It’s easy for today’s young filmmakers to forget that the art of the cinema goes back 132 years; television 83 years; and interactive media 23 years. Today’s students might think the latest high tech tools are all they need to succeed in the rapidly-changing visual effects industry; and they’ll be sorely disappointed when their ignorance of time-tested filmmaking technique puts them in the dole queue.

That’s why mentoring is so important to the future success of young VFX professionals. I recently sat down with Zoic Studios’ Syd Dutton to discuss the importance of industry pros passing along their knowledge to the next generation.

Dutton has been a leading matte painter for film and television for over three decades. His credits include Dune, Total Recall, the Addams Family films, Star Trek: First Contact and Nemesis, U-571, The Fast and the Furious, The Bourne Identity, and Serenity. The Emmy-Award winner co-founded Illusion Arts in 1985, which created thousands of shots and matte paintings for over 200 feature films over 26 years.

As we spoke, Dutton’s longtime collaborator and Zoic compositing supervisor Fumi Mashimo listened in, and occasionally interjected. Mashimo’s credits include From Hell, Van Helsing and Public Enemies.

The things I learned gave me the foundation I needed for this business… I try to pass it along as much as I can…

The first assistant I had was Rob Stromberg, a well-accomplished matte painter. I would have hired him immediately, but he was driving a Porsche, lived in Malibu, and had a cell phone at a time when cell phones were still a luxury. So I said this guy’s pretty talented, but I can’t afford him. Then I found out later it was all a façade, and he was poor as a church mouse. But he had tons of talent.

So I hired him, and he just really excelled when we switched to computers, which just terrified me — but he really embraced it. It was all Macs at the time, because you could get more bang for the buck from multiple Mac stations rather than from just one SGI machine. Our first creature was a bird that Fumi [Mashimo] generated in a traditional painting, I think the same year Jurassic Park (1993) came out – and our big accomplishment was doing this bird!

Rob was great; and he really wanted to direct, so after a number of years he left. He later went back into matte painting and formed his own company, called Digital Backlot. Then he became a digital art director on Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Apparently Rob had learned all the lessons I had learned from [legendary visual effects supervisor and matte painter] Albert Whitlock, that I passed along, like how to compose a shot using light and dark.

Most recently he became a production designer — which is really a jump for a visual effects person — first working for Jim Cameron on Avatar, for which he won an Academy Award [Best Achievement in Art Direction]; and this year he was productions designer on Alice in Wonderland, which is pretty amazing.

Mike Wassel was another one. His background was in design – he went to the Art Center in Pasadena — but he also knew car design, which was fortuitous for him. I got a call from Universal around 2000 saying we have this little movie we want to do on a budget, and we have about 20 shots or so, do you want to do it, it’s for Rob Cohen? I had worked for Rob for years, starting with The Wiz (1978) when he was the producer on the show for Motown.

My partner Bill Taylor and I both realized that Mike was the guy to supervise this. I didn’t know much about cars, but Mike was a complete car fanatic. He knew how cars would bank and all that stuff. Fumi did a wonderful test of a car, and I showed it to Rob Cohen. He said “why are you showing me this?” I said “What do you think it is?” “It’s a sports car turning a corner.” And I said “that’s CG.” We got the job. [laughter]

Bill and I talked Rob Cohen into hiring Mike Wassell as the visual effects supervisor. Now Mike’s working on the fifth edition of Fast & Furious. He was nominated for a VES award on Hellboy II: The Golden Army. So Mike’s having a pretty good career since he left too.

There have been several others; their careers are just beginning. I don’t know if it was so much my mentoring directly. I certainly try to pass on what I learned from Al Whitlock, who taught me everything I know about painting, even though I went to college and I had degrees and stuff like that. But the things I learned from Al gave me the foundation I needed for this business. I try to pass it along as much as I can.

But it was also the environment of Illusion Arts — not just me mentoring, but everyone would help bring up the next person. Do you think that’s fair to say, Fumi?

A good eye is a good eye, whether it’s looking through a whole bunch of glass and a projector, or at a computer monitor…

Fumi: It was a really nice environment.

There’s a couple more people, but I really don’t want to mention them until they achieve something. [laughter]

Fumi’s probably the most unsung person; now he’s compositing, but Fumi can do anything. Fumi did CG birds on The Bourne Identity (2002)…

Fumi: Oh God.

They were great. Hundreds of birds. I don’t think you will watch The Bourne Identity and notice any of our work in it. And we did dozens and dozens of shots. We always, especially in a contemporary movie, try to be as invisible as possible – I guess that’s what everybody tries to do. In science fiction it’s impossible. In historical dramas, sometimes you can get away with it, if people don’t think too hard. But most of the time in contemporary films, invisibility is what you want.

Erik: Fumi, do you have anything to say about Syd as a mentor?

Fumi: Oh, I mean, I learned everything from him. I didn’t know much about filmmaking when I was hired by him. I can respect him as a boss and also I can respect him as a person. That’s why I have been working with him for the past 23 years.

We found Fumi when he came from Canada with Randy Cook, who’s an Academy award-winning animator (for The Lord of the Rings trilogy). At that time Randy was working on a film called The Gate (1987), and Fumi was working as his assistant for no money, because he wanted the experience; and Fumi didn’t speak very good English either. [Fumi scoffs] But we could tell from his work ethic that he would fit in. So when Randy’s film finished, we asked if he could stay on. He learned English and all sorts of things, and when the computer came along he learned that too.

The old-fashioned optical printer guys, once they learned the computer, they became at that time the very best compositors; because a good eye is a good eye, whether it’s looking through a whole bunch of glass and a projector, or at a monitor. A good eye is what it takes.

Erik: Can you talk about mentoring, as far as personal relationships?

I think mentoring is a pretty intense relationship. You try to give that person all you know and hope they will take it to another level.

