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From Rag Dolls to Riches, the story of Shane Acker's '9'.

CGSociety :: Production Focus


15 September 2009, by Renee Dunlop

Amazing how just eleven minutes can


change a persons life, even when getting to
those minutes took years. Such is the
animated short-turned-feature by Shane
Acker, called simply “9”. What started as a
UCLA thesis project has become a highly
anticipated animated film, and has given
hope to many a fledging animator with
similar dreams.

The 11-minute short was completed in mid-2004


after four and a half years of work. According to
Acker, “I wanted to make sure that many people
got to see it, so I aggressively sent it to festivals.

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CGSociety - '9'

The nice thing about festivals is once you show at


a couple of big ones, the word spreads so you
start to get invited to others.” His marketing
worked, and in a relatively short time he found
himself on the path to making a feature. He met
an independent producer, Jim Lemley, who
encouraged Acker to write a treatment. The result
© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.
is a film inhabited by little rag doll characters who
create their own world out of the remnants of
human civilization. The villain, the Fabrication
Machine, makes his own creations, frequently “Know the fights to fight and know when to
modeled after mythological creatures. The nine compromise and know when to really stick up for
rag dolls attempt to exist, always stalked by the
what you believe in.”
Fabrication Machine.
Shane Acker, Director
 

© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.

Selling the film was going to be a challenge. They


knew it was outside of the material of most
animated features; and they wanted to set it up

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CGSociety - '9'

as an independent and keep the budget to a


quarter of other films. It was a tall order, but
Lemley approached Tim Burton’s agent to see if
Burton would be interested in the project. Burton
immediately loved it, and with Burton on board,
the doors began to open. However, the money
flowing out of those doors was pretty dismal.
They first set up shop in Paris, and in Luxemburg
for seven months to take advantage of the tax
credits. They had already done six months of pre-
production in which they designed the world and
story, but “when we started making the film,” said
© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved Acker “it became apparent we were never going
to finish the film on time or budget and needed
more artists to tackle the job.”

They rethought the approach and went through


an audit process with a bond company who
reviewed the project requirements. They also met
with Co-Producer Jinko Gotoh who fell in love with
the project. She brought the project to Starz,
pulled in more producers and studio money and
got the project back up and running. For Acker, it
was a moment of relief, but now the pressure to
deliver was on. Yet through gumption or naiveté,
“we just got it going and kept pushing and
fighting to see if we could actually get it done.”

Joe Ksander

CREATIVE DECISIONS
As anyone knows, a project is only as good as its
team, so Acker needed the best he could afford
and a team he could trust. Joe Ksander, the
Animation Director, was one of those plus he was
familiar with the short from its early stages.
Ksander met Acker at a storyboard class at UCLA
saw the story reel for the short, called Stitches at
the time. “I saw it and was amazed because most
of the stuff we were seeing was very student like,
and Ackers’ stuff was very cinematic. It reminded
me of the Ray Harryhausen movies which was the
stuff I grew up watching. I was so impressed I
told him if there is anything I could do let me
know, even if it’s just animating a couple of
shots.”

David Bass (left), and Director Shane Acker.


 

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CGSociety - '9'

© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.

Ksander got his wish and more. He was brought


in at Animation Director and handled a creative
role. He worked with Acker to figure out the
performance aspects, what the characters were
like, who they were supposed to be. “Some we
figured out as we went,” said Ksander. They
worked out how, for example, the complicated
machinery of the Fabrication Machine might move.
“That was in 2000, when our computer technology
was far more limited in terms of the tools within
Maya and processing power. So when we went to
make the feature we had that aesthetic in mind,
sort of like ‘what can Shane make in his garage?’
"

© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.

A fan coined the terminology “stitchpunk” for the


nine main character rag dolls, each with their own
distinctive personalities. Some of that is in the
design but the designs are so similar, many of the
differences come from the performance. “We
weren’t doing fancy cloth simulations or
subsurface scattering; we were a couple years
behind the newest technology,” explained
Ksander. “But again, because our time was so
short and our budget was small, you are forced to

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CGSociety - '9'

be creative and efficient. So our characters have


no skin, no hair. We were judicious about where
we spent that money, like in terms of the FX. Our
FX guys did some great stuff.

“We had really good voice actors that helped


motivate the animation and help even with the © 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.
design. We changed the design of #1, voiced by
Christopher Plumber. As soon as we had him cast
we redesigned the face to feel more like Plumber
because he brought so much to the role. The
whole thing comes down to performance and
story. Instead of worrying about new technology,
we worried about design.”

Ah, but as any technical artist knows, though


story and creativity is king, it’s all just a dream
until you see the pixels.

© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.


 

   

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SEAMSTRESS
The film is miles past the short in terms of scope and number of characters.
Besides the cloth characters, the film includes a variety of mechanical beasts
and a couple of digital humans. The seamstress was the most problematic of
all the characters due to the complexity of movement and controlling the
deformations of the character. She was based on Medusa with other spider,
snake, and crablike elements with a long segmented body and six limbs each
with four joints. That was a fun character to design according to Ksander.
“Shane did the basic design but then we brought in people with architectural
and product design background to flesh it out. The designer that did the
detailing did it on giant drafting sized paper that was then digitized in the
computer, and it has that richness of detail that you get in architectural turn
of the last century European industrial design. But once we started to animate
it, we realized there were limitations.”

That was where VFX Supervisor Jeff Bell came in. “The base controls for the
Seamstress allowed for rooting the skeleton and spine of the character at the
head, mid-section, or tail of the character. The control rig was chosen based
on the motion required within the shot.” Bell gave two examples. “When the
Seamstress leaves the library at the end of the fight sequence with the
characters, she is rooted at the mid-section, enabling the head and tail to be
manipulated with a similar flexibility of motion. In the destruction shot of the
seamstress, as we see her being dragged to her demise, she’s rooted at the
head of the character, allowing her to move her body with a whip like
motion.”

Jeff Bell

Deformations for this character were a difficult

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CGSociety - '9'

challenge. It complicated matters further when


the seamstress, who was originally slated to only
appear in a handful of shots, wound up in three
sequences, forcing a rethink of the rigging
controls. “Animation helped immensely here,”
said Bell. “One of the animators at Starz worked
directly with rigging to come up with a scheme
that would allow the character to appear
reasonably well shaped both a closed and open –
this was enhanced by adding a variety of blend
shapes to control the overall shape of the
character hood and head, and a default blend
shape was added that could be sculpted by
Character Finaling to fix any other issues with the
shape, post animation.”

As Ksander explained, she was “a scary,


nightmarish creature, but was also nightmarish
for the animators,” because she was also fast,
and big but fast is tough to animate. Weight is
difficult to portray, but weight moving quickly and
dexterously is even more difficult. “We had a
couple of animators who really nailed it. When
you get the right animators on a character, then
the shot sings. It’s almost like casting an actor,
you want to get the right animator in the right
role. Those poor animators got so good at
animating the Seamstress, they got a lot of
Seamstress shots!”
© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.
 

FABRICATION MACHINE
To help the design of the fabrication machine,
Ksander and Acker devised a back story: Initially,
the scientist, who tends to have a toymaker
aesthetic, created a clockwork thinking machine.
However, the thinking machine is taken away by
the dictator who tortures and corrupts the
thinking machine until it becomes a factory
producer of intelligent war machines, robots that
eventually destroy civilization. The design is
modeled on the early A-Bomb design in homage
to the Robert Oppenheimer story, and the core,
or brain, is in the center surrounded by layers and
layers of limbs and tools to create- or destroy.
Like a wounded animal, the more the rag dolls
hurt the machine, the more dangerous it
becomes.

There were two versions. The first was attached


to the ceiling inside the plant, seen in a black and
white flashback sequence. The second was after
the plant was destroyed and the machine was
torn free. “Additionally,” said Bell, “the fabrication
machine had two parts to it – the body, plus the
head that contained the essence and intelligence
of the machine. The portion that formed the head
eye of the fabrication machine was a separate
character in and of itself; that was attached to
the fabrication machine body through constraints
after the references within the animation scenes
were brought in.”

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CGSociety - '9'

© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.

When the fabrication machine tears itself free, it


required a walk cycle, so they had to modify the
design to accommodate. Both the destroyed and
non-destroyed version had switches for the limbs
to enable forward or inverse kinematics. With the
number of appendages, this posed a few
challenges for the animators due to the sheer
number of controls and switches available to
them. The unruly and uneven limbs required
some thought, according to Ksander. “We found
animating this thing like a bug didn’t quite work.
It had a couple of pieces that made it look like a
four limbed creature, so we had it walking like a
four-legged creature. Its arms were hanging from
the torso which gave it a scary feel, so we
dangled it like a spider. Especially when it’s
attached to the factory, you see it crawling across
the ground almost like a diver. It had a creepy
unnatural feel to it.”

Multiple versions had to be created for layout,


animation, and rendering, managed through a file
reference manager. This enabled the animation
and layout teams to obtain reasonable
performance from the creature within the scene,
leaving the heavier version until it was time to

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CGSociety - '9'

render. In most cases, Lighting did not use the


high-resolution version within Maya either, other
than to initially setup the membership for the
render layers. For the most part, the only portion
of the pipeline that dealt with the high-resolution
version was the renderer itself, mental ray.
© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.
 

© 2009 Focus Features, LLC. All rights reserved.

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CGSociety - '9'

FINDING DIRECTION
And now that Ackers’ school thesis is a feature
film, and he has moved up to director? “If you sit
down and try to animate a shot, it’s not a good
use of your time as a filmmaker. But by setting
examples doing a couple shots myself to help the
layout guys understand, it gets everyone on the
same page. Every day was something new,
something I’d never done before, so you have to
trust yourself and your own instincts, make
informed decisions, and rely on your crew. I put a
lot of trust and faith in them and listened to
them. That is what I learned as a director. It’s a
lot about communicating, to inspire, to inform, to
paint a picture where they can go in and do their
job.”
Related links:
9
Shane Acker, Writer, Director

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

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Traveling to America's Pacific Northwest, taking close to 60,000 photo


references and camping out in the woods at night to record ambient noises
that would otherwise be down right frightening is the kind of R&D that
Remedy Entertainment committed to when developing Alan Wake. CGSociety
has a chat with Remedy's managing director Matias Myllyrinne on the
development and direction of Alan Wake.

Even before anyone even knew what it was about, Alan Wake started getting insane
amounts of praise beginning with the ovation that the first ever trailer received at the
2009 E3. Finnish game developers Remedy Entertainment, the creators of Max Payne,
have diverted from developing the familiar city dwelling environments of Max Payne to
a project with much more organic environments in Alan Wake.

FEEL
First step was to determine a clear direction for the game in order to establish the 'feel'
of the whole project. "When you build a thriller like this what you need to do is to get a

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

baseline of reality," says Matias.

"It needs to feel authentic, it needs to feel real and we wanted to really condense the
essence of the Pacific Northwest. We did a lot of location scouting around Washington
and Oregon; we even ventured up into the Canadian side of the border. We tried to Remedy Entertainment managing director
distill down what we saw and really get a body for it." Matias Myllyrinne.

Remedy visited American towns that are


famous for being filming locations such as
Astoria, Oregon where movies like 'The
Ring' and 'The Goonies' were shot.

While visiting these towns they instantly


found them to be gold mines for concept
as the cities themselves were filled with
many locales that could potentially be
recreated for Alan Wake such as ghost
towns and saw mills as well as ideas for
vegetation habits where much more brush
appeared to grow closer to the shore than
the much drier inland areas.

Location reference and ingame Warehouse creation. ©


Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

These locales were picked for concept


because they have a way of playing with
people's minds. "Alan Wake, at it's heart, is
a psychological action thriller. It's a
combination of an action game with
something very cerebral," says Matias.

"We kind of played with the 'intrigue of the


mind' idea and kind of go into the subjective
where the player asks 'is this really
happening or are you imagining it?' I think
we really have both sides of that coin in the
game"

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

These locales were picked for concept


because they have a way of playing with
people's minds. "Alan Wake, at it's heart, is a
psychological action thriller. It's a
combination of an action game with
something very cerebral," says Matias.

Location reference and ingame Warehouse creation. © Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy
Entertainment.

"We kind of played with the 'intrigue of the mind' idea and kind of go into the
subjective where the player asks 'is this really happening or are you
imagining it?' I think we really have both sides of that coin in the game."

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

Location reference and ingame range tower creation. © Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

DESIGN AND
DEVELOPMENT
Alan Wake is far from 'realistic'. Although
much can be found in terms of life-like
visuals, the game is rife with paranormal
aspects.

"On top of the baseline of reality, then we


go into the supernatural elements," says
Matias. "Wake's enemies have been taken
over by the dark presence so they are
protected by shadows so you use your
light to destroy the shadows"

When dealing with the living shadows of


Alan Wake, any old canned smoke effect
just wouldn't cut it.

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

Remedy decided to seriously emphasize


the shadow effects in Alan Wake by
coming up with unconventional concepts
on how they wanted it to look. "We
wanted to have a specific and distinctive
look and feel for that," says Matias. "We
wanted the effect to look and feel like ink
dissipating into water.

What we did is we had this huge tank of


water and poured dark blue and black ink
into it and we filmed that for reference on
how we wanted the shadows to look. If
you watch the film 'Insomnia' for example,
it has a distinctive blue tint to it in certain
scenes.

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

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LIGHTING "One of the things that we found very early on was that we just
couldn't find an 'off the shelf' solution to do that. So having to
Lighting is probably the most important aspect of development in get into building the system from the ground up enables you to
Alan Wake due to the fact that light is a weapon. Depending on fulfill your creative vision for a lot of the things like the long view
how much light is in a scene at any given time should make the distances to being able to show intricate detail on the small
player either feel safe or vulnerable. scale of the world but also having those large environments
which are key for a thriller in the Pacific Northwest. Our
"We built the whole lighting engine from the ground up and a big rendering guys have done a ton of work on the lighting.
part of why we wanted to do that is to get the lighting right Actually, they kept on improving on it until the very end. It was
because light and darkness are key gameplay elements," says never really quite 'done'. Even towards the very end they
Matias. wanted to do this a little more or that a little more."

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

An unconventional game requires


unconventional tools. Development tools
had to cater to the demand of this
particular game so almost all of the tools
used to develop Alan Wake were
developed in-house at Remedy. "Some of
our geometry is based on our old Max
Payne tools, MaxED. Also, for some of the
normal mapping we used ZBrush. Also, we
built our own world editor to build a lot of
the procedural tools. For example, the
worlds are huge so if you have a map that
is eight by eight kilometers of
environments that is 64 square
kilometers. So what we wanted to do is to
build these tools to be quite smart so once
you elevate the ground higher, there will
not be many trees at the higher points. Or
if we place a road in the middle the world,
the system automatically knows not to put
trees or grass or anything on the road and
will automatically generate gravel on the
sides of the road."

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

With the sheer scale created in Alan Wake,


one would thing that this is an open-world,
sandbox title. That was almost the case
during development but the Remedy team
felt that a different approach would be more
developmentally friendly, especially when
dealing with the frame rate.

"We started off building a sandbox game and


that wasn't working out for us so we went
into a linear direction but the tools were very
much built to create an open world
environment. I mean everything in the game
screams 'open world'. The level of detail of
in-game objects then became really
important so we used dynamic visibility
optimizations from Umbra to keep the frame-
rates up."

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

Development of Alan Wake proves, yet


again, to be totally unconventional as the
character design process completely
excluded the creation of concept art in
favor of a more 'true to life' approach.

"For Wake as a central character, we


wanted what our Art Director calls a 'tired
but determined' look. For me he seems
like he's slightly on edge and hung over.

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

For the characters we took a lot of


concept photographs as opposed to doing
concept art for the characters.

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

We took photographs of the real actor with very dramatic lighting Enemies in Alan Wake are, in fact, humanoid and by no means
and distinctive shadows on his face and kind of played with the are they zombies either. "We didn't want to do big monsters like
'light and dark' element there. For a lot of the enemies and the crab monsters or anything like that. We wanted to have a
locals that have been taken over by the dark presence, we distinctive feel and vibe to those characters.
wanted to have them grounded in reality, once again, but
something would be slightly off; there would be a distortion to We wanted them to remain just 'locals who have been taken
them that goes into their audio effects and voice-overs as well." over' so you might have, for example, a lumberjack in the woods
Matias Myllyrinne's intention is that the enemies would not be or a fisherman by the shore; these are people that you can
something you would find in a game like Dead Space. really encounter in a small town but they will be slightly tilted
and twisted"

© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

Animation is, of course, a combination of


both motion capture and hand-keyed
animation. "For animation we have our own
mo-cap studio in our building so we do a lot
of quick iteration there," says Matias.
Ambient animations, such as when the
characters are having conversations, were
motion captured while fighting animations
required the deft touch of an animator.

"Some of the things you have to just go back


to key-frame. Some things are just better
done when exaggerated by hand-keyed
animation especially for the enemies; we
wanted exaggerated movements to bring out

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CGSociety - ALAN WAKE

the drama whereas for the cast such as


Wake, his wife and so fourth, you want them
to be more realistic."
© Microsoft Games. Image by Remedy Entertainment.

For help with motion capture, Remedy looked


to Perspective Studios in New York. "We
worked with Perspective in New York for
some of the larger stunts and cinematics."

Remedy also received help from many other


studios such as CaptiveMotion who helped
with the facial animations and Soundelux
DMG who helped with the sound effects just
to name a few.

RELATED LINKS:
Alan Wake
Remedy Entertainment
Perspective Studio
CaptiveMotion

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CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

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CGSociety :: Game Production Focus


25 February 2010, by Peter Rizkalla

Take a character from a video game whose


design is now so recognizable that he is iconic
within the game industry.

Now, make a sequel to that game using a


totally different main character, have him retain
the same iconic design of the first protagonist
but make him individual from the first. This is
the complex and awkward challenge that
Ubisoft Montreal had to face with the
production of Assassin's Creed 2. Fortunately,

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5504[5/18/2010 4:26:46 AM]


CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

this challenge also came with a slew of creative


solutions.

Remembering that the first Assassin's Creed


was set during the Crusades, it still managed to
define itself as a fantastic work of design both
artistically and as pertains to game design.
With Assassin's Creed 2 being set in the All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

Renaissance, the design possibilities are


limitless. Taking the gameplay formula that worked in the first Assassin's Creed, the bulk of the work could
now be focused on the design of the game. Establishing the perfect setting for this title was step
Mohamed Gambouz, art director of Ubisoft one. "As it was the case in the first Assassin's Creed with the crusades, the idea of Assassin's
Montreal tells us about how the design of Creed 2 was to explore another pivotal period of human history this time it was the Renaissance,
Assassin's Creed 2 went from concept to we couldn't find a better era where arts were right at the center," Gambouz tells us. "Our main
creation. focus from the beginning was to make the game look and feel rich visually whether through
architectural styles, textures, ornaments, and diverse and historically accurate," he says.

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

A team of only a half a dozen designers were put together to create the "Once we get one where we are satisfied, we take it and add more detail
first concepts of Assassin's Creed 2 not only to create the content but to and polish to it. It then becomes the visual hook of the game, something
also create the feel of the art. that somehow summarizes the art direction. Based on accurate
references and photos we start doing illustrated strips of our generic

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CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

"We have six concept artists; for characters, environments, props, buildings to define each of the architectural styles, the colors and
gameplay ingredients, storyboards, posters, mock-ups ...etc. In materials and also its accessories and props. After that we go deeper in
environment concept art, for instance, we started by doing a couple of details by doing some close-ups to illustrate style and color of textures
quick illustrations we call vignettes just to have an idea about the mood, and type of materials and enrich all of that with a lot of photo
the color palette, the dominant shapes and volumes, etc. references."

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

It goes without saying that the bulk of design had to be centered around the main character Ezio.
He had to be similar to the first Assassin's Creed main character, Altair, but he still had to appear
as a distinguishable character in his own right.

"We knew since the beginning of the production of Assassin's Creed 2 that Altair is a very iconic
character and it's not a good idea to change the aspects that made Altair so memorable so we
decided then to keep all of his main features (white suit, hood, red belt, hidden-blade...etc) and
add to them a different flavor so that the new appearance follows Ezio's characteristics and that
his costume respects the era's fashion. We also decided to move personalities from where Altair
was a cold blooded soldier to where Ezio is a charmer nobleman while still keeping the central ?
Assassin' characteristics. Even Ezio's attire is different to Altair's sober and functional suite to a
more refined and fashionable costume."

The character team was composed of about 11 people. There were six character modelers, the
technical director, the skinner/rigger and the in-game character integrator. Nicolas Collings, Senior
Character Modeler at Ubisoft, talks more about the crew.

"This project was a blast to work on as we had hundreds of characters to bring to life in a
Renaissance style. It was also challenging, because one of the strong aspects of Assassin's Creed, as
opposed to any other games, is the heavily crowded street."

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CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

"At some points there were more than a hundred characters on display
at the one moment. This gives an illusion of real life scenery and
inevitably immerges the player straight into the renaissance life. The
consequence resulted in a very tight budget such as low poly count and
low texture resolution by character so we obviously had to optimize as
much as possible every asset.

"Still to counter this aspect and to match the high quality graphic
standard of the latest best games, we developed a few in-game
techniques such as the possibility to overlay onto any desired area
small swappable patterns or colors on top of the diffuse map. To
maximize the workflow even more, we used a mix of 'old school' and
'next-gen' techniques to generate sharp details, normals and alphas."

Collings is proud to point out the character team was full of great
talents such as Michel Thibault, Laurent Sauvage, Francois Levesque,
Alexandre Troufanov, Ian Ladouceur, Yanick Cloutier, Vincent Gaigneux
and many others.

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5504[5/18/2010 4:26:46 AM]


CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

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CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

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Designing the environments of Assassin's Creed 2 "The choice of the Renaissance as a setting had big impacts on art direction choices. We wanted
went much deeper than just modeling and texture to emphasize the richness and beauty that marked a part of this era as we know it, whether in
mapping buildings and streets. It had to feel like terms of architecture or fashion. We wanted to maximize the visual variety so we divided the
Italy. It had to have the same presence and cities and regions into distinct themes such as carnival district in Venice and under-construction
sophistication that surrounds Italy especially in Florence are a few examples. We also gave a different color scheme for each city (more
during a vibrant era such as the Renaissance. obvious during day time) depending on its characteristics; cyan for Venice to communicate water
Specifically, an inescapable challenge was to presence, ocher for Florence for buildings under construction, Green for Toscana for vegetation
absorb the feel of the cities that existed at that presence... etc."
time.

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CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

Prop design was also a large part in the


development and the overall design of
Assassin's Creed 2. The implements that Ezio
used had to match the overall design of the
rest of the game. Costumes, architecture,
weapons and armor all had to look like
something that would be produced in that era.

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

"Most of these designs were based on historic


references whether from paintings, old sketches
or movies.

"We then exaggerate some parts depending on


our needs (visual or gameplay), the flying
machine for instance has a more "spiky/pointy"
silhouette than the original one. We thought it
would be interesting to add a Batman feel to it.

"The constant use of ornaments was a central


part of our designs especially with floral shapes
weather on metal for armor and weapons or on
stone for buildings or on fabric for costumes."

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CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

Lighting and particle effects presented a


challenge in the development. Being that
Assassin's Creed 2 is an open-world, sandbox
style game and also considering that day
changes to night means that there had to be
measures taken that allowed the design of the
game to be revealed enough to be appreciated All images courtesy of Ubisoft.
while also keeping the environments
understandable enough to roam for the player. "But after a lot of tweeks, and thanks to our color correction tools, we were able to find a good
balance between readable paths and interesting contrasts," explains Gambouz.
"The lighting was a big challenge, especially
with the time of day cycle. Also, our large Also due to the large scale of the cities, local lighting like torches and lanterns was a big issue as
environments are fully navigable and required classic omnis were too costly for the desired density, so they were replaced with a baked lighting
clear lighting so the player doesn't get confused on projected large texture on the whole city.
about where they are going, and this
sometimes reduces the possibilities of having "For the FX," says Gambouz, "one of the favorites is the construction-deconstruction effect on
strong contrasts." geometries which occurs during cities flyby or before-after a white room, it's pretty cool and it's all
in real time."

All images courtesy of Ubisoft.

Towards the end of the project, as with any


production, there are always ideas that don't go
through. Some ideas, developers would hate to
let go of and others that would have
developers thanking God that they didn't make
it.

In this case, [SPOILER] the actual main


character, Desmond, whose mind is reliving the
events of his ancestor Ezio is equipped with
what Gambouz tells us is, "a modern version of
the hidden blade that Desmond will use to fight
the templars in the present. For Ezio we went All images courtesy of Ubisoft.
through different costume designs before
deciding to keep the Altair design as our base." Clear direction would probably be the theme in creating Assassin's Creed 2. Knowing the 'bare
bones' process of exactly what needs to be done is essential in creating any form of animation.
"For me, what makes a great game is a good cohesion, synergy and balance between the different

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CGSociety - Assassin's Creed 2

This would be great to see as bonus content in parts of the game: story; gameplay; visuals; sound; AI... to achieve the perfect mix for a unique
the game. Designs that also would have been and memorable experience," says Gambouz.
great to see are "Ezio's appearance at different
ages such as 6, 15, 20 and 30."

Assassin's Creed 2 is out now for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and will also be released later for the PC;
hopefully with bonus content. Hint, hint Ubisoft.

Assassin's Creed 2
Ubisoft
Nicholas Collings
CGSociety article on Assassin's Creed

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

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CGSociety :: Production Focus  


30 October 2009, by Renee Dunlop

The digital production crew at Imagi in Hong Kong, with an


average age of just twenty three, has resurrected the
historical Manga character Astro Boy. First created by
Osamu Tezuka, he is remembered by many in Japan as the
'god' of manga. While the 2D creation of Astro Boy
happened decades before most of these artists were born,
the Imagi offices in Los Angeles and Hong Kong decided it
was time to flesh out the storyline into a film, and the hero
into a 3D character.

According to Director David Bowers, the transition was not


an easy one. "In manga, Astro Boy is a beautiful, iconic,
very graphic design. He's like Mickey Mouse; he has the
two horns in his hair that are always in silhouette when
he's drawn." The decision was to design the film version
Astro in 3D. The Astro design, after some brief sketching,
was worked out in 3D, first as a maquette that was
scanned, then as a 3D model. The early designs of Astro
Boy went through several iterations, testing different ages

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

and proportions, keeping the iconic eyes, whether or not to


include eyelashes, and making sure he didn't look too cute.
But one of the challenges was what to do with his hair
style.

Osamu Tezuka, creator of the original manga Astro Boy.--


>

"When you put him into 3D and turn his head, one of those horns will disappear and he doesn't look like Astro Boy anymore." The
cheat they used was to occasionally switch the horn from the left to the right side depending on the location of the camera. "It's a
nod to the way he's always been portrayed. I think it's important that Astro Boy has the iconic two point shape."

Tim Cheung, Head of Animation on the film and VP of


Animation at Imagi, felt that while there are few technical
challenges left to tackle, there is always the challenge of
strong character portrayal, especially with a recognizable
character like Astro Boy. "It's more about how the users
use all the tools that are there to do great stuff."

Still, some tools had to be added to the Imagi library.


"When I first came to Imagi two years ago," adds Cheung,
"I worked with the R&D department to develop a facial
animation system that went on top of the Maya platform.

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

It allowed the animators to have hundreds of controls that


are based off my experience of what is necessary to do
great facial animation.

The tool is actually quite simple, it's very similar to the


system that a lot of places use, it's a blend shape slider-
based system.

We've been able to fine tune it to make sure when the


animators use it they influence the right parts of the face
to make it move and feel more real." Every movie going
forth will use the same facial animation system, "so that
animators can get familiar with the way the controls work
and they don't need to relearn from character to character
or movie to movie."

When Astro Boy, the robotic resurrection of Dr. Tenma's


deceased son Toby, is first rejected by his father, Astro
Boy finds himself tossed from his Metro City home high in
the clouds down to Earth below, which has become a
destination for discards from robotic to human. This
landscape becomes a key location for the next several
scenes.

Here, Astro Boy is led into a trap orchestrated by vagabond


children scouring the landscape for usable robotic parts.
The massive scrap heap stretches to the horizon in a
mountainous landscape as far as the camera can see, and
the individual discarded items need to interact with the
characters as they run through, tumble over, and hide
behind.

Art Director Jake Rowell described


the terrain as similar to an airplane
bone yard. "We had a sketch session
to flesh out what it would look like if
we had all these football to people

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

sized parts scattered all over the


place. Your frequency is going to be
rather high, and that meant the mass
shapes of our mountains and our
terrain needed to be rather big to
accommodate the smaller frequency
of the smaller parts." Too heavy to
render fully modeled, Imagi had to
find another way to create the
landscape of interactive debris.

Rowell decided to move directly to 3D and previs the entire terrain, not including the smaller refuse, but the terrain topology. Once
Rowell learned the storyline needed Astro Boy to fall to Earth, then be led to the trap where he would meet the children that were to
become his friends, he knew where the main areas of visibility would be. "We sculpted out from a profile view, looking at the boards,
how Astro Boy fell from Metro City to the scrap heap. The two major angles of that valley, looking to the left and right, and the path
that led him to the trap. That minimized the impact of what we had to deal with, of what the characters needed to interact with. It
was one mountain where he fell, the valley, and a valley path around to the trap. Anything beyond that was displacement maps and
instancing."

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

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Another of Chen's tasks was the


character called Trashcan, a robotic
dog-like companion that first found
Astro Boy and led him to the scrap
yard trap. One of the favorite
characters in the film, Trashcan is an
energetic bundle of bolts and
cylinders whose original concept
didn't allow him to get his mechanical
nose to the ground to sniff out
danger or opportunity.

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

Rowell explained, "In the initial


design, Trashcan ran using his
back legs pushing the front legs
that remained static. He could run
and jump, but couldn't get his
nose and mouth to the ground.

So we made the back legs pivot


higher on the body so when he
needed to, his back legs would
rotate forward and become the
front legs, and the front would
become roller balls for the back.
He could pull himself instead of
pushing himself.

By doing that, his whole body


would rotate and his head would
be closer to the ground. The focal
point of his pivot had to be shifted
to accommodate that."

The Trashcan rig.

Imagi has offices on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, with Bowers located in the US and the production team in Hong Kong. Years ago,
this would have created a production nightmare, but by working with a proprietary video teleconferencing setup, Imagi became a 24
hour studio. Bowers was pleased with how well the arrangement worked. "There were cultural differences and production pipelines
that are different in the United States than in Hong Kong, but we had great production mangers and a team who made sure
everything ran smoothly. It worked out quite nicely. I would work during the day in LA with my crew over here then have a meeting
at the end of the day from 4:30 to 6:00 or 7:00 PM talking to Hong Kong. Then they would work through the night and the next day
I would come in, and there would be new animation to look at. With video conferencing technology advancing so far in the past few
years, it really is like being in the same room."

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

By using artists fairly new to the field


and located in economical Hong
Kong, the producers were also able
to save money.

Estimated at roughly $40 million by


IMDb, Bowers felt "it wasn't an
expensive movie. It cost a fraction of
a Pixar movie but at the same time
the crew was so resourceful and so
determined to get my vision on
screen, I didn't cut corners at all."

Which direction will Astro Boy or


Imagi take next? In a typical British
dry humor, Bowers quipped, "I
suppose it depends how well Part
One does. The last sequel is the one

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CGSociety - ASTROBOY

that doesn't make any money. I hope


people embrace it."

Astro Boy

Imagi Studio

David Bowers, Director

Jake Rowell, Art Director

Tim Cheung, Head of Animation

Yan Chen, VFX Supervisor

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

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The artistic crew at DICE use Frostbite, Destruction 2.0 and a whole lot of talent
to create new battle levels in Bad Company 2.

CGSociety :: Game Production Focus


20 May 2010, by Paul Hellard

Battlefield: Bad Company Two is primarily a


squad based first-person shooter. Similar to
previous titles in the series from EA Digital
Illusions CE (DICE), the game is played out on
large maps with vehicles, aircraft, turrets,
unmanned aerial vehicles armed with hellfire
missiles, and so on, but the majority of the game
is based around infantry combat.

"Battlefield Bad Company One was a good looking


game but it didn’t have a lot of visual variety,"
says Art Director Gustav Tilleby. So when he
started looking at developing and populating the
new Battlefield Bad Company Two, adding
variation was a big focus.
"The most obvious thing we did was to add the
jungle and snow settings to the already existing
woodland and desert settings, giving us four
distinct settings in total," Tilleby describes. "In
addition to the new settings we focused on adding

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

more variation into the levels themselves. Every


five to ten minutes of gameplay, a change was to
be presented to the player, for instance going
from a narrow section to an open section, by
changing the weather and lighting or by
presenting a vista."

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Characters
There are a whole bunch of extra characters in
the story of Battlefield Bad Company 2.
Characters with personalities that stay true
through the missions. Many players in Multiplayer

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

mode report finding some characters quirky to the


extreme. Their demeanor and behavior stays
carefully authored throughout the mission.

Frostbite
The crew at DICE also wanted Battlefield: Bad
Company Two to feel really big and epic.

The Frostbite Engine is a game engine created by


DICE, developers of the Battlefield series. DICE
has confirmed a Frostbite 2 engine is being
developed that will support DirectX 11 on PC.

Frostbite has other capabilities like HDR Sound,


which is able to adjust different types of sound
loudness and let the player hear important
sounds clearly even if there are many other noises
being generated. There are two noticeable
versions of the engine; Frostbite v1.0, used in
Battlefield: Bad Company One and v1.5 used in
Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company
Two featuring Destruction 2.0 which has Bullet
Drop and ability to destroy whole buildings
instead of walls only. DICE is currently developing
Frostbite v2.0.

"Frostbite is good at rendering large environments


so that was definitely something we wanted to
take advantage of by creating vast height maps
with long view-distance," says Tilleby. "In
addition to the large heightmaps we did a lot of
cheating with backdrops, effects and scripted
events to make the world seem bigger than it
actually is."

In some cases the DICE artists added matte


paintings of mountains, or silhouettes of cities far
into the background. Also, more subtle things
were added like a powerline cutting through the
landscape, hinting at some city or town out of
view. Scripted events were also added like jets
swooshing by overhead or tracer fire. Perhaps
smokepillars and explosions on the horizon. These
were all designed to give the impression of a
larger, living world where stuff happens even
without player interaction.

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE


 
Concept Art
As Art Director, Gustav Tilleby had two guys
working full time with concept art during the
production of Battlefield: Bad Company Two. One
was primarily focused on storyboarding and level
visualization while the other focused more on
moodboards and character concepts.

"We really wanted to storyboard a lot of the


actual game and not only cinematics so the
concept artists worked close to the design team
while creating the framework for each mission to

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

visualize their ideas at an early stage," explains


Tilleby. "In addition to creating concept art an
extensive photo reference catalog was created.
The intention was never to recreate reality but we
were very inspired by the actual locations when
building Bad Company Two.

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

   

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

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Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE


Destruction 2.0
In Bad Company One, there was a good cross
section of destruction. There was deformable
terrain and you could destroy most walls and
props. But in Bad Company Two, the spectrum
was broadened by adding fully collapsible
buildings, a kind of macro destruction, by adding
more and smaller pieces to props: micro
destruction. "Combined with the ability to just
blow stuff up, it gives a more satisfying
experience where you can destroy your
opponents' cover piece-by-piece with handguns,"
says Lead Designer David Goldfarb. "A player
could level the entire battlefield with a heavy
vehicle, with grenades or rockets."

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

All tanks, APCs, Jeeps and helicopters are based


on real vehicles. The quad bike, jetski and the
UAV are not. When creating a made up vehicle it’s
still important to make them feel authentic so we
collected a lot of reference that were used as
inspiration when creating those.

