Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/57248
n n n n Stereo 3D In 2007, actor Nicholas Cage enthralled audi- ences with his burning portrayal of the comic- book antihero Johnny Blaze in the film Ghost Rider—with a great deal of assistance, of course, from digital effects. Five years later, the actor reprised his role in the sequel Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and once again a VFX team had to up the ante in terms of creating the character's fiery form with CG controllable fire and smoke, but they also had an even bigger challenge in that the film is in stereo 3D. Smoke and fire are essential elements in the sequel, just as they were in the original movie. The premise of the story is that by day, stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze as- sumes his human form, but by night, he becomes the blazing skeletal biker Ghost Rider. In the sequel, the action—and the smoke and fire—are dirtier and grittier than before, as the antihero cuts a path of destruc- tion through Eastern Europe in an attempt to rescue a young boy, and the world, from a burning fate. "The directors brought a different aes- thetic to this film. They have a much more down-and-dirty type of style," says The Creative-Cartel founder Jenny Fulle, who served as VFX producer on the movie. "So while the effects are similar in nature to those of the first film, they were executed in a way that is darker and more gritty." This time around, the VFX team at Iloura in Australia heated up the screen as the main visual effects vendor for the movie. Their work ranged from creating digital doubles and machinery/vehicles, to the decaying and withering effects, as well as the scene-stealing CG fire. According to Glenn Melenhorst, Iloura's VFX supervisor for Ghost Rider 2, of the 450 shots the studio completed, ap- proximately 30 percent were for fire-related effects on objects or on Ghost Rider himself (see "Fire Effects," pg. 40). According to Fulle, the fire had to act like a character; it had to show emotion. As if cre- ating realistic, emotive fire throughout the film weren't daunting enough, there was also the matter of the stereo 3D, since the movie would be filmed in 2D and then converted to stereo 3D for release. "You cannot get the three-dimensionality of fire when you are converting it during a post process," Fulle explains. "3D fire is transparent and moves organically, so there is no way to pull it from the plate and place it elsewhere without it looking like a flat plane, especially when it is close to the camera. It is so integrated with its environment that it ends up looking like a pop-up storybook. It's hard to deal with anything that has transparency when you are doing a conversion. So we knew we had to come up with something clever to pull this off." This challenge prompted Fulle and her Creative-Cartel team, including CTO Craig Mumma, the stereographer on the film, to meet with Iloura and Gener8 3D, the visual effects facility and conversion house, respec- tively, to come up with a better way to tackle the problem at hand. "Necessity is the mother of invention," says Fulle. "We were budgetarily challenged. We were also technically challenged. How were we going to convert all this fire? Early on we made sure that all the vendors were willing to sit together at the table and come up with a hybrid pipeline to eliminate re- dundant work and enable us to render some VFX shots natively." A New Workflow From the onset, Ghost Rider 2 was planned as a 3D film. Initially, Mumma's intention was to shoot everything practically in 3D using stereo cameras. But shooting in 3D is like bringing NASA on set—there are lots of moving parts. And it soon became apparent that the filming style of the directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, with their fast cuts and wildly moving, untethered cameras, would not lend itself to that method. As a re- sult, the stereo would be done through post conversion, a method that has not always yielded stellar results. Aware of that fact, Mumma said it was important that the parties come up with a methodology for the conversion that made sense and provided the quality everyone was looking for. "If we were going to go down this path, then we needed to develop a workflow that we could take to a conversion house that was savvy enough to understand visual effects, and adapt a whole pipeline to share everything—and get the results out of a good conversion rather than a bad one," Mumma says. The underlying question, notes Mumma, a former VFX supervisor, seemed simple enough: Why couldn't they come up with a way to treat 3D conversion like they have visual effects for years, whereby the various build images are mapped back onto a 3D model? That concept became the starting point for the new 3D conversion workflow devised mainly by Iloura and Gener8. "We needed to have a visual effects under- standing with our conversion vendor and a conversion understanding with our visual effects vendor," Fulle says. The key was to work in a non-linear way within a shared pipeline, particularly for the By Karen Moltenbrey 38 February/March 2012