Erik: Based on my own chequered experience in this industry, it might be different on the creative side, but I’ve run into a lot of “I’m not going to teach anyone anything, because they might compete against me in the future.”

That’s exactly what happens – but that doesn’t help anybody. There’s always going to be somebody competing against you. If you own a business and don’t teach your people how to do good work, then your company doesn’t do good work. There are a lot of people who won’t give away their quote-unquote “secrets,” and that just isn’t me. I like working with young people. If it’s the right person, I like mentoring.

Fumi: There are a lot of young people CG artists, they don’t want to hear it. We have so many of them passing through.

Yeah, if they didn’t work out, they didn’t stay. I wasn’t cruel about it, I didn’t fire people and embarrass them, but if they didn’t work out, they just didn’t stay. It really was a family, and if a person didn’t fit in that family, it really didn’t matter. It was just a dysfunctional family.

Fumi: It was really nice, though.

If you own a business and don’t teach your people how to do good work, then your company doesn’t do good work…

I’m proud, especially with Rob and Mike, that they have done so well. It reflects well on me [laughter], and it passes on something important. When I first started working with Al, I had artistic experience and I had degrees, but I didn’t know how to apply it to movies. Al was very patient with me, and taught me all his tricks, and all of [legendary special effects creator and matte painter] Peter Ellenshaw’s tricks, because he worked with Ellenshaw.

Al made me aware of how people like W. Percy Day worked, who was a production designer in England in the 30s. I was introduced to all sorts of production designers; most of them are long gone. It was wonderful. It connected me all the way back to the 1920s and 30s. I felt I really learned a lot on how to do things, how to be economical with your vision.

Erik: It sounds like a lot of what you learned translates into the new technology.

Oh, it all translates. People just don’t necessarily know about it. If you hadn’t been exposed to it, and talked to people who worked on these movies that were classics — it’s not in books, it has to be learned firsthand.

Erik: Do you get people who think that knowledge from before the digital revolution can’t translate?

Yeah, sure. They can’t believe it would work. Some simple — what we used to call “gags” – these tricks that are effective, they say couldn’t possibly translate into the digital age, and they can.

Erik: What about the environment at Zoic, as far as mentoring and education?

I think the training program here is really very good. It’s a wonderful way to find out who’s going to work out, and it’s certainly wonderful for young people to be around this environment.

It’s never going to be the same as the world I came up in. I was exposed to this whole backlot world, and the old movie stars and everything. In this environment you aren’t exposed to sets, and all those things I found really interesting working for a big studio.

When I had my own business at Illusion Arts, we did go to the sets. We went on locations, too. What we did on glass was something very few people could do. But as times changed and everything became computer-oriented, this became the type of environment that people would have to learn to work in. And of all the places I’ve seen, Zoic by far has the best environment. It’s the friendliest, it’s the most open.

I told one of my client producers, you’d be hard put to know who to kill to take over the company, because there’s no obvious boss walking around smoking a cigar or something. Everybody seems to know their jobs, and they just collaborate with one another. I’ve never seen people yelling at each other – maybe I haven’t stayed around long enough to see that. [laughter]

It’s a good environment, and it’s actually one of the reasons I came here. It didn’t seem to have a whole bunch of pressure – there’s time pressure, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of alpha dogs going around screaming at each other!

More info: Syd Dutton, Fumi Mashimo,  Robert Stromberg and Mike Wassel on IMDb; see also “Syd Dutton: Matte Painting from Traditional to Digital.”

Since the dawn of movies there was always a creepier, scarier, and unintentionally funnier cousin to the big budget blockbusters… the B-Grade Movie.

Cinema screens around the world flickered with startling images of wolfmen, zombies, nuclear-mutated monsters, and bug-eyed aliens with a penchant for probing. The 25th CGChallenge: “Attack of the 50ft CGChallenge” asks you, the artist, to bring these gems back to life, or create your own in their spirit, via a still image, video, or, for the first time, audio.

Awards will be given in modeling, texturing, animation, lighting, visual effects, landscape/matte painting, art direction, compositing and editing, best character, concept art, digital painting, and music & sound. Prizes include PC workstations and software packages.

The deadline for entries is April 19th.

More info: CGSociety Challenge XXV.

Visual effects professionals refer to the chain of processes and technologies used to produce an effects shot as a “pipeline,” a term borrowed both from traditional manufacturing and from computer architecture.

In the past year, Zoic Studios has developed a unique pipeline product called ZEUS. The showiest of ZEUS’ capabilities is to allow filmmakers on a greenscreen set to view the real-time rendered virtual set during shooting; but ZEUS does far more than that.

Zoic Studios pipeline supervisor Mike Romey explains that the pipeline that would become ZEUS was originally developed for the ABC science fiction series V. “We realized working on the pilot that we needed to create a huge number of virtual sets. [Read this for a discussion of the program's VFX and its virtual sets.] That led us to try to find different components we could assemble and bind together, that could give us a pipeline that would let us successfully manage the volume of virtual set work we were doing for V. And, while ZEUS is a pipeline that was built to support virtual sets for V, it also fulfills the needs of our studio at large, for every aspect of production.

“One of its components is the Lightcraft virtual set tracking system, which itself is a pipeline of different components. These include InterSense motion tracking, incorporating various specialized NVIDIA graphics cards for I/O out, as well as custom inertial sensors for rotary data for the camera.

“Out of the box, we liked the Lightcraft product the most. We proceeded to build a pipeline around it that could support it.

“Our studio uses a program called Shotgun, a general-purpose database system geared for project shot management, and we were able to tailor it to support the virtual set tracking technology. By coming up with custom tools, we were able to take the on-set data, use Shotgun as a means to manage it, then lean on Shotgun to retrieve the data for custom tools throughout our pipeline. When an artist needed to set up or lay out a scene, we built tools to query Shotgun for the current plate, the current composite that was done on set, the current asset, and the current tracking data; and align them all to the timecode based on editorial selects. Shotgun was where the data was all stored, but we used Autodesk Maya as the conduit for the 3D data – we were then able to make custom tools that transport all the layout scenes from Maya to The Foundry’s Nuke compositing software.”

