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BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 12 POST JUNE 2016 SAROFSKY ANIMATES MAIN-ON-END TITLES FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR FRIEDRICHSDORF, GERMANY — Maxon (www.maxon.net) recently announced that design-driven production company Sarofsky (www.sarofsky.com) relied on its Cinema 4D (C4D) software suite as a central content creation production tool for delivering the 3D elements featured in the main-on-end (MOE) title sequence in Marvel's Captain America: Civil War. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo (see page 22), Captain America: Civil War pits members of the Avengers team against one another due to political pressures, most notably between Captain America and Iron Man. Under the direction of company principal and executive creative director Erin Sarofsky, together with executive producer Steven Anderson, creative director and designer John Filipkowski, and other Sarofsky artists, the Chicago-based creative team worked directly with Marvel's Captain America: Civil War VFX supervisor Dan DeLeeuw (see Post's May cover story) and VFX producer Jen Underdahl to create a fully composited and rendered two-minute MOE title sequence that blends CG- based and photoreal elements. Maxon's Cinema 4D software has been in use at Sarofsky for the past five years, where it has become a regular part of the studio's production pipeline. As a main 3D application on Captain America: Civil War, Maxon's Cinema 4D R17 — the latest version of the software introduced last fall — was used primarily for animation, asset creation and rendering multi passes for compositing. Previously, Sarofsky used Cinema 4D to create MOE titles for several other successful Marvel feature films, including Captain America: Winter Soldier, which drew on the software for modeling and animating several scenes. The main-on-end titles for Marvel's Ant-Man marked the first time the studio leveraged Cinema 4D as a primary 3D tool. "With over 30 credits in the title sequence and multiple artists working on each scene, the studio was challenged to come up with new creative techniques and approaches to create a dependable 3D workflow that would allow us to conceptualize and organize a large number of compositing passes, and maintain consistency in being able to complement the film's narrative style with somber yet visually captivating photorealistic imagery," Sarofsky explains. OUTPOST VFX COMPLETES WORK ON MY BEAUTIFUL BROKEN BRAIN BOURNEMOUTH, UK — Outpost VFX (www.outpostvfx.co.uk) contributed visual effects expertise to the new Netflix series, My Beautiful Broken Brain, which was released last month and is cur- rently showing on the streaming channel. The film is the story of 34-year-old Lotje Sodderland's personal voyage into the complex- ity, fragility and wonder of her own brain following a life changing hemorrhagic stroke. The film by Sodderland, David Lynch and director Sophie Robinson contains footage captured by Sodderland in the weeks after she woke up from an induced coma. After regaining con- sciousness she was thrown into a new existence of distorted reality where words held no meaning and where her sensory perception had changed. The project included over 110 VFX shots, all of which were created by Outpost VFX, with Elena Estevez Santos supervising. The VFX were essentially used to support the representation of Sodderland's vision of the world. The team developed two different looks, one for the POV after the stroke that was colorful, timeless and surreal, and another for the POV after the seizure that was nightmarish, ghostly and scary. Both looks were applied across several shots to recreate her right eye-sight. Every shot was individually crafted to make the most of each scene. In the childish new look, most shots had surreal or fantastic elements, such as melting clocks, metamor- phosis in the shadows, drawings that come alive, tripy warpings and deformed faces. The clue is in the detail, so the viewer had the feeling of transitory nature, that they might have or might not have seen the alteration. According to Sophie Robinson, "The visuals look completely amazing in the film. They lift it to a whole new level." In the past year the studio has worked on numerous film and commercial projects, including 47 Metres Down, Under the Shadow and Electricity, and has most recently brought on Geraint Hixson as VFX producer. With extensive production knowledge, Hixson brings with him a wealth of experience gained while at reputa- ble facilities in the UK. His credits include The Martian, Suicide Squad and X-Men Apocolypse. Prior to this appointment, he was at Rushes, working on big brand advertising campaigns including those for Mercedes and Honda Civic.