Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/997232
F E A T U R E 12 cgw | e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 1 8 AVATAR FRIENDS SHO, AECH, PARZIVAL, ART3MIS, AND DAITO FACE THE AVATAR FOR HALLIDAY'S BUSINESS PARTNER OGDEN MORROW. shooting. The stage would be ready between 9 and 10. He'd come out and start directing and shooting the performances. Then during a setup to build the next scene, he'd be back in the Vcam lounge. When we wrapped the main stage, at 5 or 6, he'd be back in the Vcam lounge. He had more energy than any- one. He shot and rendered to editorial almost 7,000 camera takes in the Vcam lounge. Once Spielberg approved the shots, the virtual production team sent files for each shot to ILM for the OASIS and to Digital Do- main for the real-world scenes, as well as motion-capture data – 50,000 seconds of character animation shot on stage – to ILM. "It's like an animated storyboard with ex- actly the film Steven wants and all the data for creating it," Roberts says. "We tracked every asset all the way through. Every time you see a cup of coffee, it's the same asset." Creating the OASIS The "animated storyboard" provided the directions for creating the OASIS. It was up to artists at ILM to produce the fully detailed, high-resolution final environments and believable avatars. "The thing that makes working in this business interesting is the challenges you get involved with and overcoming those, hopefully successfully," Guyett says. "Like all good challenges, we understated just how much of a challenge this would be. We did something crazy, like 90 minutes of the movie at ILM. We had close to 1,000 key character facial performances. It was a massive undertaking, a massive design exercise, and we were fortunate to have an incredible team working on it." In the OASIS, characters from the real world could become any type of avatar they wanted. Thus, ILM animators needed to translate motion captured from actors playing those real-world characters onto characters that might look similar or not. "As Steven turned over shots, Dave Shirk [animation supervisor] and I would put to- gether shots and come up with options for him," Guyett says. "We'd still be assembling scenes in postproduction, trying to marry the performances with the big action. There was a tremendous amount of anima- tion involved; Dave Shirk's contribution to the movie was enormous." And, those characters had to perform in believable, yet fantastic, fully digital worlds. "We designed and created an alternate world, not just a gaming world, that felt rich and textured enough that people would want to lead their lives there," Guyett says. "Because, if it's just a game, what are the stakes? Steven wanted to be sure the stakes are high." In addition to Guyett and Shirk working largely from San Francisco, ILM had super- visors at each of the studio's facilities – in Singapore, Vancouver, and London – lead- ing teams that worked on the show. "The London studio did the biggest chunk – close to half of the OASIS. They had some of the most complex scenes, in- cluding most of the third act," Guyett says. V I R T U A L R E A L I T Y PARZIVAL IS WADE WATTS' (TYE SHERIDAN) CG AVATAR IN THE OASIS.