Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6359
Rivkin leans back in his chair and ponders the ques- tion. "This is where it gets interesting and off the beaten path for an editor.We built these 'loads', [edito- rial is] on the stage during the camera process be- cause we'd have to tell Jim, 'This is the load you wanted for this line [of dialogue] or this is the load where this action was good.' We are streaming his camera angles [from MotionBuilder] into the Avid in realtime. So they are immediately available to look at and analyze. "Now there's a whole new thing that's happening," he continues. "There's an interaction between the di- rector and editor that is similar to what you would do in post, but you're in production. We'd take a break and Jim would say, 'Let's see what you've got so far.' And we'd immediately be temping in sound effects and putting in music and doing all kinds of stuff while he's shooting it. So what would normally be some- thing you would see much later on in the process, you're seeing instantly." Rivkin leans over and taps the space bar on his Avid system and the play head star ts moving. In the timeline, all 24 tracks of video and audio are being used. At the top of the timeline the completed film plays back on a giant Panasonic flat screen. "It's still missing a few effects shots here and there, but it's mostly done," he says, explaining that the track di- rectly under what we are seeing is the other eye of the 3D experience. The other tracks of that master, the visual stereo final cut is the history of the project, like rings on a tree or layers in an ice core, ever y track moves us back in time. Rivkin shows the same scene shot months ago of actors in performance capture suits scurrying around on an empty, brightly lit stage. When the actors' per- formances were captured, there were also four to eight HD cameras shooting close-ups so that at any time there was real a reference of that specific actor's face. In addition to capturing the actor's body move- ments tiny cameras that look like headset mouth- pieces were recording all the facial expressions of the actor's green dotted faces. I notice the head gear they're wearing has prosthetic pointed ears of the Navi characters they're playing. Nice touch. Rivkin isolates and plays back another track of that 20 Post • January 2010 www.postmagazine.com H OLLYWOOD — There's an adage in Hol- lywood that there's making the movie and there's getting the movie made. It's debatable which is harder, but one can't happen without the other, and producer Jon Landau made that clear during an interview we had with him at the recent Adobe Max Conference. He discussed the role that Adobe software played in James Cameron's epic, sci-fi adventure movie Avatar, on which Landau served as a producer. After Landau and Cameron went to 20th Century Fox in 2005 and got the go-ahead to make this movie, he says the first piece of software the produc- tion bought was Adobe Photoshop. "On Avatar, one of the exciting things is that it creates a whole new universe." They used Photoshop right at the be- ginning to do preliminary concept work and then later in the process to create texture maps for characters and matte paintings. "Four artists came on board," he says, "to work with our pro- duction designer and started putting pen to paper and mouse to machine." That was just the beginning. Avatar also used In- Design,After Effects, Connect, Lightroom and Pre- miere Pro throughout the overall design and per- formance-capture phase of the production. In-Design was called on to prepare print docu- ments, such as concept art and storyboards that would be distributed to the production team."We used Lightroom," explains Landau, because they had over 10,000 images on the movie "that we documented and that we were able to track and catalog and use all the metadata. "We also put together an art reel," he contin- ues Landau. "Where we took the concept art, worked with it in After Effects created some moves on it, effects and different things.We added ADR voices on top and I had the execu- tives sit in the Lightstorm screening room and watch the 'Reader's Digest' version of the movie set to Photoshop images." After Effects was also a key tool for them dur- ing production so they could show Cameron ma- terial right on the set where a CG character or live actor on greenscreen would be composited on to a background. During the performance capture, multiple HD cameras would shoot close-ups of the actors' faces.Those video faces were combined with basic rigged characters so the director could see the actual actors' facial expressions on their Navi characters.That footage got dubbed the "Kabuki mask" versions, because of how the video faces looked pasted on to the CG heads. Landau recalls,"We were doing a shoot and one of our key artists could not be on the set. Thanks to Adobe Connect he was able to access computers that we had on the set and work with an artist who was not as familiar with what we were doing, and it was as if [simulcam supervisor] Casey Schatz was there." Adobe's video editing software Premiere Pro, notes Landau, was an active tool in their produc- tion lab facility.Artists used it to "check stereo space," since Avatar was being released in both a flat and 3D version. "T he way I look at it," concludes Landau, "there are certain software tools that enable you to do your job and there are other soft- ware tools that enable you to do your job bet- ter.And that's what we have found with all the Adobe products that we worked with through- out the course of Avatar." By Daniel Restuccio continued on page 43 Avatar makes use of Adobe's Creative Suite James Horner's score for Avatar was mixed by Simon Rhodes at Sherman Oaks, CA's Ocean Way in Record One's Studio A, which houses an SSL console. Pictured (L-R) with Rhodes is assistant engineer Patrick Spain and digital recordist Kevin Globerman. Jon Landau (inset): The team used Creative Suite during creative development, pre-production and performance capture on Avatar. PHOTO: DAVID GOGGIN