By offloading a lot of the 3D production onto 2D, we were able to cut the cost-per-shot.

Romey explains the rationale behind creating 3D scenes in Nuke. “When when you look at these episodic shows, there’s a large volume of shots that are close-up, and a smaller percentage of establishing shots; so we could use Nuke’s compositing application to actually do our 3D rendering. In Maya we would be rendering a traditional raytrace pipeline; but for Nuke we could render a scanline pipeline, which didn’t have same overhead. Also, this would give the compositing team immediate access to the tools they need to composite the shot faster, and it let them be responsible for a lot of the close up shots. Then our 3D team would be responsible for the establishing shots, which we knew didn’t have the quality constraints necessary for a scanline render.

“By offloading a lot of the 3D production onto 2D, we were able to cut the cost-per-shot, because we didn’t have to provide the 3D support necessary. That’s how the ZEUS pipeline evolved, with that premise – how do we meet our client’s costs and exceed their visual expectations, without breaking the bank? Throughout the ZEUS pipeline, with everything that we did, we tried to find methodologies that would shave off time, increase quality, and return a better product to the client.

“One of the avenues we R&Ded to cut costs was the I/O time. We found that we were doing many shots that required multiple plates. A new component we looked at was a product that had just been released, called Ki Pro from AJA.

“When I heard about this product, I immediately contacted AJA and explained our pipeline. We have a lot of on-set data – we the have tracking data being acquired, the greenscreen, a composite, and the potential for the key being acquired. The problem is when we went back to production, the I/O time associated with managing all the different plates became astronomical.

“Instead of running a Panasonic D5 deck to record the footage, we could use the Ki Pro, which is essentially a tapeless deck, on-set to record directly to Apple ProRes codecs. The units were cost effective – they were about $4,000 per unit – so we could set up multiple units on stage, and trigger them to record, sync and build plates that all were the exact same length, which directly corresponded to our tracking data.”

We found methodologies that would shave off time, increase quality, and return a better product to the client.

Previously, the timecode would be lost when Editorial made their selects, and would have to be reestablished. “That became a very problematic process, which would take human intervention to do — there was a lot of possibility for human error. By introducing multiple Ki Pros into the pipeline, we could record each plate, and take that back home, make sure the layout was working, and then wait for the editorial select.” The timecode from the set was preserved.

“The ZEUS pipeline is really about a relationship of image sequence to timecode. Any time that relationship is broken, or becomes more convoluted or complicated to reestablish, it introduces more human error. By relieving the process of human error, we’re able to control our costs. We can offer this pipeline to clients who need the Apple ProRes 442 codec, and at the end of the day we can take the line item of I/O time and costs, and dramatically reduce it.”

Another important component is Python, the general-purpose high-level programming language. “Our pipeline is growing faster than we can train people to use it. The reason we were able to build the ZEUS pipeline the way we have, and build it out within a month’s time, is because we opted to use tools like Python. It has given us the ability to quickly and iteratively develop tools that respond proactively to production.

“One case in point – when we first started working with the tracking data for V, we quickly realized it didn’t meet our needs. We were using open source formats such as COLLADA, which are XML scene files that stored the timecode. We needed custom tools to trim, refine and ingest the COLLADA data into our Shotgun database, into the Maya cameras, into the Nuke preferences and Nuke scenes. Python gave us the ability to do that. It’s the glue that binds our studio.

“While most components in our pipeline are interchangeable, I would argue that Python is the one component that is irreplaceable. The ability to iteratively making changes on the fly during an episode could not have been deployed and developed using other tools. It would not have been as successful, and I think it would have taken a larger development team. We don’t have a year to do production, like Avatar – we have weeks. And we don’t have a team of developers, we have one or two.

While most components in our pipeline are interchangeable, Python is the one component that is irreplaceable.

“We’re kind of new to the pipeline game. We’ve only been doing a large amount of pipeline development for two years. What we’ve done is taken some rigid steps, to carve out our pipeline such a way that when we build a tool, it can be shared across the studio.”

Romey expects great things from ZEUS in the future. “We’re currently working on an entire episodic season using ZEUS. We’re working out the kinks. From time to time there are little issues and hiccups, but that’s traditional for developing and growing a pipeline. What we’ve found is that our studio is tackling more advanced technical topics – we’re doing things like motion capture and HDR on-set tracking. We’re making sure that we have a consistent and precise road map of how everything applies in our pipeline.

“With ZEUS, we’ve come up with new ways that motion capture pipelines can work. In the future we’d like to be able to provide our clients with a way not only to be on set and see what the virtual set looks like, while the director is working — but what if the director could be on set with the virtual set, with the actor in the motion capture suit, and see the actual CG character, all in context, in real-time, on stage? Multiple characters! What if we had background characters that were all creatures, and foreground characters that were people, interacting? Quite honestly, given the technology of Lightcraft and our ability to do strong depth-of-field, we could do CG characters close-to-final on stage. I think that’s where we’d like the ZEUS pipeline to go in the future.

“Similar pipelines have been done for other productions. But in my experience, a lot of times they are one-off pipelines. ZEUS is not a pipeline just for one show; it’s a pipeline for our studio.

“It’s cost effective, and we think can get the price point to meet the needs of all our clients, including clients with smaller budgets, like webisodes. The idea of doing an Avatar-like production for a webisode is a stretch; but if we build our pipeline in such a way that we can support it, we can find new clients, and provide them with a better product.

“Our main goal with ZEUS was to find ways to make that kind of pipeline economical, to make it grow and mature. We’ve treated every single component in the pipeline as a dependency that can be interchanged if it doesn’t meet our needs, and we’re willing to do so until we get the results that we need.”

For more info: Lightcraft Technology; InterSense Inc.; Shotgun Software; AJA Video Systems; IDYE’s coverage of V.

The level of the technology available to produce computer graphics is approaching a new horizon, and video games are part of the equation.

Creators in 3D animation and visual effects are used to lengthy, hardware-intensive render times for the highest quality product. But increasingly, productions are turning to realtime rendering engines, inspired by the video games industry, to aid in on-set production and to create previz animations. Soon, even the final product will be rendered in realtime.

Aaron Sternlicht, Zoic Studios’ Executive Producer of Games, has been producing video game trailers, commercials, and cinematics since the turn of the millennium. He has charted the growth of realtime engines in 3D animation production, and is now part of Zoic’s effort to incorporate realtime into television VFX production, using the studio’s new ZEUS pipeline (read about ZEUS here).

Sternlicht explains how realtime engines are currently used at Zoic, and discusses the future of the technology.

“The majority of what we do for in-engine realtime rendering is for in-game cinematics and commercials. We can take a large amount of the heavy-lifting in CG production, and put it into a game engine. It allows for quick prototyping, and allows us to make rapid changes on-the-fly. We found that changing cameras, scenes, set-ups, even lighting can be a fraction of the workload that it is in traditional CG.

“Right now, you do give up some levels of quality, but when you’re doing something that’s stylized, cel-shaded, cartoonish, or that doesn’t need to be on a photo-realistic level, it’s a great tool and a cost effective one.

We’re going to be able to radically alter the cost structures of producing CG.

“Where we’re heading though, from a production standpoint, is being able to create a seamless production workflow, where you build the virtual set ahead of time; go to your greenscreen and motion capture shoot; and have realtime rendering of your characters, with lighting, within the virtual environment, shot by a professional DP, right there on-set. You can then send shots straight from the set to Editorial, and figure out exactly what you need to focus on for additional production — which can create incredible efficiencies.

“In relation to ZEUS, right now with [ABC’s sci-fi series] V, we’re able to composite greenscreen actors in realtime onto CG back plates that are coming straight out of the camera source. We’re getting all the camera and tracking data and compositing real-time, right there. Now if you combine that with CG characters that can be realtime, in-engine rendered, you then can have live action actors on greenscreen and CG characters fully lit, interacting and rendered all in realtime.

“People have been talking about realtime VFX for the last 15 years, but now it’s something you’re seeing actually happening. With V we have a really good opportunity. We’re providing realtime solutions in ways that haven’t been done before.

“Now there’s been a threshold to producing full CG episodic television. There has been a lot of interest in finding a solution to generate stylized and high quality CG that can be produced inexpensively, or at least efficiently. A process that allows someone to kick out 22 minutes of scripted full CG footage within a few weeks of production is very difficult to do right now, within budgetary realities.

“But with in-engine realtime productions, we can get a majority of our footage while we’re actually shooting the performance capture. This is where it gets really exciting, opening an entire new production workflow, and where I see the future of full CG productions.”

What game-based engines have Zoic used for realtime rendering?

“We’ve done a several productions using the Unreal 3 engine. We’ve done productions with the Killzone 2 engine as well. We’re testing out different proprietary systems, including StudioGPU’s MachStudio Pro, which is being created specifically with this type of work in mind.

“If you’re doing a car spot, you can come in here and say ‘okay, I want to see the new Dodge driving through the salt flats.’ We get your car model, transfer that to an engine, in an environment that’s lit and realtime rendered, within a day. We even hand you a camera, that a professional DP can actually shoot with on-site here, and you can produce final-quality footage within a couple of days. It’s pretty cool.”

How has the rise of realtime engines in professional production been influenced by the rise of amateur Machinima?

“I’ve been doing game trailers since 2000. I’ve been working with studios to design toolsets for in-game capture since then as well. What happened was, you had a mixture of the very apt and adept gamers who could go in and break code, or would use say the Unreal 2 engine, to create their own content. Very cool, very exciting.

“Concurrently, you had companies like Electronic Arts, and Epic, and other game studios and publishers increasing the value of their product by creating tool sets to let you capture and produce quality game play — marketing cameras that are spline-based, where you can adjust lighting and cameras on-the-fly. This provided a foundation of toolsets and production flow that has evolved into today’s in-engine solutions.”

It’s truly remarkable how the quality level is going up in realtime engines, and where it’s going to be in the future.

How has this affected traditional producers of high-end software?

“It hasn’t really yet. There’s still a gap in quality. We can’t get the quality of a mental ray or RenderMan render out of a game engine right now.

“But the process is not just about realtime rendering, but also realtime workflow. For example, if we’re doing an Unreal 3 production, we may not be rendering in realtime. We’ll be using the engine to render, instead of 30 or 60 frames a second, we may render one frame every 25 seconds, because we’re using all the CPU power to render out that high-quality image. That said, the workflow is fully realtime, where we’re able to adjust lighting, shading, camera animation, tessellation, displacement maps — all realtime, in-engine, even though the final product may be rendering out at a non-realtime rate.

“Some of these engines, like Studio GPU, are rendering out passes. We actually get a frame-buffered pass system out of an engine, so we can do secondary composites.

“With the rise of GPU technology, it’s truly remarkable how the quality level is going up in realtime engines, and where it’s going to be in the future. Artists, rather than waiting on renders to figure out how their dynamic lighting is working, or how their subsurface scattering is working, will dial that in, in realtime, make adjustments, and never actually have to render to review. It’s really remarkable.”

So how many years until the new kids in VFX production don’t even know what “render time” means?

“I think we’re talking about the next five years. Obviously there will be issues of how far we can push this and push that; and we’re always going to come up with something that will add one more layer to the complexity of any given scene. That said, yes, we’re going to be able to radically alter the cost structures of producing CG, and very much allow it to be a much more artist-driven. I think in the next five years… It’s all going to change.”

Read Zoic Studios’ ZEUS: A VFX Pipeline for the 21st Century.

