Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/739236
16 cgw s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 6 invisible dragon was moving through the space and gave Elliot the slightly magical feel the director wanted. Blending several frames together when Elliot moved worked until he moved too far and too fast. "We'd use displacement and refraction to drive distortion on the background and dial it in per shot," Roberts says. "The director wanted to see Elliot's performance and not see it. Sometimes we can see his face. Sometimes only his eyes. We'd dial the camouflage, the refraction, and the reflection up or down so that David could change the emotion of the scene, even slightly. It was a great creative process." Most of the VFX shots were of Elliot composited into plates, but the end sequence was largely CG, with the actors work- ing on greenscreen stages. For backgrounds in these scenes, the artists would oen project plate photography onto 2.5D ge- ometry. "The photography gave us all the lighting cues and the other information we needed to make the shots as good as we could," Roberts says. The crew also created thousands of CG trees to fill in the background for the end sequence, and to forest a bare New Zealand canyon shot from a helicopter for other shots. During the film, Elliot would fly through the forest with Pete on his back. "A pine beetle had killed all the pine trees in the canyon," Saindon says. "So, we shot mul- tiple passes down the canyon to be able to do photogrammetry later. Once we had the geome- try, we added the CG trees." In addition, the crew created a CG deer, a CG butterfly, and a few digital doubles. For modeling, the artists used Autodesk's Maya. Weta Digital's rendering so- ware Manuka handled lighting. Compositors used The Foundry's Nuke and in-house tools for deep compositing to fit the CG char- acters into the plates and help make the CG shots believable. "We use deep compositing all the time," Roberts says. "It means we can combine lots of CG renders together quickly, and they can all hold themselves out in 3D space as they should. It also means we can render characters and environments that interact with each other, and if one of those elements changes, we only have to re-render the necessary things because all the elements know where they are in space. That way we get quicker turnarounds." As with many films, the last act of Pete's Dragon has the most effects. And in most films, the last act has the most challenging effects. But, that isn't what Saindon cites for this film. "I should say the third act, with its all-CG environment, destruc- tion, and typical VFX hoopla was the most challenging," Saindon says. "But the reality is that the hardest parts were the intimate scenes between Pete and Elliot, the slow parts. The subtlety of Elliot was the biggest challenge. To have the dragon breathe fire and have angry action is pretty standard. We're all used to doing things like that. But to get emo- tion out of a CG character that's obviously a CG character and not a double in the background is hard. You can't hide a big green furry dragon." Or, can you? ■ ELLIOT DOESN'T SPEAK AND IS NOT ANTHROPOMORPHIC, SO ANIMATORS NEEDED TO FIND WAYS FOR THE DRAGON TO COMMUNICATE WITH ELLIOT. HERE HE USES PETE'S PICTURE BOOK. COMPOSITORS USED REFLECTIONS, REFRACTIONS, PROJECTIONS, DISPLACEMENTS, AND MORE TO MAKE ELLIOT MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR. Barbara Robertson (BarbaraRR@comcast.net) is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW.