On December 2, 2010 Universal Studios officially opened UVS1 and the studio is looking forward to having both internal and third party productions utilizing the facilities. “The virtual stage is a pre-rigged, pre-calibrated turn-key facility designed for the most simple to the most complex shoots. We are excited to be able to offer UVS1 for both internal and third party clients,” says Jeff Berry, Executive Director Virtual Effects and Production Services at Universal. “Working with Zoic Studios was an integral part of developing the facility.”

I sat down and spoke to Mike Romey who is Zoic’s Pipeline Supervisor about his experience working on Zoic’s virtual set pipeline, which was first developed from Zoic’s work on the episodic television show, “V.” Romey said, “Universal asked us to put together a virtual pipeline for them based upon Zoic’s Environmental Unification System (aka ZEUS). So taking what Zoic developed for ‘V’ we wanted to be able utilize what we already knew, but ultimately make it even better. One of those things that Universal and we wanted to improve upon was content acquisition. On set the content is acquired and as soon as the day wraps, the tapes are ushered out of UVS1 right over to telecine where they start editing. When it goes to editorial, the most important thread that binds the data we are acquiring is time code. If the time code gets broken it causes a huge problem because all the data we are acquiring on stage is time code driven. When collaborating with Universal we were thinking about UVS1 we wanted to make a facility where you could control the process up to the point of layout. You could be at stage where you could do acquiring, content distribution, layout, but you were in the same localized facility and vicinity and storage where there was no disconnect. The files weren’t ushered away from you so the downstream visual effects could control the importance of time code. That’s why you see storage, editorial suites and a bullpen where artists can work connected to UVS1.”

Universal Virtual Stage 1 really takes the idea of pre-visualization before production out of the equation, “The idea of pre-vis before production becomes a way to work, but this becomes a better way to work where you do pre-vis on production day.”

“Working at Universal was amazing,” said Romey. “They have great on-lot departments that we collaborated with like Set Lighting, Grip, Sound and IT. The Studio even has a Metal Shop. We could lean on them to build custom brackets we would need for the camera or any of the units. It was a great experience for everyone at Zoic from our pipeline department to our IT department, understanding how to go about integration of a pipeline that we are using in production and how we translate that information into UVS1. We are really proud that we had the opportunity to work with Universal.”

“If you have a project that has a virtual set and you have a high volume, not only are you pre-visualizing what you’re doing, but it allows the Director and the talent and the DP to interact with the environment in real time,” says Gina Fiore Zoic’s Executive Producer of Television. “The DP can see how the shots are laid out and create lighting changes. The big part of what goes wrong I think with green screen is that the talent isn’t lit very well. When you go to integrate talent into a scene it can become problematic. When you can actually see the set, you can light to it and the talent. UVS1 is also very beneficial to talent. They are able to look at themselves in the monitor and line themselves up to the environment.”

The virtual set comes in handy when there is a show that is using a lot of virtual set environments. Fiore says, “Instead of having to start from ground zero and get the shots in house, you are already about 30% or more there depending on how well you can light and integrate the virtual set before you get into post-production. When the editors get the content, they aren’t looking at green they are looking at a virtual set they can cut together. When you are trying to get approvals from the studio or the network, even though it’s not perfect, they get a sense of how the scene is going to play out instead of having to look at it in a complete green environment.”

The amazing part of UVS1 is the quality; the work print can be used as is. Also all of the pieces on stage are modular so the production can choose to keep or remove elements depending on their needs. Clients can bring in their own camera package and lenses. Film cameras can be used if they have a high definition video tap. The entire system is tied to editing bays with 60 terabytes of online storage so as soon as a director gets the shot they can select it and the editors can immediately begin working on it. Turnaround can be tremendously fast. UVS1 bridges pre and post production in a fundamentally new way. You can take your storyboards that you create in Maya for pre-vis right before you started shooting, feed them into the computer system, work with them on set and show post production what you want right away.