This is second part of a two-part interview with Zoic Studios senior compositor Johnathan R. Banta, about creatures designed for the Fox sci-fi drama Fringe. Be sure to read part one.

The Lionzard (from episode 1:16, “Unleashed”)

In this first-season episode, anarchists opposed to animal testing ransack a research laboratory, but get more than they bargain for when they unleash a ferocious transgenic creature. Later, Walter faces off against the creature in the sewers.

Banta says, “It was a lion-lizard combination, a chimera of a bunch of different creatures created in a lab. This also went through the ZBrush pipeline. There were no maquettes done for this particular one.

“This was a full-digital creature; luckily it did not interact too tightly with any of the actors. It was rigged up and had a muscle system that allowed for secondary dynamics. The textures and displacement maps were painted locally. There was some post lighting to add extra slime, with everything done inside the composite.

“It was actually very straightforward in its approach. The challenge of course was getting it to be lit properly and integrated in the shot. Compositing was a heavy challenge, as there was lot of haze on the set, a lot of lens flares – not direct flares, but gradients from different lights and so forth. We did our best to match the color space of the original photography. I think it was very effective.

“Another challenge was the bits of slime; it had to have slobber coming off of it. So we actually shot some practical elements; we did some digital cloth elements, a combination of things.”

The Hand (from episode 1:12, “The No-Brainer”)

A seventeen-year-old is working at his computer and chatting on the phone, when a mysterious computer program executes. Strange images flash before his eyes, and the teen is drawn in, mesmerized. Something protrudes from the middle of the screen and impossibly takes the form of a hand. The unearthly appendage reaches forward without warning and grasps his face.

Banta explains: “This boy spends a little too much time on the computer, and a hand reaches out of the computer, grabs his face, and begins to jostle him around and melt his brain. Which is not unlike my experience as a youth.

“We made a series of maquettes and we photographed them, just different positions of the hand coming out; and we composited them into a couple of shots. At the same time the animation was being worked on in CG, so we could start previsualizing it and then composite it.

“A cloth simulation was used for the screen. The hand was coming out, and we would create several different morph targets based on that cloth simulation. There was a bone rig in there, so we could animate it grabbing the kid’s head. That’s some very effective work, especially when projecting the textures on. The side view of the hand coming out of the monitor is one of my favorite shots.

“What they had on set was a monitor made of plastic, and a greenscreen fabric with a slot in it [where the screen would be] – and they had some poor guy in a greenscreen suit shove his hand through and grab the kid on the head, and the kid wiggled around.

“So we had to paint back and remove the actor, whenever he was touching the kid; otherwise we would use a clean plate. But whenever he was touching the young actor, we would remove that hand and replace it.

“They were also flashing an interactive light on the young actor that was not accurate to what we were rendering. When the hand got close it would actually light up his face, because the hand was illuminated with television images. So we came up with a way of match-moving his animation, and using that to relight his performance. We had to match his animation for the hand to interact with him, but we also used that match move to relight his performance.“

The Tentacle Parasite (from episode 2:09, “Snakehead”)

A wet, shivering man frantically combs the streets of Boston’s Chinatown. Gaining refuge, he suffers incredible stomach pains. His rescuer puts on heavy gloves and uses shears to cut his shirt away. The man’s abdomen is distended and wriggling as something crawls around inside him. A squid-like parasite crawls out of the man’s mouth, and rescuer retrieves it.

“Recently we just did yet another thing coming out of a poor guy’s mouth,” Banta says. “This time it wasn’t just nice little potato-shaped slug — it was long and tentacled, had sharp bits and just looked pretty nasty to have shoved down your throat.”

But there was an additional challenge on this effect. “You were seeing the creature moving underneath the actor’s skin; the actor’s shirt was off, and he was wiggling around on the ground as he probably would if this were happening, like a dead fish. He was shifting all over the place, his skin was moving all over the place, and we had to actually take full control of that.

“So we did match move. We went to our performance transfer system, which essentially takes tracking information from the original plate and assigns is to the match move. There are no specific camera set-ups; it’s just whatever they give us, and we grab every bit of information from the plate that we can, and use that to modify the 3D performances. These were then projected onto animation that we used to distend the belly and so forth, and up into the throat.

“The creature had 18 tentacles. Ray Harryhausen, when he did an octopus, decided to take two of the tentacles off, because he wouldn’t have to animate those, it would take less time. We didn’t have that luxury. There was no way to procedurally animate these things, and it had to interact with the guy’s face. So we had the exact same challenge we had with the slug coming out of the mouth, that we had to take this actor and pull his face apart as well, and make his lips go wider. But this actor was moving a lot more, so the performance transfer and animation tracking was more challenging.

But I’m very pleased with the results. We used fabric simulations for the different bits of slime again.

Razor Butterflies (from episode 1:09, “The Dreamscape”)

A young executive arrives late to give a presentation. After he has finished and the boardroom empties, he collects his things, and spots a butterfly. It alights on his finger — and unexpectedly cuts him. The insect flutters by his neck — and cuts him again. After attacking a few more times, the creature disappears into an AC vent. The man peers into the vent just as a swarm of butterflies pours out. They surround him, cutting him all over his body — he runs in a mad panic, crashing through a plate glass window and falling to his death.

Banta says, “We tracked every camera in the scene and laid it out into one common environment, so we could reuse any lighting in any point in the scene. That gave us the ability to put the flock of razor-winged butterflies into the appropriate spot.

“A big challenge on its own was volume — controlling and dictating the flocking behavior, so the swarm would follow the actor, intersect with him in the appropriate parts and not intersect in others, and eventually chase him through the window where the would fall to his horrible demise.

“There was one close-up of a butterfly resting on his finger — it flew into frame and landed, it was brilliant – that was pretty straightforward in its execution. More often than not the hard part was controlling the sheer number of flocking butterflies, especially given our standard turnaround time.”

