Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/863766
12 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 7 Among the thousand planets that make up Luc Besson's mega- city are two particularly interesting ones created by artists at ILM. The "first mission" sequences introduce the two main characters, Valerian and Laureline. One planet contains the universe's biggest shopping bazaar – five million stores that line a cross-shaped canyon extending 500 floors deep. But, shoppers in the 28th century needn't walk through 500 floors of stores to find what they want. Instead, they stand with- in a large arena on a desert planet, don a helmet and gloves, and shop virtually. They can touch things with a glove. When they buy something, they place the object into a "transmatter," and the object travels to them through space. While shopping, the merchant sees them as holograms and the two can interact. "So, three looks," says Philippe Rebours, visual effects supervisor at ILM. "We had the desert where we see 'tourists' shopping, the merchant world in the bazaar where we see all the shoppers – all these different aliens and humans – as holograms, and the tourist view, which gives the audience a POV to see what Valerian or a tourist sees: the merchant world but with a degraded image. What happens in one world happens in the other." And then it gets complicated. Valerian wears a transmatter box on his arm and uses a system that makes him invisible in the bazaar. His goal is to retrieve a stolen object. But the huge CG criminal Igon Siruss' [John Goodman's] pitghor, a dog-like alien, jumps on him and breaks the box. Valerian's hand is in one world and his body is in another. Aer a 17-minute chase through the enormous CG bazaar, Valerian and Laureline escape in their spaceship, the Intruder. Besson previs'd the complex sequence with students from his school, Ecole de la Cité, located at his film studio complex, La Cite du Cinema near Paris. "He put a few tables here and there, shot, and edited the sequence like that," Rebours says. "We were able to watch the sequence when we were bidding. Even though there was no set really, and done with students, you could see it was a Luc Besson sequence. I wasn't bored at all." Later, the ILM crew color-coded each shot to show which take place in the desert, which is a tourist vision, and which is the merchant world, to help everyone know which shots were where. Hybride worked with ILM to create the desert world. Artists working largely at ILM's Vancouver studio created the merchant world with its multiple stores, streets, and crowds, and the tourist vision. Besson filmed the chase on bluescreen stages. "In the end, the entire planet has a purple sky with an orange sun," Rebours says. "You know you aren't on Earth any more." For the desert world, the actors worked on a huge stage with sand on the ground and a portion of the wall that surrounds the compound. To make the desert scenes otherworldly, Besson filmed them top lit as if there were a broad sun. Then he sent art- work that put the desert against a red sky, and artwork with some mushroom-shaped rocks and some multicolored rocks tilted as if the wind had blown against them. "He also sent us a photo from a commercial that had red, blue, and white clouds on top of each other," Rebours says. So that de- fined the look of the desert – tilted rocks and multicolored clouds in Shop Till You Drop Artists at ILM send Valerian into a bazaar BY BARBARA ROBERTSON formances for sequences at Wellington before principal shooting, and for others in Paris during filming. The body performances provided data that, except for fingers and some hand movements, the animators could use with- out much tweaking. "Because the Pearls were supposed to be larger than normal humans," Reynolds says, "the actors wore high platform shoes when Laureline and Valerian were in the shots, but the models were used to walking in high-heeled shoes. If what Luc shoots is working, we go with it." For the facial performances, the Weta Digital crew captured the principal characters in the Lightstage as a starting point for creating CG facial models, and did FACS sessions with the actors. "We used the baseline model of the actors from the Lightstage capture as the 'from' stage and remapped that onto the Pearl character we designed," Hill says. "The Pearls were essentially augmentations of the original actors." Modelers gave the Pearls bigger and wider eyes than humans, and double-lobed ears. Animators added tiny details and found ways to move the Pearls' mouths to make them believable. "They had quite a lot of dialog, and we struggled with that," Reynolds says. "We motion-captured French actors speaking in English. They sounded American, but they shaped their lips differently than an American would. It's subtle, but it would look wrong." The animators also created a base animation that the shader team used to drive the chromatophores that showed the Pearls' emotions through skin changes and patterns. "Any time you have something to do with shape and timing, animators can turn things around faster than doing iterations with rendering algorithms.," Reynolds says. "So, we used lights in [Autodesk's] Maya to make patterns and timings, to create shapes on the skin. Once it seemed right, we baked that into the skin." Proprietary code transformed the lit skin into texture maps the shading team could use. "We worked for the duration of the proj- ect to get it all to look right," Reynolds says.