It’s definitely an exciting time for the visual effects world and Universal’s new Virtual Stage 1 is certainly the next step in virtual set production.

For more information on Universal Virtual Stage 1 check out the website at: http://universal.filmmakersdestination.com/content/universal-virtual-stage-1

Also check out some pictures from the stages below:

The visual effects for “V” are incredibly vast in size and scope.  The show averages between 250-300 shots. For Episode 111, the season finale, there were 432 visual effect shots created for the episode.  There was a great deal of integration between the 2D and 3D artists for this final episode and very detailed effects were created.

In order to create efficiency in the workflow, a virtual set pipeline was created.  Says Mike Romey, “The system, called ZEUS, Zoic’s Environmental Unification System, allows real time motion tracking of the camera on set as well as real-time rendering of the CG background and compositing of the actors on green screen.  This allows the Director of Photography to light to the background, the Director to block scenes using the full virtual environment and the actors to see the space that they are performing in.  The pipeline works like this: the visual effects department gets the final script and then breaks it down by environment.  The art department will send the 2D sketches, conceptualized color, lighting and feel for the environment as well as a sketch up file that is converted to start the CG model.  The files that are sent from the art department to the visual effects department are refined, modeled, textured and lit.   When this has been completed, the files are imported into the on-set system.”

Romey continues, “Once in production, the virtual set is an incredibly beneficial tool for both the actors and director to truly comprehend and visualize their surroundings.  Actor placement and positioning becomes specific, everyone on set has an awareness of scale and direction of the physical environment.   Hence, this takes out any guesswork in the production pipeline and the adage; ‘fix it in post’ becomes virtually obsolete.  In post, a feed from the real time composite is used for editing and temp VFX purposes.  Once the episode was cut, an EDL from the AVID was sent to the VFX facility. A proprietary system was created that read the EDL, searched the camera motion data from set and created files in MAYA, NUKE, and SYNTHEYES.  These files all had matching camera and scale data as well as links to the green screen takes.  This system was pivotal in getting all of the shots into the pipeline quickly and on schedule.”

The budgetary and time constraints in episodic television make large-scale prosthetic make-up practically impossible.   For these types of shots the “V” team used a combination of techniques to place CG elements onto performers in the scene.   Nate Overstrom says, “The extended jaw of the ‘V’ soldier was created by tracking an array of 2D points on the actors face and then projecting them onto a CG mesh.  This process was dubbed ‘performance transfer’ as it captured the performance of the actors face and moved it to a CG model. Digital mouth and fangs were added to the CG match model and 3D eyes were tracked onto the head.  The human eye was projected on the CG model and an animation was added to have the human eye membrane peel back.”

Dave Funston was responsible for creating the egg chamber in the season finale. “The size of the scene necessitated several levels of detail for the egg models as high-resolution geometry.  Due to the vast quantity of eggs it would have made the rendering of the scene impossible. The eggs in the foreground were real three-dimensional geometry while the background eggs were renders of 2D cards, which made the background renders easier to manage.  As the eggs grew, the audience had to see the fetus of the creatures inside the egg, which also had to move. Low-resolution creature models were placed inside the eggs and animated to give the impression of the growing soldiers inside.  The eggs were placed in the scene using a combination of hero-animated geometry, animated egg cycles and 2D sprites with animated sequences mapped onto them.  Particle systems with collisions were used to populate the eggs throughout the chamber.”

The script called for the egg chamber to be destroyed by a cryogenic grenade.   Overstrom spoke in detail about the process, “The mushroom cloud was created in Maya Fluids.   Voluminous clouds were created that integrated the shockwave and ended up on a solitary cloud with some fractal textures that were imbedded to create the glowing energy within the cloud itself.  The shockwave effect was created in five passes that were both particle and geometry based.   A series of matte paintings were set up to convey the destruction of the room.  A big crater was formed in the middle of the room to denote the power of the explosion and strewn everywhere are cracked, frozen eggs with creature parts sticking out of them.  Eggs were encased in blocks of ice and snow.  A large over-scanned matte painting was used to cover the motion of the shots.  A large still rendering of the virtual set was generated as a backdrop for the matte painting.  In order to add a sense of depth to the painting, displaced ground geometry was generated and the matte painting was projected on to it to create parallax during the camera moves.  Smoke and wispy elements were on 3D cards over the basin area to create additional depth and texture.”

