUED FROM PG 33 VFX FOR SPOTS says TJ Burke, creative director and CG supervisor at Brewster Parsons. "The trick was to match that style with our 3D tools. The look of anime is not physical reality. And 3D tools are made to build what's physically real. So you have to break out of where the math wants to take you and add more of a hand-built feel." Burke discovered that initial notions of physi- cally-based eff ects, such as simulated hair, cloth and fi re, "looked too perfect. No one respond- ed to it well. So we went on to stylized, tex- ture-based or hand-animated approaches." Brewster Parsons began with storyboards, which they cut into an animatic then built into a previs. "It was nice that we kept evolving the same set ups on the previs we started with," Burke explains. "We did a lot of tweaking with the shaders, and we built tools for automating the pipeline and building render passes, which we combined in ways we hadn't expected." The company used Maya for modeling and an- imation, Chaos Group's V-Ray for rendering and Nuke for compositing. "We were in the design phase almost to the end of the project," Burke notes. "Getting the right balance of fl atness, dimensionality and outlines all depended upon the game charac- ters. Hitting render was pretty easy and revisions were super fast, but getting the proportions and design right were the big challenges." TIMBER Timing is everything. So when Discovery an- nounced its Eaten Alive show, in which a man was slated to be devoured by an anaconda, 1-800-Contacts decided to move up the air date for Snake, a comic spot from agency Pereira & O'Dell with a similar man-eating reptile theme. Part of an eight-spot campaign featuring VFX and fi nishing by LA-based Timber (www.timber. net), Snake shows an animal control offi cer panick- ing over his immediate need for contacts while a man sits, legs out, in the stretched belly of a giant snake. Phil Morrison of Epoch directed. Timber collaborated with Morrison and special eff ects house Legacy Eff ects to determine if the snake should be practical or CG. "It really wasn't a case of either/or," says creative director Jonah Hall, who's partnered with Kevin Lau in Timber. "An ex- pensive animatronic wasn't going to happen on a commercial schedule. And modeling and animat- ing a photoreal CG snake was also time prohibi- tive." So a team approach was the best solution. Legacy Eff ects devised a practical snake, which weighed about 200 pounds and had to be held by a C-stand and sandbags, Hall reports. "It was a giant rubber snake with an expandable portion for a guy to fi t into" — a Legacy employ- ee who was fed oxygen pumped into the prop during his time inside the skin. But apart from ca- bles pulling the giant tail, "the snake was static," Hall explains. "We photographed it from 50 diff erent angles during the site survey and had our match move department analyze all the photos and create a high-density model with Agisoft PhotoScan soft- ware. That allowed us to track the static snake and reproject the photography onto a CG wireframe digital puppet so procedural mathematics could make it move with an inverse kinematic skeleton." Side Eff ects' Houdini was used to add the snake back into the spot in a photogrametry process. The snake's fl icking CG tongue was modeled and animated in Houdini, too. Nuke and Flame were tapped for compositing. Another 1-800-Contacts spot with a pirate theme features more VFX by Timber. A partial deck of the ship was shot greenscreen. Epoch arranged a dockside shoot in Venice where Timber cinematographer Ernesto Lomeli lensed footage of the ocean to recreate the maritime backgrounds. Timber also added digital fog, a digital school of great white sharks seen in an aerial shot, and a CG burning ship sinking in the distance. www.postmagazine.com FOR MORE ON VFX FOR TV SPOTS, VISIT US AT: Sigel, who's collaborated with the director on eight fi lms since 1995's Usual Suspects and who shot the fi rst two X-Men movies. With regard to the Alexa workfl ow, the DP reports that all the Alexa material was viewed through LUTs he created with Company 3 and adjusted on-set with his DIT, Julie Garceau. The material then went to a trailer where it was color-corrected by colorist Adrian Delude working on a DaVinci Resolve. "I would go in at lunch and at the end of the day to tweak," says Sigel. "Next stop would be editorial and Fluent, who would archive the material. All color corrections were attached to the fi les to travel together all the way to the DI." So how early on did the team have to incorpo- rate all the VFX (done by Digital Domain, Gentle Giant Studios, Mokko Studio, Rhythm & Hues, Cinesite, Ollin VFX and Fuel VFX) into production? "On a fi lm this scale you have to work with VFX and production design from Day 1," the DP stresses. "The look of the fi nal product is a combination of those three worlds, because so many of the sets are combinations of actual construction with virtual extensions. Deciding what elements will be real has a big impact on how much you have to light. Even though parts of the set may be pure CGI, you still have to know how it is lit in order to match the fore- ground. If you're not all on the same page you will have a mess." The DI was done at Company 3 with colorist Stephen Nakamura. Director David Ayer and Fury, his WW11 tank movie starring Brad Pitt, is also getting some traction thanks to its other star — the 30-ton tank named Fury, one of 10 vintage tanks used. Though set in Germany, Ayer shot the fi lm in Britain with director of photography Roman Vasyanov, the Rus- sian-born DP who shot the 2012 micro-budgeted End of Watch for Ayer (earning a 2013 Independent Spirit Award nom for Best Cinematography), and two indies last year — The East and Charlie Country- man. "We shot for 60 days, and it was very complex as over half the fi lm was shot inside a tank, an in- credibly-tight space" the DP reports. "We used real tanks and then replicas for all the interior work, and the weather was another big challenge as there was a lot of mud and rain involved." VFX houses includ- ing Look Eff ects, Mammal Studios and Zero VFX helped recreate the period and chaotic conditions. The DI was done at Efi lm. Also in contention are The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the fi nal fi lm in the series, with Weta Digital and senior VFX supervisor Joe Letteri (who was Oscar-nominated for his work on the fi rst two Hobbit fi lms) once again at the helm of the spectac- ular VFX. And then there's Chris Nolan's sci-fi epic Interstellar, which mixed 35mm with IMAX, with VFX by Double Negative. And while the hugely successful Transformers franchise has never found much Oscar love, maybe No. 4, Transformers: Age of Extinction, will, thanks to the VFX work by ILM and other vendors, including Method Studios and Digikore.