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One of the sequences Fuel VFX created for Prometheus is the engineers' control desk. PROMETHEUS Sydney, Australia's Fuel VFX (www.fuelvfx.com), along with MPC and Weta, was one of the main visual effects houses on Ridley Scott's latest feature film, Prometheus. The stereo 3D movie is set late in this century and centers around a mission to the far reaches of space, where a team of explorers are following leads to an alien race they believe visited the Earth ages ago. Paul Butterworth was visual effects supervisor for Fuel VFX, which was responsible for more than 200 complex shots. The studio handled the reoccurring holograph effect that shows the aliens — called engineers — as they were recorded in the central pyramid structure thousands of years ago. Fuel also handled the "Known Universe" sequence, which shows a map of the universe, planetary trajectories and the Earth's relation to other galaxies. And on the starship Prometheus, Fuel created the "holotable," from which the crew observes realtime laser scans of the pyramid, as well as the wintery forest view outside Vicker's (played by Charlize Theron) personal quarters. The film's team, including visual effects supervisor Richard Stammers and visual effects producer Allen Maris, sent out requests for bids. And, according to Butterworth, it was his job to "work on the numbers and charm your way onto the movie." Budgeting for sequences, particularly those with effects that have never been attempted before, is always a challenge, he notes. "As a basis, I think the more complicated something looks, the tighter the budget," says Butterworth. "There are scenes that you have never seen before, and it's really hard to guess how much that's going to cost. You try to break it down in man hours — what you think it's going to take to research it, develop the tools, concept and draw it, animate it, color time, render and comp it — but you could still be way in or way out." Then there's the added challenge of working in stereo 3D. "There are several things that make it unbelievably more difficult," he notes of working in stereo. "The biggest challenge was that even though it's shot in parallel, and that makes it easier for post in tracking, they are never truly perfect. One camera is slightly off or the lens is .01mm out, so the picture is slightly different. You find that you spend a lot of the time correcting for the lights. You probably spend five to six times more prepping a shot for 3D than you would normally." Butterworth references the "juggernaut chamber," where the aliens hibernate as well as control actions via a large, round desk. "It was a huge set," he recalls — one with 30-foot-high ceilings. Fuel VFX handled set extensions, the actions that take place on the control desk, the holograms of the engineers, and the ceiling. "The control desk, where it's lighting up, it's a 3D surface that has been tracked and relit," he explains. When the engineers are walking on the desk surface, they are walking on 3D geometry. "The hidden challenge with 3D is the accuracy you have to have with virtual objects." Initially the holograms were going to be executed using live action of the engineer, which was an actor in a suit. The darkness as well as the required motion made it too much of a challenge, so instead, the 7-foot 5-inch actor was scanned in his suit and also motion captured. The mocap data was then applied to the CG model for all of the hologram sequences. "For the engineer, we used a combination of Maya, a particle system that we wrote, and Houdini mixed together," Butterworth explains. "Where you have the engineers running down the corridor, you have the main body, and the particles are made in Houdini, but then the particles that [spray] off to the walls are all Maya particles." Because these recordings needed to look as is they had been played over and over for thousands of years, they were given a deteriorated look similar to that of VHS tape. "In every film you usually have a handful of shots that you like…but on this film there were so many shots that looked beautiful. It's hard to pick from," says Butterworth of Fuel VFX's work. This includes some of the less complex effects, he notes, like the holotable. "A lot of work went into the engineering of that," he recalls. "The details of all the graphics and making sure every graphic has a real relevance, so if you looked closely you could see the speeds of the probes, and representatives of the different air levels in the various astronauts' tanks, where the sun is at various points versus its mission time. So we spent a lot of time designing the interface and the pyramid structure." The table on-set was made of glass and had LED tracking markers along with a mirrored surface. Under the glass was lighting that could be cast upon the actors' faces. "We took the lighting further," he notes, adding that the studio performed tracking, relighting and matching of the color temperature. The view from Vicker's quarters on the Prometheus is another attention grabber. "There is a forest outside her window, like a large virtual screen saver, and I really like it because I'd like one of those myself," he jokes. "It's a fairly simple effect — a matte painting with snow flurries, but it's one of those things that was a great idea that you'd love to see in your house." The studio worked at 2K+ resolution, which Butterworth explains as being a 2K frame with 80 additional pixels on each side. www.postmagazine.com Post • July 2012 27