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February 2012

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Bits & Pieces Luma's robust VFX pipeline S ANTA MONICA — Luma Pictures (www. lumapictures.com) is a busy visual effects studio working on some pretty cool major motion pictures. They are currently finishing up The Avengers, recently completed work on Underworld 4, and have 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor and X-Men: First Class under their belts. They specialize in, according to VFX supervisor Vince Cirelli, complex CG which encompass creatures, digital humans and computationally large effects. Being able to create these types of effects on tight deadline calls for an efficient pipeline. Currently this Linux-based studio uses The Found- ry's Nuke as its main compositing tool and writes a lot of its own stuff based off of Autodesk Maya, Pixologic Z-Brush and Solid Angle's Arnold renderer. Another big part of the workflow is Assimilate's Scratch and Scratch to Nuke. also being able to do complex color corrections. It seemed to fit their needs perfectly. "On Wolverine they had shot plates that needed very serious color work due to on-set pyrotechnics lighting actors in an unflattering way" describes Cirelli. "With visual effects we try not to affect the plate and maintain the fidelity, so when we turn it over to a DI facility they have the latitude they need to correct it in any tonal range. However, with Wolverine, because of the need, we couldn't do the visual effects without first correcting the plates. We demoed a few different tools, and for the cost and the price, Scratch achieved every- thing we were looking to do." At press time, with Luma knee deep in over 200 VFX Vince Cirelli (inset): Luma provided 100 creature shots for Underworld Awakening. Luma's road to an efficient pipeline began as they started work on X-Men Origins: Wolverine back in 2009. They realized the existing workflow, while helpful in ways, had some gaping holes that slowed them down significantly. "We had a hard time playing back sequenc- es," explains Cirelli. "It's important, when you are dealing with hundreds of creature shots, to maintain consistency across the show. So playing back and reviewing 2K is imperative across a sequence. The software we were using previously was clunky, and had limited correction tools that worked in an intuitive way." As is usually the case, evolution grew out of neces- sity and Luma had to find a better solution. Cirelli had heard that Scratch did 2K playback "beautifully," while 6 Post • February 2012 shots on The Avengers, Scratch is still a big part of their workflow. "With advances of online color on set, direc- tors are used to looking at work prints that look fantas- tic; they are expecting to see visual effects grade plates that match editorial playback — this is very costly for a visual effects facility, especially if you have a show that is very particular about matching the color they've come up with. We are now very quickly able to devise our edi- torial grades inside Scratch and write them out of Scratch, really speeding up that whole workflow," says Cirelli. The previously mentioned Arnold ren- derer is also a big part of keeping Luma's workflow fast. Cirelli calls it a "beautiful brute force raytracer" that makes things easier on artists because "if you provide it with realistic lighting data, acquired on set, there a lot less cheats and tricks needed." He says this used to drain an artist's time and turn them more into technicians. This tool goes hand in hand with how Luma believes the future of VFX is going. "Artists should be both lighting artists and compositors," says Cirelli. "We don't like to split the departments anymore. The future is this kind of convergence between lighting and compositing." For the just-completed Underworld Awak- ening, which opened January 20, Luma created over 100 creature shots. Their efficient workflow helped tremendously with extremely complicated shots. "Every shot was very complex, where the creature was close to camera destroying its environment or transforming from human to creature," explains Cirelli. For the nine transformation shots they created, Luma called on Paul Debevic's ICT — the pioneer of HDRI workflows now used by many. "He has devised an incredible way to create digital humans. The technology is named Light- stage. It was instrumental in allowing us to achieve photoreal transformations of humans into werewolves like never before." By Randi Altman www.postmagazine.com The Brothers Olson Give It All Away for My Plastic Sun W Amariah Olson, ILMINGTON, NC — The Forgery (www. the-forgery.com), made up of Obin and recently produced a new effects-heavy music video for My Plastic Sun. Give It All Away tells a tale of love, loss and vengeful seduction. The video was created over several months and incorporates live-action and greenscreen footage shot with Red One and 5K Epic cameras. Obin and Amariah Olson used HP z800 Windows machines running Adobe Premiere CS5.5 and After Effects 5.5, along with NewTek LightWave for animation and Eyeon Fusion for compositing. The video's opening lighthouse sequence was initially going to be shot on location, but weather forced the team to create it instead in studio. Stock shots of fire, and shot fire plates were incor- porated into the VFX sequences. SynthEyes was used for camera tracking. The studio called on Scratch for color correction. Red r3d files were converted to dpx files for compositing. See it here: www.the-forgery.com/direct/?id=34722864. WHAT POST READERS ARE UP TO: right Bundle, Dolby Media Meters." – Konrad Pinon, Margarita Mix, Santa Monica now RADIO: "A native Angeleno, time is spent tooling around in my car. My drive time consists of me flipping the radio dial between The Dan Patrick Show and The Herd with Colin Cowherd. I'm also a huge fan of The Petros & Money Show. You get your sports, music and comedy." TOOLS: "iZotope, Waves

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