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

Levels
When the levels in Bad Company Two were
created, the art team started by defining a rough
framework. Firstly there were the overall themes:
in Panama Canal it was destruction; in Atacama
desert there was a sandstorm; in Nelson Bay it
was a night assault.

After that, they created a rough heightmap with


some basic object placement. "During this phase,
we started to define how the visuals would
change as the player progressed through the map
and what each area would look like," says Tilleby.

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CGSociety - Battlefield: Bad Company 2

"In the Arica Harbor, we wanted the theme to


give the impression of a long ongoing battle
around the area so we added huge smokeplumes
on the horizon."

This level itself has several distinct areas. It starts


at a desert highway and a temporary military
base, then moves into a more urban environment
and afterwards moves down towards a harbor.
Designing like this not only gives each level its
own theme and gives the players a sense of
progress as they play through them, but also
helps navigation and readability by making it
easier to differentiate and interpret each part of
the level.

Battlefield Bad Company Two is available for PC,


PS3 and Xbox 360.

Related Links:
Battlefield Bad Company Two
DICE
Electronic Arts

Discuss this article on CGTalk

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Image: © EA Digital Illusions CE

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

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CGSociety :: Studio Profile


3 June 2010, by Aaron Allport

Blitz Games Studios is 20 years old this year. We've


come a long way from Philip and Andrew Oliver
founding the company in Leamington Spa all those
years ago, working with a handful of developers on the
early consoles with a matchstick's worth of memory and
in 2D. Fast forward to 2010 and we're still here, still
making games, still making art. But now there are
around 230 of us in multiple divisions, eight dev teams,
11 support teams and with our own proprietary
technology.

To remain a successful, stable independent studio,


especially in the UK, has always been tricky and never
more so than now. Two of the most important factors –
perhaps the most important factors – are quality and
diversity. As Studio Art Director, my job is all about the
quality of the art we make right across the studio and
that involves not only the style and direction of the
work we're doing at any one time, it also takes in the

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5685[6/11/2010 12:10:40 PM]


CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

core skills that all artists and animators rely on for the
artistic decisions they make on a day-to-day basis.

Blitz Games Studios Art Director: Aaron Allport

To build and maintain a studio's reputation,


quality has to be consistent from the first
pitch materials to the finished game, and with
that we start to build on the artistic vision of
the game right from the outset so that we
get into the right mindset, identify relevant
USPs and highlight any potential risk areas.

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

The industry's expectations of what we can


do must not only be high but always looking
further upwards.

Since we started developing on this


generation of consoles, which was almost six
years ago now, it became very clear that any
'that will be good enough' art skills and weak
visual development just wouldn't cut it. With
the quality of titles in the market, constantly
rising consumer expectations and the higher
visual resolution to which we work, every
single art decision that we make has to be
bang on the nail, and that means a culture
where constant learning and constructive
criticism are embraced from one end of the
development cycle to the other.

As an independent we are constantly pitching


for new work; this could be original IP from
our own talented designers, or it could be our
take on a licensed property that a publisher
wants from us.

In many ways, working on a licensed IP is


much harder than original ideas; not only do
we have to be on-point with the existing
artwork, but we have to instill that familiar
scenario with a new vision of our own to
excite and inspire both the license holder and
the publisher so that they'll trust us with their
baby.

Our diversity as a studio means that we


might be pitching gritty, hyper-real concepts
alongside brightly-colored, highly stylised
children's cartoons, so our concept artists
have to be capable of the highest quality in a
range of artistic styles. It certainly keeps
them on their toes!

Karaoke Revolution, Publisher: Konami

Pre-development (the preparation once


the game has been greenlit) is probably
my favourite part of the whole
development process; for an Art Director
leading on a new project, it's a really fun
time because this is where the art team
explore, establish and illustrate the visual
identity of the game - and then we have
to figure out how the hell we're going to
do it!

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

The main elements of art pre-


development are to establish the art style,
what the game is going to look and feel
like, to establish the art quality, to set
benchmarks to guide the game against
and to establish the processes by which
we're going to make all that happen.

Inhouse environment workshopping.

Establishing the art style is a really


organic process involving a lot of very
fast and varied concept art, paint-overs
and discussion with the designers, not
forgetting that the client will also want
input and will need to be kept in the loop
at all times.

The skill of art direction lies in


encouraging the mad fermentation of
creativity from all concerned while
keeping a steely eye on the quality and
feel of the game, so that the best ideas
are chosen but so we also retain
consistency and direction of the over-
arching goals of the project.

The art production processes and


pipeline, on the other hand, requires a lot
of communication between artists,
designers and programmers; that also
includes support teams such as R&D and
BlitzTech, our technology team.

Achieving and maintaining high quality is


not just about having great ideas about
the art and animation in a game, it's
about how the art supports the overall
game experience and vice versa.
Crucially, it's also about how we realise
them, how we make them as easy and
efficient as possible to create.

The more powerful, supple and intuitive


the art pipeline is to use, the more
creative our artists can be on any project
and that surely is what creates great
game art.

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

Inhouse environment workshopping.

As an example: our R&D Art Team have been working on some A lot of work went into this; it's not easy to communicate
procedural animation tech as part of our behavioural systems and genuine emotions on an in-game character, but it also had to

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

emotional display for in-game characters. As the initial research was be a system that was easy for our animators to use. Once it
for a medical simulation for our serious games division, the facial had been well and truly proven in our serious game
movement had to be as realistic as possible as we were prototype, we rolled this tech out in our BlitzTech pipeline for
communicating to doctors in training the physical and emotional use by all our other development teams.
effects of real medical symptoms.

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This all ties in to our avatar creation tech; we


want to generate lots of high quality
characters, both faster and more cost
effectively. This is a sectioned piece of asset-
driven technology that we can add into any of
our games to give the player the freedom
they want, to create and customise their in-
game avatars.

Of course this doesn't mean less creativity for


our character artists; in fact it gives us more
opportunity to create more believable
characters at a higher fidelity with less risk to
the project.

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

Inhouse character research.

With the studio's considerable diversity, many different styles of animation are
needed, with different pipelines for getting it all into the game. We have projects
here that require very high quality hand-keyed animation in Maya or complex
performance capture, facial animation and lip-synch. For our recently-released title
Dead to Rights: Retribution we conducted full performance capture for both the cut
scenes and in-game animation, but everything was altered in MotionBuilder after the
processing to give the game a hard-core, hyper-real feel. And it worked; some of
the combat moves and take downs are bad ass!

Karaoke Revolution, Publisher: Konami

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

© Namco Bandai Games; courtesy of Volatile Games, Blitz Games Studio. 'Dead to Rights Retribution.'

Similarly, in-game environments are getting


vastly more complex; we can have much
more detail, complex surfaces, expansive
landscapes as well as complex lighting and
atmospheric effects. Of course, there's still
cross-platform development to consider so
the techniques that we use on the Xbox 360
compared to the Wii may differ, but the
pipeline is, and should be, as similar as
possible.

We have lots of tricks to help with this, for


example using spherical environment maps
to simulate a Fresnel falloff or using alpha
threshold for dissolves and transitions. We
also still use vertex lighting a lot because it
can give a nice base ambient lighting
solution at a very minimal cost.

In fact for one of our Blitz Arcade titles we


used next to no textures in the environments
at all. To save on memory and processing we
dropped the textures in favor of higher
polygon meshes that were vertex lit and
painted.

© Namco Bandai Games; courtesy of Volatile Games, Blitz Games Studio. 'Dead to Rights
Retribution.'

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

© Namco Bandai Games; courtesy of Volatile Games, Blitz Games Studio. 'Dead to Rights Retribution.'

We also pay a lot of attention to the ?


create and review' process here. Both peer
review and discussion as well as direct
feedback from our leads are paramount in
our studio, plus we concept heavily and
find all relevant reference material before
blocking meshes out based on design
specifications.

Then we get it into game and review it for


playability and scene composition before
taking relevant screenshots of key
moments in the area; these we paint over
to give direction on next steps, detailing,
base lighting and indication of surface
colour and type. From there it's an
iterative loop of build, play and review
before we start on the surfacing process
(textures and shading) which works in
much the same way.

The beauty of this process is it allows us


to stop and ask ourselves questions... Are
we staying on track? Is this in line with
the agreed concept? Are we staying true
to the requirements of the publisher? All
these questions get asked so that when
we get to the final polish stage, we're
confident that major things shouldn't
change.

It's also a great process because when we


do our paint-overs, we are doing what
artists do best - communicating ideas and
the need for change using a visual
medium. Not to mention it gets our 3D
artists thinking in a more illustrative,
conceptual way which can only make

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

them better artists.

© Namco Bandai Games; courtesy of Volatile Games, Blitz Games Studio. 'Dead to Rights
Retribution.'

The other important ingredient is graphic


design which often seems to get missed out
when talking about game art, but for us it's
vital. Many games have large numbers of
complex menus, user interfaces and head-up
displays; bringing in people from a graphic
design background to ensure these are as
elegantly and intuitively designed as possible
really improves the way the player interacts
with the game.

Nor is it just the UI that benefits - graphic


design skills bring a different and valuable
perspective to many other areas of the game
including cut-scenes and composition in
general.
So what I've tried to cover here are all the
main areas of development involved in
making a game at Blitz Games Studios. The

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CGSociety - BLITZ GAMES

continued success, stability and longevity of


this business is down to the passion,
experience and creativity of the collective.

It's great to see the latest selection of junior


artists and animators joining us, breathing
new life and ideas into the mix. Our founders
started all of this to provide a safe haven for
Blitz Games Studios
these creative people that love making
Dead to Rights Retribution production focus
games: 20 years on and here we still are,
Discuss this article on CGTalk
with so many exciting challenges still to
conquer... so much great art still to create.  Share This 
Here's to the next 20!

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CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

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Blue Sky Studios completes ice-breaking VFX


for final frolic with Sid and Scrat.

CGSociety :: Production Focus


16 July 2009, by Renee Dunlop

Snow prints, rivers of lava, lava falls, exhaust,


debris, bubbles, high viscous fluids, geysers, stink
bombs, dust and steam. These are just a fraction
of the effects needed for 'Ice Age: Dawn of the
Dinosaurs'. Blue Skys’ Effects Supervisor Kirk
Garfield faced an imposing list of FX and
volumetrics for the third installment of Ice Age.
But did he flinch? “I like being busy and being
under the gun and when I’m not, I’m bored. I’m a
masochist that way. I’m used to my schedule
looking like triple booked meetings after every
hour for the entire day.”

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5171[5/18/2010 3:42:10 AM]


CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

 
Making snow stick. © 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.
 

Blue Sky was happy to oblige, upping the ante by


adding several new tricks to their latest film.
Snow gathering on fur, for example. “Before, they
would leave the characters bare of snow. This
time, they leveraged off the fur technology,
placing particles along the roots of the fur
anywhere from the roots to the tips to make it
look like they were covered in snow.” But when
asked what sequence demanded the most,
Garfield chose the Mist Monster.

MIST MONSTER
Buck, a new character, has a habit of
exaggerating his memories of the past. In one of
his flashbacks, he climbs up a tall tree through a
canopy of swirling clouds where he encounters a
© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios. volumetric version of his nemesis, Rudy.

 
© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.

In the past, Blue Sky has used a volumetrics


using a technology called Smog, where the user
would cerate spheres in the shape desired and the
FX team would make an isosurface from that
shape and fill it with noise. “That worked OK in
the past but it would break down pretty quickly;
when those spheres separated from each other
they would look like cotton balls. We couldn’t put

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CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

much motion into it or reveal the method we


used.”

For this movie they took advantage of Maya’s


compressible fluids and set up all of the dust,
snow powder, mist, and the entire sequence of
the Mist Monster using what Blue Sky calls
SmaugVox, smog in a voxel system. “We gained
two things. One was with Mayas’ fluid system, we © 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.
were able to run simulations. We made a series
of tools to determine the contact between the
geometry and the ground and packaged it for the
FX TD’s so they could run sims using Mayas’
rendered feedback to see what it would look like,
then exported the density and velocity
information to bin files that we would convert into
voxels for our proprietary software.”

Blue Sky never had a way to render the voxels in


the proprietary software but in this film, the R&D
department came up with a way of rendering the
compressible fluids out of Maya in studio voxel
space. “We ended up with great motion. Whether
it was the stomp of a dino foot or Sid careening
down a slope, we were able to use the Maya
fluids to generate dynamic fluid behavior,
including the mist monster sequence where we
filled almost an ocean bed with clouds, than in
Maya, filled up Rudy and emitted fluids from
him.” It took some noodling from the FX TD’s and
a lot of collaboration from the composting
department and several months of work to pull it
all off.

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.

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CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.

   

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CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

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LIGHTING
There was a great deal of upfront development to
make sure that the teams were able to produce
what the director was looking for. To achieve that,
the FX department worked closely with the
lighting and compositing team, who added their
own Nuke elements in order to marry the FX
departments’ 3D volumetrics with the goal of
filling in the background and empty spaces. This
collaboration helped not to overburden the render
farm or the lighters with too much information.

Lighting Supervisor Haji Uesato elaborated on


some of his challenges. “We did a lot of
handshake work with FX. They did some beautiful
volumetric mist elements for clouds, and we
supplemented a lot of that with some 2D noise
© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios. ;
based, card based mist work. FX spent months
generating effects for the mist monster that were
very complicated to put together, but lighting-
wise, because they were mostly 3D elements we
were able to light them conventionally and boost
them up in the comp to really sell them.”

However, some lighting hurdles come from


unexpected places. “The challenge was that we
had an entirely different world to deal with. The
original characters were designed to be seen on
ice so they were earth toned, browns and greens,
oranges and yellow over whites and blues. When
we got under ground in a very brown and red
world, that was a very difficult challenge for us. It
was complicated by the lushness of the
environment.”

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.
 

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CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.

BUCK
The introduction to Buck pays homage to the
famous scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin
Sheens’ character rises silently from the water,
his fur (Buck, not Martin Sheen’s) soaked and
plastered. “In the past,” said Garfield, “we
haven’t actually been able to get the fur to look
wet. We’ve had wet grooms for the fur, but there
was never a good way to move a sheen or
highlight texture through the fur, and put fluid
effects on top of the fur, drips and things, to
make it look right.” In this movie, Blue Sky took
the time to develop better techniques, combining
the best of both worlds of hand animated FX and
procedural or simulation based effects.

Blue Sky found that neither using strictly


procedural or simulation methods nor manual
methods give the style that director Carlos
Saldanha wanted, or the control or directability
they needed, especially for a scene requiring the
water to drip and run off in sheets, utilizing four
water drip systems, each with a different
resolution and noise water bump seamlessly
integrated together. “We combined a lot of
different techniques. We had one of our FX
animators use a rig to make hand animated drips
on his nose, over his lips, drips along the knife
Blue Sky features director Carlos Saldanha. photo: Jamie Midgeley. he’s holding in his teeth. Those were animated off
the character and his props, and through the
water."

"What we would do is take a pruned selection of


those hand animated particles and apply them to
a 2D fluid sim using Realflow's Realwave surfaces
(Next Limit) which gave us control over the

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CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

ripples made from the droplets” The fact that this


wass a close-up shot meant the detail had to be
high res and accurate, employing the use of
secondary splashes too. “Because we combined
hand animated FX with both procedural and
simulated effects, we were able to really control
it. After two or three iterations the director loved
it. That was a nice way to work.”

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.
 

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.

SNOW PRINTS AND STINTS


When Garfield first started at Blue Sky as an FX TD, his tasks on
the first Ice Age were “lots and lots of snow print shots.” They
used a tedious process and involved running what they called a
NURBS march that would capture the intersections of the ground
plane and the geometry meant to leave prints by taking high
contract grey-white texture maps, key light those maps and
bring them into Shake, add detail, and export that version, then
displace the surface. The entire setup could run a couple of
days, an expensive process. “We knew, in this picture with a
hundred-plus snow print shots, we needed a better method.”

The Blue Sky Research and Technology team came up with their
own footprint technology called bssFootprint, a plugin for Maya
which allowed the artist to see instant feedback of the objects
creating the prints right on the screen using smooth shading,
etc, by deforming the geometry frame by frame. The process
went from a couple of days per shot to a couple of hours. If the
© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.
director felt the front of the berm was too high or two sharp,
instead of going back and re-simulate the footprints, they used
the Maya sculpting tools combined with another plugin from R&D
to sculpt the prints frame by frame to finesse the look. “It really
streamlined the process for us. No longer were we afraid of

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CGSociety - Blue Sky on Ice

footprints! Now we welcome it whenever we see it in


storyboards!”
 

© 2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Photocredit: Blue Sky Studios.

THE MELT DOWN


On Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, it was supposed to be a
non-effects movie and it ended up being about two times the
amount of FX per TD than Ice Age: The Meltdown which used
26 artists. On Dawn of the Dinosaurs, they had a grand total of
twelve. “The way things work here,” said Garfield “we leave a
very short amount of time between final layout and beginning of
lighting, and they like to have our FX in there for the lighting
department. But the reality is, unless the effect takes less than
five days it’s just not going to happen, so we use these gorilla
tactics where we’ll get in to bid things early, the team gets in
there early while the animators are just starting to work, we’ll
set up automated scripts so when it finally comes through, it
can be ready at 75%. If we didn’t work that way there would be
no way we could have had as many FX in the film as we did. We
had to work smart and work early, and always show how much
movie they can have for what time is left and how much staff
we have.”

Did that scare Garfield away? “I’m a big spread-head. I already


have the next movie completely estimated. I get in there as
early as script and story and stats and update my bids all the
way through every step of the pipe, mostly because FX are so
dependant on up and down stream departments. If you don’t
raise flags early enough you are going to wind up with
something that is just not going to be able to be reproduced.”

Related links:
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Blue Sky
Kirk Garfield
Maya
Next Limit Technologies
Realflow

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

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"C.J Markham - Career Animator"- Artist Profile, 25 November 2008

CJ Markham's career is an amazing series of steps showing great perseverance,


talent and a little bit of luck. He is riding an amazing wave, working on Red Dead
Redemption, GTA4 and now with 343 at Microsoft as Motion Capture Supervisor
on projects like the Halo franchise.

Walking the line between film and games, CJ Markham has found a balance in
the animation of characters.

CGSociety :: Artist Profile


25 November 2008, by Paul Hellard

Dreams
Growing up in Huntington Beach, CA, C.J Markham was the little
guy at the back of the class who just sat and drew. The
traditional goals and models for success offered by the school
were not available so he focused all of his energy on art.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5660[5/20/2010 2:20:42 PM]


CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

“Throughout school, I struggled with reading and writing and by


the time of graduation, my parents and teachers had given up
on me ever becoming successful,” CJ tells.

“After high school I continued painting murals and portraits for


family and a small clientele in southern California, but I
struggled to make a living as a traditional artist.”

An avid gamer since the days of Commodore 64, CJ and a mate


would dream of starting a video game company after they got
through university. It only seemed natural to choose a field that
combined his love of video games and art.

CJ worked in theater as an outlet during his school years, and


found set painting to be extremely inspiring. He even took up
helping with mural layouts for a friend. “For the following year I
worked as her apprentice, coming up with solutions for different
ways to make the best of the space available to be painted,” CJ
says. “She taught me all her techniques for time efficiency while
still maintaining high quality. It was better money than flipping
burgers, which is what everyone else was doing.”

By the age of 16, CJ used his huge portfolio of murals to be


accepted into a Senior Portfolio Prep class. He was the only
Junior. Everything seemed to fall into place at last. He even
started a Bachelors of Science degree course in Media Arts and
Animation from the Art Institute of California: Orange County.
A year and a half before he graduated, he started his first job in
the video game industry. He found himself at Taldren, working
on the game ‘Black 9’.

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

Reality
The next year was a blur. CJ was promoted to senior animator
and was creating NPCs, animation sets, player and character
rigs for the ‘Black9’ game, having a great time. But then the
publisher Majesco pulled the plug on the project. The game was
never released. “I was completely unprepared for it,” says
Markham. “I had put everything I had into ‘Black9’ and to see it
get canceled felt like a year and a half of my life was flushed
down the toilet.” Taldren was a small company, and CJ had a
much broader role there than most first jobs in the industry.

“I spent a huge amount of time rigging, weighting, and


animating 21 distinctive characters to populate a unique game
world, but within a matter of days that effort not only
evaporated, but I couldn't even show the work to get another
job," explains CJ. "This setback made me seriously doubt my
career choice. I decided to go to New York to work directly for
the publisher who had canceled ‘Black9’. Even though it felt like
a betrayal, at the time I believed it was the only opportunity I
would have to make the experience I gained at Taldren count
for something in my career progression.”

CJ moved to Glyphx Games in Utah, part of the Majesco group,


working with them for the duration of the production of ‘Advent
Rising’. Right up to the date it shipped in May of 2005.

Advent Rising With a good set of tools like an in-house MoCap system, MotionBuilder, Diva,
“I think that every animator in the video game and MOG, the crew were able to take that three week turnaround time down
industry needs to get the opportunity I had to to as little as three hours for a grappling move to a day for an eight-character,
work for a small developer on an ambitious one-minute scene. This new pipeline was built with only six months to the end
project like “Advent Rising’,” says Markham. of the project. Although it took an entire month to get it up and running
smoothly, once the initial setup was done, as a team of three animators we
“I wore so many hats to expand my knowledge, it pumped out two hours of cutscene animation in four months flat.
was an incredible experience for me. I got the

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

chance to do everything from acting out the Although ‘Advent Rising’ was getting good reviews, the sales were not meeting
motion capture for the main character in cut- expectations. ‘Advent Rising’ was meant to be the first in a trilogy, and Glyphx
scenes, to building everything in them from had banked on their next project being the next game in the series, but with
storyboarding, blocking, staging, directing the the disappointing sales of the first one it became more and more clear that
MoCap, camera work, rendering in the game the publisher wasn’t going to go forward with a second one. “I wasn't really
engine and even some post editing. For the in- looking for a new job at the time, but I was in a prime position to be swept
game side, I animated several characters into a new project,” explains CJ. “Around that time a good friend of mine sent
including three boss fight animation ranges. As me the link to Weta's online recruitment questionnaire, and more for a laugh
interesting and daunting as all these then anything else I filled it out and submitted it. I thought the chances of
responsibilities sound, the most gratifying part for them hiring a video game guy with no film experience were virtually nil."
me was what we were able to do with our
production pipeline.”

   

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

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King Kong
“After a week, I had a six-month contract to work on ‘King Kong’
and a ticket to fly to New Zealand. It wasn't until I talked to
some of the other contractors at Weta that I realized how
unusual the speed of my recruitment was. Although I can't say
for sure, I credit the work I did on a particular creature in
‘Advent Rising’ with getting me the job because it showed that
even though I hadn't specifically worked in films, I had already
convincingly animated a large ape-like creature.”

CJ Markham’s short stint in the film world in New Zealand was an


amazing experience for him but he admits enjoying the quick
turnaround and artistic freedom of working on games. “I was
spoiled by having ‘King Kong’ as my first film experience,” he
says. “Peter Jackson is a very demanding and meticulous director
to work under, and it's always going to be hard to follow a film
like ‘King Kong’ when comparing it to other readily available
productions.” Markham considered a few film projects right after
‘Kong’, but the titles were fairly G rated."

After his time at Weta he was asked to work on the ‘Beowulf’


film, but he’d already booked his first vacation in four years, so
Sony agreed to wait until he’d returned from Australia. “When I
came back to the US,” explained CJ, “my contact at Sony
Imageworks had sent my details to SCEA, and those
conversations led to my time in San Diego to work on KillZone.”

Images courtesy of Weta Digital Ltd. King Kong © 2005 Universal Studios. All
Rights Reserved.
 

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

Jetpack in the Killzone:Liberation Intro

The Killzone:Liberation Intro


The Killzone:Liberation Intro was a groundbreaking project for
CJ Markham as Animation Supervisor. Three elements of the
Killzone:Liberation Intro were big challenges: the jetpack
soldier; the facial animation; and the dog attack.

Directing the motion capture for the soldiers marching and


running wasn't anything new for CJ, but when it came to the
jetpack soldiers it gave him something interesting and new to
play with. On set, Markham noticed the character model’s upper
torso and arms were quite rigid while the legs were hanging
free. This gave him the idea to request a leg-raise workout

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

stand for the day of the mocap shoot. Even though they had a
wire-work system at their disposal, CJ wanted to keep the actor
stationary and have them show a series of direction changes in
the legs so he could combine the weightlessness of his lower
body along with the rigid upper body. That would read very well
as someone using a jetpack. All translations were key framed in
and the motion of the legs was placed and timed to give the
feeling that the character was not only controlling and
anticipating the propulsion, but that his legs were still subtly
subject to any change of inertia.

The facial animation on Armon went through many different


‘Armon’ from the KillZone: Liberation Intro. trials. At the time, an extreme close-up on a video game
  character was a forbidden fruit, more so if they wanted a
convincing facial animation. “Even though the director felt safe
putting me in charge of the facial animation because of my
previous key frame work on Kong,” explains CJ, “Sony’s first
approach was to motion capture the performance. The producer
on the project was determined to put our new $90,000 licence
for FaceRobot to the test. FaceRobot was still a very new
package in March 2006 and I got a crash course in it when very
few people knew about it.

“To me a defining characteristic of working with motion capture


is that it’s always easier to turn a subtle performance in to an
exaggerated one than the other way round. This was the case
here and the director and I both felt that it wasn't the right
solution, so I eventually got to scrap the high-tech route and
take it back to key framing blend shapes in Maya. After a couple
of passes, the director was very happy with the look of ‘cold
Attack dogs in Killzone:Liberation Intro
hearted spite’ that changed into a ‘pure evil grin’ I’d key
framed. This sequence became the keystone of the E3 preview,
which was later used for the intro to the game.”

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

“While the mocap team tried to make out noses


The dog attack was CJ’s favorite part of the KillZone project. CJ was keen
from tails in the data, I decided to try mapping the
for a K9 Police unit to get involved so they could capture a real attack dog.
rigged geometry to the markers,” describes CJ.
While the police weren’t too eager to rock up for a variety of political
“The initial run up was there in the data, so I was
reasons, they later found some dog trainers who loved video games and
able to rotoscope the dog model in 3D to the
agreed to let them MoCap what they do. “One week prior to the shoot they
existing data, but at impact and after the initial
lent us a Kevlar dog suit and mask to place the motion capture markers. The
bite, the markers dropped like flies from one frame

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CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

whole capture experience was surreal. There were two guys in the session:
to the next. From watching the reference footage I
the controller and the aggressor. Their names say it all. The attack dog was
was able to improvise the landing and tugging
such a fascinating creature. Under the guidance of the controller it seemed
movements with keyframes. Once I got a human
like any other friendly dog. But once the aggressor came within view of the
character in the scene I was able to set up a series
dog, while wearing a specific attack suit, the dog went crazy.”
of constraints from the dogs’ mouths and the
While the MoCap was eventually successful, as soon as the dog moved, the human’s arm so that I could communicate the
markers flew everywhere, destroying the data. It also didn't help that any pushing, pulling and resistance that flowed between
markers that managed to stay through the initial attack tended to fly off the three subjects. I have since done some
when the dog relaxed afterwards. The only person who could get close experimenting with motion capture of other animals
enough to it to place the markers back on was the controller. Getting an such as cats, but there is still a ways to go before it
accurate solve from that became impossible. The entire experience wasn't a will be as straightforward as capturing a human
complete wash though. character.”

A dialogue scene from Grand Theft Auto 4.

Mentors
ROCKSTAR NORTH An animation pioneer who has effected the way CJ works
CJ Markham worked for Rockstar London, and helped Rockstar North
is Harry Walton. "To not only work with, but to have my
on episodic content for GTA4. Finishing up ‘Grand Theft Auto 4’ took
animations reviewed by someone who created my
some heavy months out of his life and he is happy to be staying on in
childhood favorites was very intimidating at first," says
the city. “Living in the UK is a whole different world from living in LA,”
CJ. "Walton worked on classics like 'Gumby', 'Land of the
explains CJ. “Because the city of LA is about everything that is up to
Lost', Ed209 from 'Robocop', 'Nightmare Before
the minute and new, and the city of London is a unique juxtaposition of
Christmas' and the list goes on. After I found out how
the very old and the very new. Living here can be very surreal at times
much the original 'King Kong' inspired him to become an
because those two exist literally on top of each other. Compared to
animator it opened the door to share stories about
Southern California, working and living in the UK not only has a
working on Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong in
different pace, but an overall feeling of greater permanence."
exchange for stories of the stop motion work he had
“The best experience I can compare to working on GTA4 is working on done that had inspired me.
‘King Kong’. They were both very ambitious projects, but were well
received and acclaimed. The guys at Rockstar North are an awesome "Ruben Apodaca is also a legend for me! He taught me
bunch, and working on GTA4 was a fantastic experience. My most everything I know about 2D animation while getting my
recent work includes all of Yusuf Amir's cinematics from GTA4 Ballad of bachelors degree. Learning all of the fundamentals of
Gay Tony, and several cinematics from Red Dead Redemption. My animation from such a pioneer of the industry was truly
three years at Rockstar were amazing but last month I had a career a great honor, and I savored every last moment of it.
change. The Halo Franchise is what originally lured me to this industry Even though I work in 3D animation I can't help but feel
and I'm ecstatic about working for 343 now. I've worked on some great that he deserves some credit for everything I've
projects in the past and I can't wait to share what I'm working on now achieved in my career."

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5660&page=2[5/20/2010 2:21:15 PM]


CGSociety - C.J. Markham: Career Animator

when the time comes.

Markham's Advice:
1. Be willing to relocate. While born in California, my career
has taken me all over the world, and some of my best
experience was gained furthest away from my home town.

2. Stay willing to try new software and techniques. I've always


jumped at the chance to learn something new and that
knowledge has opened a lot of doors for me. When you limit
yourself to one software package or one technique, you limit
your opportunities.

3. Work hard. Making movies and video games is the best


career I can imagine, and a huge privilege to be a part of it.
Remind yourself of that when you're asked to do overtime. You
can't get to the top without proving yourself first.

4. Be cool to everyone. It is a small industry and there are


only two degrees of separation. Someone you work with now
can some day be your boss, so try not to make enemies.
 

Related links:
C.J Markham
Rockstar London
Rockstar North
SCEA
Weta
Advent Rising

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CGSociety - Chris Balog

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An ILM 'Iron Man 2' artist ignites his career, turning down a job as a firefighter
to become a visual effects artist.

CGSociety :: Artist Profile


15 June 2010, by Barbara Robertson

In little more than five and a half years,


Chris Balog has worked as digital artist at
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) on nine films
including 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At
World’s End,' 'Rush Hour 3,' 'Iron Man', 'Star
Trek,' and 'Iron Man 2.' Not bad for the first
security guard hired by Pixar Animation
Studios.

It’s true. Balog’s first job, right after he graduated


from Arizona State in 2000 with a criminal justice
major, was as a security officer for Pixar. He
worked there for five years, becoming a security
coordinator, onsite EMT, and onsite paramedic in
the process. In fact, he was on his way toward
becoming a firefighter when he decided to
become an artist. Now, instead of fighting real-
world fires, he’s puzzling together images of
explosions, smoke, fire, and other elements to
construct final frames for blockbuster movies.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5706[6/16/2010 3:30:33 AM]


CGSociety - Chris Balog

“I know animators who say they love animation


and they don’t know how we [compositors] do
what we do,” Balog says. “But, to each his own.
This is a lot of fun. For ‘Iron Man 2,’ I got to blow
up a bridge, destroy a bunch of cars, and have
guys flying through it all. This is a great job.”

It seems a mysterious path -- criminal justice to


visual effects -- but four key elements along the
way provide clues that, together, show why it
worked for him.

First, the spark was always there. His family loved


Star Trek. credit: © 2009 Paramount Pictures Corporation. movies and photography. His uncle Jim Balog is a
famous nature photographer. His sister is a USC
film school graduate. His older brother is a
creature supervisor at ILM. “And my dad was
really big into photography,” Balog says. “His
thing was covered bridges. I think I’ve seen every
covered bridge from the Mississippi to Maine.”

So, even though he majored in criminal justice at


Arizona State, a place as far away from 17
winters in New Hampshire as he could get, he
slipped in a side adventure: He took animation,
Photoshop, computer science and web design
classes, and tossed in a screenwriting class, as
well. And, while in school, he composited his first
image by pulling characters out of one image and
putting them onto another. “It fascinated me, but
I had already decided on my career path,” he
says. “I kept it in the back of my mind."

Star Trek. credit: © 2009 Paramount Pictures Corporation.


 

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5706[6/16/2010 3:30:33 AM]


CGSociety - Chris Balog

Star Trek. credit: © 2009 Paramount Pictures Corporation.

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.
 
JAPANESE GARDEN:
We asked Chris Balog about a shot he composited
for Iron Man 2. The shot takes place in the
Japanese Garden near the end the film with Iron
Man firing everything he’s got against Whiplash.

CB: This started with a plate that had foreground


elements shot in daylight and bluescreen behind.
Everything came in pieces. The characters,
rendered elements, the geometry from layout. We
had to make it look like a war zone.

CGS: You’re working in Nuke?

CB: Yeah, there are things you can do in a 3D


space that you really can’t do in Shake. For

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5706[6/16/2010 3:30:33 AM]


CGSociety - Chris Balog

example, in this shot, I would have the geometry


for the gun, so I could track muzzle flashes to the
axis point of the barrel. The 2D elements would
move with the barrel. I had other shots where I
had to blow up pillars and cars and in Shake you’re
really guessing about how to track things into the
plate. In Nuke, I can grab geometry from the
characters, put 2D elements on it, and the elements
move with the geometry in space. It’s much faster.

CGS: So, other than muzzle flashes, what did you


do to turn the garden into a war zone?

CB: Well, they gave us some concept art from our Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.
art department, but they also gave us freedom to  
do what we want to do. The other compositors and
I thought it would be great to put some fire in the
shot, so I found some elements with trees on fire.
And then I started putting in smoke plumes and
added embers flying around from the burning trees.
Someone put ash on the ground. And if you look,
Iron Man is standing in a river, so I added water
splashes. I color corrected the interactive lighting
to match the color of the sparks and timed the
lighting to go off at the same time the sparks went
off, and the muzzle flashes to go off at different
times.

CGS: You have a lot of motion here that needs to


make sense. Do you storyboard shots like this?

CB: No, you just kinda go with it and do a lot of


iterations. I’ll put together a first pass with all the
elements. Sometimes we get directions. A lot of
times I do something that I think is good on my
own. I put embers on the dead drone that was on
set and they liked that. They loved the muzzle Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

flashes and the sparks. Ben Snow, the vfx  


supervisor, was like, “I want sparks on every
frame.” And, when it went to Jon Favreau, he said,
“I want more sparks. I want more embers falling
down.” At the end, when the whip slashes across
the camera, I added a lens flare and Ben said,
“That’s great. You’re done.”

CGS: It sounds like fun.

CB: Oh, it’s great. You get asked to have this guy
fire a bunch of guns with tracers and sparks
popping off and whips flying around, and you go,
“Oh. That’s cool.”

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5706[6/16/2010 3:30:33 AM]


CGSociety - Chris Balog

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.
 

His goal after graduation was to join the secret


service, but first, he needed real-world
experience. So at his brother’s suggestion, he
moved to California and interviewed for a
corporate security position at ILM. That didn’t
work out -- company policy prohibited security
officers from working alongside family members.
And then, as if Balog’s eventual career in
computer graphics were predestined, a security
officer he interviewed with at ILM moved to Pixar
and hired him.

Fourth, although he pushed into paramedics and


beyond at Pixar until he pushed so far he decided
to stop, he developed a new skill along the way,
and that skill, surprisingly, provided his entre’
Star Trek. credit: © 2009 Paramount Pictures Corporation.
into visual effects: He created and managed
databases for key distribution, parking
information, and so forth, working in Linux.
Knowing this, when Balog decided to leave Pixar,
a friend suggested he interview for a resource
assistant (RA) job at ILM. And this time, it didn’t
matter that his brother worked there.

Once at ILM, Balog committed fully to his new


career. The former security officer, who counts
among his hobbies running, rock climbing, tennis,
and working out, poured all that physical and
mental energy into becoming a compositor.

Star Trek. credit: © 2009 Paramount Pictures Corporation.

   

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CGSociety - Chris Balog

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“When I came here [to ILM], they asked if I


wanted to do what my brother was doing,” Balog
says. “I said I wanted to do something different.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved puzzle solving,
model building, and putting things together and to
me, compositing is the ultimate kind of puzzle
solving. You’re the person at the end who takes
all the great stuff people have done before you
and create the final product. That sounded really
fascinating.”
As an RA, Balog placed the data, that is, the
resources for a show online – the reference
photography, principal photography, information
from the clients, and so forth. And, he managed
the disk space for the often 50 terabytes or more
of information generated during the post
production process.

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.
 

“It was a very entry level job,” Balog says, “but


you can advance if you work really hard. So I
spent 18 months working really hard and it paid
off.”

In fact, the steps Balog took could be a field


manual for moving up the artistic ladder. For
example, while he was an RA, he realized that he
could access all the ongoing work. “I’d pull up the
work from shows and just watch it to see how the
shots would progress over several weeks,” he
says. “I wanted to train my eye to see what they
did, what techniques they were using. I’d open up
the compositing scripts to see what they’d done
and sometimes, I’d ask people how they did
something.” He also took advantage of ILM’s
online training for software programs. He began
learning Shake and then later, Nuke. And the
artists at ILM noticed.

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.
 

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CGSociety - Chris Balog

Soon, he moved from managing the database into


managing the work coming in from outside the
studio for the 3D re-issue of 'Nightmare Before
Christmas.' From that, he stepped into reviewing
work for 'Pirates 3.' “I had done a little roto and
paint work on ‘Nightmare’,” Balog says, “and I
had some great mentors.”

Award winning compositor Eddie Pasquarello


began helping him, and Dave Gottlieb became his
first compositing mentor. “They started teaching
me what to look for,” Balog says. “So when the
work came in, I’d make sure the shots had the
proper grain. And, I could see where the roto
wasn’t correct. For example, they might have
done shapes for every individual frame instead of
making a shape track for the object throughout
the shot, which causes motion blur issues. Stuff
like that.”
© 2006 Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. All rights reserved. Image courtesy Industrial
Light and Magic.
By the time ILM had finished working on 'Pirates
3,' Balog was a junior compositor doing entry
level shots. “I’d put Davey Jones on a plate where
he wasn’t crossing anything,” he says. “I just had
to make sure he matched the environment. It’s
simple A over B work, but you’re the last one
touching the shot.”
When post-production work began on 'Star Trek,'
ILM was ready for a deeper commitment, and
assigned a dedicated mentor to work with Balog.
"Conny Fauser sat with me for the whole show,”
Balog says. “There are many ways to do a
composite, but she made sure what I was doing
was technically correct. That gave me a great
foundation.”

© 2006 Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. All rights reserved. Image courtesy Industrial
Light and Magic.
 

Star Trek. credit: © 2009 Paramount Pictures Corporation.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5706&page=2[6/16/2010 3:33:23 AM]


CGSociety - Chris Balog

“It was a very entry level job,” Balog says, “but


you can advance if you work really hard. So I
spent 18 months working really hard and it paid
off.”

In fact, the steps Balog took could be a field


manual for moving up the artistic ladder. For
example, while he was an RA, he realized that he
could access all the ongoing work. “I’d pull up the
work from shows and just watch it to see how the
shots would progress over several weeks,” he
says. “I wanted to train my eye to see what they
did, what techniques they were using. I’d open up
the compositing scripts to see what they’d done
and sometimes, I’d ask people how they did
something.” He also took advantage of ILM’s
online training for software programs. He began
learning Shake and then later, Nuke. And the
artists at ILM noticed.

'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'. credit: Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.


 

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

He’s learning about other parts of the pipeline, as


well, through ILM’s web classes and training
programs. “One of the things about being in this
industry is that you constantly have to learn,”
Balog says. “New software, new techniques. I’ve
done paint, roto, and compositing and I know
some things about layout. I want to know more
about layout and I want to know lighting. If
you’re a well-rounded artist you can do new
challenges.”

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5706&page=2[6/16/2010 3:33:23 AM]


CGSociety - Chris Balog

What sort of new challenges? “I tell myself that


one thing I would like to do is a shot all by myself
from layout to animation to final,” he says. “That
probably won’t ever happen; to learn all that
would be very difficult. Maybe someday I’ll be a
compositing supervisor. But right now, I like
doing the shots. People ask me why I work such
crazy hours. It’s because I like my job. You get a
shot and hear, ‘Here’s the plate. We need a city
behind, guys flying through, a bridge on top,
explosions going on,’ and you go, ‘Yeah!’ It’s fun.
I love it.” Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

Related links:
Chris Balog
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Rush Hour 3
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Iron Man
Iron Man 2
Star Trek

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Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

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CGSociety - Cinderella: The Gal from Out West.

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Artists at Delacave Studio conjure up magic before the clock strikes midnight.

CGSociety :: Production Focus


1 June 2010, by Courtney Howard

The story of Cinderella has stood the test of time.


Many variations exist, but an adaptation of French
author Charles Perrault’s story, Cinderella: The
Gal from Out West was brought together by
popular French animation studio Delacave. This
entertaining version pits morphed animals and
reptiles against one another in the middle of the
American Old West.

Beautiful, tomboyish Cinderella lives in a frontier


town controlled by her abusive stepmother. The
telegraph delivers news of a Russian prince’s
arrival by train accompanied by his mother, a
Grand Duchess. The stepmother, wishing to
marry off one of her daughters to the aristocrat, A mix of MachStudio Pro and camera projection in compositing improve the sharpness in this image from
Cinderella. The skull, cactus, trees, and train are all rendered in MachStudio Pro. credit: Images: Delacave

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5679[6/11/2010 12:12:14 PM]


CGSociety - Cinderella: The Gal from Out West.

throws a ball which the cowgirl Cinderella cannot Studio.


possibly attend.
 

In this composite image from Cinderella, the smoke is in Maya, the background is a mix of MachStudio Pro, camera projection, and a matte painting behind the triangle mountain.
Artists rendered everything else in multiple layers and different sizes in MachStudio Pro, and they used camera projection to improve the stereoscopy compared to a matte painting.
credit: Images: Delacave Studio.

Clever characters, riveting action, and


breathtaking animation and environments
combine in this lively take on an everlasting
narrative about love, justice, and living happily
ever after. Delacave’s Cinderella, in addition to
being truly unique, has the distinction of being
France’s first stereoscopic 3D film when released
in 2011. Yet, this milestone is not the studio’s
first.

In 2008, Delacave Studio—a premier 3D


animation studio catering to feature films and
television series in the center of Paris—became
the first studio in Europe to produce an animated
feature film—The True Story of Puss’n Boots,
which was released April 1, 2009—using a
hardware rendering engine. With its latest
animated feature, Cinderella, Delacave continues
to push the envelope.

“Delacave Studio is a computer animation studio


with the technical, creative, and production
capabilities to create a new type of animated
film,” explains Pascal Herold, Delacave Studio’s
chief executive officer. “We are entering a new
Images: Delacave Studio. The True Story of Puss’n Boots era of animation with the fantastic development
and success of CGI and 3D technologies.”

 
 

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CGSociety - Cinderella: The Gal from Out West.

Images: Delacave Studio. The True Story of Puss’n Boots

Herold would not entrust France’s first


stereoscopic 3D film and other landmark projects
to any average, run-of-the-mill tool; rather, he
sought to arm Delacave’s artists with software
and hardware innovations to complement their
unbridled imaginations. “In 2009, we decided to
look for a more sophisticated engine combining
3D rendering with strong shading capacities,”
Herold adds.

Delacave adopted MachStudio Pro, an advanced


software solution from StudioGPU, and at once
infused the company’s production workflow with
real-time, GPU-based rendering. MachStudio Pro
is on the cutting edge of the general-purpose GPU
(GPGPU) movement, delivering renders in far less
time and at a higher quality than more expensive
and time-consuming rendering engines based on
slower, power-hungry CPUs.

Delacave employs MachStudio Pro in many facets


Images: Delacave Studio.
of its production pipeline, including: shading with  
maps and created libraries, validating 3D
stereoscopic and lighting parameters in the pre-
rendering phase, and rendering with the definitive
lighting and all the different passes and layers
needed for compositing.

“With MachStudio Pro, we can very quickly get


results of the first intentions of lighting and check
if the 3D parameters still work with the textures,
materials, and lighting,” Herold says. “Instead of
having to wait hours to render a frame to check
lighting and 3D stereoscopic features, it takes
minutes with MachStudio Pro.”

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5679[6/11/2010 12:12:14 PM]


CGSociety - Cinderella: The Gal from Out West.

Images: Delacave Studio.

   

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Artists rendered the feather and fur in this composite image from Cinderella using Autodesk’s mental ray; all other elements were rendered in MachStudio Pro. credit: Images:
Delacave Studio.

Iterative renders are integral to Delacave Studio’s


creative and production processes, especially with
the first-of-its-kind project that is Cinderella.
MachStudio Pro provides the essential tools for
Delaclave artists to develop and check their work
quickly and accurately throughout the animation
process. Herold credits MachStudio Pro’s API with
its easy-to-use, yet powerful Python scripting and
Autodesk Maya export functions. “The API comes
with almost all the user functionalities exposed,
and the parameters of each object are

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5679&page=2[6/13/2010 7:03:24 PM]


CGSociety - Cinderella: The Gal from Out West.

modifiable,” he explains. These traits enabled


Delacave’s research-and-development team to
craft custom scripts that improved the daily
artistic workflow and seamlessly integrated
MachStudio Pro with the company’s asset
management system. In particular, the team
sought to construct a transparent bridge between
Autodesk’s Maya and MachStudio Pro—a goal they
achieved thanks in large part to the flexible API.

Delacave Studio’s digital artists likewise


harnessed MachStudio Pro to attain their
Images: Delacave Studio. objective: bringing their creative vision to life in
all its 3D stereoscopic and animated glory.
“Artists can experiment and make many more
tests, and this flexibility results in an overall gain
in image quality,” Herold enthuses. “If your entire
pipeline is correctly built around MachStudio Pro,
the director can ask for animation modifications
even up until a couple of days before the final
movie deadline!”

Delacave and MachStudio Pro GPU-based


rendering continue to be a perfect match,
reminiscent of those made in countless fairytales.
“MachStudio Pro affords us the ability to make
retakes at low cost without waiting endlessly for
rendering,” notes Herold, “and it gives us much
more confidence in delivering projects on time.”

With MachStudio Pro’s GPU rendering in its


production pipeline, Delacave Studio remains on
Images: Delacave Studio. the bleeding edge of animation; and, in taking
Cinderella from the pages of a storybook to the
big screen in France’s premier 3D stereoscopic
film, Delacave and MachStudio Pro have solidified
a place in history.

Related links:
Delacave Studio
Mach Studio Pro
Extra galleries of artwork

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

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London’s best studios pool forces to work VFX


into the latest version of a classic film.

CGSociety :: Production Focus


11 May 2010, by Renee Dunlop

The titans of the UK joined forces to deliver the


2010 version of Clash of the Titans, a film first
brought to life in 1981 by Ray Harryhausen. While
there is no competition, and never will be, to
Harryhausens’ extraordinary talent and vision, it’s
undeniable that FX have some a long way. Under
VFX Supervisor Nick Davis’s guidance, Moving
Picture Company (MPC), Cinesite, and Framestore
created seamless worlds from Olympus to the
underworld, and a myriad of virtual characters to
live there.
Olympus. credit: Framestore.
 

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

Medusa. credit: Framestore.

OLYMPUS
Olympus, home of the gods, was handled at
Framestore. During preproduction, Olympus was
one location that had an extremely limited
budget, resulting in the decision that all of it
would be done in camera. But in postproduction,
that decision changed. The filmmakers took a look
at the footage of the 12 actors shot on a
soundstage, and just didn’t feel they looked like
gods in a god-like place.

“The curve ball thrown to us,” said Davis “was,


what were we going to do? We came up with the
idea of rotoscoping the actors and their chairs off
the original set and replacing it with a virtual
environment. It took massive amounts of roto and
tracking and creative composite work to make
© Warner Bros.
them fit into the world. We replaced the floor with
a virtual world and moving clouds, a long
corridor, and a giant vaulted ceiling.” The result
was a gathering of gods who could gaze through
the clouds to the world below, or stride across
that world in a matter of steps as the clouds
swirled around their ankles. Particle systems
created the clouds, the actors feet were tracked
and modeled. The foot geometry and collision
detection would push the clouds out of the way,
then they would reform and settle back behind
the feet as the gods walked.

© Warner Bros.
 

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

© Warner Bros.

credit: Moving Picture Company

PEGASUS
Anyone who knows horses will tell you that they
are a bundle of twitch and muscle and a coat that
reflects every breath and flex in multiple
directions. It was why I was so impressed at how
seamless Pegasus’s wings were attached. MPC
developed a method of being able to track the
wings on, putting tracking markers around the
horses shoulder areas. “Then it was just a matter
of really pushing the tracking software to make
sure we came up with a methodology to lock the

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

wings on, patch in the skin around the wings to


seamlessly blend into the fur of the real horse,”
explained Davis. The tracking was extremely
difficult, since it involved tracking the skin and
muscle around the corner of the shoulder, one of
the most powerful and muscled areas on a horses
body. “We had a sequence of about 14 squares
on the horse and used four witness cameras all
the way around.“ By syncing all those together, it
gave the tracking team information where the
shoulder really was and how the muscles
credit: Moving Picture Company
underneath were working, in conjunction of the
camera moves and the movement of the leg of
the horse.

Using a library of textures captured from the real


horse combined with the shader technology, MPC
made sure all of their fur shaders captured the
anisotropic feel that the black fur gave, how it
caught the light and how it handled the specular
change of the highlights every time the horse
moved. “When you are exposing the sequence of
a black horse in daylight he’s going to go very
black, so you can hide more things. We were
quite grateful they picked the black one in the
end since the white horses were a little less
forgiving!,” explains Davis.

   

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

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credit: Cinesite.

SCORPIONS
Another creature achievement was handled at
Cinesite, who delivered the terrifying scorpions.
The sequence was shot in the Canary Islands at
9,000 feet where the pristine environment
provided a harsh and stark grandeur to
compliment the giant killers. Davis explains, “they
had already been through development of the
animatics and previs, working with the director
and the stunt department. We created this action
sequence based around the location and what we

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5649&page=2[5/20/2010 2:15:09 PM]


CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

wanted the creatures to do.” Special FX


Supervisor Neil Corbould created air rigs, pyro
rigs, mechanical rigs, and explosive rigs to
represent the claws and tail and give the actors
something to interact with as they were fighting.
This gave real world interactive dust getting
kicked up to ground the plates in reality that were
enhanced digitally in post-production. Cinesite
came up with an in-camera previs setup that
allowed the camera operators to see the scale of
the CG scorpions on location to help with framing
and for the actors to know where things were in
3D space.
credit: Cinesite.

credit: Cinesite.

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

credit: Moving Picture Company

KRAKEN
And then they released the Kraken. The climatic
battle sequence, running around eight minutes,
was handled by MPC and was the bulk of their
contribution. It involved a full CG environment, a
cast of digital doubles and fantastical characters,
layers upon layers of water effects, and the
Kraken, a 500 foot tall, 10 million-plus polygon
creature that fully interacted with water, the city
and its entire environment. “The Kraken was the
most complex, time consuming, render intensive,
design intensive and challenging part of the
whole movie,” said Davis.

The design alone was daunting. Davis rattled off


a few of the questions. “How are we going to
create all the caches and simulations of the water credit: © Warner Bros.
to give it the scale and mass we were looking
for? How does this thing move, how does it
unfurl, stand up, move forward, how do the
tentacles move? We started the rigging of the
creature and the development of the different
textures, what was going to be a rigid shell, what
was going to be translucent and need more
scatter, what would feel sinuous and gelatinous,
how the inside of the mouth would look. We took
creative license from bears and sharks, and all
sorts of creatures. At the same time we knew we
had to place it in water and it would interact with
massive volumes.” One 45-second shot that was
divided into three cuts in the movie was when the
Kraken first comes up out of the water. “I think
they did something in the region of 200 water
caches and simulations to create the elements
that made the shot look real, from spray to water
cascading down the sides.” Caches interacted
with other caches, adding to the puzzle. “It took
up a massive amount of disk space, and we did
over a thousand versions of the shot before we
finally got it completed.”

credit: Moving Picture Company


 

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

CG Supervisor Patric Roos from MPC worked


closely with Davis to define the characteristics
before setting to work on the sequence. “We did a
lot of development in the beginning of the film,"
said Roos. “LookDev on the water, and designing
the CG city, which wasn’t shot at the time." The
general layout of the city was based on the
physical location but the design wasn‘t locked
down, so was in constant flux. “We laid out a
simplified city to get the scale right and make
sure we could fit the Kraken in and make sure it
could perform in this environment. That was quite
challenging, having a city layout that would
change while we were doing previs. We had
drawings of what the set would be, and we had
some early 3D models. We used those to find our
live action locations in the city first, and locked
those in. But beyond the point of what was shot
on film, we didn’t know where the cameras would
be.” They had to fully design the city in detail
because “the camera could be anywhere. Since
the Kraken is such a huge creature, you are
moving cameras quite freely.” Roos planned it out
like it was a real city with the palace area and its
grand buildings, back to the slums. In the end,
the CG city was so complete it worked like a
practical location shoot and the camera could be
placed wherever it was needed. Projection work
was added once shots were locked down.
 

“Between the rig and the model that was


rendered, we developed a system that abstracted
the rigging from the actual model so the model
that was rendered was not tied to the rig," said
Roos. "It’s kind of like a subdivision surface but
render model was stored on disk and only got tied
to the rig at render time.” That gave the artists
the freedom to put an immense amount of detail

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CGSociety - CLASH OF THE TITANS

into the model without limitation, and little


overhead on what the riggers could and couldn’t
do.

The textures relied on procedural texturing where


possible. “We could paint simple maps and
populate with procedural textures, using
photographs and library that would cover up the
selected area with barnacles or whatever you
might want to add,” Roos explained. If it was
something the artists wanted to tweak they could
simply resave the model separate from anything
else in the pipeline and it would update when it
was rendered. “It was kind of on-the-fly
skinning."

How was it taking on a classic film by one of the


greatest stop motion artists in the history of film?
Nick Davis ventured to answer. “Ray Harryhausen
is the grandfather of our business. You can never
forget where this movie came from, especially
being in the VFX business, he’s been the pioneer
for most people in this industry. In some respects
it was a scary thing to take on his work, but I
think the FX have moved on so much that it’s a
different discipline now. What Ray had to do, you
can’t even imagine. Now we have teams and
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of artists
from roto and paint work and tracking, rigging,
lighting. But back then it was pretty much Ray on
his own. I don’t think we were trying to outdo credit: Moving Picture Company.
him in any shape or form, I don’t think we could.”

Related links:
Clash of the Titans
Nick Davis, VFX Supervisor
Patric Roos, CG Supervisor, MPC
Ray Harryhausen
Moving Picture Company (MPC)
Framestore
Cinesite

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

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In this first of two features covering the efforts of


Vancouver's Image Engine VFX studio, we meet some crew and find out how
they worked.

CGSociety :: Production Focus Part 1/2


20 October 2009, by Paul Hellard

History
For many years, the founding partners of Image
Engine, namely Robin Hackl, Christopher
Mossman and Greg Holmes wanted to nurture
the company into new areas, to start taking on
more film work. They'd grown a primarily
television-focused business over the previous
ten years, just like other boutique shops in
Vancouver. When Neill Blomkamp arrived with
the feature film pitch for 'District 9', this was

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5302[5/18/2010 4:20:39 AM]


CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

exactly what they were waiting for.

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

They needed folks with feature film experience to


drive the growth. Shawn Walsh began as a Digital
Effects Supervisor on the existing episodic
television work, but given his background, he
quickly turned his attention to the task of creating
a feature film division at the company. Now,
Image Engine has grown roughly four or five fold
in four or five years.

"The first person I called begging for help was


Peter Muyzers who was my CG Supervisor when I
worked as a lighter at The Moving Picture
Company on 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban'," explains Walsh. "Both Peter and I
were looking for an opportunity to create
something in Vancouver and the film division at
Image Engine fitted the bill for us. Pete and I
hashed out a plan to grow the company into a
film focused entity and set that plan in motion."
Now, film work accounts for about 90% of Image
Engine's revenue. Shawn Walsh says that
Muyzers has been the key catalyst in their
increased technical capabilities, the drive towards
establishing a strong R&D department under John
Haddon, and creatively reaching for the highest
level possible. "It has been a really challenging
three years, but we are really jazzed about our
crew's potential," Walsh says.
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5302[5/18/2010 4:20:39 AM]


CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

Film
When Peter Muyzers and Shawn Walsh went to
New Zealand to flesh out the film plan, Neill was
very responsive to their suggestions regarding
the visual effects process and to some degree
handed the torch to them. "He'd been carrying
the ideas for visual effects on 'District 9' for
some time, and I think he really wanted
someone to take up the charge. Neill's ideas
and our plan to facilitate them held up
throughout the entire production at Image
Engine, from the initial scrums at WingNut Films
back in New Zealand."

"Neill Blomkamp is an incredibly savvy


filmmaker. His knowledge of the process from
start to finish is well beyond his years," Walsh
adds. However, Shawn points to one aspect you
wouldn't necessarily know until you have some
working familiarity with Blomkamp is that he is
a focused designer. "I was working with Neill in
pre-production," explains Walsh. "It was only
after I watched Blomkamp laying out the visual
effects of 'District 9' at Image Engine that I was
truly convinced that this work was possible
within our budget."

The crew completed somewhere around 80


shots in the final five weeks of the schedule.
"That simply would not have been possible
without the combination of Image Engine's R&D
driven film pipeline, Neill's incredible clarity of
vision and our amazingly talented crew," says
Shawn. "Also, let's not forget that Neill had a
great mentor and support system in Peter
Jackson and all the folks at WingNut who were
all very passionate about this project. They are
a great bunch to work with!" CJ in close up. © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
 

   

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Staffing
There were a lot of other people involved in the
hiring process, but ultimately Peter Muyzers
(Digital Production Manager), Stefanie Boose
(Visual Effects Producer) and I really put a lot of
effort into reaching out into the visual effects
community and qualifying people to work at
Image Engine on this project. We were fortunate
in that the previous three years had seen a slow
and steady accumulation of talent at Image
Engine. At the start of the project we had
assembled a great core crew of about 50 at
Image Engine. But for 'District 9' I flew to
London, Toronto and Montreal to conduct

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

interviews with folks who were interested in


joining our crew. In addition, key people also
came from direct working experience or referral.
James Stewart (Creature Supervisor) is someone
I have known for just about as long as anyone I
can remember in the industry, Rob Bourgeault
(Lighting Lead) and I went to film school together
and Dan Kaufman (Visual Effects Supervisor) was
new to Image Engine but was referred through
friends in the industry and did a great job leading
the charge during post production. It is amazing
sometimes how people can come together on a
project like this one that has 'something special
about it' that people can just feel. Our crew is a
tremendously talented group and range from
juniors I have personally mentored at The
Vancouver Film School all the way through to
very senior people who have been attracted to
our agenda.

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Artist, modeler
Marco Menco began his dream job working at Image-Engine (IE) after
searching Vancouver VFX houses for a few months. After traveling from Italy
with his partner and fellow CGTalker Vivien Hulbert, Marco started in the TV
department of IE working on 'Stargate: Atlantis'. The aliens he created for that
show gave proof to his managers he was able to handle the alien for 'District
9'.

Marco's specialty was poly-modeling and texturing of the aliens and the
clothes. Starting from a 3D scan of the clay model provided by WETA
Workshop, the IE crew re-topologized the model and then cleaned the
geometry in Maya to prepare it for rigging. Playing with lots of different
aspects of character creation, they used ZBrush mostly for texturing, for gross
displacement for background clothes. "I was pretty excited to work with the
'marquette' of Christopher Johnson (the main alien) on my desk, especially
thinking that was done by the great artists at WETA," explains Menco.

Marco Menco.
 

"I worked with my creature supervisor James


Stewart shoulder to shoulder to build the creatures
and get them ready for rigging, then animation.
Jelmer Boskma, Gus Yamin and Alexander Lehman

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

were working with me during this process," Menco


adds. "After this, I had the chance to work on a
human digital double. It was the digi-double for
Koobus, the bad guy. That was a pretty different
experience for me since I did the character in
almost his totality. I started from the scan of the
actor, built the geometry, then I did the texturing
and the look-development, guided by Nigel
Denton-Howes and Joe Eveleigh."

"It was a great experience," Marco chirps. "Neill


Blomkamp, the director, was sending comments
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
and excitement through Shawn Walsh, our Visual
Effects Executive Producer and Dan Kaufman, our
Visual Effects Supervisor and that was always
really encouraging to keep the spirit and the
quality of the work high. The team was full of
amazing artists such as James Stewart, Jelmer
Boskma, Julianna Kolakis, Anna Ivanova and many
others, so it was quite easy to talk about art, ideas
and to learn from each other. It was what I was
looking for when I choose to study at the Academy
of Fine Art! I learned a lot about how to deal with
modeling with creatures and characters in a
professional production environment at the studio
Image Engine and being part of its team of artists
makes me feel quite proud."

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

Jabuka
Image Engine's Digital Asset Management
system was written in-house by the Digital
Asset Lead on the project, Nigel Denton-Howes.
IE looked at various asset management systems
that are marketed solutions, but none of them
seemed to be able to match their necessity for a
flexible, robust solution that would tie into the
existing pipeline which had facilities for
animation caching, version control, etc. The
house needed the ability to modify the look of
the aliens almost on a shot by shot basis and to
maintain visibility and ease of management. The
variation would take shape via texture map
changes, shader changes, additional rigged CG
assets on the aliens. Many small details that
had to be tracked on a per set-up basis. "Nigel
is one of the most naturally talented folks I
have ever worked with and he was the ideal
combination of an artist with programming
capabilities to take on the asset management
system," says Walsh. "We needed that process
to be open and easily manageable by artists
and coordinators alike. Jabuka allowed us to do
all that and more."

"Jabuka is an asset management and shot setup


system written in python using a postgreSQL
database backend," adds Nigel Denton-Howes,
Modeling and Texturing Supervisor. "Many of its

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

shot-end lighting tools are built upon the cortex


libraries open sourced by Image Engine. Jabuka
was designed to handle version control of
assets, shot setup and interdepartmental
dependencies once in shots." Although Jabuka
was used and useful on every shot in 'District
9', it really shines in shots with large numbers
of creatures. The shot setup tools included
many used for randomization including color,
paint, sticker, geometry and clothing variations.
"These tools made it simple for animators to
select 40 or 50 creatures, hit one button, and
get a crowd of entirely unique characters," adds
Denton-Howes. "These same tools also made it
a simple process for a sequence supervisor to
modify those initial random characters and have
those changes propagate to the TDs."

CJ in close up. © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
 

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

Neill Blomkamp's brief was that "Jason Cope's


performance as Christopher Johnson must live on
in the shot through the CG." This was a huge
challenge for the animators, but one that was
aided by the process that Animation Supervisor
Steve Nichols set in motion. The animators first
faithfully recreated Jason's performance (either
from motion capture or rotomation) and once that
was nailed, Steve would begin to push for a more
alien look and feel exaggerating various
movements to become more twitchy, sharper,
more insect-like. "The unsung heroes of the
project were the camera tracking and match
move crew," says Nichols, "because without them
the animators would have had a much more
difficult job and ultimately the shots may not
have held up. The liberal blend of motion capture,
rotomation and key framing that we employed
allowed our animators the flexibility to chose the
best approach at the right moment in all of the
shots. My personal favorites are the shots that
were derived via rotomation. It was an incredibly
successful method for what we needed in this
film."

Next week, CGSociety wraps up the coverage


of 'District 9' with an interview with Peter
Muyzers and Julianna Kolakis.
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Related links:
Image Engine
District 9
Neill Blomkamp
Shawn Walsh

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 1]

Dan Kaufman
James Stewart
Jelmer Boskma
Gus Yamin
Marco Menco
Alexander Lehman
Nigel Denton-Howes
Joe Eveleigh
Julianna Kolakis
Anna Ivanova
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Texturing, lighting and pampering the critters of 'District 9'.


Image-Engine completes the story.

CGSociety : Production Focus Part 2/2


3 November 2009, by Paul Hellard

The Executive Producer of 'District 9' Shawn


Walsh, had been following Director Neill
Blomkamp's career pretty closely for some
years. It was a pleasant surprise when Neill got
in touch one day asking if he was interested in
collaborating on a project. "We'd nearly crossed
paths many times, but we didn't know each

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

other," adds Walsh. He says Neill sent him


"great rambling bits of text that included all
kinds of wildly imaginative stuff he wanted in
the film. It was all very improvisational."

Peter Muyzers, Digital Production Manager,


thought there was something about the first
connection with Neill's assistant that convinced
him to explore the film project a little further.
"There was a brief outline in an email that
immediately struck us as interesting," Muyzers
explains.
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
 

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

The Mission
It's no secret Neill Blomkamp has always had a keen interest in seeing
Vancouver prosper as a center for filmmakers. Post production services and
visual effects are crucial to being able to execute whatever he has in mind -
which almost always includes computer generated images.
It's also true that the film was originally imagined as a Weta Digital project,
but with major projects like 'Avatar' having a huge effect on their workforce,
Neill argued for the opportunity to take the film elsewhere and Peter Jackson
agreed.

"I think it had more to do with focus than anything," explains Shawn Walsh.
"Neill just wanted a passionate group of his own that was going to embrace
his film." Blomkamp vetted the project to various houses, but he was really
encouraged by [eventual] On-Set Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Muyzers and
Shawn Walsh showing him what was going on at Image Engine and they
pitched successfully for the work. "That had a lot to do with Peter and Neill
connecting with respect to how the film was going to be shot on location in
South Africa because Peter would be responsible for the on-set supervision,"
explains Walsh. "It is great when you see two people connect like that
because you know you can support and foster that relationship."

Muyzers and Walsh were surprised by how much Neill already knew about

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

them. "He really keeps tabs!" exclaimed Walsh. "I think that softened the
landing on his leap of faith. Once we got the ball rolling, we worked very
closely with Line Producer Trisha Downie and Post-Production Supervisor
Pippa Anderson at WingNut, along with the film's financiers, to ensure that we
were working with a budget and plan for visual effects that would stand up
over the whole duration of the project."

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Challenges
Neill presented Image-Engine with an amazing
challenge. Take something completely foreign
and seamlessly insert that element into a
cinematographic shooting style that is designed
to feel overtly unpolished and raw: a
documentary film sensibility. There are aspects
to many of the shots that are simultaneously
bizarre and surprising, yet totally believable and
completely integrated into the live action
photography. That challenge was not sequence
based, but rather existed in all of the shots. "We
had many short sequences and one-offs that
proved very challenging from a tracking and
digital management perspective," explains
Walsh, "but ultimately our work was like one 27
minute sequence dealing with variations on
similar digital assets."

Just make it look Cool!


One of Blomkamp's best and most often used
directions will simply be this: "Just make it look
cool". Creature Supervisor James Stewart thinks
the word 'cool' has a tremendous amount of
implied trust as it assumes that they are
thinking the same thing when that word is used.
"Firstly, the greatest aspect of Neill's directing
was his ability to empower the team as artists,"
says Stewart. "This was the key aspect to our © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
relationship with Neill. He thinks like an artist so
we were able to cut through a lot of red tape
and get a tremendous amount of art on the

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

screen."

The sculpts from Weta gave the Image-Engine


(IE) team their starting point for both creatures.
Christopher and Little CJ. So much of the
creature was laid out initially and it was up to
IE to interpret it into something that would
work logically and rig it that way.

James Stewart's job was to play art director and


supervise the build process. Crew familiarity for
the character started when Shawn handed them
the book, 'A Smaller Majority'. This was the
book that Neill had used to wrap his head
around the character. Inside were incredible
pictures of bugs, slugs, crabs, spiders. They
asked the author to send a DVD of RAW images
so they could have the most realistic images
possible.

. © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

"If you look at the Goliath bug, that color was


used for one of our aliens, the grasshoppers for
another," explains Stewart. "There was not a shell
on the character or a spec highlight that we were
not able to compare to something in real life... all
good art is that way. My job was making sure
that the reference was hit and that artistically
everything worked... and worked together with
the backgrounds they would be intended to fit
into."

Image Engine didn't have many generalists. There


were solid modelers, texture artists riggers and
look development artists. "I think having talented
experienced artists make artistic communication
much easier and the possibilities seem infinite,"
adds Stewart. "This was the feeling I got from
this crew."

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

   

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

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Julianna Kolakis
Julianna Kolakis first worked on the look
development of Christopher and little CJ with
James as well as the look dev lead Joe Eveleigh,
the lead lighter Robert Bourgeault, and later Anna
Ivanova, the second texture artist who came
aboard to help with maps for the aliens and other
models. The artists all contributed to the
character development gathering references and
giving artistic feedback on how materials such as
the skin, shells, and tentacles should look.

"There were 2026 texture maps for a variety of


adult aliens (excluding clothes), and each model
had 21 UV maps at 4096 pixels," explains Kolakis.
"These maps included colors, bumps,
displacements, various specs, wet specs,
roughness, masks, multiple subsurface, and
reflections for materials such as the shell, skin,
eyes, fur, bruising, blood, dirt, dust, war paint,
and stickers.
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
 

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5322&page=2[5/18/2010 3:39:55 AM]


CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5322&page=2[5/18/2010 3:39:55 AM]


CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

"A lot of the textures were first painted in ZBrush


and then brought into Photoshop for editing. This
way I could quickly polypaint a simple pattern and
export all maps for the body. I'd make the
necessary changes to one map in Photoshop for
filtering, adding color, photo details, etc, and apply
the same adjustment layers to the rest of the body
maps easily. I used my first maps as a template for
all the others, just plugging in colors or masks to
make the appropriate adjustments. More variations
were created by inverting patterns and colors,
diversifying war paint and stickers as well as
changing clothes."

There was room for conceptualizing a few more


things such as wounds, eye colors, and alien
patterns. The faces were changed based on a few
ideas from James. He had a great sense of how the
face should look and feel, and came up with a new
concept focusing on a more insect-like appearance-
one with more shells and less skin than originally.
Following his sculpt the team fleshed out a 2D
concept which got approval from Neil right away.

MoCap
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Ultimately all the mocap was refined to background


aliens and specific key moment of alien behavior.
and the animators added ticks and sped up some
of the subtle movements to make them seem like
aggressive seven foot insect like creatures.
Animation Supervisor Steve Nichols had a deja vu
moment when he saw the plates and there were
the gray suits that he was familiar with on 'Pirates'.
They were helpful to get the performance and
interaction Neill wanted with the actors and aliens.
One main actor, Jason Cope, put on the unforgiving
gray suit for the performance scenes involving
interaction between CGI and live action actors. He
focused on Christopher Johnson's character. The
Animation Team would try to get as much of his
nuances and character ticks from the plate and
then 'alienize' the performance to make if feel less
like a guy in a suit.

