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October 2012

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the art direction as well. "There was a tre- mendous amount of concept design. You constantly have to conjure new material in order to satisfy the needs of the story." In producing over 1,056 visual effects shots, Glass oversaw a global band of VFX studios that included Method Studios in LA, Vancou- ver and London; Industrial Light & Magic; Trixter Films; Lola Visual Effects; Gradient Effects; One of Us; Bluebolt; Rise Visual Effects Studios; Scanline; Black Mountain; Arri VFX; Exozet and a small Berlin based in-house team of two compositors. The obvious structure of six stories was their first way of evaluating how to distribute the effects shots. "It was both a very difficult movie and in some ways a simpler movie to break into sections because the nature of the content is six different stories that are really unrelated, at least visually," recalls Glass. "That automatically chopped into six." The second set of criteria was all the visual effects character work. "The actors playing different roles in all the stories, each of them, at least once, requires a level of prosthetic or make-up work," relates Glass. "When you lay on very heavy prosthetics, one of the things that it does is add spatially to the size of someone's skull." Lola VFX took a trick out of what they had done for the Steve Rogers character in Cap- tain America. Glass says, "We said, 'Okay, let's build the prosthetic and then we'll just shrink the head back down so that it looks more normal.' In the process, you can re-proportion it slightly, so you can give the jaw line and other features a slightly more feminine feel from an underlying actor that is actually male." The next biggest challenge was trying to build, design and imagine Neo Seoul, a city in the far future and give it a coherent look. There was also a big chase sequence that takes place in that future city. "We wanted to make sure that went somewhere that had the fire-power to do that," recalls Glass. "The time frame was going to be quite tight. We approached ILM, and they were fantastic. They wanted to be involved in the project, so they took on that chase section. "There were a tremendous number of one-off designs and needs that had to be addressed, and all the work that goes into imagining them, visualizing them and then making them." One-off designs? Typically, says Glass, you design a CG environment, a place, or a build- ing, and it will be seen from multiple angles in the scene. "The core work of designing that and detailing that is typically done one time. It can be used and reused in the film. In this movie there are very few instances where you're in the same place for very long. We are having to create new views and new designs, have new effects, new requirements on a frequent basis." For the entire production, "our basic reso- lution was 2K," explains Glass. "We did scan some things at 3K and 4K on a few occasions. Some of the work was done at very high resolution to ensure that we had the quality and detail. We had several shots where they were in 8K based on things that were behind things. When you're actually spending time looking at some great detailed vista, that's when you want to maximize and put the attention into the higher resolution detail." When it came to sharing files between companies Glass says, "We tried to keep it as clean as possible. It's never fun or easy to deal with the sharing of things, but it's typically inevitable at some point, given the complexity of how things all interrelate." The biggest area where there was sharing was when there was work to be done on the characters. describes Glass. "His character is in many, dif- ferent set-ups and scenes, some of which were with ILM for the chase sequence and at Method for other shots. "What we try to do is do the work effec- tively on the base plates, provide the base elements for the work. So rather than making "Like the Chang character," sharing overly complex, it's really feeding a new element into the set-up a company already had. There are a few instances where it was more complex than that. Instances where we were sharing assets, so that the model was built, and it was used and seen in different situations." Pushing the envelope on this movie, says Glass, wasn't about any particular focus on a technology, but more how to creatively administer and run a project of this com- plexity. The budget for the film was approxi- mately 100 million, one of the highest bud- geted indie movies ever. Glass notes that insurance and bonding costs among others knocks that down considerably. From a sheer production standpoint for the scope and level of the effects work the accomplishment is quite remarkable. "We were tackling something that was colossal in ambition and scale," reflects Glass. "The movie is about two hours and 45 min- utes long. It covers six stories in different time periods. You have so many things that you're juggling, we effectively had three directors, but two teams of directors that were operating in two different continents. It had two crews operating in parallel on different continents, different countries we were shooting. It has a lot of complexity from that point of view just bringing it to the screen. Just keeping all those things and trying to progress with design and keep continuity across the look of things wherever applicable. It was a very exciting project overall." "I am very lucky," concludes Berner. "Something like Cloud Atlas comes along and you think, 'Wow, is it possible that there is something that could show a bigger, broader, wider spectrum of your work than ever before.' There is. Cloud Atlas is romantic; it has the adventure story; it has the love story; it has the thriller aspect; it has the humor. Six stories, and you have to turn this all into one movie, and it's great to have this feeling I have when I look at." www.postmagazine.com VFX supervisor Dan Glass: "We were tackling some- thing that was colossal in ambition and scale." Post • October 2012 15

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