At the end of the episode the sky takes on a distinctive red color as the Visitors begin entering earth’s atmosphere, “The Red Sky sequence starts with a fleet of motherships dropping a red mist over the earth.  The mothership models needed to be retrofitted with moving panels and additional geometry to show that they were transforming into ‘battle mode.’   The shops were rendered in Lightwave and composited in Nuke for the final effect. Voxel particles in Lightwave were also created for use as the red mist.  The episode ends with a giant pullback of Anna in her suite with the red skies rolling in above her.  This shot was achieved using a combination of software and techniques.  The interior set was rendered in Maya Mental Ray, while the outside of the ship was rendered in Lightwave.  A virtual camera from the set was blended with a tracked camera based on stock footage and exported to each software package.  Ship renders were integrated in Nuke and fluid particle clouds were added for the red sky effect,” says Overstrom.

For last season’s finale, the number of visual effects created for one hour of television rivaled some heavy visual effect feature films. You can see more of “V” when the series returns tonight, January 4th at 9pm PST.

Rocco Passionino was the Visual Effects Supervisor on Burlesque and worked very closely with Director Steve Antin to make sure the visual effects created were in tune with his vision of the film, ” We worked very closely with the director to ensure his needs were being met as far as the visual effects were concerned. This process was started over a year ago when we were first involved in the early script stages of the film. From there, boards and technical scouts helped to further evolve what was needed from us. We assisted him through the entire shooting process, including second unit photography as well.”

Over 115 visual effects shots were created for the film. “There were several matte paintings that were necessary to convey what the director was looking for. Most of them were idealized version of the locations. For the Grundy, Iowa farming landscape, which is where the protagonist is supposed to be from, we shot the foreground plates up in Piru, CA. The location was incredibly beautiful and looked and felt quite rural. Steve Antin wanted Grundy to have a desolate wasteland feel to it. This helped further the point that anyone who had ambitions to do something larger than life needed to get out of this small town environment. We created a bleak and depressing, gray and dreary vista that coincided with the color palate of what was happening inside of Dwight’s Bar which is where the protagonist worked. The other Matte Paintings that we created also had to have a pseudo real look to them. When the protagonist moves out of her small, bleak home town to the glitz and glamor of LA, the view outside of her window was that of quintessential Hollywood icons that were put together to epitomize a hyper real version of what a Hollywood landscape actually looks like.”

Antin had a very specific concept for the film and it was the responsibility of the Zoic team to deliver the Director’s vision. “Working with Steve Antin was a unique experience. Steve had been a child actor before becoming a director so he used a vast amount of visual references as inspiration for the film. He would show us clips and stills to use as a basis for shots if not whole sequences. He was very enamored with iconic Hollywood and the emotion those films expressed.”

Burlesque was definitely a bigger film in terms of scope for Passionino, “When you are working on a film that involves both Christina Aguilera and Cher as well as the rest of the cast its not hard to recognize the scope of the film. The musical numbers alone are showstoppers. There were a lot of times they consulted with us to ensure the shots they were getting could be achieved with visual effects and we made sure they were getting the best they could when the cameras were rolling. Its a film I am really proud to have been involved in.”

The film opened fairly well at the box office and it will be interesting to see if the momentum can continue in the coming weeks. Also I think about other movie musicals and wonder if in a few years this will stand up to some favorites that have become cult classics? Either way, I hope that this is the start of Cher’s comeback as an actress.

Below are some of the visual effects that the Zoic team created. Check out Burlesque in theaters now.