Banta is thrilled to be creating otherworldly monsters for JJ Abrams’ Fringe. “I like doing these creatures; I hope we get to do more!”

Read Part 1

Zoic Studios recruiter Adam Mutchler hunts heads for the Culver City, California-based visual effects and digital production company, for both staff employee positions and for freelance jobs on specific projects. He recruits compositors, character animators, concept & character designers, LightWave & Maya generalists, and Maya dynamics and lighting pros.

Each week he reviews dozens, sometimes hundreds of demo reels from both up-and-coming and veteran VFX artists. As a result, Mutchler knows a good VFX reel when he sees it. If you’re looking for work in the industry, you would be wise to take heed — here is his advice to IDYE readers:

Edit and publish your reel.

You may have great clips of your work, but you need to edit your demo properly. Throw it in a timeline, and export and upload it to something like Vimeo with password protection. Sometimes a recruiter just needs something new to show the hiring manager, to grease the wheels for that last-minute freelance position.

Use a decent video player or video sharing service.

Use a video player that can be rewound or clicked through. Large QuickTimes can take forever to load on a computer. Using an annoying player that doesn’t work in all browsers? You might be losing jobs. If they can’t see the reel, a recruiter or hiring manager will just move on to the next applicant. They may only have a day or two to consider applicants for a looming job; and clunky video players and slow load times aren’t helping.

Vimeo embed is better than most players. It allows password protection, plus downloadable original files if you get the annual Vimeo Plus service. And YouTube’s HD is better than many people’s players on their sites.

Terribly compressed files aren’t great for compositing reels. Try to get the best quality you can, so we can actually see the work you do. DVDs are fine, but they tend to get lost or misplaced on hiring manager’s desks. Web sites and emails don’t go away, and they’re always a forwarded email or an email search away from being found again.

I want to know specific projects and companies. Extended periods of employment at well-regarded companies bode well for work ethic and quality of work.

Just say “no” to Facespace.

Don’t use MySpace or Facebook for anything. These aren’t professional sites, and you’ll look less professional by using them as a server for your reel. Also, some companies block Facebook or MySpace at work, so recruiters can’t actually see your reel while at the office. That won’t help get your work seen.

Use LinkedIn for career networking. It’s what it’s for.

Keep your reel brief and to the point.

Keep it short and sweet — although if you’re a veteran, a super- thin reel can be worrisome, especially if there is very little variation in the types of shots, or if the work is very old. Nine shots of roto is a roto reel. If you’re compositing, have a separate comp reel, even if it’s thin.
Keep your reel and resume updated.

If you’re a veteran artist and haven’t updated your reel in awhile, at least update your resume with the various freelance jobs you’ve worked on. If you don’t have a web site on which to display your latest resume, use a LinkedIn account.

I want to know you’re not rusty. I’m not a big fan of skill-set-based resumes that don’t list dates at various companies and specific projects worked-on. Being the VFX sup/owner of your own LLC doesn’t really help me figure out what you’ve been up to day-to-day. Include what you’ve done, even if you are billing as a company.

Really old work and an old resume can be worrisome. Has the artist been off the box? Supervising only? If you don’t have time to get your new work into a reel, at least update your resume. “Freelance for three years” isn’t an updated resume. I want to know specific projects and companies. Extended periods of employment at well-regarded companies bode well for work ethic and quality of work.

The type of work is important too. Commercial and episodic turnarounds tend to be fast. I like to know that someone is used to the pace and has done it before. If you’re a CG artist or compositor, but also work as a supervisor on many jobs, you may want to have two resumes. Your long-term career growth may make you want to push your supervisory skills; but if you’re applying for freelance artist jobs, that supervisor resume may actually hurt you. If I need a workhorse, I’m not going to hire a manager who doesn’t work on the box anymore. Your resume can give the wrong impression in terms of what you’re capable of.

…if you’re applying for freelance artist jobs, that supervisor resume may actually hurt you… I’m not going to hire a manager who doesn’t work on the box anymore.

Flame artists that also use desktop compositing software might want to use the two-resume approach. If you consistently work off the Flame in After Effects or Nuke and are applying for non-Flame jobs , highlight specific work that is non-Flame. A reel filled with color correction finishing work or all-Flame composites doesn’t help me hire an AE or Nuke artist. The last thing I want is someone who knows a little AE or Nuke but needs their primary package, i.e. Flame, to actually get the work done. That luxury doesn’t exist — so despite a highly-skilled insanely senior Flame artist saying they “know” another package, a resume that spells out work done in that package quells many of the fears about how comfortable they actually are in these packages.

Break down shots – but don’t overdo it.

Breaking down a composite or a model into the various layers, etc., is fine and great… but do it quickly. I can always press pause or rewind, but I’ll never get the minute or two of my life back that’s spent going around the same model 15 times. I’ve hired model/texture people off a handful of JPEGs. It’s the quality of the work that counts, not the turntables and the music you picked for your demo.

Explain to me what I’m seeing.

Lower-third text on a reel is a fantastic way to break down your reel, even if you can’t do a before-and-after. Lots of studios won’t give you the “before” of a shot, and sometimes great VFX work is invisible. I can’t give you the credit you deserve for a great shot if I can’t figure out what you did! You have to tell me or show me. Or do both.

Also be prepared to talk through what difficulties arose with a given shot. This conversational breakdown of your work over the phone or in person can be what shows a recruiter or hiring manager the way you think, and can reveal your level of knowledge and experience in a way that can’t possibly be known by viewing the finished shot alone.

Tell me what software you used.

Break down what software you used for each project. Many compositors claim all software packages are more or less the same with different buttons; and while there is some truth to that, knowing an artist has been in the trenches on a production using our choice of software eases the worry under a tight turnaround. When companies balloon up and take a chance on a new artist, a deadline is usually looming, or they feel like they’re falling behind schedule. They want to make the safe bet.