Rotomation was mainly used for some of


© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Christopher Johnson's performance. Jason or
another actor was in the plate for keying the
actor/alien moments. This kept the relationship and
timing of the live action actors performance to the
alien.

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
 

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
 

Keyframe
Many of the alien scenes and all of Little CJ was
just straight keyframed by a small talented team
of animators.

The Aliens had a fantastic bipedal rig that also


had many cool alien appendages. They used
simulations in Maya for the tentacles and the
Lead, Jeremy Mesana created great tools to get
the most from the rigs quickly. Antennae drag
and cycles for the alien appendages. The Facial
rigs were based on the muscles of a human face.
It was a joint based system that transferred from
one alien to another, so the team stored facial
poses in a central server for general use. This
would keep the expressions 'on model'. The eyes
were a key part of the face for nailing the
performance. © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

"I relied heavily on my team's abilities," explained


Nicholls. "We discovered how Neill wanted the
aliens to move. They couldn't look like guys in
suits and they couldn't be too fantastical either,
as the film is set in a very gritty, real world. We
found we could use a subtle naturalistic motion
and then add ticks and hyper shifts in the motion
that an actor can't do. This kept it real but also
something cool. The team was small, nine to 12
and then 16 at the peak. We knew we were
working on something special so we all put our

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

heart into it!"

© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Budget
Image-Engine managed to maximise the budget they had available through a
combination of 'getting Neill's vision' and making that vision work within the
budget that was available, with British Columbia's tax incentives for Vancouver
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. VFX houses. "The important thing to remember was that we had a business to
  run and we knew if we couldn't make totally brilliant VFX with whatever
budget there was, we were doomed to go under," admits Peter Muyzers. "It is
important at all times to ensure that the business model is a solid one, and
this was the case with Neill's project. There was very little 'excess' money
available on the 'District 9' project."

The team made a point of separating themselves from what definitely could
not be done and what could. "Neill had a great knowledge of what was
possible, for instance we stayed away from cloth synth, which is expensive,"
explains Muyzers. "We were advising even before we started shooting on the
approach, and Neill was very comfortable with that."

Peter Jackson's involvement was definitely a cache for recruiting the best for
the project. People had not heard of Neill Blomkamp, but they had definitely
heard of Peter Jackson. But the story holds some very pertinent issues for the
world situation today. Set in real-world, gritty environments, top line crew
© 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
became interested because they respected Neill's vision.
Peter draws the parallel to the feeling at ESC during the production of the
'Matrix'. Cool ideas, top VFX, great results from each department, a 'similar
buzz' around the studio, which was great to be a part of.
 

On Set
Peter Muyzers had on-set VFX Supervision
experience while working at Moving Picture
Company in London on the 'Harry Potter' series
and many other projects. He knew that he had to
make sure what was brought back to the studio,
could be used to its maximum edge, for the
production. Because Neill knew a great amount of
what was possible, Peter Muyzers could be almost
invisible to the camera, talent and direction on
set. "They could pretty much go on shooting 360
degrees what was needed and the HDRIs, texture
plates and lighting maps could be generated on
the go, despite the environment also being
extremely harsh," says Muyzers.

BC Advantage

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CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

Vancouver's VFX and film industry is going


through a 'transformation' at the moment. Peter
Muyzers sees similarities to London's VFX 'coming
of age', obviously many years ago now. "'Lost in
Space' was being worked on by many studios in
London at the time," says Muyzers. "The thing
that time did in London was it made various
companies work together, taking on this one big
project. Competition kind of disappeared and
everyone pulled together to make this film
happen. On 'District 9' here in Vancouver, the
same thing is occurring. With three Vancouver Model Sheet of the MotherShip. © 2009 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
houses working on it, egos had to be set aside to
final each shot. This is working at the moment,
and I hope it continues to happen on consequent Related links:
Image Engine
productions. Although as far as I know Neill isn't
District 9
a 'franchise' kind of guy, not into doing sequels
Dan Kaufman, Overall Visual Effects Supervisor on District 9
like 'District 10', 'District 11' etc, this certainly
District 9 [Part 1]
isn't the last you heard from him by a long shot."
Peter Muyzers
By my reckoning, this isn't the last we're going to Julianna Kolakis
hear from Image-Engine either. The Smaller Majority by Piotr Nazkrecki

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CGSociety :: Artist Profile


3 September 2009, by Barbara Robertson

A common, and valuable bit of advice for people who would want a career in visual
effects is to invest in art courses, photography, filmmaking, animation, and so forth.
Dan Kaufman, visual effects supervisor at Image Engine for the highly acclaimed scifi
feature 'District 9,' provides the exception to that rule.

Kaufman's first job, while still a computer science and EE major at UC Berkeley
(California) in the late 1980's, was developing graphical user interfaces for software
running on Commodore 64 computers. Although he was interested in computer
graphics, the university offered only one basic CG class at the time. So, after
graduation, he found a job as a lead programmer and project manager for a game
developer, Spectrum Holobyte. "I souped up the 3D engine for a flight simulation
program," he says, "and then I started working on arcade games." Soon, he was
designing and writing Welltris, the 3D sequel to Tetris.

But, he was in his twenties and it was time for a change. "The downside of doing

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CGSociety - District 9

games was that we always had to make them for the lowest common denominator
system, which, with the technology at that time, was never as cool as I wanted," he
says. "I wanted to make images that looked completely real." He wanted to make
movies. This wasn't an idea out of left field. Dan Kaufman, VFX Supervisor, Image Engine

"I always liked movies and special effects," he says. Although his parents weren't involved with the film
industry, the family lived in Newport Beach, California, near Los Angeles, so filmmaking was in the air. At
age nine, inspired by Ray Harryhausen's effects in 'The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,' Kaufman talked his
'Meet the Artist" parents into giving him a Super 8 camera so he could make stop-motion films. "I animated clay stuff
thread moving around," he says. "I made a robot out of paper and animated it.

I scratched film to make laser beams. I even tried to do double exposures, which was hard with a super 8
camera. I had to cover the film advance with tape. But, I got one shot with a space ship model I built
flying away from camera."

In junior high, he found a friend who was also interested in special effects and together they created more special effects films. That
friend, Everett Burrell, also grew up to become a visual effects supervisor ('Pan's Labyrinth', 'Hellboy') after first working as a make-
up effects artist. "Even in junior high, he had lots of great designs," Kaufman says. So, after five years working on software programs
and games, Kaufman switched from employee to consultant, sold his house in Northern California, and went home. Well, he first
bought a round-the-world ticket and traveled for three months. Then, he moved home to Los Angeles intent on working in the film
industry.
"I considered going to UCLA film school when I got back from my trip, but I talked to people I knew who were in the program and
they said although it was good for making connections, it was expensive," he says. "They told me to just jump in." Nice idea. But. "It
wasn't that easy," he says. "There was no direct route for getting into visual effects at that time. There were no schools. I think it's
easier for people now to build up a reel and get a job."

He applied at visual effects studios, but without


professional film experience, he couldn't get a foot in the
door. So, he decided to make a film, a short live action film
with effects.

"I knew this project wasn't going to happen when my


producer told me he didn't have enough gas to get to my
house for a meeting," he laughs. "That was my second
producer.

The first one moved to Kentucky for family reasons and


didn't tell me until after he moved. It's hard to get all the
pieces in place, especially if you're paying people not at all
'Leatherheads'. or very little."

When his film project fizzled, he quickly got antsy without anything to do, so he leveraged his game development experience into a
job with Pacific Interactive, a company that created educational multi-media CD-ROMs for Disney with funding from Electronic Arts.
And, as sometimes happens in life, that move resulted in his first job at a visual effects studio. The studio was VIFX, founded by
Richard Hollander, Greg McMurry, John Wash, and Rhonda Gunner, after working at EEG on 'Bladerunner' and 'Brainstorm.'
Hollander's wife, a creative producer at Pacific interactive told Kaufman her husband was looking for people to hire.

"She had no idea I was interested in visual effects," Kaufman says. "I didn't have an interview. John Wash showed me around the
studio and when he finished, I asked if I had a job. He said, 'yes.'" He was a perfect fit: Kaufman didn't need to know anything about
visual effects; they wanted someone to do screen graphics - the user interface and graphics that appear on computer screens and

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CGSociety - District 9

other monitors in films.

And then, VIFX landed the work in 'Mighty Morphin' Power


Rangers.' "We had about a million shots and they needed
people, so they told me if I could get up to speed on the
software, they'd give me shots to do," Kaufman says.

Every night, he'd find an empty workstation and teach


himself how to use Side Effects Software's Prisms. And,
that was it. Soon, he was doing shots and he's been doing
shots - or supervising people doing shots ever since. He
was making movies - or, at least parts of movies.

'Castaway'.

"I was really happy," he says. "No more screen graphics. I


enjoyed making things that looked cool."

While at VIFX, Kaufman learned how to handle everything


from writing RenderMan shaders to creating composites
using command-line compositing tools. "I think that helps
me now as a supervisor," he says. "I've done all the jobs
at one point or another. I've concentrated on effects work,
but I've also done characters and creatures, animation,
compositing, and so forth. I know what's involved."

'Dark City'.

He left VIFX in 1996 after completing his work as digital


effects supervisor for "Stephen King's The Shining," and
spent a few months in Australia working on "Dark City."

Once back in LA, he spent time at Cinesite, Digital Domain,


and Sony Pictures Imageworks, taking on more
responsibility with each move.

By the time he joined CIS Hollywood in 2002, his list of


films included 'What Lies Beneath,' 'Cast Away,' and 'Stuart
Little 2.'
'Stuart Little'.

At CIS Hollywood, he was digital


effects supervisor for that studio's
work on 'The Core' 'Matrix
Revolutions,' 'Poseidon,' 'Ocean's 13,'
visual effects supervisor on 'Scary
Movie 3' and look development
supervisor for 'X-Men: The Last
Stand.'

He developed pipelines, broke down


scripts for bidding, and worked on
location for films ranging from those
with invisible effects to those with 3D
creatures.

'Supernova'.

"I haven't done anything on the box for a while now," he says. "I began tapering off at CIS Hollywood. I wrote some shaders - it's
hard to find people to do that - but, that was about it. I was mostly supervising - trying to make sure everything comes together in a
final product, a final shot that looks good with everything working that's what the director is looking for."

So, when Image Engine executives Shawn Walsh and Peter Muyzers called, at a friend's recommendation, to see if he'd be interested
in supervising their shots for 'District 9,' he was more than ready. "I'd seen [director] Neill Blomkamp's short and his commercials,
and I was impressed," Kaufman says. "When they gave me the run down on their work for the movie, I was sold. It was exactly the
kind of movie I like. Aliens, space ships, ray guns. Sign me up."

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CGSociety - District 9

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What he signed up for was around 300 or so shots that


included CG aliens, and those CG aliens included one of
the main characters, Christopher Johnson, his son CJ, and
his friend Paul.

When Kaufman arrived, he found what he remembers as


about 15 people in an empty room. "I believe more people
actually worked there," he says. "They must have been on
vacation. But, we were hiring almost continuously the
entire time.

It wasn't as easy as if I had walked into a smoothly


running machine, but I've worked on lots of projects that
required setting up pipelines and procedures, and there are
a lot of talented people in Vancouver, so overall, things
went smoothly. And, Neill was happy with the work."

Neill and most film critics, as well. Filmed in South Africa,


'District 9,' tells the story of one alien's attempt to free his
son from a ghetto, and one human's realization of what it
means to be alienated.

The low-budget film received an 89% rating on Rotten


Tomatoes, with critics calling it fresh and exciting. Among
the kudos are many for the visual effects.

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CGSociety - District 9

"We didn't break technical ground,"


Kaufman says. "What we had was a
small amount of money, a small
crew, and, in a way, a kind of look
we haven't seen with CG effects
before. Trying to get all that
together was the trick. We had to
match such a real unpolished
location. The dirt and grime and
reality of being in a shanty town in
Johannesburg combined with the
cinema verita, you're there in the
scene, look. We tried to put all
those pieces together as efficiently
as possible and make sure they
blended into reality as well as we
possibly could."

Although CG aliens dig through garbage, negotiate with


drug dealers, get stoned, and fight in many shots in the
film, Kaufman likes to think of 'District 9' as having
invisible effects. "It is a kind of invisible effects movie," he
insists. "It just has aliens in it."

The point he's rightly making is that the film doesn't


emphasize the effects.
In fact, he and the crew at Image Engine went to great
effort to make sure the aliens looked like they lived in the
slum, to make them look as natural in that environment as
a seven foot cross between a grasshopper and a lobster
could.

"The way Neill shot the movie, as if he took a news


photographer and dropped him into the place, was helpful,"
he says. "We layered things in and matched where we
could, which meant lots of tracking.

When there's any hero interaction, we had a guy in a gray


leotard on set that we took out and then matched as
closely as we could. And, we layered in details like dust, CG
flies, bits of paper, and garbage." "It's really hard to get
stuff to look real with CG," he adds. "Reality is complicated.
You have not only what the real world looks like, but a
model of reality in everyone's head, which is different for
every person, and is not based on what's actually there.

It's only a construct; we fill in huge gaps in our perception. And, all
the different physical interactions end up in being a photon
bouncing off something. CG is such a cheat. You have to grab the
important parts, which are the subtleties that give verisimilitude,
and hope that's close enough."

So how does someone know which parts are important? "It's an


attention to detail," Kaufman says. "I think some people see the
details of the real world and see something in a shot that doesn't
look right and know why, and others don't. As far as knowing how
to fix it, that comes from doing lots and lots of shots."

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CGSociety - District 9

Now that he's finished 'District 9,'


Kaufman is considering what he
most wants to do next. "Stability
hasn't been all that important to
me," he says. "I like to try
something new, to work in different
places. 'District 9' was a high point.
It's the kind of movie I want to see
and I really enjoyed working on it.
We'll see what happens. My career
has never been linear."
Perhaps not, but once he
remembered what he most loved
doing as a child, it has been
focused. And his friends were
right: He didn't need to go to film
school to get where he is now.

A background in computer science,


hard work, talent, and a little bit of
being in the right place at the right
time turned out to be just the right
trick.

District 9
Image Engine Design

Meet the Artist

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CGSociety - How To Train Your Dragon

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The Effects of Dragons, Fire, and Fur at DreamWorks.

CGSociety :: Production Focus


29 April 2010, by Renee Dunlop

Just as the title, 'How To Train Your Dragon'


implies, DreamWorks had an unruly task to
wrangle. From layers of furry clothing to
characters with two heads, there was a lot
to keep an eye on. By the time the
DreamWorks Animation film was in the can,
VFX Supervisor Craig Ring might have
wished he had two heads (and could breath
fire) himself.

PELTING THE CHARACTERS


“The biggest challenges were the characters,”
said Ring. “Vikings are not simple guys to rig.”
The Viking wardrobe and hair styles were
imperative to the story but animating layers of
furry wardrobe was not for the weak of heart.

“We had a tribe that, (in the book) is called the


Hairy Hooligans. That was very much in the
character designers’ minds.”

The father character, Stoick, is the perfect


example with his layers of pelts. But that is only
part of it. Half his face and much of his chest was
buried under his facial hair, a huge beard that
was “probably one of the most complicated
hairstyles we’ve ever done.”

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CGSociety - How To Train Your Dragon

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


 

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

That beard added another consideration, namely


how do you show a characters facial expressions
when you can’t see the characters face? It was a
design question that required research into the
world of the unshaven. Perhaps if you looked far
enough into the family tree, you would find a
connection to the most obvious recent reference,
namely Gimli from 'Lord of the Rings'. By studying
that character and others like him, Craig Ring and
his team were able to discern how much of the
expression transferred to the eyes and the
position of the mustache. “A great deal of
discussion took place deciding where the right
balance was between the beard behavior and the
facial animation, and how that affected the
various expressions.”

Implementing those emotions meant the


reactions were driven by the face rigging
underneath coupled with a dynamic system built
into the beard. The beard had targets to help the
facial animation. Close to the mouth the beard
would follow the mouth animation, then would

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CGSociety - How To Train Your Dragon

blend in to a dynamic simulation further down


that would automatically do collisions with his
clothing. “We’ve used a variety of cloth solvers
depending on the show. Shrek uses Maya Cloth,
but with this show and this clothing, when we did
some early investigation on the show we ended up
with Syflex. There would always be individual
shots that you had to do stuff on top of but that
was default out-of-the-box solution.” Though
there weren’t a lot of technical breakthroughs
concerning the clothing, there were hours upon
hours invested in getting the various layers to
behave correctly. One layer would be simulated
first then the next layer added would react to that
simulation. Then there was the fur grown on top
of the simulated cloth. Stoick’s cape, for example,
had long fur. The underlying cape fabric was a
dynamic simulation, then guide hairs would add
it’s own set of dynamics to as it reacted to the
© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved. fabric simulation. On top of that was the beard.
 

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CGSociety - How To Train Your Dragon

Lust, Greed and Gluttony. © Image courtesy of Electronic Arts and Visceral Games.

To animate both the human character and dragon


faces, DreamWorks turned to its own in-house
software appropriately named 'Rig.' Though Rig
works like Maya with many animation tools under
the hood, the DreamWorks Rig system, written
by Dick Walsh, is based on human facial anatomy
with variants so it can be used on something like
dragon faces too. Rig didn’t drive the faces with
blend shapes. The musculature underneath is fit
to the design and uses hundreds of controls to
feed the appropriate behaviors, such as those for
a smile. “We’ve done most facial blend shape
animation and this kind of musculature based
rigging, and the later seemed to do a better job
for how you got in to the targets. Blend shapes
are great once you get to the target but the in-
between seemed better when based on what the
muscles underneath a real face would do."

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


 

“The supervising animators and the head of


character animation will figure out what a good
smile or frown will be. Those controls are all
available the next level down if you need to go in
and tweak something, but you can use higher
level controls that will operate the low level
controls to animate a lot quicker. We might spend
eight to ten weeks rigging a face, and a lot of
that time is spent first fitting the system to the
character, then concentrating on getting the high
level controls to work well so the animators don’t
have to animate 200 controls just to get a smile.”
As if that wasn’t enough of a hill to climb, add in
mid-way, a new version of Rig was introduced.
“There were several new features, it was faster,
and had an easier workflow, but anytime you
introduce something new it presents problems.”

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


 

THERE BE DRAGONS
That was half of the characters. “The other half
were dragons who were… even worse!” Ring was
grateful they weren’t furry. “They had at least
four times the number of controls a human would
have, because they had spines down their backs
which all had animation controls, the tail rig was
complicated, the tongues, the faces were weirdly
shaped but still needed to emote.” The design of
a dragon by nature is a challenge due to their
having wings, a tail, and often four limbs. The
two headed dragon called the Hideous Zippleback
had roughly 90 spines running down his back
that were rigged. “The big challenge rigging the
dragons was the character complexity. They were
so many controls and the rigs were so
complicated that we had to spend a lot of time
trying to optimize, how to turn off parts of the
rig, how can we hide things that aren’t being used

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CGSociety - How To Train Your Dragon

just then, what can we do to help the animators


go faster.”

There were five main species of dragons outside


of the Night Fury (Toothless) and the Red Death
(the dragon in the lair): the Hideous Zippleback,
Deadly Nadder, Terrible Terror, Monstrous
Nightmare and the Gronckle.
© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.
 

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

   

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They were designed to be atypical dragons,


something that hadn’t been seen before.
DreamWorks wanted that to extend to the fire as
well, so each dragon had it’s own personality and
it’s own style of fire, so instead of the standard
fireball solution, the FX team had to create
several unique versions. The Gronckles would
chew up rocks and melt them in their stomachs
then shoot out lava balls. With the two headed
dragon, one head breaths gas and the other
ignites it. One dragon has a white hot and spark-
filled fire inspired by magnesium powder. Another,
the Monstrous Nightmare, was based on napalm
and flame throwers.

“We were trying to get away from most live


action dragon movies. They have used propane
fire because it doesn’t stick to things, it makes
cool big fireballs in the air that just disappear.
They don’t burn down your set as opposed to
burning liquid that sticks to things and burn down
your set. Well, we didn’t have that problem! So
we decided to have our fire flow and stick like a
viscous fluid.”

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


 

In order to do the crowds, DreamWorks used a


number of different surfacing variations, body
shapes and facial positions. But in a situation like
the lair with it’s stereoscopic fog simulations,
sometimes huge crowds would be lost in the mist.
The crowd reveal where they are flying in the fog,
that scene had thousands of dragons in it. “A lot
of times we didn’t realize how big the crowds
were because we are used to crowds being on a
two-dimensional surface. We were really

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CGSociety - How To Train Your Dragon

surprised because it didn’t look like that many,


but it was because you have dragons in X, Y, and
Z, and its multiplied three times rather than the
two times the way a 2D surface is.” The big
crowds were slow and difficult to deal with in
rendering. However, at least the flying animation
of thousands of dragons was simplified; most of
the crowd animation used cycles while the
dragons were flying.
© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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CGSociety - How To Train Your Dragon

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

FROM THE SHADOWS


Though his contribution began earlier in the form
of visual consulting, one design decision became a
major factor towards the end- mainly the depth of
the shadows. Roger Deakins, the brilliant
cinematographer of a wide range of films and
styles from O Brother, Where Art Thou? to No
Country for Old Men was brought on board to
make suggestions for lighting. “We spent a lot of
time looking at his movies, trying to push the film
style to his sensibility, letting stuff fall off into
complete blacks, have stuff that overexposes and
blows out. We looked at live action reference
before but it was interesting to sit in the room
with the guy that shot all this stuff. He helped
remind us that even though you spent months
building every leaf in the forest you don’t really
want to look at the forest in a dramatic moment.”

Deakins’ particular style kept the lighting style


simple, with light emitting from dragon flames or
candles which, in night sequences such as the
opening scene when the village is under dragon
attack, meant much of the screen fell into
darkness. The result was a black screen peppered
with vague detail and huge, fiery explosions that
set the story on it’s path- and got the audiences’
attention!

Related Links:
How To Train Your Dragon
DreamWorks Animation
Craig Ring
Roger Deakins
Dick Walsh
Syflex

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© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


 

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CGSociety - Iron Man

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Breaking all the iron clad rules.

arvel’s first venture into filmmaking with the release of Iron


Man rocketed the 2008 summer season off to an excellent
start. Jon Favreau directed and ILM created many of the
effects, along with Stan Winston Studio, The Embassy VFX, and a
list of others. But in a rare departure from what so often is the
norm, Favreau encouraged the artists to do more than create his
vision. He let them create some visions of their own.

Oscar winners and ILM artists Doug Smythe, Digital Production


Supervisor, and Hal T. Hickel, Animation Supervisor, and their
digital effects teams worked on a little over 400 shots, mostly
involving the Iron Man or Iron Monger related scenes. As expressed
by Hickel, both were surprised and even a little intimidated at the
unexpected creative input they were encouraged to provide. “This
show was interesting because, while we were not directly involved
with the previs, we were invited at a very early stage by Jon to
contribute ideas, which was really nice. It’s one of those things
that… we often want more opportunities to have creative input, and
on this film, we were surprised at how much of that suddenly we
had.”

On most films, the plates are shot with minimal VFX input. The
editor cuts them together, and the sequence is sent to the VFX
team with instructions how to add their work. Follow-up meetings
with the director usually revolve around individual shot topics such

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CGSociety - Iron Man

as a character is moving too fast, or move that over there. “With


Jon Favreau, when they would shoot it, cut it together and hand it
to us, he would say, ‘You know, this really isn’t it yet, this is our first
pass. You guys are the experts on animation.

We may have made choices about which takes we use or the order
we put the shots that don’t serve the animation. So as you get into
the animation, feel free to look at other takes and choose them
instead, or reorder the shots and pitch it to us.’ It wasn’t like ‘do
whatever you want and its fine with me,’ he was saying do whatever
you want and show it to me, and if I like it, I’ll put it in. Because
maybe we haven’t hit on the right combination of things yet, and as
you put your animation in you will discover things, and I don’t want
to get locked in too early. I want to take advantage of those
discoveries.’”

For a long time the term 'post-production' has been quietly


considered a misnomer for digital FX. Digital FX has become a
staple throughout the production all the way through the pipeline,
not just solving problems and adding bling, but creating complete
scenes and workflows that affect the entire film and production.
However, it is rare for a director to recognize the talent that
supports this, and rarer still for one to realize the contributions that
can be made towards the success of a film. It was such a surprise
to Smythe and Hickel that at first they didn’t know how to react.

In their first meeting with Favreau, they were prepared for the
standard critique, but instead, explained Hickel “Jon would say,
‘Lets take a couple steps back and look at this whole sequence and
its place in the movie, how it’s serving the story. This shot might not
even work anymore, we might not even need this shot.’ At first, we
were like ’oh, boy’. But once we got our heads around what he was
asking, we realized this was fantastic, awesome! For me, that was
the most rewarding about this project creatively.

It was a neat project, a lot of fun to work on. I’m somebody who
loves robots, mechanisms and technology, so there are a lot of
reasons like that to be excited about this movie and have fun with
it. But I think the thing I will remember and always want to talk
about, was working with Favreau and how that differed from other
projects I’ve been on. It was really pretty cool.”

Of course, the team had to remain within the confines of the


licensed character, a heroic one that wore a suit of armor and could
fly.

The live action Iron Man suit created by Stan Winston Studio was
ideal for static shots, but a digital one was needed for movement
and of course anything where Iron Man would fly. The practical
version wasn’t just to be digitally matched, it needed to exceed it
with better mobility and heroic proportions. “Marvel Comics seemed
to have a precise mathematical formula to make him look more
heroic, how the big the chest is supposed to be compared to the
waist and the legs,“ said Smythe.

Marvel wanted the torso elongated, and the waist shrunk down,
unlike true human proportions. “We had to make something that
looked photoreal and be able to intercut with the live action suit,
sometimes within the same shot, have part of the suit be real and
another part be CG while making it look clean with nice motion and
shape of the character.

Iron Man is about 6’3“, whereas Robert Downey Jr. is not that tall.
The practical suit is built to fit his physique and size, so we had to
have our suit be able to mix and match with the practical suit as

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CGSociety - Iron Man

well as the superhero size version.“

There was also the issue that Downey found the practical suit
restrictive to his acting, as explained by Hickel. “Winston’s guys
made these beautiful suits that were faithful to the Iron Man design,
but they were hard to move in. We told Robert Downey Jr. if he
couldn’t get into the pose or move the way he wanted to, we could
add the suit digitally. When he saw that, he didn’t want to wear the

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CGSociety - Iron Man

practical suit at all, to the point where there were times when we
almost wanted to bribe him to put the practical suit on.

He liked not wearing it, so we wound up doing more shots than we


anticipated. But the bottom line was, he was more comfortable and
felt better, so presumably his performance was better. For us, it’s all
about making the performance better and not encumbering the
actor.”

Regardless of pose, the Iron Man suit needed to appear sculpted, a


perfect fit, and heroic without confining. While a comic book version
has the liberty to ignore parts that might break the silhouette, the
3D version didn’t have that freedom. The solution was to create a
system of overlapping panels that could slide and twist against each
other, without bits and pieces poking out at odd angles.

The difficulty of creating realistic looking metal was a challenge,


especially considering the constant mix and match of practical and
digital costuming. The brushed metal practical suit had tremendous
detail, and digitally creating a brushed bumpy surface would have
required too much rendering power to resolve without flicker and
aliasing. “We had to come up with some new technologies to
simulate what happens to a brushed metal surface, both where you
are up too close and when you are further away.” Smythe chuckled,
“That required a lot of words you find in Siggraph journals. We are
fully buzz word compliant with all of our technologies.”

What were some of those buzz words? Full anisotropic adjustable


BRDF shaders with high dynamic range environment lighting
capture for image based lighting, with capabilities to adjust lighting.
“We actually sent some samples of the suits out to a lab to have
them analyzed to get a measured BRDF of the surfaces, which we
then replicated as closely as we could with our surface material
shaders, again requiring a balance between the real surface
characteristics and wanting to be able to tweak and adjust them per
shot as needed. What comes out of the box mathematically is not
always what you want. Sometimes the director will say, ‘I want the
highlight there, not here.’ So you have to move the light and change
the surface and fix things without breaking the things that they do
like.”

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There are always surprises in production, tasks that are expected to


be simple and turn out not to be. In Iron Man, that turned out to be
flying. The dynamics, physics, and believability was a lot more
elusive than they anticipated. Iron Man’s flying needed a unique
style from other superheroes, and couldn’t reflect the movements of,
say, Superman or Peter Pan.

Iron Man didn’t have super powers; he was wrapped in a suit of


heavy technology that, if it failed, could kill him.

Hickel, Animation Supervisor at ILM, credited Favreau for his


comparative description. “Superman takes off quickly and lands
slowly, whereas Iron Man takes off slowly because the suit is
heavy, but he lands quickly and comes down with a thud.

That was a good starting point for us all to see how Iron Man is
different from some of the more traditional superhero stuff that has
been out before.”While Iron Man was ground based, he needed to
have naturalistic movement. Though ILM assumed they would use
Mocap or the IMocap process developed for Pirates of the
Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest for much of the animation, they
wound up doing a lot of keyframing, and there is little straight
forward motion capture in the film.

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CGSociety - Iron Man

Kent Seki from Pixel Liberation Front (PLF) did the previs, and
Favreaus’ encouragement of creative freedom allowed for Hickel
and Smythe to suggest ideas PLF was happy to implement.
According to Hickel, Favreau apparently used previs to try out ideas
rather than to work out issues that would be more or less locked.

“Looking back, I realize he could do previs for a year on a film and


I wouldn’t know that the stuff in the previs was going to make it into
the movie, or at least a high percentage of it. He finds new things
as he goes.

I suspect that it’s probably similar to the way he works with actors
in, say, a comedy. The writer’s don’t write the final work that makes
it to the screen. The actors start improvising, adding their stuff.
Maybe shoot seven different versions with different ideas and jokes,
then it goes through editing, maybe the ADR adds some more
funny lines for the over the shoulder shot later on- it just keeps
building and adding and changing. I think visual effects people
aren’t used to that, they expect more structure. Previs, lock it down,
shot what we prevised- but that’s not how Jon works.”Favreau had
ideas about the character, but didn’t specify instructions like Iron
Man should fly with his head up. Favreaus’ suggestions “had to do
more with the vibe of the character, it should feel realistic, or heroic,
or feel a missile or a jet plane. Some directors are very, very visual,
and they give you more of a framework to work inside, so maybe
you have less room to move but there are other aspects of it that
are fun. Favreau was less visual and more about vibe and
character. You had a lot of room to run, but you also had a lot of
rope to hang yourself.”

All superheroes have their recognizable poses. Superman stands


with his chest out and fists on his hips, cape billowing in the wind.
But Favreaus style is more organic, and though he wanted Iron
Man to have those “Marvel Moments“, he didn’t want to distract the
audience with artificial comic book structure. He instead sought to

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CGSociety - Iron Man

insert the poses throughout the action, encouraging the impression


they were happening naturally. According to Hickel, it’s a matter of
finding your way through the forest of bad decisions to the relatively
few good ones.

“We buried those Marvel Moments in the middle of the action so


they were almost subliminal. There is a point where Iron Monger
hits Iron Man and he flies back, then gets back to his feet and
leaps to the air using his rocket jets. Rather than having him stop
and enter this pose and stand there, there is just a moment in the
middle where he is at the top of the arc and has drawn his fist back
to deliver this punch to Iron Monger. You would have to stop it on
that frame to see that pose, but its there, right in the middle of the
shot.“

“My personal favorite shot,“ said Smythe “is a scene where Stark is
testing out the silver Iron Mark 2 suit, testing out his gear, and the
camera starts at the floor and cranes up to the top of the suit
where you finally reveal Iron Man in all his glory. It's geeky
hardware worship at its finest. The flaps are flapping, the blue lights
are on in the suit, and the suit is 100% CG. The target audience is
going to go nuts.“

It was also important to Favreau that the camera felt like a real
camera. When Iron Man is flying, the camera is made to feel like it’s
on a long lens covering the action. And when it’s on the ground,
they attempted to make it feel like it was on a tripod with pan and
tilt, or on a track, or a boom arm. They avoided the camera just
magically flying through space. “We did the same thing with the
action, where we wouldn’t break the fourth wall or characters doing
things that felt like goofy comic book acting.“

“It’s nice to see actual film making and storytelling going on and be
involved in that process, both directly and to watch the director at
work,“ said Smythe.

“It’s pretty rare, and I’m hoping we have future opportunities. We


like to think of ourselves, in our own way, as filmmakers as well.
Clearly we aren’t trying to be the director, or take over what the
director is doing, but to be treated as people with ideas, that’s a

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4510&page=2[5/17/2010 8:55:49 PM]


CGSociety - Iron Man

really nice thing, and once you taste that fruit you want to keep
doing it. It was really nice to work with Jon and all of his team, to
have that kind of creative input.“ Judging by the response at the
box office, it was a decision favorable to all.

Iron Man
Doug Smythe
Hal T. Hickel
ILM
Stan Winston Studio
The Embassy VFX
Gray Matter FX
The Orphanage
Pixel Liberation Front
Giant Studios
Gentle Giant
New Deal Studios, Inc.
CA Scanline Production GmbH
Cafe FX
Prologue Films
Lola Visual Effects
Lucasfilm Animation

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

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CGSociety :: Artist Profile


1 December 2009, by Daniel Wade

As Art Director, Jan-Bart van Beek is responsible for the overall


quality of art and animation at Guerrilla. Originally a
photography student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The
Hague, Jan-Bart soon turned to computer graphics software to
enhance his work. After graduation, he applied his knowledge
as a CG artist in the field of advertising. His ambition to create
something more enduring eventually led him to join Guerrilla,
where he quickly became the lead artist on the first Killzone
title for PlayStation 2.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5372[5/18/2010 4:19:04 AM]


CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

I started my education in 1992 at the Royal Academy of Fine


Arts in The Hague, where I studied photography at the Applied
Arts department. Although I can draw and paint at a
rudimentary level, it's not where my strength lies.

In that regard, I used to look at photography as a way around


my limited abilities as a painter. Eventually, I found that
photography alone was rather restrictive, and didn't allow me to
create what I wanted. Computers were just making their
entrance into photography, and we had a couple of Macs
running Photoshop 2.0 at the Academy.

I had worked with graphics software on Atari and Amiga


computers as a kid, so being able to pick up the software
straight away and start creating the images I wanted was a
great relief. After Photoshop came 3D Studio MAX R3 and Alias
PowerAnimator. Ultimately, I graduated in photography with 3D
CGI work?ironically becoming a bachelor in photography
without making a single photo.

Jan-Bart van Beek.

Although I worked as a CG artist in


advertising for several years, I didn't
really feel at home in the industry. I didn't
mind the commercial nature of the work,
but it all seemed very transient. You work
your ass off for a couple of weeks, on
something that is up on billboards or TV
for a couple of weeks more, before it
disappears from the public's awareness
completely. It seemed to hold very little
long-term value. I wanted to build
something bigger, that would last longer.
I also didn't like the solitary professional
life of a photographer?there's no real
team effort involved. It's pretty much you,
and only you, doing all the work.

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

I ran into Arjan Brussee and we met up on several occasions after that. At the time he managed his own game development studio,
Orange Games. It was a real start-up company, run from Arjan's living room, but I wasn't yet convinced I should drop my career in
advertising and join his studio. A couple of years later I ran into him again, right around the time his small studio joined forces with
two other small game development studios. Suddenly, their development team was thirty strong with solid financial backing, which
made the prospect of moving into games a lot more appealing to me. I joined as a freelancer in 1999, to help create the demo for a
game called Marines. We had no idea what the future held at that point, and certainly never could've guessed Marines would grow
into Killzone

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

Killzone started life as a short in-engine


animated demonstration. These days we call
them target renders, but back then they
were called demos. We spent three months
slaving over something that just barely ran
on a high-end PC, and took it to Sony to
show what we were capable of.