Loni Peristere, Co- Founder and Executive Creative Director for Zoic Studios directed the commercial. “Every once in awhile good creative lands on my desk attached to a creative team that is willing to do what it takes to lead advertising with an emotional center that drives the brand. ‘Neighborhood’ was one of those projects, and it was a pleasure to make. I am extremely happy with this short emotional film about families and the holidays.”

“My favorite part of the shoot in the dead of August was seeing the actual neighbors on the street, mystified by the miracle that only film production can make. Their homes, their street, transformed into a winter
wonderland. It was amazing.”

Below are the on set photos I took.  Enjoy them and stay tuned for behind the scenes video of the shoot.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Inside Zoic Studios

Also I am about to head to set for a big commercial spot that we are working on. Can’t say much, but I can say it’s up the street and is bound to be a lot of fun on set.

Finally the biggest news of the day is TOMORROW November 18th at 4:00pm Zoic Studios is having it’s first LIVE BROADCAST. Yours truly will be interviewing VFX Supervisor Andrew Orloff on Ustream about the latest and greatest in Visual Effects for such shows as V, Human Target, and CSI. So join me as I take you Inside Zoic Studios:
Inside Zoic Studios

When I found out last week Mark Stetson, Academy Award winner for Visual Effects for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Academy Award nominee for Visual Effects for Superman Returns was joining the features team at Zoic Studios, I have to be honest I was pretty giddy with excitement.  I recall the 2002 awards ceremony when Lord of the Rings was nominated for best picture.  My reaction when the film lost the award was something like this:

However, the film did win for Best Visual Effects for a motion picture and Stetson’s reaction was quite different than mine.  ”It was completely surreal.  I was pretty much in shock that whole weekend.  I’m one of those people that always wonders why and the big why was why me amongst the thousand artists that worked on it.  Visual effects people don’t have too much association with the glamour of Hollywood so that was another part of the shock value.”

Stetson has been working in the world of visual effects since the late 1970’s.  He attended Art Center College of Design studying industrial design.  He was also an experienced model maker, having spent a year beforehand apprenticing at General Electric on the east coast in the housewares product division.  ”I remember seeing Star Wars in the theater when it opened in 1977.  That first space ship shot in the opening of the movie.  I thought wow this is something I could do.  Within the next year friends of mine went to work on miniatures for Star Trek, the Motion Picture.  Paramount had been working on a TV reunion movie, but with the success of Star Wars they decided to turn it into a feature.  I pestered my friends, left school a semester later and joined them in the model shop on Star Trek, the Motion Picture.”

In 1980, Stetson had his career-making opportunity – as Chief Model Maker on Ridley Scott’s cult classic, Blade Runner.  Did anyone working on the film know the cultural impact the movie would have on a generation of movie goers as Blade Runner is a cult classic today.  ”We knew it was special, we really did.  I was into science fiction and had read, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, on which the film was based.  It was an important experience and we all felt that right away.  Ridley Scott was hot (and he still is), and we knew he was really pushing for something special.  We worked really hard on it, and although there were about 100 visual effects shots in the movie, only about a third of them were miniature shots.  It was my first film running a model shop.”

Did Stetson ever think what his life would have been like had he stuck with industrial design at General Electric?  ”In 1983 I opened my own miniature effects shop for the first time.  I took some industrial design pattern work to stay busy -  and I hated it.  I never looked back after that.”

In 1989, Stetson opened another miniature effects shop with business partner, Bob Spurlock.  ”To make a joke about Blade Runner, we had a Nexus 6 business plan – we only wanted to run the business for five years.  Bob’s life plan had him leaving Los Angeles in five years, and my life plan was to become a Visual Effects Supervisor.  That’s what we both did.  We had a very successful business and closed the doors while we were still hot.”  From there, Stetson worked with Digital Domain as a Visual Effects Supervisor and the first thing he did  there was work on the film The Fifth Element, winning his first BAFTA Award as a result.

