Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/834195
m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 7 c g w 1 7 of the palace than the one we know now, as the palace was very dark with dirt back then," says Turner. Nevertheless, the artists had to make the palace as photoreal as possible, taking their own photos and using Enwaii to build the model. They then re-projected the photos onto the model and added 1950s post-war dirt and grime. Still, covering the building in dirt without it getting lost in the grime was hardly easy, and it needed to be realistic to the period while still being recognizable as Buckingham Palace. There were also many digital set exten- sions, such as Downing Street. One of the more difficult extensions was for a BOAC DC-4 plane, which had to feel three-di- mensional. "We saw it from many angles, and at times we got very close to it, so the level of detail needed to be very high. Also, shiny silver aircra needs to reflect the light believably," Turner adds. The DC-4 was used in multiple scenes across the series. The team took a good deal of detailed photo reference of a real DC-4 in South Africa and used that to build a 3D model using Maya and Enwaii. They then re-projected those photos back onto the model as textures, and added addition- al detail on a per-shot basis using digital matte painting done in Adobe's Photoshop. Furthermore, the model was rigged so that it could take off and land, which it did in a handful of shots. CROWD-PLEASING Crowds are ever present in the series. One of Us did not use digital doubles for this work, but instead used digital crowd replications. The group devised an in-house 2.5D tool in Nuke that was a card generator, giving the artists a choice of crowd elements and letting them determine the costume, angle, resolution, and actions. While the overall effects were not difficult, what made them complicated was the scale of the work. There were four different directors across 10 episodes, and the shooting schedule and post schedule overlapped significantly. This meant the artists oen were pulled in two directions at the same time. "The number of shots and the huge amount of data became a challenge when juggling multiple episodes at once," says Turner. It's not every day that a studio gets such a royal assignment. As a matter of fact, One Of Us typically works on films, and although this was an episodic production, they approached it as a feature film. So, the expectations for high-quality work were exactly what the group is used to, and the crew was able to transfer its film experi- ence directly to the project. And the result? Award-winning.