They liked our demo, and gave us the green


light to turn it into a full-blown game. We
finished Killzone in 2004, with a team of 45
people. In small start-up teams like these,
there isn't much room for highly specialized
artists. Every artist on the project took
responsibility for whatever art needed to be
done. Our roles also changed quite a bit
during the project.

By the end I was Lead Artist, supervising as


well as realizing the rigging, animating,
modeling, texturing, programming, and so
on. During the final stage of production I was
assigned to work with Axis Animation in
Glasgow to create Killzone's opening
cinematic. I really liked working with the
team at Axis, and when Sony asked us to
create a target render for Killzone 2 on the
PlayStation 3 a year later, they were high on
the list of people who could help us illustrate
our vision.

I had been the Lead Artist on a very small


R&D team charged with developing
Guerrilla's next-gen engine up to that point,
but when our managing director asked if I
could lead the target render project, I took
on the role of writer and director for what
would become known as the E3 2005 trailer.

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

The target render project turned out to be


quite an interesting challenge. To properly
convey our vision of a highly immersive
and dramatic theater of war to E3
audiences, we wanted to present the
project at 1080p, with full Dolby Digital
5.1. Of course, in 2005 high definition
didn't really exist yet in Europe.

There was probably only one tape deck in


all of London that supported the 1080p
format, making it rather tricky to put
together a presentation. Thankfully our
efforts were not in vain, as the
presentation caused a lot of buzz at E3. It
put Killzone right back in the spotlight,
and gave everyone a good idea of what
we were aiming to achieve in terms of
graphical quality and art direction.

It also helped us focus our efforts, and


allowed us to pre-visualize the game
before writing a single line of code. We
became very committed to delivering on
the promises we made in that
presentation.

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5372[5/18/2010 4:19:04 AM]


CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

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While making the transition from the


PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3, it became
apparent that we required new work methods
to achieve the desired quality standard. The
use of new techniques such as ZBrush
modeling, normal mapping and complex
shader structures still lacked standardization.

We spent several months defining the most


optimal way of making ZBrush models, the
most optimal way of generating normal
maps, the most optimal way of setting up
shaders, etc. before we could properly move
into production and start working with our
partner companies.

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

Our internal concept art team designed


nearly 95% of all characters in the game.
The process consists of two stages. First,
there's a concept phase in which the
character is visually explored with quick

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

sketches, as well as with mood paints which


show the character in action.

When those designs are signed off by Game


Design and Art Direction, a production
design is created. This shows the character
from all angles, and contains lots of
reference for specific details and material
expressions. Guerrilla's internal character
modeling team, while very capable of
delivering high quality character art, cannot
'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.
handle the enormous amount of characters a
game like Killzone requires.

The modeling process can take some time,


and we usually assume a three to four month
period from the moment the briefs are sent
out to the moment the character is polished
and inserted into the game.

An average character will go through ten


feedback and review cycles. After the model
is signed off, the character artists at Guerrilla
often spend an additional week tuning the
character, textures and shaders before it's
truly done. One of the reasons for this
additional week of polishing is that our game
engine has its own unique look.

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

We use Maya's Hypershader system for editing and tuning our shader, since that system works well and most Maya artists are
already familiar with it. Of course, it's been vastly expanded upon with additional nodes, creating shader effects that Maya doesn't
normally support. The lighting in Killzone is based on Image-Based Lighting, a technique also used in movie special effects. The only
way to properly evaluate the way the shader interacts with the lighting is to see it in the game engine itself.

'Killzone 2' © 2009 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

The Massive Black team.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5372&page=2[5/18/2010 4:19:35 AM]


CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

The Guerrilla Games Killzone 2 team.

In fact, there are already multiple skilled and


specialized outsourcing companies that can
create very high-quality character art. While
demand for high-quality character art is
likely to increase in the future, it may
become increasingly difficult for junior
characters artists from Europe and the US to
find work at large game developers.

Of course, they will still be able to hone their


skills at smaller start-up developers and
outsourcing companies. There will always be
a place for highly skilled, highly talented
character artists, but getting there takes time
and total, unrelenting commitment to one's
craft.

What technology will bring in ten years is


hard to predict. Character pipelines and
software from ten years ago look nothing like
their current-day counterparts, and the
character pipelines and software we'll be
using in ten years will look nothing like what
we use today.

If I have to make a prediction, it's that we


will witness the debut of a break-through
technology like ZBrush. Hopefully, it will be a
technology that bridges the gap between
modeling and texturing, as the state of this
area is still less than ideal at the moment. I
also hope that volumetric pixels with rich

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

material data (which are at the heart of


ZBrush) will become possible as a real-time
format.

I honestly can't wait to get rid of all the


baking, downsizing, and polygon-reduction
techniques we currently use.

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CGSociety - KILLZONE 2

Ballistic Publishing 'd'artiste: Character Modeling 3

Guerrilla Games

Killzone 2

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd.

Jan-Bart van Beek

Playstation article

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CGSociety - LOVELY BONES, LOVELY LANDSCAPES

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CGSociety :: Production Focus


11 February 2010, by Renee Dunlop

Weta is again synonymous with fantastic landscapes, but in Lovely Bones the greatest
accomplishments were extreme imagination. It's rumored that Joe Letteri said it best:
"Avatar's challenges were obviously really technical, and Lovely Bones challenges were
more creative."

Two of the Lovely Bones team who offered insights to brightening the grey area of
creativity were Art Director Michael Pangrazio and Compositing Supervisor Charlie Tait
as they tried to find the purity of a child mixed with the brutality of her own murder,
and her attempt to find her way from the dimension of the living to her next
destination.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5482[5/18/2010 4:01:52 AM]


CGSociety - LOVELY BONES, LOVELY LANDSCAPES

Michael Pangrazio, whose limited


experience of, oh, maybe fifty of the
industries top films dating back to The
Empire Strikes Back, was the Art Director
and Concept Artist on Lovely Bones,
layering together hundreds of elements in
Photoshop to develop the look of the
fantastical environments.

His method varies, driven by his


inspirations. Sometimes he will work from
a rough previs layout, or he will work
from a blocked out 3D scene with rough
lighting, painting his ideas over the top
and sometimes adding his own lens.

Image © Paramount Pictures.

"I might want to do two side by side "They were going to basically accept the work I generated from the script pages, and it
concepts with an impossible lens was up to me to be self-motivated and to generate the images and ideas based on the
situation, like a fisheye next to another words on the page. This went on for about six months. It was difficult in that I didn't
fisheye to give a 180 of what the world get assurance I was on the right track for anything, I was just sending work out and
could look like. not getting any information back." However, setting him free had some beautiful
results.
"It's not relevant how I present the work
in terms of camera. It's information, the
atmosphere of the scene that is more
important than the specific camera lens.
They will decide that later; or in the case
of Previs, it's already decided.

"It's Look Dev, very efficient and it saves


a lot of time. It's quick and shows you
everything at once and if they like it,
boom, that's what the scene will look
like."

The world before heaven was undefined,


but Pangrazio was faced with the unusual
decision his concepts would not be
reviewed.

Image © Paramount Pictures.

Pangrazio's fame is as an artist, he is not technically inclined.


He was in the industry for 35 years doing matte paintings with
a brush and seven years ago, after a nine year hiatus, he
returned to a Wacom tablet and Photoshop.

He also does limited work in Vue and sometimes sits with a


Maya artist to work out blocking. Working with technology is
new to him, but has hardly slowed him down and certainly
hasn't affected the stunning results.
Image © Paramount Pictures.
He paints very little, mainly sourcing fragments of images
edited with filters and transparencies. He photographs some He knows intuitively what highlights will work. "I make images out
source material himself, but most he pulls off the internet. of hundreds of other images, sometimes multiple hundreds of
images, working for several days. It's funny, it does turn out to

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5482[5/18/2010 4:01:52 AM]


CGSociety - LOVELY BONES, LOVELY LANDSCAPES

"There is nothing too low-res. 100x100 pixels? Fine, because it look like a painting. I just find that I can't paint with a pen, I just
doesn't matter for concept work. It doesn't matter if it's don't get the right feel for painting out of Photoshop.
pixilated or blurry, because I'll use so many layers of different
transparencies and different filters that all that disappears. If I "It ends up evolving into its own creation. Sometimes I don't even
need a highlight, I'll grab a highlight. It's got a spectral falloff know how it's going to end up looking, I might find something
that is accurate, different color temperatures on the outside, that I use a part of, and it changes the whole image and moves it
and that gives me the amount of complexity that I can't seem in a different direction. That is the fun of what I can do. I have
to get in Photoshop in a traditional way." some freedom here to explore and present what is my vision."

Image © Paramount Pictures.

Those weekly meetings, presenting ideas, hearing Jackson's' thoughts, and making the
required changes went on for two and a half years, right to the end.
Compositing Supervisor Charlie Tait's
fondest memories were "the way I got to The process put Pangrazio under a tremendous amount of pressure to come up with
work with VFX Supervisor Christian fresh and unique concepts "Imagine," said Tait "being under that sort of pressure, to
Rivers, Director Peter Jackson, and come up with these amazing ideas, all the time, late into the night. Something that
Michael Pangrazio. can't be described very well, everyone having their own vision, and direction like 'I want
it to be surreal, and it can't have architecture, and maybe there could be a bird?.' It's
"We had these meetings weekly, way really hard to come up with all these things day after day." For that reason, Pangrazio
back before there was a script. For me, would have to do the designs in a sketchy manor.
this was the most exciting part of the
project, to be involved with the whole
creative process. Compositors, we are
always right at the end of the line. We
take everything that's been done so far
and we're the last to touch it before it
becomes film. We were trying to help
Peter obtain his vision, coming up with all
kinds of crazy looks.

"All the in-between and Heaven stuff had


to be photoreal, but it had to be a bit
wrong somehow. For a compositor to
make something photoreal but slightly off
was extremely difficult."
Image © Paramount Pictures.

Pangrazio would "paint these amazing illustrations in Photoshop, At one point, when Pangrazio was up-res'ing one of his own
then in the next meeting present perhaps ten or so he had done concepts into a final matte painting, he shared the office with
that week, and Peter would jump on something he liked or make Tait. As Pangrazio painted, Tait composited in collaboration.
suggestions or zoom in on one concept in particular. I would Pangrazio would shoot his matte painting over to Tait who would

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CGSociety - LOVELY BONES, LOVELY LANDSCAPES

take that, find a bluescreen shot it would go with, and put it place it in the top of his flowgraft, render it, render another
together as a moving shot so Peter could see it in context with script in Nuke, and they would review the results together,
(lead character) Susie in the foreground to get the idea if it was deciding what needed to be altered and which of them needed to
going to work for him or not." Some would be accepted, some make the tweaks.
would not. "That was a really fascinating process."
"I don't know how many people have had the opportunity to
If Jackson still liked the concept, either Pangrazio or another work with Michael like that. It was a really good, fun thing to do.
matte painter under his guidance would recreate the design from He normally sits in his own office, creating these concepts, but to
scratch, but at a much higher resolution. be working on something to go into a finished shot is different for
him. For me to sit by him and work with him was a real privilege,
I really enjoyed it."

Image © Paramount Pictures.

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An example of the artistic challenges


would be the shot of Susie and another
murdered character, Holly, walking along
a beach with the night sky on the left and
the daytime on the right. The left has the
moon, and mountains and dark water,
and on the right you have an amazing
blue sky and the field with the tree
towards the horizon.

How do you use day and night at the


same time? Should the characters be lit,
and what side should the light come
from? And how do you handle the close-

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5482&page=2[5/18/2010 4:03:11 AM]


CGSociety - LOVELY BONES, LOVELY LANDSCAPES

ups?
Image © Paramount Pictures.

It was initially filmed in live action with the girls walking along a Since the girls were filmed in daylight, both had a light
very wild New Zealand beach during daylight. It was beautiful, background behind them, so comping Holly into the matte
but it wasn't the serene beach Jackson imagined. Consequently, painting wasn't so difficult. However, when the camera cuts
the beach as well as everything above the horizon had to be across to Susie, the shot required hair roto, separating her from
replaced with a matte painting. The beach, water, and the plate, and a day-for-night grade on the background.
specularity was created in 3D, the waves lapping on the shore
were created from elements in 2D.

The efforts have paid off by taking a


terrifying topic and presenting it with a
The scene where Mr. Harvey falls to his death was not in the first cut, it was added as a surreal and calming beauty that keeps
response to a test audience. Though his accident initially unfolded in a similar fashion, focus on the story of an innocent child
with the icicle falling and hitting him in the back, from that point he toppled over and accepting her own death, instead of the
was found later, lying in the snow completely still, made up to look like he's frozen and technology it took to create the imagery.
pale as if he had been there all winter. "I think the industry needs a lot more
artistry and a little less of a technical
Originally Mr. Harvey didn't suffer so much damage, but the audience just wasn't approach to solving problems," said
satisfied; the need for justice of this perverse character was just too great. In the final Pangrazio. "Sometimes people look at the
version, on impact he hits the ground, his body broken and his arms askew. The technical side and they think it doesn't
camera moves in for a close-up, and he twitches- his last bit of life. look right, so go back to their traditional
software programs and think it's going to
Weta had to make it look like Harvey crashed to the ground and rolled into that final get better. I think it really has to do with
position, and was still warm and moving, using a digital double. taste, and proportion, composition,
lighting, and the emotional content of a
"We added loads of snow particles to help make the transition work," said Tait. "In the scene. All the things they used to teach in
end there were hundreds of layers, 30 layers of just particles. Those were the very last art school. I think people can get caught
three shots we were working on, right up to the deadline, with a few people working up in a technical trap. There has to be a
24/7. It was an awful lot to do." balance."

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CGSociety - LOVELY BONES, LOVELY LANDSCAPES

Image © Paramount Pictures.

Weta digitally had to make the practical


hole much deeper, adding debris and the
illusion that items were sinking into the
dirt. "It was almost like a character," said
Compositing Supervisor Charlie Tait. "It
allowed the shape and structure to be
changed."

A small hole was dug, with a big blue


tarpaulin stretched over top to give it an
edge. The sink hole was modeled and
went through a lengthy design process.
The debris in the sink hole was added,
some made from scratch and some was
found in Weta's library of old models. The
dirt was filmed as elements for filling in
the sink hole at the end.
Image © Paramount Pictures.

Art Director Michael Pangrazio worked


on the Ships in the Bottle sequence
during his six months without review. In
the beginning, he didn't even know what
the main character Susie looked like, or
even the costuming. He did a scene with
a stand-in Susie running along a beach
with huge Ships in the Bottles that was
incorporated into the father smashing
his Ships in the Bottle collection, re
presenting the membrane between the
two dimensions being breached and
Susie sensing her fathers' grief and
anger.

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CGSociety - LOVELY BONES, LOVELY LANDSCAPES

Image © Paramount Pictures.

Lovely Bones
WETA Digital
Michael Pangrazio, Art Director
Charlie Tait, Compositing Supervisor

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CGSociety - Machinarium

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CGSociety :: Game Production Focus


12 January 2010, by Paul Hellard

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5435[5/18/2010 3:51:34 AM]


CGSociety - Machinarium

Jakub Dvorský started Amanita Design in


2003 when he finished Academy of Arts in
Prague with a free online flash game called
'Samorost' as his thesis project. In 2005
animator Vaclav Blin joined the studio and
'Samorost 2' was created. Since then we
have found several excellent collaborators -
musician Tomas 'Floex' Dvorak, programmer
David Oliva, painter Adolf Lachman, sound
maker Tomas 'Pif' Dvorak and animator
Jaromir Plachy. The gang was almost
complete.

Besides the independent and commissioned flash games like


'Samorost' series, 'The Quest For The Rest', 'Rocketman VC'
and 'Questionaut', the artists at Amanita Studio created a
couple of music videos 'Plantage' and 'Na tu svatbu', also
websites, animations, illustrations and production design.

Even though they are scattered around the Czech Republic, the
core business of Amanita is online games. However there are
always side-projects that keep the gang fresh and original.
Vaclav Blin is preparing a very strange interactive music video,
Jakub is working on production design for an animated feature
film, Adolf Lachman is a freelance painter and sculptor. The
cities of Prague, Brno and Pardubice bubble along with all kinds
of creativity from this troupe.

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CGSociety - Machinarium

Starting from the blank canvas, the Amanita


crew decided they wanted to create a full-
length adventure game.

"We wanted to make it a bit different and


more complex then our previous flash
games," explains Jakub. "Then we came up
with an idea of a robot as the main hero who
lives in robotic world - that gave us a lot of
space for various possibilities, with other
characters and the environment full of
machines, tubes, levers etc., perfect for
creating and implementing various logical
puzzles. It all started from just a quick idea
and a brainstorming session."

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CGSociety - Machinarium

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CGSociety - Machinarium

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To invent and create the final look of the


game was quite a long process. Even at the
very beginning the crew knew they needed to
be very different from the previous games
which is also very different from most of the
current games and match the world of rusty
robots.

"We felt we needed something warm with


visible human touch in it to create a contrast
to that robotic world that the character goes
into, so we came up with an idea of hand-
drawn backgrounds which are scanned and
finished in Photoshop. Also the animations
are mostly hand-animated frame by frame,

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CGSociety - Machinarium

the sounds effects live recorded and the


music full of live instruments."

A very rustic, hand-made computer game

Amanita Design only used Photoshop for


backgrounds and characters and then
Flash for animation and the game itself.
"So first we would make the design
sketches and initial concept art (all on
paper), then the backgrounds and
characters are drawn on paper. It only get
scanned and finished in Photoshop
(shades, colors, textures).

The final bitmaps are imported to Flash


and all the animations are done and then
it goes to the programer," explains Jakub.

The story is about a little robot who has been


unjustly thrown out to the scrap yard out of
Machinarium which is a town populated only
by robots.

In the game he returns to the town and


meets the gangsters from Black Cap
Brotherhood. These guys are just preparing a
bomb attack on the central tower where the
town ruler is living. Of course our hero must
stop them and also rescue his friend robot-
girl.

There are two kinds of


puzzles and classical
adventure tasks, e.g. If you

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CGSociety - Machinarium

want to pass through the


police control you must
dress up like policeman, so
you need to get beacon
(bulb) and something what
resembles the police hat
(colored traffic cone), and
logical puzzles which are
usually in detailed window
which opens when you click
on some machine etc.

"We wanted the game to be


challenging even for hard
core gamers, but at the
same time accessible for
everyone, even non-
gamers," Jakub explains.

"That's why we implemented into the game the hint system and the comic book walk-through. The hand-drawn walk-through is part
of the game so you don't need to feel ashamed if you'll use it now and then, but only when you are really stuck."

Amanita Design

Machinarium

'Samorost 1

'Samorost 2

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CGSociety - Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

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Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 developer interview with Lead Artist Brent Gibson
and Lead Animator Adam Olshan from Vicarious Visions.

CGSociety :: Game Production Focus


29 September 2009, by Peter Rizkalla

What once began years ago as a small, hopeful title called 'X-Men
Legends' has now been shaped into a mainstay in the game industry.
The Marvel Ultimate Alliance series is now considered an anticipated,
ongoing series. The production of 'Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2' brings a
typical question to artists and animators working on a recognizable
series. How do you take a recognizable universe with iconic
characters and reshape them into a new title? Lead Artist, Brent
Gibson and Lead Animator, Adam Olshan talk to us about the
painstaking challenge that faced the Vicarious Visions crew when
creating 'Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2'.

Dealing with any Marvel piece means that you have to stay true to the source
material. Unlike previous titles such as 'X-Men Legends 2' where many artistic
liberties could be taken, MUA2 has a much more serious, 'real world' feel to
the story so the visual feel also has to be taken seriously. In MUA 2 we find
that a law has been passed that requires anyone with special abilities such as

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CGSociety - Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

mutants and superheroes to be registered under the Mutant Registration Act.

This causes a civil war between mutants who see


security in the act and are in favor of it and
mutants who see the act as a way of steeling their
freedom and are opposed to the act. “The source
material is absolutely incredible regardless if it’s
characters or Marvel universe locations,” says Brent
Gibson. “It made sense to head in a more realistic
direction with the Civil War story line which has
themes and subject matter that is very relevant to
  our times. We then decided to ground the Marvel
universe in a more modern reality to make it
visually resonate with a wide audience and be
more cohesive and consistent. This is tougher than
it sounds with such a wide variety of visuals that
need to be tied together For example; Latveria vs.
Wakanda, or how do you get Songbird or Thor to
hold their visual feel in a manner that explores
more realism?”

Dealing with realism in a superhero game almost


seems like a paradox, especially when dealing with
superheroes in a video game. “We wanted to see
and feel the effects of our superhuman powers
touch more of the environment to make for a more
visceral experience. The idea was not to just have
awesome visual FX. As a player you want to impact
your surroundings, not just have them always be
cosmetic.”
 

The Ultimate Alliance series is known to be absolutely packed with a variety of


different heroes and mutants from the Marvel Universe which instantly means
that an outstanding amount of content would need to be designed. Faced with
such a huge task at hand, the Vicarious team gets help from many other
teams as well as a single freelance artist. “The character modeling was a
collaborative effort between our internal talent, Activision central art, Eric
Deschamps (freelance concept artist), and Xpec. Our concept artists, with the
help of Eric, worked tirelessly to crank out hundreds of concept pieces to cover
the massive number of Marvel heroes and villains needed for the game. Those
were passed off to Activision central art to be modeled in ZBrush. After
passing through us again for quality checks, the ZBrush models where sent

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CGSociety - Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

over to Xpec to be made into game assets. Once they passed our quality
benchmarks they would be handed back to us for final touch-ups and
preparation to go in game. From there our army of animators, engineers,
effects artist, and audio folks would bring them to life. Each character went
through a lot to become playable, and it still blows my mind that we have so
many that are playable.”

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CGSociety - Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

   

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Any Marvel game is a game that deals with


superpowers. Superheroes have unique physical
abilities which changes how a normal humanoid
character model would be animated. This, in turn,
presents problems for the animation crew. How do
you create dynamic looking superhero animations
while still being believable? Remember, this game
needs to be taken seriously. “Mr. Fantastic’s
stretching abilities posed an interesting challenge,
since scale (especially non-linear scale) can
create unexpected results. Mr. F’s rig was driven
by biped, so we could preserve the portability of
animations. The animators used a combination of
biped sub-anims (to stretch the rig) and helper
dummies (to form curves and arcs in the limbs).
The scaled portions of the rig were then exported
as translation instead of scale, making things
much cleaner.”

Lighting the MUA2 world meant having versatility.


The inclusion of many different environments
meant that each of those environments had to be
lit according to the circumstance. To keep things
simple, the team then categorized the
environments into dark and light and then created
two sets of lighting systems; one for darker levels
and the other for lighter levels. “Our new system
for outdoor environments has crisp, clean
shadows. The indoor environments support four
fully-dynamic shadow casting lights. And
everything is dynamic, so our heroes can smash
and break just about anything. Aesthetically, we
worked hard to make sure that every light had a
source and that all of the colors felt natural in its
setting. We tried to allow everything to be lit only
by the lights in the environment to ensure that
cohesion we were looking for. Things like party
lights took away from the art and tended to

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CGSociety - Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

flatten everything out. We did have rim light


solutions to help pop the characters a bit. It is
interesting to add that several of our tools
allowed for working in real time. The Lighting
system was one of them. It was a huge time
saver to light the levels in engine while the game
is running.”

MUA2 comes with a promise that almost anything


in the environments would be destructable. Don’t
forget, this was only partially available in the first
Marvel Ultimate Alliance due to the fact that game
was also being developed for the previous
generation of game systems which had much
greater hardware limitations than current gen
consoles. “We approached environments a bit
differently than the MUA/Legends games of the
past. We integrated aspects of Havok into MUA2.
Havok changed quite a few things. It also
presented some awesome challenges. With larger
more open spaces comes the need to actually fill
those spaces. Suddenly we were able to spawn
tons of debris as we laid waste to objects all
throughout the environments. With Havok all of
those things need physics! I think I heard an
engineer cry as I just said that."

So what does that mean for prop animations? “In


MUA2 something as simple as a supply crate now
has the ability to spawn something killer – like
grenades that you can pick up and use, or light-
able flares, or even something simple like packing
peanuts. Then your fusion/power designer goes
and does something crazy like plug Havok forces
into the hero powers <GASP!>. You find yourself
and three hero buddies in an environment with
swingable dynamic casting lights and destructible
objects everywhere and – BANG – you have
massive destruction! You get a chance to play a
super hero game where you actually feel like you
have incredibly powerful superhuman abilities that
not only look great but also affect your

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CGSociety - Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

environment.”

So in the ocean of design and animation that is


Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, you can imagine that
sheer content was probably the largest hurdle to
jump. “Creating the shear amount of content was
the biggest challenge. We created dozens of
levels, dozens upon dozens of characters,
hundreds of powers, hundreds of fusions,
thousands of animations, and so much more.”
With all this content being created under time
restrictions, there is still material that was
designed for MUA2 that did not make it to the
final version of the game. “At one point in the
game we had what we called 'cosmetic boosts'.
These collectible boosts could be applied to your
team to change their appearance for fun. For
example we had boosts that when applied would
give everyone in your party pirate hats or the
speed of the game would get jacked to about 10x
the speed. All were hilarious but we didn’t have
the time to get them through all of the legal
channels and implemented bug free. Rest assured
next time we will give it more time.”

With the recent Marvel buyout, I would have


loved to see a boost that game everyone
something like Mickey Mouse ears. Just thinking
out loud.

Related links:
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Activision
Vicarious Visions
Pixologic ZBrush
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CGSociety - NEW MOON

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CGSociety :: Production Focus


10 December 2009, by Renee Dunlop

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CGSociety - NEW MOON

As the New Moon rises, so do the stars "Strong concept art will save a lot of steps in the CG process;
at Tippett Studio. Charged with creating
the Quileute Wolf Pack for the Twilight it helps to keep the artists from meandering from the final goal." -
sequel, some of the industries leading
character artists sunk their teeth into Aharon Bourland, Technical Art Director,
just under 60 shots ranging from three
to twelve seconds that were pivotal to
Look Development.
the storyline. And those shots are
getting noticed.

Wolf Mountain and


Frankenwolf
The challenge wasn't just to build a
believable wolf, but to build five unique
wolves of extraordinary size and
weight, to portray that mass often with
little more than the surrounding trees
as comparisons, create believable fur
and humanesque eyes that weren't
distracting. Nate Fredenburg, Art
Director, helped to make sure those
requirements were fulfilled, combining
real-world attributes and CG magic.
"At Tippett Studio, we always look to
real-life creatures for reference on how
to design our characters, real or
mythical. For New Moon, we had a
special opportunity to travel down to
wolf sanctuary in Southern California to
observe wolves up close and personal.
The key to looking at live reference is
to form a knowledge base, study the
creatures, their quirks and behaviors,
the language between the pack. We
looked for signs of what the creature
was about and added those to the
visual effects to make them believable."

In Lucerne Valley, there is a sanctuary


called Wolf Mountain where a dedicated
group is trying to save wolves from
extinction. This is where the Tippett
artists traveled to spend personal time
with the wolves, many tame enough to
be approached and touched by
strangers. There the artist could
observe behaviors, pack interactions,
hierarchy behaviors, and movement,
and "closely examine the fur and its

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CGSociety - NEW MOON

different lengths over the body, the


coloring variations and markings, as
well as the structure of the face, eyes,
teeth and so on."

The trip was extremely fruitful, but Phil Tippett, with his
honed eye for perfection, added a second method to study
fur under different controlled lighting and wind. "We had a
bunch of photographs of wolves that we were studying but
Phil was insisting that we take it to the next level and have
something to touch, walk around, and actually do your own,"
explained Fredenburg. This resulted in the creation of what
became affectionately known as the "Frankenwolf".
Tippett bought wolf pelts and cut them up with an Exacta
knife and pasted it onto a taxidermy blank "so that we could
do a lighting lab in two conditions? controlled lighting on our
stage where we could shine very specific lights and look at
how the fur responded, then we took it outside on an
overcast day, which was perfect for New Moon. We came up
with strategies for how to artistically make the wolves look
better in flat lighting, which is what we were dealing with
and is a very difficult lighting situation."

Hair Raising
One of the key observations we made at Wolf Mountain was
the complexity of the fur. From nose to tail the fur quality
changes, prompting the painters to create a zone chart of
the animal that divided the wolf up into fur zones; on the
nose and the legs the hair was short and velvet, on the neck
the mane was thick and long, belly clumped and long, the
back more medium length while the tail was bushy. The
coloring was not only unique over the length of the body, but
the hair follicle had unique color ticking from root to tip.

Image courtesy Tippett Studio.

"Even with as far as computing power


has come," said Fredenburg "it still is
very difficult to accurately mimic real
life, so everything we do to come up
with our fur look is an approximation,
a cheat. It's not about replicating a wolf
hair for hair; it's about getting the feel
of a wolf. Even though we pushed 4
million hairs on this show, which is
twice what we normally grow, it is still
not nearly the number of hairs a real
wolf has."

A real wolf would have hundreds of


millions of hairs but a digital wolf will
only have perhaps four million, so some
interpretation is needed to achieve the

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CGSociety - NEW MOON

same effect.

To help achieve the fullness and fur


realism needed, Aharon Bourland,
Technical Art Director and Look
Development, helped create Tippetts'
in-house tool, Furator.

New Moon was the second Tippett


film where this tool was used. Similar
to Shake in that is uses a tree-based
system, it allows for characteristics
of hair to be added via nodes, then
merged back together for the final
groom.

It was developed to be highly flexible


and extensible, such as the ability to
twist a group of hairs from the tip and
leave the base alone.

Another very helpful addition was


Scraggle, a tool that used a CV interp
node that increased the number of CV's
and resulted in a scraggled hair, then
further adjusted so that the majority of
scraggle was towards the base, creating
the illusion of a thicker undercoat with
smoother fur on top.

Image courtesy Tippett Studio.

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CGSociety - NEW MOON

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The R&D team was moved to sit next


to the painters so information could be
shared quickly and deficiently. Since
Furator is so new and constantly
improving, the R&D department was
instrumental with collaborating with the
painters to make sure they were using
the right parameters to get the job
done and in the most efficient way.
R&D was able to teach the paint how
the tool was meant to be used and the
painters, in turn, were able to teach the
software developers how they wanted
to use the tools.

Wolf coloration is rather complicated


due to the multiple color changes, not
only across the body but down the
length of the hair. A grey wolf might
have dark roots and a white band in the
middle and a brownish tip, yet add it all
up and you have a salt and pepper

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CGSociety - NEW MOON

look.

To mimic this, Tippetts' texture painters


painted three different sets of maps to
dictate the color from the root to the
tip of the fur.

The painters had to achieve just the


right amount of deep color to the fur
without making it look too noisy or
course, and the lighters had to
maintain that detail but soften the fur
so it had that nice plush feel.

Painters painted maps and set numbers


that stylized the hair, to clump,
elevate, change the length, or
randomize it to make it look more
natural. Then they used imaged-based
lighting to mimic the films overcast
environments.

Eyes and Face


The book described the wolves as
having eerily human eyes. "We were
told early on that they literally they
wanted us to plop the actors eyes into
wolf, which always sounds like a good
idea on paper but it does not work
visually," said Fredenburg, "so we had
to play how much to accentuate them
as human eyes and how much to push
them towards wolf eyes. The eyelid
shape around them is definitely wolf.
For the eyeball itself we tended to play
a little bit dark so they wouldn't stick
out as these funny white eyeballs in the
head of the wolf." Wolf eyes are iconic
and easily recognizable. They have a
very distinct eye shape and mysterious
expression. "As soon as we put the
human eyes in that it destroyed that
iconic wolf look, so we tended to play it
as subtle as possible to keep from
distracting from the wolf."

With eyes, the surface quality is not hard to This was particularly challenging on one extreme close-up shot, as explained
achieve but there's something intangible about by Bourland.
eyes that is hard to get right. There are all kinds
of subtleties that go into eyes that make them "We had to re-write our fur shader for this show. It was so close on the eye
alive. The life in the eye comes from the way you could see individual hairs coming out of the skin. We had to write a new
light plays on the eye when it's refracted shader that would shade a cylinder so you could see each hair was rounded

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CGSociety - NEW MOON

through the lens. "It's not by mistake that when you were close, but as you backed away it would shift to a flatter
people say they're windows to the soul. They're shading model, which worked better at a distance. It would use LOD (Level
a focal point. There's a lot of unconscious stuff of Detail) to determine which shading model it was using, and transition
that we read from eyes that we still don't between them as you pulled in and out. We also re-wrote the GI (Global
understand. Illumination) setup so it would solve on the hairs. Before it was too
expensive to solve GI on the hair but we improved the fur shading so it
Eyes are doing things we know and register? like would solve occlusion and color bounce on the individual hairs."
we can read emotion on people through eyes?
but if I were to try to draw a sad eye or an
angry eye there's a subtly there that eyes can
express that we cannot necessary see but just
perceive, and that's very hard to get into CG."

Modeling and Animation Keep Your Shirt On


At Wolf Mountain, the wolves were The wolves also had to switch from human to wolf form and back again, creating
separated in different pens, some some humorous situations. Tom Gibbons, Animation Supervisor, got a chuckle out of
completely isolated, some in packs of the young wolf shape-shifting process and the dilemma it created.
three. In the packs there was generally
an alpha, beta and omega. The They wanted to approach this in complete opposition to the way they did it in
characters in the book had the same American Werewolf in London, which highlighted a long protracted painful
sort of differentiation. Sam, the black metamorphose. In Twilight, it's very fast, it happens in half a second. "In the blink of
wolf, was the Alpha and needed to be an eye the boys explode into wolf forms. When you first become a werewolf, you are
the largest wolf designed. Paul, the not very good at controlling it. What happens is, these kids explode into wolves and
grey wolf was muscular, Embry was destroy their clothes and shoes, and when they transfer back, they don't have any
smaller. Jacob, the main character, had clothes and have to go get more. It's kind of like hitting puberty or something, as
to stand out from the other wolves. To these boys mature from human boys into shape shifting into werewolves and not
streamline the approval process of being able to do it very well, which is the perfect metaphor for everything that is
creating five distinct but similar wolves, adolescent."
the model for Jacob was used as the
source asset for the other four wolves There is a great deal of ribbing among the digital wolf pack as well as what was
in a process that involved a technical observed at Wolf Mountain. "That is exactly the way wolf packs work. There is a lot
rig for adjustments and natural pose for of rough and tumble challenging play fight all the time."
approvals, with a blend shape that
could shift between the two. Character
Supervisor Stephen Unterfranz
explains: "Our rigs are broken into
animation rig, the cut up geometry, the
stiff parented geometry and then the
deforming geometry, which we call the
bound rig. One piggybacks on the
other. We have a template file that
contains all the model pieces and the
skeleton and weighting with none of the
rig, IK handles, etc, installed. Then we
have a builder file that calls all the
individual modules, the scripts that

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CGSociety - NEW MOON

construct limbs and spines and eyes,


and things like that. There is also a face
rig that comes from model, primarily a
blend shape rig that gets piped in to the
full model also in this template file."
This meant the one master wolf and
rigging system could push out five
wolves from one template when they
were only updating master.

