Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/74632
vfx for Stereo 3D MORE PROMETHEUS North Hollywood, CA's Identity FX (www. identityfx.com) also contributed to the Ridley Scott film Prometheus. The studio provided stereo optimization services, working with much of the production footage. According to Identity FX producer/COO David Scott Van Woert and co-founder/ stereoscopic VFX supervisor Leo Vezzali, the studio spent nine weeks earlier this year working on 49 minutes of footage for the film. "We essentially did a majority of the production footage," Vezzali explains. "Most of the scenes were practical. They projected on set so we basically had to do all the color and geometry alignment for all those shots, including the ones that have the built- in semi transparency." Identity took out all of the polarization ILM's Jeff White: Because the viewer is so close to the screen in Transformers — The Ride, ILM had to create high-res imagery to make the effects work. problems that are often associated with films that are captured natively during 3D acquisition. This one contained "a ton," he notes. "You had a lot of dark environments with interactive lighting, including the holographic projections on the screen. Some are always going to be recorded differently when using a beam splitter rig. So we went through and removed all of the technical issues associated with native 3D so the narrative could really come across," says Vezzali. He points to a number of notable scenes in the film, including the scene in which the robot character David is examining researcher Shaw, the lab sequences, the exterior shots (which were shot in Iceland), and the cave interiors. "The most challenging shots, consistently in every 3D film I've ever worked, on are Steadicam shots," says Vezzali, noting this film was shot with Red Epics. "The camera was hardly ever stationary in this movie. Because they can't make the rigs any heavier, you get a lot of jostling when the Steadicam operator is moving. This being an action movie, we had to remove a lot of the jitter and misalignment associated with quick camera movement." Identity FX relied heavily on its SGO Mistika system, along with The Foundry's Nuke and Ocula products. "We probably did 95 percent of the 49 minutes on the Mistika, and the other five percent went out to our Nuke and Ocula pipeline," he recalls. Those were shots that had zoom or focus disparities, polarization issues or geometry problems. Vezzali served as the Mistika operator and says shots that would have been too time consuming for one person to address in Mistika were farmed out to the rest of the team using Nuke and Ocula. 28 Post • July 2012 Mistika offers just the right toolset for Identity FX, which at its core is a VFX house that works on both 2D and 3D projects. "I've worked on Aliens of the Deep and U2 3D, and have been looking for a robust 3D toolset for a long time," Vezzali explains. "One of the things that's really exciting about it is we can tailor the solution to whatever our project requires." "Because we started as a VFX company, we've always had a toolset mindset," adds Van Woert. "We use the right tool for the job as opposed to trying to impose a static protocol. We use a lot of off-the-shelf stuff, but we've woven it together in a very unique and proprietary fashion. The Mistika is beautiful in that its stereo 3D toolset is probably the most robust in the market. But, at the same time, it's very useful for visual effects and even editorial." TRANSFORMERS — THE RIDE ILM visual effects supervisor Jeff White headed up a team of nearly 50 to create Universal Studios' latest attraction, Transformers — The Ride. The experience had just opened in Hollywood when Post caught up with White, following a similar launch of the attraction in Singapore last December. Transformers — The Ride marks White's first experience in theme park attractions, allowing him to draw on the previous work he contributed to the Transformers film franchise. The Universal attraction was in production at the same time as the third film in the series — Dark of the Moon — and entertains participants with both a pre-show video experience as well as with a motion- simulation ride. According to White, this new project provided several challenges as well as Paul Butterworth of Australia's Fuel VFX on stereo effects, "There are several things that make it unbelievably more difficult." Identity FX would receive 10-bit DPX files via Aspera. Mistika would be used to handle near realtime color matching — a slow process in Ocula. Vezzali would create color corrected passes and then send them to the Ocula team, where they would focus on geometry issues. "In some cases, a shot would come back from Ocula after being geometrically aligned and I would do a final tweak pass with the client, based on whatever he needed," Vezzali adds, "so it was a very integrated process throughout… It was really interesting to see how we could take an offline process, like color alignment, and make it a very interactive client experience." www.postmagazine.com unanticipated rewards. "There's a smaller crew, but you end up working for a much longer period of time than a film project," he notes. "I first met with Universal after the second film, Revenge of the Fallen. They said it was going to take two and a half years to do this project?! It's a very long, iterative process in terms of animation, the camera work that we do and what the motion base is doing. It's very tightly coupled together in a way I didn't appreciate before doing a ride." The pre-show portion of the attraction employs video monitors to set up the story. The ride portion spans approximately continued on page 44