Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/74632
VFX FOR STEREO 3D [ Cont.from 28 ] in total. four minutes and includes 12 screens "There's several different types of screens on the ride," White explains. "If you are used to working on one screen and one aspect ratio — this one has three different types of screens and aspect ratios for the content for the ride. A team shot location footage in Chicago to create the street scenes that were used. Transformer characters were modeled and animated using Autodesk Maya. ILM used its proprietary Xeno solutions for rendering, along with 3DS Max and XSI. Compositing was performed in Nuke, and White says as the deadline approached, as many as 100 Nuke licenses were put to use. A test site in Orlando Ingenuity Engine created this surreal labyrinth for the Katy Perry music video Wide Awake. output media." Some of the screens are flat, and set pieces are used to disguise the edges to create seamless transitions. The attraction's main screen is a 60-foot-long-by-30-foot- tall projection screen that curves 270-degrees from left to right. The ride's vehicles are 12 feet from the screen, creating a visual experience that spans beyond attendees' peripheries. "When you bring the characters into audience space, there is nothing to tell you they are not in your area, which I think is really unique," says White of the attraction's curved screen. Because the viewer gets so close to the screen, ILM had to create high resolution imagery to make the effects work. "We couldn't just use one single 3D camera because the field of view is so huge. If you just rendered through that ultra-wide fish-eye lens, the stuff that really matters is what's right in front of the audience. That part of the screen has a small amount of resolution, so we ended up rendering it in tiles. We had a center panel, a left panel and a right panel. And that all got stitched together in Nuke. The resulting image was between 8K and 9K." While some of the attraction's media was drawn from the Transformers' films, ILM also created original [ Cont. from 42 ] make changes based on what the other person had done. "We both got inspired by what each other had come up with," explains Lambert. "The whole project was a very organic process. Hugues Sweeney, the producer at the NFB, was incredibly trusting of our artistic vision, giving us the resources and time to just try out things." Since the music, voices and sounds were all pro- grammed into the film and played back with a degree of randomness, Lambert made sure that all the indi- vidual sounds worked well together, and that they 44 Post • July 2012 allowed the team to view the media in more of a real- world setting. "That was kind of tricky," White says, "because at ILM, we only have flat screens to do our reviews on, so we are looking at this huge curved media on a flat screen that sort of looks like a map of the world that's been unwrapped, where everything is a little distorted." Universal handled programming of the ride vehicles. "It was a fun project, and I didn't realize what the opportunities were going to be in terms of having that huge screen and the audience moving," explains White. "And the addition of physical effects that are hitting the riders — wind — it's amazing how having that real, physical thing happening to the audience adds so much to the media. And you can't really do that in a movie theatre." WIDE AWAKE David Lebensfeld, founder/creative director at Hollywood's Ingenuity Engine (www.ievfx.com), says the studio just wrapped up visual effects services on its second stereo 3D job — Katy Perry's Wide Awake music video. The studio's initial experience on a stereo 3D project was the work it contributed to the feature film, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. The Wide Awake music video was produced by DNA and directed by Tony T. Datis. In it, Perry takes a journey that begins where her California Girls video left off — leaving the California Girls set and heading to her dressing room. From there she is whisked away into a surreal labyrinth, where she encounters a younger version of herself, homages to past videos, and a not- so-charming prince. She awakens on the other side to perform her hit "Teenage Dream." translated on both high-end headphones and "crappy" laptop speakers. "The result is always mixed on the spot with variable volume parameters, so I basically just had to play with it for a week on different set-ups and fine tune it." Recently, Bla Bla was featured at a month-long inter- active exhibit in Paris, at the gallery at La Gaité Lyrique. The challenge for Lambert was to take the linear story of the film and adapt it to looping stations that could all play at the same time. He spent a lot of time calibrating levels so each section of the sound would be punchy, www.postmagazine.com One of the biggest differences between the Katy Perry video and the Harold & Kumar film was the time given to deliver a final product, notes Lebensfeld. While a feature film may afford them several months, the music video was posted — in both 2D and 3D — in just three weeks. As it turns out, Panasonic was involved in the financing of the Wide Awake project, and will help extend the video's reach by using it to demonstrate its consumer electronics in stores and at trade shows. Ingenuity Engine normally has a dedicated team of 13, but scaled up for Wide Awake, adding 25 freelancers to meet the tight deadline, which included work on 140 shots. The video was shot in 4K using Red Epic cameras and was posted in 3K. The studio would ultimately deliver the final music video in high definition. Ingenuity Engine created matte paintings, extended the labyrinth environment, completed sky replacements, and created fluid effects, among other things. Lebensfeld cites several challenging shots, including one in which the labyrinth floor crumbles away, and another in which Perry's dress releases a flurry of butterflies. "A lot of decisions were made for 3D," he explains, noting that while the studio would first deliver a 2D version of the music video, issues had to be worked out in advance to make sure the 3D version played without any hitches. "There is a shot where butterflies start flying off of Katy's dress and towards the camera," he recalls. "[It's] a straight forward thing to do in 2D, but in 3D it breaks all sorts of rules. If you get too close to the camera, your convergence gets all screwed up, so we made all of those decisions for 2D first but with 3D in mind." Ingenuity Engine uses Autodesk 3DS Max 2012 for modeling and animation, and renders with V-Ray. All compositing is performed using The Foundry's Nuke. Clean-up work also presented challenges, because much of it is labor intensive and performed by hand. "It's paint work, it's tracking patches for stuff," he explains. "[That] stuff needs to be perfect from eye to eye. " The Foundry's Ocula plug-ins for Nuke helped the studio address color matching, alignment, focus, interaxial shift and disparity problems. Ingenuity Engine's 3D workstations were paired with Nvidia 3D Vision stereo 3D monitors and glasses, allowing artists to review stereo footage in realtime and in full color. Panasonic plasmas were also available for S3D viewing. Ingenuity Engine also relied on Autodesk's Smoke for finishing. AUDIO FOR NEW MEDIA but would not obscure the other chapters. He also made quadraphonic mixes. Lambert used the facility's 200-speaker ceiling grid, as well as additional subwoof- ers, to reproduce the sound. In addition, he created a new generative track for the exhibit entrance. "The whole experience was amazing," he says. "It was particularly moving to see kids interact with what we had created and experience it with total wonderment. Hopefully, it will plant seeds of creativ- ity in them, like the weird animation films of my youth did for me."