Related Links

New Moon
Tippett Studio
Tippett Studio New Moon site
Tom Gibbons, Animation Supervisor
Aharon Bourland, Technical Art Director, Look
Development
Nate Fredenburg, Art Director
Stephen Unterfranz, Character Supervisor
Wolf Mountain

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CGSociety - Night of the Werehog

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CGSociety :: Production Focus


15 December 2009, by Paul Hellard

In April of 2006, an R&D department was


established within the SEGA Corporation of
Japan and over the next three years what
emerged was a fully staffed and serviced CG
animation studio.
The creative crew was put to work on game
cinematics for the many games created for

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5402[5/18/2010 4:16:34 AM]


CGSociety - Night of the Werehog

SEGA, one of which is about a young


Werehog, basically a cross between a
werewolf and a hog.

CGSociety talked to Takeshi Ito, the producer


of the cinematic for the adventures of Sonic
and Chip in VE Animation Studio. At Siggraph
Asia 2009, the 'Night of Werehog' is selected
for the Animation Festival official screenings.

The story takes place following a journey of Sonic,


with his new found friend, Chip. This is a dark
comical story about a night when Sonic and Chip
discover an old mansion they walk into, is inhabited
by ghosts. The three ghost characters in the film are
the original characters of VE Animation Studio.

"We spent a lot of time at pre-production stage -


plot, concept art, story boards, story reels - before
we got into actual 3D CG productions," explains Ito.

"One good example is character development, which


we first started with 2D designs, went through
maquette modeling for checking details, and then
finally moved into the CG.

We didn't want to start production until after we were


confident enough to tell a convincing story." The
short has no dialog. The story is told purely with
animation. So the team concentrated on character
performance. "This is our first original short film, and
we are heading for more in the very near future. In a
long run, our major goal is to make animated feature
films," says Ito.

Yo Amano is the lead environment artist for the


cinematic. He said when his team made the props
and background, he focused on balancing the
exaggerated character Sonic to the set surrounding
him. When he placed the characters on each set, the
environments seemed too realistic compared to the
animated character of the Sonic and Chip.

So he deformed the environment and backgrounds to


make them to appear more stylized. He collaborated
closely with the lighting department to make sure the
interior of the house was more like the same style as
Sonic.

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CGSociety - Night of the Werehog

Creation of the models from hand-drawn sketch characters, brought across from the original video game Sonic image, was the major
job here in modeling. There are a few differences though. These character models need to be able to stretch and deform. Go from a
small ball to a towering giant. As there are no spoken lines in the cinematic, the story would need to be propelled as these characters
act out their thoughts.

Creation of the models from hand-drawn


sketch characters, brought across from the
original video game Sonic image, was the
major job here in modeling. There are a few
differences though. These character models
need to be able to stretch and deform. Go
from a small ball to a towering giant. As
there are no spoken lines in the cinematic,
the story would need to be propelled as
these characters act out their thoughts.
Our modeling team first builds the low
polygon models. At this phase, the director
will check it in the low polygon models, if
director gave them the green light, then the
models pass to the rigging and animation
department to set up.

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CGSociety - Night of the Werehog

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When he saw the schedule of


this project, Animation
supervisor Jiro Yamagishi
knew there was not enough
time to do motion capture.

And he had to find out a way


to add motion to characters
in some other way. Visual
tReference. "What I did was
make an acting plan,"
explains Jiro Yamagishi. "I
hired actors to film and used
their moves as reference."

He asked them to move as the


characters would in the storyboard, but

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5402&page=2[5/18/2010 4:17:15 AM]


CGSociety - Night of the Werehog

he wanted them to not move exactly


the same as in the script because he
wanted to only take some variations
and ideas from their moves.

These actors' work gave him further


inspiration for bringing more animation
to the 3D models. Not as easy as it
sounds. Over several months work, the
actors, animators and director grew to
know the characters very well. Well
enough to display thoughts and fears
in their body language alone.

Autodesk Maya was at the core of the "Night


of the Werehog" production pipeline. Maya
2008 was used in all 3D tasks such as layout,
modeling, rigging, animation, shading,
effects, and lighting.

Our Maya-based rigging and animation


system streamlined the body rigging process.
Facial rigging is manually done per character
on Maya, which enabled us to create rich and
expressive facial animations with stretch and
squash. The motion of the ghosts' cloth was
a blend of skinning and mayaMuscle's smart
collision and jiggle. The tearing of Werehog's
gloves is accomplished by Maya nCloth.

Another core software is Pixar's


Photorealistic RenderMan. RenderMan
Studio's Slim, which is nicely
integrated into Maya, was used for the
first time in our production to create
various shaders. Another of the key
technologies in the "Night of the
Werehog" production is the fur system,
which was realized by the combination
of Maya Hair and RenderMan. Maya
Hair was used in the modeling and
dynamics simulation process. The
result is then exported as spatially-
partitioned RIBs with our in-house
exporter. At rendering time,
RenderMan dynamically reads in fur
RIBs based on their bounding boxes for
maximum memory efficiency.

The final quality all depends on the lighting,


just one phase before the composite. The
supervisor of the lighting department, Hada

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CGSociety - Night of the Werehog

Takuya said "In this project, we needed to


show clear transparent color. We tried to
avoid using too many layers by trying to
perfect the images at lighting phase. Also,
the character layer and background layer are
the only two layers rendered.

From time to time, a character layer is


broken down to ambient and key light layers,
and a background layers is broken down to
front and back light layers. If the process
was needed multiple times, we rendered
characters with ambient and key light, then
background with only front and back light
only. As a result, there was no specular and
diffuse layers, and less color correction
process."

Lighting was primarily important in the


'Werehog' cinematic because it also
took a part in the dramatic overtone of
the story. There was not only an
electrical storm going on outside.

There were camera flashes going off,


and each of the ghosts were
luminescent, and moving around the
room. Each of the assets had many
effects, like thunderbolts with the flash
timing, ghosts that flashed and made
themselves transparent.

All these assets needed to combine at the


lighting phase. If this didn't happen, work
flow was affected. If all the layers were
composited in the final compositing process,
there would be less load to render. The
triumph as far as Suzuki is concerned is that
all the stages were complete and ready to
render, and fed into final composites all at
the same time.

All images and characters © SEGA/© SSVE.


All rights Reserved.

SEGA

Night of the Werehog


SEGA SAMMY VISUAL ENTERTAINMENT
INC.

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CGSociety - Run for the Artifact

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CGSociety :: Tutorial
8 December 2009, by Aurelien Rantet (Aurel0988)

Just before the challenge


began, I was planning to
work on a personal movie
project. In fact I was
about to start my last
school year in September.
You see, I am studiing at
the ESTEI in Bordeaux,
which develops a three
year program in CG.

I would have to find an


internship soon and I did
not have a lot of pieces
to show on my demo-
reel. I hadn't started this
personal project when I
saw that a CGChallenge
had just begun.

The 'Run for the Artifact' short film entry.

It took me one second to give up my first idea and to start working on this competition. I thought that having participated in an
international competition would be a good thing to have on my CV. When I saw the theme, I could not resist. Then I won. I'm pretty

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CGSociety - Run for the Artifact

new in the CG world so this award is a real honor for me, especially considering the level of the other participants.

At first, I wanted to do a really serious story.


With realistic characters, deeply detailed
environments and put the emphasis on good
visual effects. I had imagined a script with a
proud warrior doing amazing stunts like
jumping from buildings on fire, fighting giant
robots and plenty of other things that action
movie heroes do. But when I started
sketching, I realized two things. I'm alone,
and I have got only two months to do the
whole thing!

I then decided to put the story as the first


priority, with funny jokes and a good
punchline. I started by writing down any idea
or gags that came to my mind. I gathered
them in order to make an unique story. I
decided I wanted a story with a beginning
and an end. I think seeing a movie trailer
which has no movie coming next is too
frustrating!

Texture Studies.

When the story was final, I started to work on the


design. The tone of the story was definitely funny
so I felt free to use delirious shapes, glaring
colors and overdone motion. I didn't want to have
an ultra-realistic aspect but rather something
funny to watch, with a lot of solid color like a
cartoon. I did some tests in order to determine
which techniques I could use.

I worked on the textures to give them a stylized


aspect, rather than ultra-realistic. Even the
lightning was worked the same way. I've not used
global illumination or final gather, only spotlight
and omni-directional light, locally applied to keep

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CGSociety - Run for the Artifact

complete control.

When you are designing characters, it's really


important to stay coherent with the script.
Anybody must be able to recognize the skills and
the mood of the character he is watching. I
wanted the main character to look friendly. He is
a spy but, not like James Bond.

He does not control each event occuring around


him! His suit recalls modern warfare equipment,
with the bullet proof vest, the gun hustler. But he
doesn't have the shoulders of Rambo. He does
not look threatening. The bad guy is the exact
opposite image. He is tall and strong, he looks
rustic.

The robot's design is very simple: it's the


opposite view of all machines we can see in
video games or films, which are very
complex with a lot of mechanisms and
details. I've tried to keep it threatening by
using the good camera shot. There is a funny
contradiction because the biggest enemy
looks like a big washing machine. For the
other machines in the factory, I drew my
inspiration from industrial robots. It's
sometimes very useful to know how real
mechanics work, so as to be able to imagine
a credible one.

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CGSociety - Run for the Artifact

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The film has four different scenes with


different atmospheres. For the staging, the
environments are as important as the
character. The environment must bring the
regard at the right place, so it must be
designed for it.

When I designed buildings and structures, I


was thinking of the action placed in it, like a
video game level designer.

I think it's important to keep an eye on the


global aspect of the film and I don't think of
elements as separate things. It's very
important to stay coherent.

In order to have a strong ambiance, I used very


strong colors. They increase the emotional impact
on the viewer. In order to do the right color
choices, you must know what colors mean and
more important, what you want to show with
them.
Good lighting is essential: on my film, even in the
same scene, each shot has its own light. Most of
the shots are lit from three points, with a main
light, a fill and a rim. The main light is very
important: that's the one that makes the image
understandable. It has to be credible, generally
it's the sun or the strongest light source of the
place. The fill light comes to fill-in the shadow. It

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5383&page=2[5/18/2010 3:37:58 AM]


CGSociety - Run for the Artifact

makes all the details of the scene visible.

Generally we use the global illumination or the re-


bounce of the light. And finally the rim light
comes to underline the outline of the shapes. It's
very important for the esthetics of the picture.
The theory is very simple but you can go very far
with it. I've used this method for every shot of my
film, even sometimes to light the ground.

Making a short film is a huge task. I had never


worked on such a big project, so I did not know
how to organize my work. After having drawn my
storyboard, I directly started to model the first
scene, beginning to render shots without making
any animatics. I saw very quickly that it was
definitely the wrong way to work.
After that, I completely changed my organization,
by using basic shapes to symbolize characters and
environments. Doing it that way, I could see if the
scene was good and the action understandable
before starting detailed modeling of the scene. As
a result, I was able to go deeper in my mise-en-
scene: it allowed me to test shots and to avoid
losing too much time when they were wrong.

Time was precious. I did not have too much of it


to complete the film, so I had to optimize the

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CGSociety - Run for the Artifact

scenes. It's useless to have some highly detailed


model just on the back of the camera. So I
arranged the screenplay so we always look in the
same direction. In order to work faster, I used a
lot of tips aimed at decreasing the render time.

Using matte-painting or not recalculating fixes of


images. For example in the shot where the spy
hits the glass, the foreground doesn't move, so
I've rendered it separately, then I've added the
glow of the TV and steam of the coffee cup with
After Effects. What's happening in the window is
rendered separately.

I didn't have a plug-in to create any special


effects and I had no time to learn how to use
one. I used a basic particle tool to create all
the smoke and fire.

Moreover I had only one computer for work


and rendering, so i had to make a
compromise between visual quality and
render time. Each effect is fully optimized for
one camera angle.

I was always jumping from 3ds Max to After


Effects to find the good balance between
compositing and the mental ray render.

It's a kid's dream to be a


secret agent! It was really
fun to imagine the story
and bring it to life, so I'm
really happy people like
it.

Thanks to everyone who


offered me
encouragement and
critics during my work.

The 'Run for the Artifact' 'Making Of' video.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5383&page=2[5/18/2010 3:37:58 AM]


CGSociety - Run for the Artifact

My name is Aurelien Rantet. I'm born in Toulouse,


France. I'm living in Bordeaux at the moment,
where I'm currently preparing for a Master in 3D
animation and web design at the ESTEI.
Computer Graphics takes me a lot of time, but it's
a real passion for me.

I've drawn since I was too young to remember


and started digital painting several years ago.
Discovering 3D animation have been a real
revoluton for me.

Secret Agent
Aurelien Rantet's entry
Seceret Agent CGChallenge results
Aurelien Rantet's CGPortfolio
Autodesk 3ds Max
Adobe After Effects

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

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The Effects of Dragons, Fire, and Fur at DreamWorks.

CGSociety :: Production Focus


24 June 2010, by Renee Dunlop

As the Shrek franchise marches off into the DVD player sunset, the
fourth installment of the DreamWorks creation leaves us wanting
more- and more and more, because the film is such a joy to watch.
Under the guidance of VFX Supervisor Doug Cooper, his stellar team
produced the most visually sumptuous Shrek to date. Alex Ongaro,
Head of FX, and Cooper, who last graced these pages from his
Supervisor stint on BEE Movie, share information to help you create
your own fantasy world.

“We’ve had improvement of our FX tools,” said Cooper when asked about
advancements since his last feature film and subsequent CGSociety article.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been able to do this scope or complexity. Even
though we have a lot of the same rendering technology we had before, we
have made our renderer distribute across a large number of machines so an
individual artist can sit at their desk and have a mini-farm dedicated to them,
they can have perhaps 40 machines that feed into their machine.” This is a
good thing, since some of the scenes would test any render farm. From

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

Fiona’s long flowing curly red hair. “the best hair I think we’ve ever made,” to
the alternate reality transition, to working in stereo 3D (S3D) the artists were
put to the test, and rose to the challenge.

Doug Cooper

“When Shrek is first whisked away and Rumple’s carriage tears apart and rebuilds itself,
that sequence begins Shrek’s perfect day, being the ogre he wanted to be.”
Doug Cooper, VFX Supervisor

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

ARTISTIC CHOICES
Cooper, who as a VFX Supervisor focuses more on
the final look than how it was done, helped to

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

define a familiar world from a new point of view.


“Because it was the forth movie, we knew we
needed to make it fresh and interesting. We
really wanted to take the franchise out with a
bang. The idea of the alternate reality was a
great way for us to visually reinvent the movie as
well as being able to play with the characters and
take the whole world of Shrek and turn it on its
side. Shrek is very well known for making fun of
fairytales, and now we get to poke fun at Shrek.
It gave us an opportunity to laugh at ourselves.”

Shrek was Coopers’ first experience working on a


stereo film. By leaning on the lessons learned
during the creation of S3D films How to Train
your Dragon and Monsters vs. Aliens, Cooper
and his team were able to focus more attention
on how to utilize the S3D as a story telling
component.

“For example, there’s a moment when Shrek does


his roar at the birthday party and he’s screaming
this terror out at the audience. We are playing
Shrek’s face large in a close-up, hanging in front
of the screen in front of the audience while he’s
roaring. When he settles down for a second we let
him drift back behind the screen, so
subconsciously we are giving the audience some
distance from Shrek.” When you watch it you
don’t see it, but you feel it. It’s as if the space
opens up and there is an uncomfortable silence
between you and Shrek. (And it works.)

Fiona character in the alternate universe.


© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.
 

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5729[6/25/2010 3:35:07 AM]


CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

ALTERNATE REALITY TRANSITION


At the beginning of the film, Shrek is finding domestic life a bit crowded, and
he misses his days of terrorizing and mayhem. The final straw is at his
children’s first year birthday party when one of the young guests repeatedly
demands Shrek do his famous roar (see official site, link at the end of this
article). Storming out of the party, Shrek encounters Rumpelstiltskin, who
makes the most delectable offer- for Shrek to give just one day of his life in
exchange for the perfect day he‘s yearning for. As Shrek signs the contract,
the alternate reality begins, tearing apart Rumpelstiltskins’ carriage and
reassembling it in the alternate world.

The director wanted an effect to take Shrek from this world to the alternate
world, but wanted to avoid the overused wormhole effect. It also had to work
in both 2D and S3D. To accomplish this, DreamWorks went with the concept
of tearing up paper, symbolically the contract, in a tornado-like cloud of chaos Alex Ongaro.
created within a sphere. This particular shot used Houdini for the paper effect
and the tornado effect was handled with Maya particles before fine-tuning the
scene in proprietary software. Head of FX Alex Ongaro explains: “In a typical
particle sim, we do 80% of the shot in the application before the proprietary
format, where we can do a lot of post processing on the particles, such as fine
tune the color of the particles without having to go back to the original
software."
 

“Because the whole movie was about the contract, we went with the concept of paper
tearing apart, so we made the world rip apart like it was like paper.”
Alex Ongaro, Head of FX

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

   

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

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To make the shot work correctly in S3D, “we had


a simplified model of the set that was to tear
apart.” The lighting department rendered the high
resolution model of the environment, one image
per eye like a regular shot, then the FX
Department took those images and projected
them back on to a simple plane. “The result is an
image that looks exactly as if this was the full,
high, detailed set when in fact it's a simple plane
that we can now ‘easily’ tear apart.” The
simplified plane was processed in Houdini using a
voronoi technique to create the torn pieces of
paper, a common technique to fracture geometry.
Then, those pieces of paper were instanced to
particles, and it was the particle simulation that
© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.
was driving the technology. To further support the
appearance of paper flying in the wind, Ongaro’s
team added procedural animation applied when
the pieces detached, and displacement maps as
they spun in the tornado effect. “We decided not
to go with cloth simulation or soft bodies because
it was really hard to control and all of our effects
had to be art directable, so in a situation like this
its much easier to use a procedural approach.”

While that solved the problem of the foreground


elements, the background element was another
that pulled Shrek to the alternate universe. The
huge Maya particle simulation in the shape of a
sphere that created the effect had to be exported
© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved. roughly 30 times to achieve the detail
DreamWorks was looking for, each with it’s own
particle distribution. Anything outside the view
frustum was culled to help render times, but still
totaled 300 to 400 million particles. The particle
shader also had subsurface scattering. It was a
massive scene to export form Maya, taking 10 to
12 hours to complete.

That language through in the climatic sequence in

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

the palace at the end of the film, when Shrek’s


fate is tied to his love for Fiona and his children
and former life. The tumultuous cloud technique
that was used during the palace destruction was
also used when Shrek and Fiona kiss, and he
dreams he is going back home. By slowing the
cloud effect down to a tenth of the speed and
softening the colors to pastel hues, they were
able to utilize the same technology but give it a
romantic feel.

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


 

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5729&page=2[6/25/2010 3:37:12 AM]


CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


Curves: Source curves used to create filigree effect (left). Nib thickness and pen angle added using particles (center). An assortment of filigree curve styles stored in a
library (right). Artist: Andrew Kim

THE GRASS ISN’T GREENER


Visually, one of the thing Cooper wanted to do was make sure the alternate reality had clear visual
indicators that it was different, bringing those in slowly so as not to give anything away at first. “We
took the Shrek world and cranked it up to eleven, with a beautiful colorful bright storybook style for the
town he terrorizes. We don’t reveal that anything is amiss until after that, when we bring him into the
forest where he sees the wanted posters and sees Fiona is on one of those posters. That is where we
introduce the visual concepts that will eventually describe the alternate reality.” There is a little more of
a fall coloration in the leaves and golden grasses. Once Shrek discovers his home isn’t his home
anymore, the contrasts are starker, the sun brighter, the shadows deeper, and the whole place is dryer.
What was once a swamp is now baked dirt, dried yellowed grasses and dead trees with no leaves.

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


Process: Source curves are added from a library to layout the effect (left). The rendered result of the filigree curves (center). The volumetric ray burst from the
character that precedes the filigree burst (right). Artist: Andrew Kim

FILIGREE POOF
There is also the 'rumple poof' that he disappears in, developed by Andrew Kim. As explained by
Cooper, “we spent a lot of time working with Andrew on the art direction to comes up with something
that had an intricate filigree design pattern and still have an organic quality. He really nailed that, and
that was a really difficult thing to achieve. We tried to do that kind of effect in films before, but Andrew
pulled all the stops and came up with a great technique that lets us get the intricate design detail that
also works in stereo.” None of it is cheated, and you can really feel it live in the space of the stereo
image.

This process will be covered in a SIGGRAPH paper this year, but above is a sneak peek of how it was
done. Inspired by the banf effect from one of the X-Men movies, DreamWorks used procedurals instead
of relying on nondeterministic simulation. According to Ongaro, “we created a library of particles doing
this filigree effect and those particles that were already saved on disk were placed in each scene to
create this poof.”

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Used in both an early scene as Shrek first celebrates his perfect day and as a group scene at the end,
the mud angels was a process that evolved as much as the storyline. “I can explain both, because they
share a technique. Then I can explain the one at the end, because it was a big hack,” Ongaro chuckled.

MUD ANGELS

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

The first mud angel was with Shrek only, using Maya particles. That took quite a bit of iterations to get
the thickness and viscosity right, and the shading to feel wet and have a glistening quality. The effect
worked extremely well but it was ridiculously slow, with simulation taking three to four days.
Fortunately (or unfortunately!), the shot worked so well and the director loved it so much he decided to
add it to the end with all the main and many secondary characters included. On top of that, the artist
that worked on the single mud angel shot was now working on the tornado shot, so a different artist had
to be assigned. That artist was versed in RealFlow, so selected that software for the job. While RealFlow
was excellent with the particles, it proved difficult to art direct.

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.


The first figure is what simulated in Maya, the pink particles are coming straight from the simulation, the blue one are offset using velocity vector in order to achieve
border treatment. The second and third image are the result of the first image after being treated in composting, those are the map used has displacement maps, the
first to push the plane down the second to pull it up at the edges. The fourth figure is a close up of the result. Artist: Baptiste Van Opstal.

The solution was to use RealFlow on the close-up characters at the beginning, Shrek, Fiona, and some
other ogres, a simulation that took 20-30 hours per character, much faster than Maya but still too
prohibitive to use for all the characters in the wide shot. To complete the required number of characters
scattered around the outside of the screen, Ongaro proposed a simple but sparkling solution, using
displacement maps. “We created a system that was emitting particles from the characters arms and
legs. Those were rendered as black and white images which were projected on to the plane and used as
displacement maps. It’s kind of a foot print system, but because the mud had to be viscous, we thought
doing particles would be easier. Then, we could add practical expressions to make it look more alive.”
Some particles dragged a bit, others matched the speed of the characters movement and even change
the opacity, all resulting in a convincing look that blended well with the simulation. The two methods
work together so well you can’t really see where the breaking point is.

© 2010 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

THE END
So sadly, it’s time to allow a little alone time for Shrek and Fiona, and Donkey and Puss in Boots. I’m

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CGSociety - SHREK Forever After

sorry to see them go. But they’ve made us laugh and cry while they’ve taught a valuable lesson: While
each day we whittle away the hours in our own alternate realities don’t forget to read the fine print, or
you may never get home again.

Related links:
Shrek
DreamWorks Animation
Doug Cooper
Alex Ongaro
BEE Movie
Maya
Houdini
RealFlow

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

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CGSociety talks to
'Singularity' Art Directors Brian Pelletier and Charles Morrow.

CGSociety :: Game Production Focus


10 June 2010, by Peter Rizkalla

At the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con a friend of


mine introduced me to an Activision game
developer who I’d never met before. He
mentioned working on a game called Singularity.
I had first heard of Singularity back when it was
announced at the 2008 E3 and I was very
interested in the time altering concepts behind the
game. How would Singularity’s unique ability to
control time affect the animation? How would it
be presented? What techniques and tools would
be used in developing the time bending effects?
As we all talked more and more, I realized that I

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

was talking to Activision Producer Brian Pass.


With Brian’s help I got the opportunity to talk to © 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
Raven Software Art Directors Brian Pelletier and
Charles Morrow to really get a good look at the
gorgeous and very elaborate animation
techniques in developing Singularity.

First of all, the idea for Singularity was first


conceived by only a handful of Raven developers.
As the project progressed, the entire Raven
Software team had been working to complete
Singularity which is a feat that is very rare for
this development studio.

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Concept
Charles Morrow introduces the whole theme of
Singularity. “Believability was first up and a few

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

stunning photographs of derelict cities and


structures provided the principal art direction. It
was critical the world feel as realistic, as credible,
as epic – and as forgotten - as possible. That
prototype team established a steep sense of
abandonment and desperate solitude in the ‘proof
of concept’ level. We also settled on a Soviet
location early in production. Thematically, this
allowed us to throw our hero into early and
historic cold-war tension and generate the ‘what
if’ revisionism made possible by our scientific
Singularity. The second stage was to frost-on
graphical echoes of classical science-fiction motifs,
Americana motifs from the sci-fi boom of the 40s
and 50s – again tapping into cold war aesthetics.
That’s how the concept artists were asked to
approach Katorga-12: take angular 50’s era
Soviet realism in one hand, and space-age
Americana sci-fi in the other, and mash ‘em up.
Stylistically, but brutally. We called this ‘Ray-gun
Realism’.”

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Design
'Uncanny' is the single word that Charles Morrow
uses to describe Singularity which is a rightly
fitting term for Raven Software as they have
probably created every great X-Men game in the
last seven years from X-Men Legends 1 and 2 to
Marvel Ultimate Alliance to X-Men Origins:
Wolverine. “Not too much rocket science here,”
says Art Director Brian Pelletier. “It was useful to
often go dark, wet, and windy. Imply as much as

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

reveal. Aside from dim lighting, this gave us


opportunities to bring the E-99 ‘foliage’, gases
and pools to life. And of course gave us dark
corners creatures could spring from. The
architecture was directed to read typically lab-like
and sterile, industrial and oversized, very brutal
and ‘work camp’ – though the team found a few
opportunities to break that oppression by adding
notes of humanity, such as placing children’s
artwork in the educational facility."
© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
"Having occasional bad weather, disruptions to
time flow, encounters with the island’s present
denizens and whispers of the past all vying for the
player’s attention, we allow the island come alive.
Just as when you enter a crowded party or a fair,
you choose what interests you the most…you
can’t see it all instantly. There are layers to the
interaction, each player will prioritize as he or she
wishes. Some interactions will overlap; some will
demand the player’s complete attention.”
Speaking of the environments; Todd Foster is the
Lead Environment Artist of Singularity.

Brian Pelletier continues on about the design of


Singularity. “In regards to art, the visual goal is
to bring the world to life. We need to take a lot of
the inanimate objects and set pieces we make
and have them animating or doing something
that creates movement in the world. Trees and
plant sway in the breeze, flags wave, fans spin,
etc. Environmental FX really adds to the
movement in the scene; water dripping, rain,
sparks from electronics, litter and bits of debris
floating in the air, smoke, fog this list goes on.
One of the other visual movement cues that can
go unnoticed is the surface reaction you get as
you walk through the worlds. We take a lot of
care in getting the reflection or specular
highlights to move across surfaces as you
traverse through the world and we ride a fine line
so the player subconsciously notices the
movement of the reflections on the surfaces but
not distracted by them. We painstakingly adjust
our surface shaders to give us nice reaction as
you move past them.”

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved

   

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© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved

Controlling Time
Getting the animations to look right when altering
the time of certain objects and characters was my
main interest in Singularity. Pelletier tells us how
the Raven crew came up with the time-
manipulating animations. “Generally we had two
different kinds of age events; one while using the
Time Manipulation Device (TMD) and the other
was world environmental age events. The TMD
glove effects were meant to feel like time was
being pushed into an item or character; or pulled
from them. Items affected by the TMD were a
different matter. We had to determine what a

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

good solution for forcing time or removing time


from an item; as well as making it feel good and
communicate well to the player. After a number
of iterations, we went with a peel or crumble age
event for environmental age changes, and a burn
away feel to the aging events for items and
characters. After a number of concepts were
completed, we’d determined that the animation of
the items and characters would play a large part
in how the effects would feel deliberate."
© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved
 

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

"We decided to have the material transitions run


from animation breaks and deforms while
character aging would start from the core and
radiate out from there. To get this we
experimented with a couple different methods
and went with a hybrid of vertex painting to get a
direct motion to the material component and
some aged noise to give it some randomness. We
used an alpha channel too and called it in the
material during the age event and transitioned
between the two different age states, one clean
and one decayed. We wanted the particle systems
to also make some sense and to not look too
much like we’d ‘magic’d’ the age events. The
particle systems generally use a base age ash
effect. Using the color of the transition it calls
smaller sprites that transition from the age color
to an ash to give the feel of item or character
aging away. Depending on the item, other effects
are added like rust, dust, paint peels, whatever
the item or environment needed. Switching
between the two time states when the gameplay
called for it has been a huge hurdle to overcome;
juggling memory budgets, texture budgets and
audio budgets in order to make sure both looks
and atmospheres were not only captured faithfully
but ran well on all the platforms kept a lot of our
team members busy for a good portion of the
development cycle of Singularity.” Designing how
characters would look, before and after, being
altered by the TMD was the task of Lead
Character Artist, Ryan Butts.

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved


 

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved


 

Development
Typical tools of the trade were used in creating
Singularity but it’s also nice to know that the
Raven team still likes to put out concepts on good
old paper. “We still sketch on paper and sketch
and paint digitally using mainly Photoshop using a
Wacom Cintiq – all of our artists have them,” says
Pelletier as I jealously wait for him to continue.

“Texturing is done with Photoshop with help from


Crazy Bump. We model using mostly Max and
ZBrush and also use Maya and Softimage.
Basically whatever the tools the artists are
comfortable using; we don’t force them to use
one tool over the other. Animation uses, Maya
and 3ds Max animation tools, aligned with an on
site Motion Capture studio. Initially there was a
reliance on building a library of high poly assets
we could repurpose or kitbash to create a new
character or to create modifications on an existing
character. Eventually this pipeline included
tapping into our 3D Scanning department here at
the studio, where we could scan in various military
gear or other equipment for base meshes.
Granted, there is a good deal of cleanup involved
here, but thanks to ZBrush we were able to
streamline this process. We also used ZBrush to
create “proxy” or temp meshes, allowing us to
rapidly prototype interesting and unique
silhouettes we would then run by various

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

members of the team. Artists would then facemap


these test assets in 3ds Max and rendered them
down to low poly assets the animators could use
to build new rigs or block in test animations. This
© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
process worked well for the mutant civilians
wandering through the village areas as well as for
some multi-limbed creatures featured in multiple
aspects of the game. Another key software
package we used for this prototyping process and
for creating our final retopologized base meshes
was Topogun. Topogun gave us the freedom to do
in a matter of hours, what would normally have
taken several days. Software packages like these
and others like 3DCoat, are really helping to free
up an artist’s time.”

Brian Pelletier tells us how familiar the Raven


team is with the use of the Unreal Engine. “For
shaders, Raven has been developing with the
Unreal Engine for over four years now. On our
past Unreal powered game, Wolverine:Uncaged
Edition, we invested heavily into shader
technology that would allow us to dynamically
gore and heal characters. For Singularity, we
recognized that we didn’t need such a large
commitment to a single feature like gore, instead
we wanted to focus a high overall level of polish
on the materials. And unlike our other title, this
game features a first person camera which means
the player can have a much closer view of your
characters –it needs to always look great.”

© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.


 

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CGSociety - SINGULARITY

Pelletier finishes up by giving us a little


philosophy on how he believes human characters
should be made, as pertains to his expertise of
course. “We spent a substantial amount of time
focusing on the lighting and shading of our human
characters, particularly the look of skin, eyes and
hair. I believe that it is a common mistake to give
a character a simple Phong shaded material with
just diffuse, spec and normal maps. We are all
experts in how real people should look and there’s
a lot more going on with skin that a simple
shading model doesn’t accurately reproduce.

Our approach used a spherical environment map


projection to simulate outdoor skydome lighting
and skin subsurface scattering. We found that
contributing small amounts of this to the diffuse
and transmission channels could drastically affect
the believability of our character materials. This © 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved
benefits both the art and the tech teams as
spherical environment maps are a single,
relatively small 2d-texture read. Artist can paint
changes and experiment with a look much easier
than with a traditional cube map. It helped that
some of our character guys were already familiar
with the concept since it behaved similar to a
feature in ZBrush, making it a natural addition to
characters in our game. Using spherical maps for
pseudo-lighting can be a relatively cheap process
in terms of texture sampling time and additional
instruction count –something every programmer
and tech artist who looks at performance loves to
hear.”

Singularity will be released for the Xbox 360, PS3


and PC towards the end of June 2010.

Related links:
Raven Software
Singularity
© 2010 Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved
Activision

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

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erminator Salvation, the recently released


fourth installment in the iconic series, differs
considerably from the prior films in terms of
look, setting, and effects. T4 takes place in 2018 in
a bleak post-Apocalyptic future, whereas the other
films were by and large contemporary. The
Terminator robots are less primitive, more
numerous and also better articulated, owing to
major advances in CGI technology since ‘Terminator
3: Age of the Machines’ was released in 2003. And
though Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator of
the first three films, has gone on to be Governor of
California, an animated version of him appears in a
brief but tantalizing sequence.

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Whiskytree Inc.

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

McG, the film’s director, and Charlie Gibson, the


VFX supervisor, were both new to the franchise.
“McG came to me with the idea of creating an
action-driven film with effects rather than an
effects-driven action film—and that appealed to
me,” says Gibson. That idea became the organizing
principal for T4. Most of the effects, practical as well
as VFX, were done in camera and then animated
based on the footage. “We were always going for
the best action and the best cinematic effects first,
and then finding ways to shoehorn the CG effects
into that context,” he adds. “The net result is that
you get a very integrated and organic feeling, and
you’re not sure where the effects start and where
the action stops, which is the goal."

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

Gibson came on board after some heavy lifting on


the three effects-laden 'Pirates of the Caribbean'
movies. (He won his second Oscar as part of the
team that did 'Dead Man’s Chest'—the first was for
'Babe' in 1995—and he was nominated for ‘Curse of
the Black Pearl’.) The experience stood him in good
stead. He had already worked closely on Pirates
with the VFX team under Ben Snow at Industrial
Light & Magic, which was also the main visual
effects and animation house on T4.

“We drew more on the work ILM had done on


'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Iron Man' than on
'Terminator 3',” he says. To make the CG animation
effects appear grounded in reality, the film relied
heavily on ILM’s iMoCap technology which was
developed by John Knoll for Pirates. The iMoCap
system represents a big advance over traditional
motion capture where actors on a set imagine they
are grappling with an invisible CG character that’s
later animated in.

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

And T4 includes numerous fight and chase


sequences with a multitude of Terminators. With
iMoCap, it was possible to capture the physical

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

connection between what would end up being CG


Terminators and the film’s two stars, Christian Bale
and Sam Worthington. “Having a performer stand in
for the Terminator on set working with the principal
actors was key to the sense of immediacy and the
sense of physical reality,” says the VFX supervisor.
“There’s actually a physical drama unfolding in front
of the camera—otherwise, it’s a one-sided tennis
game.”

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

There were some 1,250 visual effects shots in


'Terminator Salvation'. “You’re dealing with well
over an hour—65 or 70 minutes—of solid visual
effects footage,” notes Gibson. “There’s no way
for you to get in and direct every aspect of
every single shot--you have to delegate.”

In addition, Gibson served as second unit director


on the film, responsible for many of the more CG-
heavy action sequences, while McG focused more
on scenes involving the actors.

To handle the huge effort, Gibson assembled a


team of collaborators from previous projects: “I
cherry-picked people I’d worked with before, that I
trusted to come out on location when I needed
them and, in post-production, to supervise a
portion of their work.” Instead of micromanaging
them “I let them run with it, and working with their
own teams, they added all kinds of incredible things
to the shots that I certainly would never have come
up with.”
© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

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The group included Snow at ILM, which did over


360 effects shots and the lion’s share of the T4
animation; John Fragomeni and Phil Brennan, visual
effects supervisors at Asylum VFX, responsible for
most of the work on the cyborg Marcus character;
Brian Gernand, creative supervisor at Kerner
Optical, which did the miniatures; Craig Barron of
Matte World Digital; and John Dietz at Australia’s
Rising Sun Pictures.

