Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/47109
Prepared For Post the characters' fur, and RenderMan was used for shading. BATTLESHIP Santa Monica's Halon Entertain- ment (www.halon.com), which spe- cializes in previs and post-vis, is currently working on the Peter Berg-directed feature film Battle- ship. Inspired loosely by the classic game, and adding an alien invasion to the mix, the film Neeson, Taylor Kitsch, starts Liam Brooklyn Decker and Rihanna, and will be released in May of 2012. Justin Denton, a previsualization/ VFX supervisor with Halon, explains Halon's Justin Denton, who's been working on the upcoming feature film, Battleship. ity draw the storyboard — do the animatics and drive the sequences — is becoming increasingly rare, and we think it's for the worse," says Leven. "The more you know when you go to the set, and the more the facility that is actually doing the work can contribute ahead of time, the better the product is and the easier it's going to be for everybody. We find that a lot of the movies we work on, that's not the way it works." The studio's animatics tend to be rough. "You don't need to see cloud textures or textures on the rocks or the bits of grass," notes Leven. "For our purposes, that's not what the animatics are for. The animatics are going to determine how the scene plays, and most importantly where the cameras are going to be on that day so you know how many set-ups you have and how long it's going to be to shoot. We tend to air on the side of not looking very polished, but it's serving a very specific purpose." For the final wolf pack, Tippett Studio was able to draw on assets from past films. The wolves were modeled using Maya, ZBrush and MudBox, and were animated in Maya. The studio's proprietary tools were used to create how previs can help streamline production, while post-vis can aid in storytelling: "I've been on this project for two years now," he explains. "I started out working on previs long before it was shot, and now we are responsi- ble for doing action scenes with the film and working heavily with the director, the DP and the stunt coordinator to make sure everything that we were doing would be shootable." The Halon team began previs on the film approximately nine months before principal photography began. "At that point, we were put in charge of helping [director] Peter Berg figure out the action scenes," Denton explains. "You read one paragraph and that might be a five-minute action scene. So you have to help convey what that action is." Surprisingly, much of the of the battleship imagery was shot practically, so by previsual- izing the scenes, the production team was then able have a good understanding of what needed to be captured come the day of the shoot. "A lot of the work I did with previs was to make sure the way that we shot it with our CG cameras was a way that the DP could shoot it in live action as well. If I put a camera up really high, it was a place that a helicopter could get to. Or if it was a shot they weren't sure was possible, we had to make sure it was something we felt could do as globalimageworks.com 201.384.7715 HISTORIC C ONTEMPORAR Y VIDEO FILM H D 28 …to Global ImageWorks Post • November 2011 comfortable we a full effects shot." Halon has a visual library of previs assets that it has been developing over the past eight years, but each job requires custom elements. "We did have some assets, but they were nowhere near the quality level we needed," notes Denton. "Even though www.postmagazine.com this is a movie with actors and characters in it, these ships are in a lot of ways actors in the film. Because of that we knew they were going to be heavily spotlighted, even at the previs phase, so we went ahead and really detailed them out." Today's previs imagery can be quite detailed, and Denton feels the trend is to go beyond a simple rough animation or compos- ite. "It seems like the trend has been to create more detail and try to give it a polished level and feel. That's what we did on Battleship. You are sitting at a table with creatives, and they respond very well to visuals that are appealing. Even though you can do it in a rough way, the more polished you can make it look in the time that you have, the better the reaction will be to it and the more excited everyone will be to work on it." Halon also provides strong schematic overheads during previs for what Denton calls the "tech vis pass." "What it does is tells the crew how high the camera was, its distance to a giant ship out in the ocean and what the speed of the camera travel was. We can give all of that information to the helicopter pilot and DP and crew so they can see if they can match what you've done. That's definitely something that is not discussed as much and is definitely one of the more valu- able parts of previs and post-vis alike." Post-vis takes place after the principal pho- tography has been shot and can help editors in the storytelling process by providing ele- ments that help with pacing and action well before visual effects elements are available. "Post-vis ends up being the first pass version of visual effects, but the purpose of it is more to help the editors and the director make sure they picked the right plates for the story to be told properly," Denton explains. "Some visual effects shots take months. With us, a single visual effects shot will take half the day. The idea is that we can churn through a lot of this and hand it to the editor and they can see if it's working. Then production will hand it off to a visual effects studio." ILM in this case. Halon is an Autodesk Maya house, which it uses for building assets. The studio relies on Adobe After Effects for compositing and performs camera or plate tracking in Synth- Eyes. The studio works at HD resolution for previs and at full 2K resolution for post-vis. "What we will do is hand ILM our Maya files and the QuickTime that we created from those Maya files so they have the actual assets as a starting point." For editorial, Peter Berg's team with DNxHD files their Avid workflow. they provided director for