Your work history, and your contacts amongst other freelancers at the given studio who might vouch for you, all can help assuage that fear of picking the wrong person when facing a deadline.

It’s the quality of the work that counts, not the music you picked for your demo.

Keep adding new work to your reel; and remove old work that isn’t up to par.

Spend time on new work between jobs. If you’re just starting off, work on a VFX shot, an animation, a model catered to the kind of work for which a specific company is known. Apply for that job, and then move on to the second studio on your list and do the same.

During your job hunt, continue to work on expanding your reel. As you get better, take some of your old, less professional work off your reel. Remember, people may judge your work by the best examples — but most times they’ll judge your artistry, or at the very least your taste and eye, by the worst work on the reel.

Don’t pad your reel with work that doesn’t make you proud. And if you’d like to keep your old art for its sentimental value, hide it in an Old Stuff or Student Stuff archive section on your website. If it’s the first thing people see on your site, they may not watch your new reel with the new work… they’ll just look at your second-semester model/texture work and skip to the next applicant.

And finally, about your website:

There’s nothing more annoying than a website that’s “under construction.” I realize a cool site takes time and effort to design, but don’t send people to a site that doesn’t have your reel on it.

Flash sites can also be super-annoying. I’d avoid Flash, since technical issues with your site can prevent people from seeing your work. Please think about why you’re over-engineering your website. Are you a flash web designer? If not, you may want to keep it to a simpler design. I’ve hired people with a simple free blog with some JPEGs, and an embed from Vimeo for their reel.

If you’re working on your website, but it’ll be awhile before it’s ready to launch because you’re a perfectionist, stop what you’re doing right now and register for a blog. Upload a handful of sample JPEGs of your work and an embed from Vimeo or YouTube. You should be done within an hour or two. Use it as your temporary website. It doesn’t need to be perfect — it’s just a blog, and you can link to it from your official website later on. Down the road it will become the perfect place for Works in Progress or random news tidbits about where you’re working and links to things you contributed. You can update it easily, before any time-consuming overhaul of your regular website.

Have any additional advice for someone putting together a VFX reel? Let us know in the comments!

Last weekend, NFL on Fox aired a promotional clip for the upcoming James Cameron film Avatar, featuring effects work done by Zoic Studios. Zoic inserted NFL on Fox’s robot mascot, Cleatus, into a scene from Avatar, which also featured Fox NFL Sunday co-host Terry Bradshaw.

Zoic executive producer for commercials Erik Press explained that, in his experience, Fox seems to seek partnerships with various brands, including feature films, to enhance the NFL on Fox brand and the Cleatus character. When Fox Sports approached Fox Feature Marketing Division’s Mike Perman about an Avatar tie-in, he contacted Zoic based on the studio’s previous work on a Cleatus/Terminator Salvation tie-in.

New Zealand’s Weta Digital provided Zoic with back plates and necessary assets for the shots into which Cleatus would be composited. The work involving compositing Bradshaw into the RDA Combat Amp Suit was done by another vendor.

“The project came up pretty fast,” Press said. From the time the project came to Zoic, “we delivered two 10-second billboards inside of two weeks – animation, rendering, lighting, even editorial.”

“Weta was incredibly helpful,” Press added, “as was Mike Perman. We have a great, ongoing relationship with Fox, and we look forward to future projects.”

The 3D sci-fi epic Avatar, starring Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña and Michelle Rodriguez, opens tomorrow in the US. It is Cameron’s first major feature film since 1997’s Titanic.

Tomorrow evening (11/3/09), ABC will broadcast the premiere episode of its highly anticipated new sci-fi series V, which updates and re-imagines the original 1983 miniseries of the same name. The visual effects for the new V were created by Culver City, California’s Zoic Studios, known for providing VFX for a number of well-loved science fiction franchises.

Scott Peters, creator of The 4400, brings fans a modern take on the classic V that pays loving homage to its 80s inspiration. Written by Peters and directed by Yves Simoneau, the pilot episode stars Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost), Morris Chestnut (Kung Fu Panda 2), Joel Gretsch (The 4400, Taken); and Firefly alumni Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk.

The remake hews closely to the story of the original: mile-wide alien motherships appear above the major cities of the Earth. The aliens call themselves “The Visitors,” and appear to be identical to humans. They claim to come in peace, seeking to trade advanced technology for resources. But the Visitors are not what they seem, and hide sinister intentions. While much of humanity welcomes the Visitors, a resistance movement begins to form.

Four episodes will air this month; the show will return from hiatus after the 2010 Olympics.

Visual effects and digital production

Zoic is handling all of the visual effects for V, under the oversight of creative director and VFX supervisor Andrew Orloff (FlashForward, Fringe, CSI) and visual effects producer Karen Czukerberg (Eleventh Hour). Work on the pilot was split between Zoic’s Vancouver studio, which handled greenscreen and virtual sets, and the Los Angeles studio, where the motherships and other effects were created.

Zoic began work in February 2009 on the pilot, which featured about 240 effects shots, 125 of which involved live actors shot on greenscreen in Vancouver where the series is filmed. Another three episodes now in post-production have some 400 effects shots overall, half of which involve digital compositing of actors on greenscreen.

A more detailed view of a Visitor mothership.

Orloff worked in collaboration with the show’s creators – Peters, Simoneau, and executive producers Steve Pearlman and Jace Hall – to design the motherships. The enormous, saucer-shaped Visitor mothership is one of the original V’s iconic images (along with a certain hamster), and visually represents the Visitors’ technological superiority and their domination over humanity. In addition, Orloff says, the creators were dedicated to realism and internal consistency and logic in the design of the alien technology and culture.

Orloff created the mothership on his laptop, working through numerous iterations with input from Peters and Simoneau. He wanted a design that was “freaky and menacing,” and would be emotionally impactful when it made its first momentous appearance onscreen.