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

Another essential contributor was Stan Winston


Studios, “the guardian of all things Terminator,” as
Gibson put it, which again built detailed animatronic
models of the various Terminators, some of them
life-size like the 7 foot 3 inch T-800. John
Rosengrant capably stepped into the shoes of
Winston, the four-time Oscar winning maestro of
makeup, special effects and animatronics who died
suddenly last June, after starting work on T4.
Winston was instrumental in designing the original
Terminator, and provided the continuity on all four
films. Rosengrant was one of his protégés.

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

“John and his team knew the Terminator character


inside out,” he says. “We were so glad that they
were there.” The Winston shop also owned a huge
Terminator archive, including a live-cast plaster
bust of Schwarzenegger from head to chest from
1983, when it was used to try out makeup
prostheses in the first Terminator. It came in handy
in creating the animated Arnold who appears
fleetingly in T4.

Schwarzenegger was also the prototype for the T-


800 in T4, which was based on his musculature and
body movements, as documented in numerous
photographs and footage in the Winston Studios’
treasure trove, including the weight-lifting
documentary ‘Pumping Iron,’ which first brought
him to prominence.

In creating the skeletal T-800, “we tried to keep


that sense of how he walked, and how he moved,”
says Gibson. “We wanted to create one single
character. How he looked, what the state of his
flesh looked like when he was on fire.”

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

ILM’s extensive work on T4 included character


animation for the huge array of Terminators and
digital double work for the main actors. There were
six different stunt doubles. Besides the Terminators
familiar from previous movies, like the T-600 and
T-800 as well as the Hunter Killers and
Transporters, there were new robot characters: like
the Harvester, a spider-like Terminator that is 60-
feet high and gathers up humans, and speeding
Moto-Terminators, modeled on Ducati motorcycles.

There was a lot of 2D work as well. “And we had to


match the look and get all the lighting right for all
of these pictures, so that if they had a practical
match-up they looked spot on,” says Marc Chu,
ILM’s animation supervisor.

The look of T4 emanated from McG and director of


photography Shane Hurlbut. McG wanted a world,
years after a nuclear holocaust, where the air is
destroyed, there’s no sun, and everything appears
bleached out. The cinematographer went for a high-
contrast, desaturated appearance. He used the OZ
process from Technicolor, which uses film with
much more silver on the negative, to obtain deep
blacks and blown out highlights. “That was really
difficult for us,” says Chu. “We had to make sure
there was still enough detail in our comps,
depending on how they projected or how they DI’d
it. That was a big challenge for us, but it paid off.
We paid attention to making sure that if you really
cranked up the brightness on it, nothing was being
blown out, and all the details were still there.

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

The creation of the Terminators started with


production designer Martin Laing doing the
conceptual artwork, but ILM’s Art Director Christian
Alzmann and the animation unit also got involved at
the takeoff stage. Observes Chu: “We had quite a
lot of input into creating these creatures from the
ground up, starting off with what they did with the
early production artwork, and then taking them into
how they looked in the movie which was bigger,
stronger, beefier Terminators.”

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

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The next stage was filming scenes that employed


the Stan Winston Studios animatronic Terminators,
both rigged and manned by puppeteers. They were
so well done that in a few instances parts of them
appeared in the final film. The animatronics had
detailed metallic surfaces which reflected light, and
ILM’s latest customising of the RenderMan shader
software that they developed for Iron Man captured
new subtleties like the bending of light around
curves.

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

ILM, in its work on last year’s Iron Man, had done


“a lot of interesting new work with shaders for
metallic surfaces, because they had done the Iron
Man suit,” says Gibson. “There are a lot of metal
surfaces in Terminator, and the realism of the
motorcycles and the robots benefited from their
knowledge they had developed.

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

After filming a scene, it was possible to know


“exactly what the Terminator would look like in the
scene, under all that lighting—how the reflections

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CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

would play, how the dirt on its surface would look,


how the sheen of the light would feel,” says T4’s
VFX supervisor. “Then we would have a more
articulate performance from an actor in an Imocap
suit as a reference. We would combine all of that in
digital and get a very articulate, specific
performance, which was kind of the best of all
worlds."

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

The cyborg Marcus character, one of the biggest


challenges in the film, was the combined work of
the Stan Winston Studio and Asylum. In one visual
high point, he rips the skin off his abdomen and
reveals that he is a machine underneath. Using
makeup, the team at Winston created the surface
detail, the bruising and contusions of the torn flesh
layer. The cavity was covered with blue makeup the
color of blue screen.

That got erased digitally at Asylum and got replaced


with animated CG innards designed, at McG’s
suggestion, to resemble a Mercedes engine under
the hood. “At the end you get this synthesis of
makeup and digital that feels very real,” observes
Gibson. “It’s something that’s impossible to do
using make-up techniques, and nearly impossible
to do using just digital techniques, which are so
difficult in terms of tracking things on the skin
surface.”

© Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved. Image Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic

Terminator Salvation site


Industrial Light & Magic
Many of the explosions of the movie were done in camera on sets. “Where Ben Snow CGS story
we could construct things like the gas station, the production blew those Asylum VFX
things up and created incredible full-scale pyrotechnics effects that were Stan Winston Studios
fantastic when we photographed them,” says Gibson. But in scenes with a John Fragomeni
wider scope, miniatures from Kerner Optical were employed. “When we Phil Brennan

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5138&page=3[5/18/2010 3:47:47 AM]


CGSociety - Terminator Salvation

were blowing up a huge portion of San Francisco, or an entire skyscraper, Kerner Optical CGS story
or an entire SkyNet installation, we used miniatures and built them at a Brian Gernand
smaller scale, 1/12 or 1/24,” he notes. Kerner was able to “precisely time Matte World Digital
and compose explosions and place them into shots, exactly to our Craig Barron
requirements. It’s very, very seamless. You don’t really know where the Rising Sun Pictures
full-scale work stops and the animation work starts.” Whiskytree Inc. CGS story

The A-10 planes that the Resistance is using against Skynet and its Discuss this article on CGTalk
Terminators were a combination of large miniatures of the fighters with
10-foot wingspans, computer generated A-10’s and the real thing. The Air  Share This 
Force was willing to do some flybys “and we were able to weave them all
together, sometimes into single shots. You weren’t able to identify any
particular technique."

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WORKSHOPS
No part of this website may be reproduced unless for JOBS EVENTS
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CGSociety - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

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CGSociety :: Production Focus


18 February 2010, by Renee Dunlop

Terry Gilliam's imagination is leaking


again, in a display of imagery from his
brain to your eyes. From landscapes of
giant high heels to airborne jellyfish, he
takes the viewer on a journey that is
nothing less than a spectacle of
inventiveness. The Imaginarium of Dr.
Parnassus utilizes Gilliam's wide range of
talents in his unique way, this time
incorporating digital FX into the soup.

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CGSociety - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Parnassus Original Designer and Art


Director David Warren, whose wry sense
of humor is entertainment in its own right
said, "there are a few jobs in the film
industry apart from directing which Terry
would like to do and can do. He's very
interested in how VFX works," proven by
his co-founding of the Peerless Camera
Company, "and visual FX is running
through his blood. But, bloody hell, you
have to go fast to keep up with him,
because he does push out the ideas!"
Gilliam himself did the storyboards for all
the major Imaginarium sequences,
scanning and placing them in a library file
and "hell have no fury if you don't look at
them."

While tackling the issue of funding, Gilliam and his concept artists assembled a book of
roughly 20 Photoshop renderings consisting of "the stuff that is in the darkest recesses
of Terry's mind," Warren laughed.

"Some of it's been in there for twenty years, and it all came out. I don't know where
the transvestite police came from, do you? I wouldn't know where to start but I think,
in working with him, you very, very quickly get to know that almost anything is
acceptable as an idea as long as it fits in with the taste of the piece."

The practical shoot was as economical as possible, based around


Parnassus's traveling theater. Everything else was shot against
partial sets and bluescreen. According to John Paul Docherty, Co-
VFX Supervisor from Peerless Camera Company, "we started off
with about 250 shots, went up to about 850, and between 650
and 700 stayed in the movie. We had eight weeks to shoot all
the bluescreen."

With a budget of around $20-$30 million, it was one of those


movies where everything could only be done once, and the
required complexity and number of FX was very difficult to
achieve. For example, the exploding derby tavern was a
miniature, and a scene they had to get right because there was
no money to build a backup. "Fortunately, it looked cool. Had it
not, it would have been, 'Terry! Rewrite!!' and I don't think he
would have been too thrilled."

Every practical effect was heavily augmented with CG, particle


systems, Houdini fluid motion, etc, using the miniature work as a
core, "partially because we wanted the look, and because to do
some of that stuff digitally just cost too much. To build the
temple digitally would have probably bankrupted us in one
sequence. Also, Terry has a huge miniature experience and
understands them inside and out. The trick for us was putting it
together with all the digital bits."

For example, when Jude Law is marching around on stilts, Gilliam was very conscious
that if they simply made him hang on to two sticks standing on the ground, the weight
and motion would have been completely wrong. Instead, they did intensive previs of
walking on stilts to get the gait they liked, then used a physical motorized rig that Law

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CGSociety - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

held on to with movements based on the CG previs.

I asked David Warren if any ideas that started out as practical wound up as digital.
"That's a really good question, very difficult. I've got to think now," Warren quipped.
"There were more ideas initially where they, from my experience, would have worked
better as miniatures because they needed that kind of depth and texture and lighting,
but it just wasn't worthwhile. The only way to allow the film to expand as Terry shot it
was to do the amount we did digitally, especially all the landscapes."

As mentioned, the temple was a digitally


enhanced practical model, but why?
"Terry didn't want to do the film
completely digitally, but by the end of the
day a balance had to be struck, and CG "Terry ran with it, he wanted to shoot and shoot. Also, when a miniature model is done,
wins on many arguments. With the that's it. When you are doing something digitally, it's always under construction until its
monastery, even I was thinking it could final. A director can say, lets chuck another 50 feet on either side of it, and add more
have been a matte painting. rockets, and lights, and bits and pieces. I think the fact that some things were
miniature it was good, since it meant they were done."
"But when we actually built the thing and
Terry saw it, he wanted to get the camera Of course, they did chuck far more than 50 feet on either side. It was still enhanced
close to it, inside, around it. I think the digitally with matte extensions on sides and top, fires and smoke were added, and the
fact it was physically there gave him an canyon where it sat was extended proving what all digital artists know: It's never really
extra impetuous to redesign the shot." done until the Directors Cut DVD is released.

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CGSociety - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

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Though Gilliam loves the texture he gets


with miniatures, he knew there were
many sequences that were so wild and
infinite they had to be done digitally.

One consideration was where a heckler


wakes up in a spooky forest surrounded
by broken bottles. Though many of the
props were available at Peerless from
previous films like The Brothers Grimm,
they decided it just wasn't plausible to
build practically because of the number of
shots, shooting with motion control, and

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CGSociety - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

the amount of time on stage. By doing it


in CG, it eliminated those problems and
also gave Gilliam space to work with an
infinite landscape, from forest to towering
mountain.

There were eight specific design looks to manage, shared


between Co-VFX Supervisors Docherty and Richard Bain of Bain
VFX. Bain said, "we decided early on there was going to be more
work than one VFX Supervisor could handle. Plus I was going to
be in Canada with Terry doing previs stuff and building
miniatures. I wouldn't be able to do both jobs, so it was decided
that Paul would look after the London side and I would look after
the blue screen shoot and make sure we got what we needed for
the post work."

When Bain returned, he got involved with Peerless putting


together the mirror dance sequence with Tom Waits and Lily
Cole, where Cole's character Valentina thinks her father has died
and she runs, pushing reflections of herself away until she
encounters the 'His and Hers' mirrors. Shot with multiple
cameras, it was a sequence that needed working out before
building any CG landscapes, shards, or reflections.

"I took every camera setup and started moving the camera shots They used every nearly every major software: Maya, XSI,
around in a 3D space within Shake, so it was a Shake composite Houdini and other propriety software. They composted on Shake,
to start with. We weren't aware what the choreography was, and Fusion, Nuke and Inferno for high speed compositing. Mochi,
it was pretty much decided on the day what the camera setups Vue, Terragen for some mountains, all orchestrated through a
would be." render manager they called Rush.

A free form camera unit around Waits and Cole was used, then "It was pretty nuts," said Docherty. "We had gigabytes of
the sequence was edited together. They had to work out what references, paintings and drawings and production drawings for
the CG would entail, so building a 2D environment was the most every sequence."
expedient way to handle that scene.

The distinct looks were based on what


Gilliam brought to the table early in
production. He and Warren created
concept drawings based on paintings of
Grant Wood, such as the ladder
landscape, and Maxfield Parrish who
inspired the gondola sequences, and Odd
Nerdrum. "It meant we had to write some
extra software to get the looks we
wanted. No single pipeline would suffice,
so it was being warped and molded and
mangled from sequence to sequence
pretty much all the time."

There is a great deal of digital work done


around the practical.

"It was probably the most heavily


prevised show I've ever seen, partially
because the stuff was so complex and
partially because we couldn't afford to
waste anything," said Docherty. "Then we
did what we dubbed midvis (also known
as on-set previs, as defined by the Previs
Society), which is when we got to the
point of editing in bluescreen shooting, we
realized the previs wasn't good enough to
give the actors an idea of what they were
going to be wandering around in."

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CGSociety - The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Editing was faced with hundreds of shoots


of people standing in a blue room, which
isn't the easiest thing to cut together with
any sensible level. "So we took all 800
shots up to a different level- not to a
finished level because we couldn't afford
to do that with every shot, but to a level
sufficiently close, using everything from
Terry's storyboards to artwork to CG,
digitally composited to look enough like
the end environment so that valid creative
and editorial decisions could be made." In
essence, "we did the 800 shots a couple
of times. That was a monstrous task in
itself." That, from a digital point of view
was very important.

"That was as much work as the digital work on the final shots, "We would dump what we had and transfer it up the next day. It
getting it down to the point where we weren't wasting big was an ongoing process that had to happen all the time, or else
renders, large particle systems and caches, and we had to fine we didn't stand a chance of the stuff joining up. The heavy
tune the edit to the point that the heavy duty digital work was previs and midvis allowed us to be reasonably sure it was going
pretty much all going to stay on the screen and in the movie. to stick together and also allowed Terry to get a strong input
Otherwise we'd have never finished it, it was the only way we rather than arriving on the day being told, 'this is what you get'.
could get through with the time and money that we had."
"Terry isn't the sort of director that would react well to that sort
They also built digital equivalents of all the practical models, as of discussion. It was very important that by the time we got
well as all the actors, animating them complete with camera there, the things had been built and everybody was committed,
movies, turning over new versions overnight, and sending them and that Terry had been involved at every step of the way and
off to either the miniature studio or to the shoot. was behind it."

Warren, who was experiencing the digital


effects process for the first time, found it
a real education."I don't normally do post
production, so it was very interesting to
see how a company operates on the
inside. The level of work doesn't go down,
does it? There's a certain level of stress
I'd equate with shooting the film, and
when you go into post production, it
doesn't become like 11:00 AM breakfasts
at the coffee shop. I think they all live on
Red Bull and Doritos."

Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus


Peerless Camera Company
John Paul Docherty, Co-VFX Supervisor,
Peerless Camera Company
Richard Bain, Co-VFX Supervisor, Bain VFX
David Warren, Original Designer and Art Director
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CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

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"Top Ten Tips of Texturing"


CGSociety Tutorial, 2 September 2008

We dig into the Vault for another look at one of our more popular tutorial
features. Jeroen Maton walks us through steps he found to help with the
creation of great textures.

The main goal of this article/tutorial is to give you a few hints and tricks

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4678[6/25/2010 3:31:19 AM]


CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

that might help you to make your own textures look better. What you'll
read are things other people taught me, or that I had to discover for
myself. They are not the only way to handle some of the problems, but
over the years I've found that these work best.

Material definition is a term I use quite a lot. Very often someone posts a
texture that looks weird on the model, but looks even worse if you look at
the texture sheet. In the end it shouldn’t really matter if your texture sheet
looks 'good or bad', as long as it looks good on the model.

However, a good way to check your texture is to look at your sheet, and
see if you can recognise what material it is (ie metal, rock, rubber, etc), or
what part of the model is unwrapped there.

When working on current and NextGen materials (with all the exotic maps
and effects) this is not always possible. Nevertheless, if you can
recognise the material then there’s a big chance that it’ll look good on the
model too. If you can’t, then there’s a very big chance that you see
something as metal while in fact it’s nothing more than random colors and
pixels.

(Pure photo sourcing is something that can easily cause this, but more on
that later.)

Apart from the a good diffuse map, a proper specular can help a lot as
well. There are tools that can generate specular maps for you, but they
don't give you enough control, especially when you're working with
different material types in one texture, or with bright text.

Nothing beats Photoshop if you want to create specular maps.


This way you can use masks and mask areas that you don't want to
affect. If you have white text in your texture for example, the masks will
come in very handy if you want to tone down the effect.

The picture above shows you how you can create a specular map for a
simple two material texture, with concrete and metal. Both have their own
level correction. You can use brightness/contrast instead of Level
correction for this too, but adjusting the levels gives you a bit more
control.

When working on a texture, it’s a good idea to start with a base material.
If you’re working on metal, create a solid metal material. If metal is
damaged all over, you can get those in your base.
It can be a good idea to save your base textures. This way, when you
need to create a similar texture, you only have to take the base texture
you have and build on that.

This can come in handy when you're working on a set of props or


buildings that all need a similar look. Starting with a base material for
every material type in your texture can help you to make a good material
definition. When every part has a proper material, then you can start
adding details.

Something a lot of people tend to forget in their textures are subtle


details. These are things you don't notice at first glance, but make a
texture or object interesting to look at.

Depending on the style and theme you can use a minimalist style, or go
to extremes with the detail. It is your job to give the viewer something

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CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

interesting to look at. Subtle details are perfect for this, and they can be
everything.
A sticker, some worn paint, rivets, bolts, someone that wrote something
with a black marker, mud, oil, anything. But the key is to keep it subtle. If
you go overboard with this, it'll lose it's power.

Take care. Some people like sharp and crisp textures, others
like to leave a little bit of blur in them.
Personally I prefer the sharp and crisp textures, so I always
do a sharpen pass on my entire texture.
Basically I make a copy of your entire texture, paste it at the
top of the layer stack, and do an Unsharp mask pass on that
layer (despite the oddname it will sharpen your texture).

This way you don't mess up your original texture. I prefer to


use the Unsharp mask filter over the normal Sharpen filter.
Unsharp mask will give you a control menu that can be very
useful to keep the effect under control.

It's very tempting to use sharpen too much, which will cause
all kinds of artifacts on your texture.

The prop above made by Jonas Salvador is a great example of how to


put details to good use. As you can see, the diffuse is loaded with details,
and most of them you don't notice at first glance. There are bits of tape,
stains, stickers with text, scratches, rivets, tags, etc. Details like that make
22 triangles interesting to look at.

The first image is the original texture. This is how it looks in


Photoshop without any correction.
The second image has a single unsharp mask pass at 70%.
The details in the paint and the scratches pop out nicely.

That highlight on the horizontal edge is very noticeable now,


but you could tone that down a bit. (Do this in your original

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CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

texture and redo the unsharp mask proces, this way you'll
always end up with a complete sharp texture, and it'll keep
your .psd file clean).

The last one clearly has artifacts that you don't want. The
white is too dominant, there are bright orange pixels at the
border of the paint, etc. You really want to avoid things like
that.

Avoid using photos in your textures, in such a way that they


are not properly processed. It's a very rare thing when you
can paste a part of a photo, without having to add or remove
details, or to let it fit your UV clusters.
I'm not saying it's not possible. If we look at some of Stefan
Morrell's work then you'll see that he does this very well.
However, from what I've seen on Game-Artist.net it is
sometimes tempting for a beginner artist to use a lot of
photos for their textures, while they probably should have a
look at other techniques to create a base texture.

With Tip #5 in mind, using photos isn't always bad. Photos are excellent if
you want to add small details.
Small anomalies that break the surface, and give your texture the look
and feel like it has been used.
The best way to show you the effect is to show you the same piece of
texture with and without photo overlays.

The best way to get a good effect is to go through all of Photoshop's


blending modes and to see which one is working well for the photo you
picked.

Overlay and Vivid Light usually work alright, the rest really depends on
the picture but very often give a blown-out effect. One thing to keep in
mind when you're doing this is to keep it subtle.

These are small details, things that the viewer should not notice at all.
Another thing to keep in mind is the scale of the details. If you want
subtle paint damage, like on the second door texture, make sure that the
scale of the details is the same as the scale of your object.
If not, it'll look out of place, and the viewer will notice that something is
off.

For a better overlay effect you can tweak the "blend if" options on each

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CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

layer. This is useful if you have bright or dark areas that mess up the
effect. You can smooth them out with this option. If you hold Alt while
dragging the sliders you'll split the slider up, and create a smooth
transition of what is blended, and what is not.

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CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

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One way to create dirt has already been covered, and that's
photo overlays. Those are great for general wear and tear on
your texture.

If you want small specific details, you'll need to use other


techniques. Below are a two techniques I frequently use, one
for dust and dirt, and one for rust.

Dust and dirt can be done very quickly with a solid brownish
layer and a layer mask. Simply put the dirt layer at the top of
your stack, and paint with a low opacity and flow. You can
spice things up by changing the blending mode, or to filter
your dirt layer. (add noise for example).
This will break the surface somewhat if the dirt becomes too
visible. Once again, subtlety is the key to success.

Rust is a bit more tricky. The thing with rust is that it's very
random and undefined. Other than the placement and how it
leaks, there's hardly any logic to it.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4678&page=2[6/25/2010 3:32:34 AM]


CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

I used to handpaint rust, but it always had a bit of a cartoony


look, and I was never able to get crispy rust that looks
convincing and real.

That was until DennisPls shared his technique with me, which
I've been using ever since. It's basically almost identical to
regular photo overlays, only here you only use a small part of
the texture.
You clean the edges with a mask so that it blends nicely with
your base texture. Matching scale is very important here.

Good damage placement only requires one thing: logical


thinking. If an area is likely to be hit by another object (green
arrows), or by moving parts, then logically there will be some
damage in that area.

That can be chipped paint, scratches, rust, etc. If an area is


clear from being hit by an object (yellow arrows), then there
will be a lot less damage to that area.

There is a sure chance that you'll find dust and dirt in such an
area. Also, areas that are rubbed frequently will show worn off
paint, scratches and if they are metal they will shine more.

This doesn't only work for small borders. If you go big, the
same rules apply.

The front of the forklift (1) is the area that will suffer the most,
and will therefore have more damage than other parts.
The lower part of the side will stick out most, so the biggest
damage will be done there. The wheels (3) don't need any
comments at all...

While the use of AO maps is not always required when using


normal maps, and with engines being able to render AO in
realtime, the advantage of baked AO maps is sometimes
underrated or forgotten.

AO maps are a great way to give your texture that extra bit of
depth, and it'll make your model look less like CG, and more
like something from real life. (The lack of good GI is in many
cases the thing makes something look fake).
Some people use advanced GI settings to bake their AO
maps, but in many cases that's not really necessary. Even
'simple' indications of shadow and light will make a huge

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4678&page=2[6/25/2010 3:32:34 AM]


CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

difference.

As hard as texturing can be, it can be even harder if you don't


think when you are unwrapping your model.

Nobody will ever split a face UV cluster in half, and place


those two halfs in different places on the texture, yet when
people work on props the weirdest UV clusters can emerge.

If you think about how you will texture your model while
unwrapping, you will most likely avoid "bad" UV clusters, and
save yourself a lot of time and frustration.

I hope that some of these points can help you with your textures, and that
you learned something new.

Don't forget that they are just simple guidelines.


They are not 'stick to' rules or workflows.
I can only encourage you to try as many things out as possible.

Because only by trying things out will you get a better understanding.
Which can only lead to better and faster texturing.

Like many others, I started as a gamer, and soon wanted to build my own
maps and levels.

The lack of the right props for my scenes bothered me a lot.


I touched base with Game-Artist.net and after two years we were adopted
by CGSociety, and that's where we are right now.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4678&page=2[6/25/2010 3:32:34 AM]


CGSociety - The Top Ten Tips of Texturing

The main purpose for this article is to make a summation of all the
comments that are frequently made at Game-Artist.net (and elsewhere,
no doubt). It's not the Holy Grail of Texturing, but it can help you out with
issues that frequently occur, and are easy to fix.

Related links:
Jeroen Maton
CGPortfolio
Game-Artist.net

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CGTalk

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CGSociety - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Game Cinematic

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CGSociety :: Special Feature


26 June 2009, by Dane Maddams

In the span of just weeks, Plastic Wax


Animation completed 16 shots with a

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5145[5/18/2010 3:43:53 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Game Cinematic

total of one minute 11 seconds of


animation for the new 'Transformers -
Revenge Of The Fallen' game cinematic
for PS3 and Xbox360.

"We had two weeks to work with our


good friends at Activision and Luxoflux to
garner their ideas and vision, creating
storyboards and ultimately bringing their
concept to life.

We provided them with numerous


animated storyboards until we all were in
agreement with cameras, timing and
overall composition.

One of the core components for this


piece was the frenetic feel of the camera,
throwing you into the heart of an intense
battle amid the city."

There were 11 Transformers in the cinematic, nine of which


were generously supplied to us by Industrial light and
Magic. The ILM models were in Maya format, with no
shaders or rigs and as they were film quality assets they
were extremely high in geometry detail.

Considering they were made for a very specific pipeline, we


reduced geometry that was not visible in scene and re-
worked the textures to show more appropriate scene
specific damage and wear.

Optimus Prime originally came in with around 10,000


objects in Maya which we then brought into 3ds Max and
reduced by eye to just under a third of the original object
count. Similarly Starscream came in at around 5000
objects to which we halved.

Two of these Transformers, the Combaticons - Scout and


Warrior (supplied by Luxoflux), required full UVs, textures
and shaders from scratch.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5145[5/18/2010 3:43:53 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Game Cinematic

Considering the strangely exciting yet arduous task of


making a believable Optimus Prime transformation within
the tight deadline, we worked closely with the plethora of
reference materials from the movie and brainstormed what
would be the most appropriate, while keeping the fast-
paced flow. Even though time was an issue, the rigs had to
contain many animation controls so that the animators
could refine all motion right up to the very last minute.

We built up a library of character rigs which had been


developed with very specific functionality in mind. These
could then be used for certain shots which had individual
motion requirements for each character.

A major consideration for the animation was the


camera itself. One of the critical points in the
creative brief was to develop a hand-held feel
to make the viewer feel like they've been
thrown in amongst the action.

We wanted them to feel the heat of each


explosion and also capturing the sense of
overwhelming scale from these characters.

The cameras evolved throughout the animation


pipeline.

In the intense battle scenes we considered the cameras to be an extra character caught between all of the chaos, which deemed integral to the
choreography and flow of the action.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5145[5/18/2010 3:43:53 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Game Cinematic

   

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CGSociety - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Game Cinematic

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We worked on additional battle damage to each Transformer:


burns; armor chips; explosion impacts as well as
environmental/vehicle damage on the city streets. Due to the
sheer amount of geometry contained within the Transformers,
it was important to reduce the overall amount of texture maps.

This was achieved by creating additional textures with


enhanced armour wear and for specific close up shots, we
needed a further level of control. A good example of this is
Warrior, the first texture pass was a base color followed by the
UVing and texturing in CS3 of 12 upper body panels that are
seen quite close to camera.

For the city streets, the client provided movie reference of


downtown Shanghai. We focused on a very similar and specific
area of Sydney, where we gained most of our reference
materials.
This was an advantage as we were able to take high-resolution
photos of buildings locally.

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CGSociety - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Game Cinematic

The glaringly obvious difference was the large number of neon


signs. We had to litter the streets with these glowing, flickering
adverts to give an authentic feel. Each sign needed an accurate
translation into both English and Chinese.

The 11 Transformers, human soldiers, vehicles and


Shanghai CG environment were all shaded and rendered
using V-Ray in 3ds Max. Creating the shaders for the iconic
Transformers proved to be a huge task considering the
movie is the benchmark.

To give the compositors maximum control, each character


was rendered with a number of layers. These layers
included lighting, global illumination, reflection, refraction,
diffuse and specular passes.

The opening shot for Transformers, just like in the movie,


shows the pods shooting toward earth. We used Fume FX
for all flames emanating from the asteroids and Particle
Flow for the sparks along with debris and finally Afterburn
for the smoke trails.

For the shot where Megatron is sinking into the ocean the underwater feel was accomplished using Dreamscape software. Particle
Flow was used to create the bubbles with a mixture of animated spheres rotating on an offset pivot point. These particles would
spawn out of themselves create the illusion they are dividing underwater into smaller bubbles.

During the intense battle scene, all


smoke and fire effects were created
in Fume and the soldier's machine
gun muzzle flashes were a
combination of live footage and CG.
Afterburn was used for the
Decepticon missile trails and for
smoke we used proxy collision
objects to interact with Fume.
Various pieces of flying debris were
created with Particle Flow and the
interactive lighting passes were
added to every fire, explosion and
light source in the scene.

The entire cinematic was composited using Apple Shake. All character
and set passes were rendered as 32-bit EXRs. This was especially
necessary as we were receiving all of our interactive light passes (for
explosions, muzzle flashes etc) as black and white masks. We were
then using those masks to affect the original set and character passes
that made an added bit depth necessary.

Some of the shots had over 70 individual passes, and when a great
deal of those are 32-bit floating point as you can imagine it made for
some quite heavy and complicated comps. A great deal of
atmospheric light was added, consisting of radial color gradients,
placed just off screen to simulate light spilling into the shot from the
surroundings

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5145&page=2[5/18/2010 3:44:30 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Game Cinematic

The transition from battle scene to the globe and the war room was difficult because there was so much happening in such a short amount of
time. We transitioned firstly through the blue flames of Optimus Prime's main weapon impacts, then to a realistic looking Earth, finally to a
holographic Earth, keeping it all flowing and believable. Finally a post comp grade was added to all the battle sequences. We added more blues
and greens to the city streets to match the unique colour palette of the feature film. Depth of field was used on the majority of the battle
sequence shots, also added in comp.

TRANSFORMERS and all related characters are trademarks of Hasbro and are used with permission. (c) 2009 Hasbro, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Plastic Wax is a leading digital design, 3D art, animation and


production studio specializing in the creation of premium digital Plastic Wax
entertainment, 3D art and animation for the global Activision
entertainment and gaming industries. Transformers Game
Autodesk 3ds Max
Autodesk Maya
General desktop setup Quad core PCs, Fume
8Gb RAM, Afterburn
64-bit Windows, Apple Shake
scenes rendered on Plastic Wax?s IBM iDataPlex farm. Pixologic ZBrush
Adobe Photoshop

Discuss this on CGTalk

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 All Rights reserved WIKI INSTRUCTORS
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No part of this website may be reproduced unless for JOBS EVENTS
personal use without prior permission from PORTFOLIO CGCHALLENGE
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NEWSLETTER

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CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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"Transformers:Revenge of the
Fallen"- Production Focus, 7 July 2009
The guys and gals at Digital Domain opened up to us for a extremely
well received article in July about production on the Transformers
sequel, 'Revenge of the Fallen'. The brief from Michael Bay was to fill the
screen with robots.

As you will see, as one of a number of studios involved, DD tackled the


'microcons', a girl that reforms into a robot, Reed Man and several other
creations. This was a huge undertaking and worth another look.

Balancing and extending the Transformers with new characters.


Digital Domain teams discusses the new challenges.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5153[5/18/2010 3:48:45 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

CGSociety :: Production Focus


6 July 2009, by Renee Dunlop

Transforming from Producer to Director and back


again, Michael Bay’s second installment of the
Transformers saga has unfolded to a roaring
success. Juggling between the financial
responsibilities of producing and the creative
desires of a director, Bay had one more hat to
wear. He is also co-owner of digital effects
company Digital Domain (DD) where roughly a
third of the work was done.

DD worked on five main categories. Alice the


Pretender. The kitchen bots. Wheelie. Soundwave,
and Reed Man. About 130 shots in all, with “90%
really hard stuff!” according to VFX Supervisor
Matthew Butler. Bay felt he had already shown
the transformations in the first film, so wanted to
move on to other things. However, Reedman and
Alice the Pretender were two that were designed
to transform.
 

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.


 

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

ALICE
Sam, played by Shia LaBeouf, has gone off to
college and is meeting new people, making new
friends. The Decepticons are trying to get
information from Sam. Enter Alice, the hot chick

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5153[5/18/2010 3:48:45 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

college student, who is really a Decepticon. While


Sam is trying to remain loyal to Mikaela, Alice is
trying to seduce him to gain information.

Alice, played by Isabel Lucas, was scanned at


Gentle Giant Studios, and her dress was a cloth
simulation in Maya. The digital model was then
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures. rotoscoped to fit the actresses’ movements
exactly during the 70-some frames over which
the transformation took place. A photography
plate was all they had for texture and lighting
information.

According to Paul George Palop, CG Supervisor,


“the first limitation we found was we had no
lighting information. The tiles were only taking
the projection of the plate, basically baked in
lighting. We were projecting the plate onto the
geometry and then turning the geometry into
tiles, and they would rotate out of the way.” That
was sufficient for the first few frames but as soon
as the tiles rotate, the effect broke because the
lighting was not dynamic to the environment.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures. Using HDR photography, DD built an entire set of
the room and used that to derive lighting
information. To add the extra punch, they
raytraced the tiles with occlusion and reflections,
causing some very expensive but necessary
renders. “We lost count of the passes generated
for the compositors, but it was probably around
50.” This provided the compositor with a number
of passes to dial in.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Next was figuring out how the transition was


going to work, much of which was relatively
undefined. The task was to turn the skin into tiny
tiles that transformed out of the way to reveal
the robot inside. Once the geometry had been
rotomated and exported as a geometry cache, it
was brought into Houdini. A cloud of points was
generated off the mesh and little pre-modeled
tiles were stamped across the geometry.

But covering the body in tiny tiles was only the


first step. Now they had to follow controlled
animations in what is recognizable as the
Transformers style. DD needed to break up the
body into facets that were “procedurally eroded,”
said Butler “That required tracking a constantly
deforming object of this girls clothes, skin, being
able to transition to an all CG version, have her

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5153[5/18/2010 3:48:45 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

break apart the mechanical piece to reveal the


under skeleton, predominantly using Houdini and
eventually handing off to key frame Maya hand
animation. It’s a lot of complicated systematic
reveal maps that drive procedural animation at
the surface level. Everything is broken apart
lighting wise into the most laborious technical
lighting passes to concatenate all this together at
the end.”

However, because the robot had triple jointed


arms and large spikes, the robot inside didn’t
really fit inside the digital scan of the actress, so
the robot inside was also put into transformation
mode. Choreographing that transition and
determining the sizes of the tiles was the longest
task. “Everything would affect everything,” said Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Palop, “all the variables would have a visual
impact on the final result. We had to go back and
forth, it took us months. And months. And
months, to find a combination of the variable that
we were happy with.” By working backwards from
the frame that fully reveals the inner robot and
using Nuke to morph, the tiles that appeared at
skin level were targeted to join the robot
underneath, inheriting the coloration of the robot,
from one to the other.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

   

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CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

REED MAN
Alice wasn’t the only bot that could make one’s
skin crawl. Much the same can be said for Reed
Man. Reed Man is introduced through a puma-like
robot character called Ravage who spits out insect
like nano-bugs that pour into a ventilation
system. These nano-bugs are the basis for Reed
Man, a human sized praying mantis type
character made of razor blades who is so thin he
can rotated his alignment perpendicular to the
viewer and disappear totally from view.

