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www.postmagazine.com 25 POST MARCH 2015 revis and postvis have become the norm in feature film and com- mercial production today. Once viewed as a simple way to envision a shot prior to production or act as a placeholder for editors waiting for the final shot, industry pros such as Ron Frankel, president and creative director at Proof (www.proof- inc.com), say that previs and postvis have become essential tools to "push the creative dialogue" and "finesse creative decision making." Here, Post speaks with a number of creatives about why the previs and postvis process is essential for addressing a number of production and post challenges, and often times results in saving valuable time and money. PROOF According to Frankel, whose company is headquartered in Los Angeles, with branch- es in London and Sydney, postvis, in particular, has gained ground recently. "At first, postvis was considered slap comps or temp comps to give a rough idea of the VFX, but now they're described as the first animation pass: We can hand off data to the final VFX ven- dor," he explains. "The level of quality we can achieve is pretty remarkable. Postvis is done at about the 80 percent level. We've even done some final shots — not hero creature shots, but simpler paint outs and speed changes, or adding a CG element to a shot that wasn't intended to have VFX." In many instances, previs and postvis are completed by the same company. For instance, Proof's London office handled previs for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, a recent Academy Award nominee in the Visual Effects category, while its LA home base took on postvis duties. "This wasn't just a sci-fi film but an imagined world filled with imagined aliens," says Frankel. "We had to start previs before the art department had done all the designs." While Proof's postvis has become more finished in quality, the company has been pushing previs to be "more loose and stylized." It's Proof's aim to resolve the uncanny valley concept, a theory in which as characters become more and more realistic they become "offputting and creepy" instead of empathetic. "I felt previs was falling into the uncan- ny valley, so we developed techniques, created with our proprietary Toon Shad- er software, that are more illustrative" and work hand-in-hand with Autodesk Maya, Frankel explains. "Characters are still three-dimensional, accurate and to scale, but the visual style is more like illustration and clients really respond to them. We're using Toon Shader on al- most every project now; it makes it easy to transition from previs to postvis: The underlying geometry and animation is the same, but how we skin the characters is different." For Guardians of the Galaxy, Toon Shader enabled Proof to create "rough representations" of the alien worlds. "We could convey the idea of a clean, mod- ern city or high-tech industrial mining without the minutiae the art department wasn't ready for. Then we'd fold in the art department's ideas as they were com- pleted," Frankel says. Proof did previs for "almost the entire movie — not just action scenes but lots of dialogue scenes, too. It was especially important for scenes featuring Rocket and Groot, where we had to make sure that creatures of such different scales would mix with the actors." Frankel estimates that the company made over 6,500 individual cameras, or shots, for the previs process. Postvis tal- lied 1,450 shots, each with two or three versions. "I don't think there was any- thing we didn't touch," he says. Detailed, refined postvis — done at the 80 percent level — served as placeholders through screenings while VFX vendors completed the final shots. Frankel looks for Virtual Reality to be the next big market for previs. "Everyone is very interested in it, sparked by Oculus Rift," the VR headset for gaming, he says. "But no one knows how to develop the narrative in a VR environment that com- pletely surrounds you — it's a whole new way of storytelling. So there's a need for previs to time events, design cues, dress the environment." Related to that is the idea of bringing VR technology into the previs process. "If a feature art department is creating a big set, could we put on the [VR] goggles and walk through it?" Frankel muses. Proof is already partnering with an Aug- mented Reality technology company to develop an on-set or on-location process for realtime visualization that will put CG characters into an environment, move them around and scale them up or down "so you get a very visceral sense of what CG elements will look like during the scouting or filming process." MPC FILM MPC Film Previs in Santa Monica (www. moving-picture.com) creates previs and postvis for feature films, including Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the most recent in the franchise and also a recent Acad- emy Award VFX nominee. The level of detail required by clients for previs has increased dramatically, notes Duane Floch, head of department at MPC Film Previs. "The days of anything resembling sliding characters or gray- scale environments are long gone," he says. "There's a lot more lighting, atmospherics, character animation and expression. We're excited about game engine accessibility coming into its own and are exploring how to develop a pipeline to make an easy transition with it. Game engines give wonderful realtime lighting, atmospherics, water, depth of field, shadows. They also can handle a good deal more geometry, so you're not dealing with a system with limitations." Julian Levi, executive producer at MPC Film and MPC Film Previs, notes that an artist using a game engine "spends time working on the shot and animating the shot. Then he puts the shot through the engine where it inherits all the parame- ters he's set up for the global environ- ment for that scene. It's built right in." BY CHRISTINE BUNISH P FRANKEL LEVI FLOCH MPC Film Previs had more than two dozen artists working on the previs for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.