The underside of a Visitor mothership begins its transformation. Buildings in Vancouver were supplemented with 3D models of real Manhattan skyscrapers from Zoic’s library.

Because the mothership itself is enormous, the 3D model used to represent it is huge and highly detailed. Zoic CG supervisor Chris Zapara (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Pathfinder) modeled the “transformation” effect, in which the ventral surface of the ship changes, causing the frightened humans below to fear an imminent attack. In fact, the ship is deploying an enormous video screen, displaying the greeting message of Visitor leader Anna (Baccarin). After many rounds of pre-visualizations, a design was chosen with large, movable panels and a grid of smaller panels arranged in a snakeskin pattern. The mothership was created in NewTek’s Lightwave 3D.

The “snakeskin” panels underneath the mothership flip over to reveal a video projection surface.

Digital artist Steve Graves (Fringe, Sarah Connor Chronicles) was responsible for filling in the copious detail that gives the mothership the impression of immense scale. After the pilot was picked up by ABC, the dorsal surface was remodeled to add photorealism. The model initially was detailed only from the angles at which it was shown in the pilot, due to the many hours of work necessary. As shots were created for the second through fourth episodes, Graves created detail from new angles, and now the mothership model is complete.

Our first view of the alien mothership, reflected in the glass of a skyscraper.

The mothership design was not the only way the Visitors’ arrival was made to seem momentous and frightening. As businessman Ryan Nichols (Morris Chestnut) looks to the skies for an explanation of various alarming occurrences, he first sees the mothership reflected in the glass windows of a skyscraper. Although a relatively simple effect (Zoic took shots of real buildings in Vancouver, skinned them with glass textures, and then put the reflected image on the glass), the effect on the viewer is chilling.

Visitor leader Anna (Baccarin, seated left) is interviewed by Chad Decker (Scott Wolf, seated right) on board the Manhattan mothership. The “set” was created virtually, with the actors shot on a greenscreen stage.

Because the motherships are enormous, it only makes sense that they would feature enormous interior spaces. These sets would be too large to build, so half the effects shots on V involve actors filmed on a greenscreen stage with tracking markers. These virtual sets, based on Google Sketch-Up files from V‘s production designers (Ian Thomas (Fringe, The 4400) for the pilot; Stephen Geaghan (Journey to the Center of the Earth, The 4400) for later episodes), were created at Zoic’s Vancouver studio in Autodesk Maya and rendered in mental images’ mental ray.

The ship interiors were created before the related greenscreen shots were filmed. For the episodes shot after the pilot, Zoic provided the production with its new, cutting edge proprietary Zeus system, which allows filmmakers to see actors on a real-time rendered virtual set, right on the greenscreen stage. The technology is of immeasurable aid to the director of photography, crew, and especially the actors, who can see themselves interacting with the virtual set and can adjust their performances accordingly. Zeus incorporates Lightcraft Technology’s pre-visualization system.

After actors are filmed on the Vancouver greenscreen set and the show creators are happy with the pre-visualized scenes in Zeus, the data is sent south to Zoic’s Los Angeles studio, where the scenes are laid out in 3D. Then the data goes back up to Zoic in Vancouver, where the virtual set backgrounds are rendered in HD.

An alien mothership inserted into a stock shot of London.

A mothership composited into a stock shot of Rio de Janeiro, with matched lighting and atmospheric effects.

Other alien technology was created for the series, including shuttlecraft and a “seek & destroy” weapon used to target a resistance meeting.

A Visitor shuttle docks with a mothership.

The alien shuttle and the shuttle docking bays were created in Los Angeles by visual effects artist Michael Cliett (Fringe, Serenity), digital compositor Chris Irving and freelance artist James Ford.

The “Atrium,” a city in the interior of a Visitor mothership.

The “Atrium,” a massive interior space inside the mothership, was created for Zoic by David R. Morton (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Serenity). The complex 3D model served essentially as a matte painting. It was incorporated into a complex composited shot, with actors on the greenscreen stage inserted into virtual sets of a corridor and balcony by the Vancouver studio; the camera pulls out to reveal the Atrium, which was created in LA. Extras in Visitor uniforms were shot on greenscreen and composited into the Atrium itself.

An F-16 fighter, its electronics disrupted by a Visitor mothership, crashes onto a city street.

An F-16 fighter crash, featured in the first few minutes of the pilot, was done by the Los Angeles studio. The airplane, automobiles, taxis, and Manhattan buildings in the background, and of course the explosion, smoke and particles, are all digital. All the components came from Zoic’s library. The actor was shot on the greenscreen stage. Correction: The actor was shot on a Vancouver street. Thanks to Johnathan Banta for the correction.

FBI Agent Erica Evans (Mitchell) examines a wounded Visitor and makes an alarming discovery.

A scene involving an injured Visitor, which gives the viewer one of the first clues to the aliens’ true nature, was shot entirely with practical effects (including the blinking eye). But Zoic used CG to enhance the wound, merge human skin with reptile skin, and add veins and other subcutaneous effects.

Visitor leader Anna looks out over her new dominion.

According to Czukerberg, one of the more difficult shots to pull off was the final scene in the pilot. It involves the alien leader, Anna (actress Morena Baccarin on the greenscreen stage), in an observation lounge on the mothership (virtual set); the camera pulls out (practical camera move) past the mothership windows to reveal the entire ship hovering over Manhattan (CG mothership over an original shot of the real Manhattan created for this production). The shot required cooperation between the LA and BC studios, and took a great deal of time and effort – “it was crazy,” Czukerberg said, but she adds that everyone involved is tremendously satisfied with the finished product.

Zoic Studios looks forward to doing more work when V returns next year, and helping the series become a ratings and critical success. “Rarely do you get an opportunity to redefine a classic series,” Orloff said. “Everyone at Zoic put their heart and soul into this show, and it shows on the screen.”

For more information: V on ABC; the first nine minutes of the pilot on Hulu; original series fan site.