Stetson doesn’t really miss the miniature work that he did.  ”I don’t really miss it, although I do still get a lot of satisfaction out of making things with my hands.  When I started in visual effects it was film and photo-chemical alchemy, miniatures, wire, tape and string, glass and oil paint, and a lot of people pushing rods and levers.  Motion control was being developed and refined.  We had fun in the old days, but you would go home smelling a lot worse.  I would come home and my wife would know if we were foam casting that day or using resin or painting models or shooting on the smoke stage.   She knew because the smell of the chemicals would leak out of my skin.  Directors were still looking for ways to make things look cool.  When I was working on The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman, the Director and Gary Gutierrez, the Visual Effects Supervisor wanted to play with old high speed tricks and tried literally throwing models out the window and shooting them against the sky.  Nowadays the precision of digital work is so much greater and you can do so much more and make movies look so much better.  It’s all changed, and vfx capabilities have become so much better.  The work, however, is no less difficult.  In my career as a Supervisor I spent time working for both visual effects companies and studio production companies.  The last few years I have been working on the production side and missed working for a visual effects company where I can work with the artists and be more directly involved in problem solving and finishing shots, rather than being a step removed from the artists.”

With a career spanning over thirty years are there any particular moments that Stetson can recall from his time working in visual effects that were just fun to work on?  ”Well, to walk way down towards the back of my personal wall of shame, on Solar Babies we got to build a ten-foot-tall, thousand-pound robot driven by radio control.  We had to take it apart and ship it through customs to Spain, watch it arrive on a truck stacked six crates high, fifteen feet in the air and watch as the truck backed on this stage with a giant crew of stagehands loading it off the truck by hand.  Then we are driving this robot around on stage and it kills actors Richard Jordan and Sarah Douglas and then a young Jason Patric smacks the robot’s eyes off with a hockey stick, on the first take mind you, that was fun.  Then we came back to Los Angeles and built an eighteen-foot-tall by forty-foot-wide miniature dam and blew it up, spewing into the L.A. River, dumping 30,000 gallons of water!”  Stetson continues, “Cabin Boy was fun because we got to build a ship called the Filthy Whore for the Disney Company.”  Stetson also recalls his time on Blade Runner with fondness, “We were trying new things and there was a lot of invention, which is a different kind of fun.”  And today?  “Blowing stuff up is still fun, and nowadays seeing shots come together in dailies for the first time and finaling a lot of shots at once with a director is something I just really love.”

How has Stetson seen things shift over the years?  ”Starting in industrial design, part of what I learned was to draw and communicate, but I also learned a formal approach to visual problem-solving.  That’s the aspect of visual effects that has continued to challenge and satisfy me – figuring stuff out.  That has been a constant even though nearly all of the technology has changed.”

Stetson is excited for what the future holds for him at Zoic Studios, “I like the challenge of expressing a new vision for a director.  I like getting inside his or her head and figuring out what they want, making that happen for them and adding to it.  I want to make the visual effects more than they expected and more than what they first dreamed about.  That is my goal here at Zoic, to do that, to keep doing that, to have fun with it and continue building a team by expanding Zoic’s role in feature film.  I hope to drive that vision forward for Zoic Studios.”

I had the opportunity to go behind the scenes of the show at the Zoic Studios sound stages in North Hollywood.

The sound stage is home to CSI and CSI Miami second unit photography along with numerous other commercial, trailer and film shoots throughout the year. It was a unique opportunity to see how the crew at Zoic Studios creates the visual effects for the show. The Zoic team recently won an Emmy for their visual effects for CSI, so it was definitely a treat to see the team in action. Rik Shorten, Visual Effects Supervisor along with Derek Smith, Lead Artist for the show were my tour guides on my behind the scenes journey. In the next couple of weeks I will be watching as the Zoic teams goes from production into post and will be giving you, the I Design Your Eyes readers, a rare glimpse of what it takes to create visual effects from soup to nuts. In the meantime, here are a few pictures I took on set.