The sequence is about 12 shots, including the one


with the transformation and according to Palop,
“that was the hardest shot in the movie. It’s a
brand new robot, one that needed to be
introduced to the audience so they could

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CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

understand how this creature worked. Finding the


best camera move and focal points to guide the
audiences’ eye was one of the greatest
challenges, taking months to find just the right
moves and racking to get the scene to be fully
readable.”

Bay wanted the Reed Man to disappear to camera


by simply rotating so the blade side faces the
lens, thus becoming an invisible width and
disappearing into his surrounding. Reed Mans’
movement wasn’t considered before he got to DD,
and they needed to change some of the leg
proportions. When the initial concept art arrived,
it had short back legs that animated into little
mincey steps “like Fred Flintstone bowling,”
laughed Taylor. “We had to change the
proportions of the legs and change the rigging,
and eventually arrived at something with much
longer legs that could be bipedal or quadruped. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
 

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

“It was one of those concepts that when you


heard about it, it was such a cool idea,” said
Taylor. “We knew conceptually what this thing

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CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

had to do, but how do we pull it off, how do we


make him move, how do we make him turn
invisible? We knew it was lining the blades up to
camera.” They managed this by writing a script
that would take the blades and transform nodes
and line them up to be perpendicular to camera
and disappear. Though some tricks were required
to make the Reed Man read better, this was an
easy problem to solve. Not so for the other
issues.

The building blocks of the robot are called


“microcons”, similar to ball bearings that pop
open to reveal the insect-like robot inside, and
had to match the practical shots of the ball
bearings. They were roughly only one third of an
inch and there were thousands of them. To enter
a military bunker, the ball bearings pour down
some pipes, but the behavior could not be
random. Using Houdini and a crowd simulation,
the animation provided several transformation
cycles, a few walk cycles, run cycles, climb
cycles, from the ball bearing to the robot form.
Those were fed into the crowd system so it could
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
make behavioral decisions.

The second step began when the individual insect


robots begin to assemble into one unit, gathering
together and climbing on to each other as they
create the form. The geometry becomes the
target for the particles. Though they are never all
seen in camera, Palop estimates there could be
300,000 robots following an animation path to
their final location. Each is a mere blade in
thickness. The result is the Reed Man, a five foot
tall praying mantis built from the ground up,
locking into place fully assembled.

Explained Taylor, “the assembly was a


combination of particles and instancing and
animated run cycles and build cycles, a particle
build. We would run a particle system over
targeted geometry, and get hundreds of
thousands of particles that had to migrate to the
target geometry of Reed Man. On those particles,
we would instance run cycles or climb cycles.
That became a part of our FX department, where
the animation and FX departments had to fold
together. Most of the background insect bots
were procedural and done by instancing cycles
onto particle systems. The mid and foreground
had some hero animation with keyframing. There
was a real back and forth between keyframe and
FX animation to pull off the shots.”
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
 

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CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

COMIC RELIEF
Transformers regularly breaks from its onslaught
of battles with characters meant to make you
laugh, such as with Wheelie or the eight Kitchen
Bots. But humor is tough to achieve, as Taylor
points out. “Creatively you have to search for
those things that will make these shots as
interesting, not as spectacular as the larger shots,
and that becomes a lot more challenging
sometimes. It was stupid juvenile humor, like the
espresso bot is always steaming and belching and
farting out flames, but you are looking for what
can he do to get a little laugh. When you have
small characters in the film, compared to an 18
story robot, the challenge is making them visually
exciting and interesting and look for moments
that are quieter cinematically. If you have a
Transformer the size of a skyscraper, it’s already
spectacular, so you have to do what you can to Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

plus out the smaller character.”


 

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5153&page=2[5/18/2010 3:49:35 AM]


CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Wheelie is a remote control truck/toy that has


dialogue scenes and interacts with human
characters as a brash, rude little guy. He also has
a big crush on Mikaela and is torn between
whether he is a Decepticon or an Autobot, so
“He’s got a lot of issues that make him fun to
animate. He’s a big part of the comic relief
element.”

There were several iterations to discover who the


character was. Bay first explored a schizophrenic,
high strung character, and some animation tests
using temporary voice tracks were created. It
wasn’t what Bay was looking for. He then
considered making Wheelie more adorable,
describing him as a character that would
approach Michaela and say “I wuv you!” But after
testing that character for a while, Bay hit on the
resolution he was looking for, and the Wheelie
character, a Joe Pesci wise guy type character
was born. “He’s a bit on the raunchy side, a bit
abrasive.” While consideration of casting an actor
to help define the part, Bay preferred discovering
the final nuances through animation tests. a labor
intensive process but what the director wanted.
There were same voice changes, more in the
lines of what he was saying than casting a new
voice talent, so some reanimation was needed,
but “ultimately, through the whole process,
Wheelie has been testing really well. Michael told
us it was Spielberg’s favorite character in the
movie. He’s funny, genuinely funny in the film.”

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Juggling so many requirements was a test for the
director as well as the crew at DD, but according
to Buler, “it was simply a process that had to be
Related links: done. Even though a character was in the early
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen stages and far from fully realized, and there was
Digital Domain the potential for Bay to love or hate the character
Matthew Butler (VFX Supervisor) before its full potential, it was best to show the

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CGSociety - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Paul George Palop, Digital Domain CG Supervisor character early on so the artists were at least
Dan Taylor, Digital Domain Animation Director aware if their time, and the budget, was being
Gentle Giant Studios spent wisely.

Discuss this article on CGTalk “He’s managing himself. I think in some cases
that can be a real scary situation, when you are
 Share This  thinking, ‘is he going to wear the Director hat
more and go financial out of control, or is he
going to curtail his creative freedom because he’s
worried about spending too much money? I think
he did a pretty damn good job of balancing that.”
 

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CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

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CGSociety :: Artist Profile


4 February 2010, by Barbara Robertson

It's a long way from Jungle Book and Bambi to total destruction, but you never know where a childhood
fascination might lead. For Volker Engel, co-producer and visual effects supervisor for 2012,' it led to art,
animation, and, in a chance of fate, to director Roland Emmerich.
Engel, who grew up in Bremerhaven, a seaside town in northern Germany, received an early introduction into
filmmaking fundamentals. His father, who worked on ships, and his mother, who worked in a pharmacy, gave
him a toy film projector when he was about six years old. Twenty-six years later, he won a visual effects
Oscar for his work on Independence Day.

"It played two minute short films, mostly


from Disney, in a loop," he says of that
childhood toy. "But the amazing thing was
that I could project single frames. I would go
up on our staircase and project the films onto
a big wide wall. I could stop it, run it
backwards, go slowly, or run it forward."
Which he did, over and over until, at this
extremely young age, he understood how
Disney artists made films.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5470[5/18/2010 4:06:25 AM]


CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

When he was 15, Engel entered his first film,


a stop motion animation starring toy cars that
raced through a desert, in the 'up-and-
coming' International Film Festival (u-a-c) in
Hanover, Germany. He didn't win a prize, but
at 16, he took second place in that festival
with a hand-drawn animation. "It was an
adventure story about a kid who steals a
spaceship," he says. Today, he's one of the
mentors for the festival winners.

Engel knew he wanted to continue making films after secondary school, but it
was difficult. "It was 1984," he says. "I wanted to get into moviemaking and
visual effects, but there was almost nothing in Germany." He visited schools in
nearby Bremen and Hamburg and found his answer.

The teachers in those schools told him to study with Professor Ade, who taught
animation at the Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart. "I drove 800 kilometers
to talk to him and show him my films," Engel says. "I still had to participate in a
whole day of testing and standing in front of a group of professors, but in the end
the films got me into the Academy."

A third film launched his career. Well, to be precise, the trailer for a third film.
With teenage ambition overriding common sense, Engel decided he wanted to
create a feature-length sci-fi film on Super 8 by himself. Three years later, he
realized he'd never finish the film by the time he finished school. Instead, he
decided to do a trailer and a documentary about making the trailer.

"I had to film myself," he says. "It was narcissistic, but I couldn't find anyone in
my circle of friends to share my passion. After two hours of watching me painting
mattes on cels for multiple exposures of spaceships on star backgrounds, they
thought I was nuts." At the end, though, the 'nut' had a 15-minute documentary
with firecracker explosions and spaceship miniatures that helped him land a job,
his first, as special effects supervisor, at age 23, for Roland Emmerich's film
Moon 44.

As it happened, Emmerich's office was in


front of the bus stop Engel had been using to
go to school for a year and a half. He learned
that after going to a movie with Oliver Scholl,
who had done some concept drawings for the
film. "I was the classic poor student," Engel
says. "I didn't have a car. So, Oliver said he
would drive me home to the room I rented.
When we got there, he said, 'This is amazing.
You live just around the corner from Roland's
office. You should call him.'" And Engel did.

Emmerich invited him to stop by and he


stayed for four hours. "We just hit it off,"
Engel says. He gave Emmerich the
documentary he'd made of the making of the
trailer for the film he didn't finish.

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CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

"Roland took it home and watched it with his dad," Engel says. "He told me about
seeing a specific part where I cut 500 pieces of a metal wire that had to be exactly
one centimeter long, and then glued them together to create a structure.
He said, 'I watched you cutting apart those 500 pieces and knew you were insane
enough to work with us.'"

Engel was in his third semester of school, but


with Professor Ade's help, he convinced the
school to let him take a leave of absence. On
the job, he worked with five model makers,
none professional, but all people who loved

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CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

making models. "Roland was an amazing


leader," Engel says. "He was always there
with us, figuring things out, testing things.
He loved to do this stuff himself." After
building rocks, skyscraper towers and other
models, Emmerich gave him a raise. A few
months later Engel was doing camera tests
and supervising, working 16 hours a day.
"I just loved it," he says. "I loved every
minute of it."

And the work paid off, more than in money.

"One day we were sitting on a little bench in


the studio and brainstorming about what
they could call me title-wise," Engel says.
"Roland said, 'I guess we'll just call you a
special effects supervisor.' And that's how I
got my first supervisor credit. It's always the
same. Someone opens the door a little bit for
you and then it's always up to you what you
do with that." Many of the people who
worked on the crew of Moon 44 went on to
work on Never Ending Story, Part 2, and
Engel wanted to join them. But, Emmerich
wouldn't recommend him.

"I was totally miffed," Engel says. "Roland


said, "I want you to finish your studies. I
don't want to be responsible for you
becoming a cab driver.'"
Engel talked Emmerich into recommending
him anyway, but then decided to go back to
school after all. And then, just as he was
about to finish, Emmerich called and invited
him to work in Los Angeles on a sequence
with miniatures for Universal Soldier. It
wasn't a great experience.

"I was in the southeastern part of


Glendale near a car dump," Engel says.
"It was pretty bad. Roland was away
prepping the shoot, so I was alone except
for two other guys who were not very
interested in film."

Rather than staying in LA, Engel raced


back to Germany, finished his studies and
received his degree. When Professor Ade
launched the now famous Filmakademie,
he invited Engel and 12 other students to
become the first animation class and
before long, Engel became a kind of
production manager for the school,
teaching and organizing the animation
department.

"It was amazing," he says. "The school

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CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

had a greenscreen studio and all this


equipment. Four or five SGI machines
with Alias software, the finest equipment.
I decided it would be fun to stay for a
while."

And that's where he met Marc Weigert, now


his partner in their production company,
Uncharted Territory. The two eventual
partners worked together for the first time
while Weigert was a student at the
Filmakademie. When Weigert moved to Los
Angeles, though, Engel stayed at the
Filmakademie.

"I didn't want to go to Los Angeles," Engel


says. "But after three years, I realized I
couldn't learn anything more here, so I
resigned. Two weeks later, Roland called. He
said, 'We're planning a movie which is a bit
like a modern version of War of the Worlds.
It's called Independence Day."

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5470[5/18/2010 4:06:25 AM]


CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

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Volker packed a suitcase, recruited some students to work with him on the film,
and hired Weigert as a project manager. Engel and Douglas Smith became co-
visual effects supervisors, and both won Oscars. "It was a 70-million dollar
Hollywood production," Engel says. "I had never done something at that scale
before. But the thing with Roland is that he puts trust in you, and once you feel
that someone puts trust in you, you feel you can do the impossible."

In the end, Smith and Engel supervised 325 people who created 400 effects
shots, most of which involved miniatures. And then, from Independence Day,
Engel moved on to supervise the visual effects, many of which were CG, for
Emmerich's next film, Godzilla. "I was 32," Engel says. "There were 400 or 500
people involved, and I was the sole visual effects supervisor. But it was all cool.
I felt safe with Roland because I knew him so well."

By then, Weigert had started his own visual effects company, and after Engel
finished 'Godzilla,' the two artists decided to work together. "The idea was to
have a production company to develop our own movies or co-produce, as it
turned out later," Engel says. "Not to be a visual effects facility."

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CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

On both Godzilla and Independence Day, the main visual effects unit was in the
same area as editorial, near to where the director worked in post-production.
"That's something we do to this day, " Engel says. "In film school, I had to learn
teamwork, and the biggest deal with teamwork is communication. So, we don't
do projects where the main vfx unit is more than 100 feet away from editorial
and from the director. That's what we did on 2012."

With their new company Uncharted Territory,


Engel and Weigert had worked on the film
Coronado and the TV miniseries' Dark
Kingdom: The Dragon King (also known as
Curse of the Ring, and Ring of the
Nibelungs) and The Triangle.

"For Coronado, we co-wrote the screenplay


with the director, organized the financing
and the shoot in Mexico, and organized the
post production," Engel says. "We really
produced the movie from beginning to end."

For Dark Kingdom, the two acted as visual


effects supervisors and co-producer; for The
Triangle, they were visual effects supervisors
and producers. For both productions, Engel
and Weigert hired people as they needed
them in effect, creating a visual effects
'studio' solely for the project and then
disbanding it and selling the equipment when
finished. "For The Triangle, we did 800 visual
effects shots with a team of 30 artists in a
post-production time of three months," Engel
says. So, the concept worked, but they
wanted to create their own projects. They
began working with a screenwriter.

"Just as we were about to start


preproduction, Roland invited me to dinner,"
Engel says. "He told me about 2012, and
that he wanted me and Marc onboard as co-
producers on the $200 million movie."

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CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

That left the partners thinking about whether


to pursue their own small movie, which
Weigert would direct and Engel would
produce, or get onboard for 2012. "We had
spent eight months on screenplay
development," Engel says. "The film was our
baby and we loved it and we had a financing
company onboard. But after one second, we
decided on 2012."

Engel and Weigert located Uncharted


Territory on Sony Pictures' lot, near the edit
bay where Emmerich would cut the film.
They bought machines, hired artists, and,
using software Weigert developed, became
the hub through which all the visual effects
shots flowed. Their own Uncharted Territory
created the frantic limousine ride through
Los Angeles as an earthquake strikes. The
supe's hired some thirteen other studios to
create the rest.

"In the beginning, we knew we would need


other companies, so we were able to hire
five or six main houses and then several
boutique shops with people we knew," Engel
says. "It was great. I calculated that half the
movie, one hour and seventeen minutes, is
visual effects. And these are some of the
most difficult shots to create in visual
effects. The earthquake sequences, the
particle work, the water. I was amazed by
what our artists achieved."

The film has already received two


nominations for best visual effects for the
Critics Choice Award from the Broadcast Film
Critics Association and the Satellite Award.

As is their practice, Engel and Weigert


disbanded the crew at Uncharted Territory at
the end of 2012 production, and have
"That's the fascinating point about this profession," he says. "My goal always lies in already begun thinking about the new group

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CGSociety - VOLKER ENGEL

storytelling, but don't expect anything from us with just three people in a room of artists they'll need in Germany for
having a discussion. There will always be some visual element to the films we do." Emmerich's next film, Anonymous, set in
Shakespearean England.

"It's as far away from 2012 as you can


imagine," Engel says. "We'll create 16th
century London, 100% realistic, with slow
establishing shots."

After that? Perhaps, the entrepreneurial


visual effects artists and businessmen can
get back to their personal project, Raising
Phoenix. It's story about a small furry
creature, unlike 2012 or Anonymous. "We
loved the movie E.T.," Engel says. "We want
to do something in that vein. A completely
different story, but with that sense of
wonder."

up-and-coming Film Festival


Filmakademie
Uncharted Territory
Volker Engel on IMDB
fmx/10

 Share This 
So, is life is good for Engel? "It's wonderful," he says. "I couldn't come up
with anything that would make me happier."

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CGSociety - Where the Wild Things Are

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CGSociety :: Production Focus


2 February 2010, by Paul Hellard
Maurice Sendak's 1963 book, 'Where the Wild Things Are'
is a modern classic of children's literature. It tells the story
of Max, a boy whose wild behavior has him sent to bed without
any dinner. He then wills himself across the ocean to the island
where the wild things live. Spike Jonze's film adaption has
extended the story from a short picture book for small
children, into a story designed to find the child in the heart of
every adult.

The Jim Henson Company and the Creature Shop in Los


Angeles built and refined the enormous costumes over a six-
month period before shipping them to Melbourne, Australia,
where principal photography was shot in the coastal wilderness.
This wasn't some straight forward puppet show: far from it.
The facial expressions of the lead Wild Things had to be re-
animated onto the faces of the suits, matching dialog and
performance, lighting and ambiance of the many locations and
dramatic situations each finds itself in. There were many
challenges ahead.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

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CGSociety - Where the Wild Things Are

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Iloura Digital Pictures in Melbourne was


asked by Warners to set up a team in a
previz capacity. The model generation, 3D
tracking and animation pipeline was
rigorously tested during this stage.
Iloura's Head of VFX, Ineke Majoor had a
great time working with Spike Jonze.
"He was very particular about the
performances he wanted. The original
idea was to gather immediate
performance out of the puppets as they
were shooting stuff. They thought they
could get that data, apply it to the model
and get back a performance, an almost
real-time performance. But the mechanics
of this didn't give Spike the right result,
so he decided on the keyframe animation
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. route."

Iloura developed a hair projection


technique where the deformation resulted
in fragmentation of the plate rather than
stretching; a much less apparent artifact
in the case of these characters where the
facial features were so large. Iloura
delivered around 40 character shots
before the project was closed in order for
the studio to address some story issues.

Where the Wild Things Are went thru a bit


of down time due to strikes and other
concerns, and the production was actually
stopped for some time. There are a few
studios involved, including Iloura Digital
Pictures in Melbourne, many others in the
States as well. After this unscheduled stop
in production on Wild Things, already four
years into production, Warner Bros.
decided they had to find a studio that
could handle rekindling the job from the
material already produced.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

"I think the direction to use suits from Jim Henson was from Spike's desire for the
monsters to be as real as possible," said Daniel Jeannette, visual effects supervisor. "As
real as a child's imagination. From a shooting perspective, there were creatures on set,
so dramatically, the actor Max had something to act up against." In the end, while the
Jim Henson Creature Shop suits and Iloura Digital Pictures had done some truly
amazing work; Animal Logic and DtrainFX work as well, ultimately Framestore in London

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CGSociety - Where the Wild Things Are

was asked to bring the ship in. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Framestore's part in this trichotomy was matching these three elements to bring out a
believable performance. Ben White, the CG Supervisor at Framestore, had worked on
Batman: The Dark Knight's two-faced Harvey Dent character the year before. This was
a different approach to the Benjamin Button style of face-match where they did a
separate performance capture and tried to master the two together.

"The crew had actually a fair amount of experience going through these kinds of
problems, which turned out to be incredibly useful," says White, on the phone from
London. "A lot of the challenges and pitfalls we encountered for Harvey Dent were
exactly the same issues we discovered when we came onboard this show."

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

By the time Framestore got a hold of the


job, all of the filming was complete so
there was no chance for them to go back
and gather any tracking or light
measurements. "This was slightly unusual
for us because we had to take whatever
we had and see what we could do with it,"
explains White. "We had scans of shots
and some models of the faces." Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

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CGSociety - Where the Wild Things Are

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Of course, the Framestore crew would


have been happiest to have taken the job
from the start. Multiple witness cameras
would have been helpful, because it gives
a very accurate way of tracking the
position of the head. "To get a good track,
first be certain that your model is very
accurate indeed. A small deviation of the
extreme accuracy level can throw any
solving you do, way off. These creatures
on Wild Thing were furry so the inherent
problem is that they didn't have an exact
shape," White explains. "If it was blown
by the wind it would be slightly bigger.
The suits themselves were a year old.
There were some reshoots and they would
be slightly different shapes each time they
are rigged from one sequence to another.
There were even some 'stunt-heads' that
were quite squishy."
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

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CGSociety - Where the Wild Things Are

The first way into the maze was to do a camera track of all the
shots. In that one piece of work, Framestore had about 1,600
facial tracks to do. Thankfully for Framestore there were
markers on the faces, placed there by the crew on the day. A
lo-rez head was placed in as a guide, so they knew the general
angle of the face in space. "Now a lot of the CG texture of the
face comes from a camera matte of the faces," says White.
"The edges of the eye-lids, lips and nostrils had to nail down
the initial head track which gives the head position and
rotation. Then the team would go in and line it up even further
so we could actually get a decent texture from it. We'd validate
this by doing a UV Unwrap of the face and from that, you could
see where problems were if they arose. We had an excellent
team of about 35 trackers here at Framestore."
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

The performance of each character in the


final film of 'Wild Thing' is a combination
of several people all coming together to
produce one performance. There is the
initial workshopping, which was done by
Director Spike Jonze with the actors
where they physically acted out the
scenes in character, in a studio.

That's how he roughed out what the


characters were going to do in each shot.
Then when they went out on location, Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
they had an incredibly disciplined
understanding of what the suit Heading up the Animation team at Framestore was Michael Eames whose reel includes
performances needed to be for every the squirrels in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and that newborn baby in Children of
shot. Men. All in good hands.. "There was video of the actors doing the voice performances
but we didn't just follow them slavishly," quips White. "In the end, 'Wild Thing' is a kind
"This is the critical reason why this film of interpretation of the body language, dialog recording and the original actor's
works so well," says White, "because they performances. Framestore has been known for a long time for the great team of
had to support the dialogue, perfectly, animators. The technique used in 'Wild Things' would usually hold a team back, but the
with the correct body language." Then the Framestore animators really did well. There were other effects brought in, there's a
facial animators created the performance mud fight at one stage, and a point where it snows, but the meat of the job was with
to match both the suits and the dialog. well over 1,000 facial replacement shots and it took us seven months all up."

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5466&page=2[5/18/2010 4:05:29 AM]


CGSociety - Where the Wild Things Are

'Where the Wild Things Are' site


Warner Bros.
Jim Henson Creature Shop
Framestore
Iloura Digital Pictures
Rising Sun Pictures
Quantum Creation FX
DtrainFX

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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CGSociety - WOLFMAN

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CGSociety :: Production Focus


23 March 2010, by Renee Dunlop

No one seems to know (or is willing to


admit) where the politics came from but
there they were, rearing an uglier head than
the blood soaked makeup Rick Baker created.
But as the fur flew from the hidden corners,
the artists continued to do their best against
the odds.

It was an unusually long and convoluted


process. "My initial designs, I did in 2007,"
said Baker. "I did ComicCon two yeas ago
where there was a big announcement about
The Wolfman coming out that April, but they
missed that release date." They missed

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CGSociety - WOLFMAN

several more as the moons circled by.

When he first heard they were going to make


The Wolfman, Baker's concern was that it
was just going to be a CG character. "The
script I read redlined that. He was climbing
up the walls, defying gravity, and doing all
these things that took me out of the movie."
So when the decision was made to use
Bakers' skills to create the character through
makeup, he assumed CG would be used for
the transformation, a method that he felt
was appropriate if handled in collaboration.
So he set to work on defining the look of the
Wolfman once his transformation from
human was complete. Unfortunately, the
process was going to be as painful as the
characters' first transformation.

Drawing on his years of experience and


success to create a character he had loved
since he was a boy, Baker requested "a
couple of weeks to do some designs, a range
between man and wolf. I did a number of
Photoshop images and ZBrush sculptures
ranging between Del Toro and a wolf. In
other words, if man was one and wolf was
ten, was the Wolfman a five, or perhaps an
eight?

Well upon viewing my designs they said it


wasn't anywhere in that range." Baker was
asked to do additional concepts showing
steps within that range to narrow down the
final design. This happened repeatedly until
the point where Baker told them there simply
wasn't an in-between left.

Out of frustration, he decided to show them the makeup practically. Instead, they rejected the designs. He was becoming quite
He asked for a Benicia Del Toro double to apply the prosthetics to, discouraged. "They wanted me because I did American
and was sent several Latino actors to work with- none of which Werewolf and it was so cool. When John Landis made
looked like Del Toro. This was seven months before the film was American Werewolf in London, we had a plan. We talked
scheduled to be shot when Baker finally applied the makeup to about the transformation, we storyboarded it, he knew the
himself, shot some video and, satisfied with the design, sent it off makeup was going to take a long time and we would only get

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CGSociety - WOLFMAN

for approval, thinking they were "going to flip out". so much in a day. This movie, we didn't know what the plan
was."

Seven months later they were about to film and they still hadn't Johnston came on at the very last minute and had no prep
settled on a design, plus they were bringing on a new director, Joe time whatsoever, since shooting was scheduled to start in a
Johnston. couple of weeks. Everyone was asking him questions,
Baker moved forward with the design he felt best represented The including Baker. "He had to try and get his head around
Wolfman, using the make up test that he previously did on himself, everything, and the transformation was something everyone
and the lack of time left Johnston little recourse but to accept those was worried about and didn't know what to do. The decision
designs, a situation Baker hoped wouldn't come back to haunt him. happened because, if he did it entirely in CG, he could think
It's hard to say if it did. about the transitions later and could concentrate on how he
was going to film the movie immediately.

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CGSociety - WOLFMAN

"I'm all for any trick in the book, and I


understand the decision to do it entirely in
CG was a practical decision time-wise. I still
don't understand why we weren't allowed to
do make-ups on the day or in a post
production shoot. I personally was really
excited about mixing the practical effects
with the CG effects, doing what we did 30
years ago in 'American Werewolf' but having
the added benefit of what can be done
digitally now. I think it would have made for
a spectacular transformation.

I had a great time working with the folks at


Digital Domain on the CG Benjamin Button
character, I would have liked to have
contributed the same way on this film." One
scene that he felt could have worked
particularly well using animatronics and
makeup was the scene where Del Toro is
strapped to a chair surrounded by doctors,
since the chair offered plenty of space to
hide the hardware and it would have been
easy to digitally remove any visible
mechanics.

But, for whatever reason and much to his


disappointment, Baker did his part designing
the character and the makeup, then Moving
Picture Company (MPC) figured out the
transformation scenes in CG without Baker
consulting. There were other ways this could
have been done but this was the way it
ended up happening.

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CGSociety - WOLFMAN

"I would have liked to have been more


involved with the transition. I don't quite
understand the decision not to involve the
guy who designed the Wolfman, who also
does digital sculpture." Since he had defined
so many inbetweens already and was
intimately involved with the final look of the
character, he felt he could have offered a
great deal of insight to the process.

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CGSociety - WOLFMAN

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MPC was able to source Bakers' series of


sculpted heads that were cyberscanned and
used as a jumping off point for the first
round of animation tests, as explained by
MPC's VFX Supervisor Adam Valdez. "After
that, we were iterating changes with Joe."
Valdez also was on the project early, talking
to the films' VFX Supervisor Steve Begg,
before photography started with Mark
Romanek, the original director.

"Even back then, as soon as everyone


realized the transformations were going to be
a point of focus, there was a discussion about
what we could do that hadn't been done

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5576&page=2[5/18/2010 3:56:32 AM]


CGSociety - WOLFMAN

before. Then we were working with Joe and in


post-production, but that debate hadn't really
been settled." At the point they were still
working with Del Toro acting out the beats of
a transformation, without any makeup.

That obstacle was exacerbated by the


distance between key players, since Johnston
was in LA, MCP was in London, and the work
was done via conference calls and Cinesync.
(Both Baker and Valdez give the highest
praise to Steve Begg, who had to hold all this
together.)

Johnston wanted to see how the transitions


would look in action, so animators were given
rigs that could do rough deformation and
transformation work. "In the middle of that
we had to start over, because Joe wasn't
happy with what he was getting. There were
a few rounds of discussion about whether or
not Benicio Del Toro, who played the
Lawrence aka Wolfman, should turn into
something else on the way to becoming the
Wolfman, so rather than traditional close-ups
of bones stretching and hair sprouting he
might turn into something resembling an
almost fetal orc-like creature."

Johnston wanted the first transition to appear


the most painful with each becoming
progressively easier to show how Wolfmans'
body was adjusting. This was in contrast to
MPC's transformations for Sir John,
Lawrence's father (performed by Anthony
Hopkins) who played the werewolf that turns
Del Toro into the Wolfman. Sir Johns'
transitions were smoother and more graceful
to show he had done this thousands of times.

To handle this, MPC had to build animation


rigs which could do a variety of things. "We
took our standard approach for doing faces
using a Del Toro digi-double head that could
transform into a Wolfman head. It started

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CGSociety - WOLFMAN

with aligning models so you could transform


one to the other, which was tricky because
the topology of the two forms was so
different. Then hair had to grow out of that
same geometry. It really needed to be one
setup, meaning one model layout and
animation rig so that all the custom work had
a common base." After that, the process was
handled on a shot by shot basis. The
animators would animate the transformation
as well as indicate if bone lengths were
changing.

"Then our technical animation team would


take over the deformations, and with the help
of some modeling support would create
custom blend shapes for each shot, adjusting
the skinning and muscle system underneath
the skin. Then, we would feed stretch maps
of the geometry into a texture pass that
spawned an effects pass which described how
the discoloration across the skin would take
place. We wanted to allow ourselves to zoom
as close as possible to the skin effects
without it breaking up at a texture level, so
we choose a procedural approach via those
effects passes. Then we could generate
texture maps at different resolutions as
needed."

"We did full digi-double shots, London


environment work, the rooftop sequence, the
time of day dissolve under Tower Bridge, and
the climatic scene waterfall environment that
was entirely CG," said Valdez. "And
throughout the film there was a lot of foot
extension work replacing prosthetic feet, and
quite a bit of facial augmentation, specifically
shots with the jaw that needed to open wider
than the mask realistically could.

Notable throughout the film was the work


done on the hair. "For several years, we've
had our own suite of hair tools called
Furtility, and we've created a toolset that

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5576&page=2[5/18/2010 3:56:32 AM]


CGSociety - WOLFMAN

gives the hair groomers a lot of control and


gives us a lot of interaction between the hair
and other objects.

We extended the toolset to do this kind of


growing hair, adding extra parameters to
handle shot by shot matching of hair
grooms." This was particularly useful in
scenes requiring replacement of the muzzle
or lower jaw, blending CG hair with the
mask. The way the makeup was applied- like
if it was bloody- had to match the clumping
and the strands of the hair and the look of
the blood. "That was combined with some
plate projection onto deformed geometry so
we had a hybrid composite combining plate
projection with CG hair and CG teeth and
gums and mouth interiors. We also did 3D
texture tracking in the compositing phase
where compositors added delicate touches
like very tiny vein texture work that was
lined up to camera to give it the final level of
detail. We added those on a shot by shot
basis as well."

Valdez was particularly taken with the


production design, feeling it was very
strong and beautiful, but it too presented
its challenges. "It's a very noir picture
with a lot of high contrast looks and very
large patches of just pure black. There is
a lot of dense negative space in all the
compositions, an interesting choice but
not an easy thing to integrate CG into. It
used to be that daylight was really hard
for CG, matching set based lighting, but
I'm finding on a film like this with a very
dark look it actually was very challenging
on a lighting and compositing level."

Though MPC certainly has the expertise to


create extraordinary work, Valdez
wouldn't have argued against Baker's
contributions. Baker, after all, was
intimate with the character design and

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5576&page=2[5/18/2010 3:56:32 AM]


CGSociety - WOLFMAN

does have some familiarity with CG, as


can be seen right here on CGTalk. "I've
had stuff on CGTalk forum, the modeling
challenges. I know that stuff, I play with
it for fun. It's a great tool. If it was totally
up to me, I would have mixed it up with
CG, makeup, animatronics, I would have
composited real eyes on a fake head. I'm
surprised people don't do more of that
stuff. Compositing now is so easy
compared to what it used to be. I really
would have had fun with that. I spend my
free time on my computer modeling stuff.
I don't want it to be my job, but I do
incorporate it, I do my designs that way."

The Wolfman
Moving Picture Company
Rick Baker, Make-up Artist
Adam Valdez, VFX Supervisor at MPC

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CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

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"Zack Petroc"- Artist Profile, 16 April 2009


Zack Petroc talks about his studio, recent trends in design sculpts and
preproduction. Zack also helped write the Ballistic Publishing d'artiste
book, Character Modeling 2 with Epic Games' Kevin Lanning and Timur
'Taron' Baysal.

Creating concepts for 3D designs without a pipeline in sight.


   

CGSociety :: Artist Profile


16 April 2009, by Cindy Miller.

Zack Petroc talks about his studio, including the release of new
training tools and how recent trends in design sculpts and
preproduction have transformed what he does.

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5006[5/20/2010 2:17:12 PM]


CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

Three years ago when Zack Petroc first launched his studio, the majority of
his time was spent creating 3D models for specific production pipelines. This
meant animatable meshes with a long list of exact criteria. While assets for
production are still a part of what he does, today the majority of 3D models
he creates are done well in advance of knowing what type of production
pipeline they will end up in; if they are meant to end up in one at all.

More and more production companies are seeing value in the development of
‘pitch packets’ in the earliest stages of a project. Including a broad range of
2D and 3D visuals, these design packets are often used to showcase the
potential of the project and attract funding, partner studios, and talent such
as actors and composers.

“When assembled properly, design packets are a great way to spark interest
and quickly convey the tone and overall feeling of a project,” says Zack.
"These packets of art, including character and environment designs, digital
design sculpts, practical maquettes, and animation tests, are often developed
well in advance of the final script. One of the benefits of loading the front end
of the process with design elements is that the completed art can act as a
visual stimulus for the writer. A key factor in the viability of this work flow is
that once the 3D models are created, they can be used in a variety of ways
as the project moves forward, saving time and money."

   

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5006[5/20/2010 2:17:12 PM]


CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

Zack has adopted many of these principles of development for the internal
projects his studio has in development, including his sculpted novel “Attaboy”
- slated for online sequential release later this year. He said it's a bit too early
to leak any story details about his creation, but we were able to pry one
character out of him to use as an example of how design packets are
transforming games, television, and movie development.

"No two projects start the same way,” Zack goes on to say, "I might be
brought into a project where the only design guide is a scriptment (the
combination of a screenplay and treatment that captures the premise and
tone of the project). Or, the project may already have 2D concept sketches
that need to be translated into a 3D design sculpt. In animated features, the
directors often come from an animation background and will supply me with
rough sketches or idea templates that need to be developed.

Sometimes, the design that needs fleshing out has real world counterparts
and I receive web links to images with notes that approximate what the client
is after, 'Can you give our character this type of outfit, but the proportions
and attitude of the person in this image.' All a creative team needs to get a
design packet rolling is enough information to get them headed in the right
direction."

Zack says the approach he is using on “Attaboy”


is a combination of the techniques he has seen

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5006[5/20/2010 2:17:12 PM]


CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

work best on recent projects. This means that


with rare exception, if a sketch or specific image
is not provided for reference, then your first step
is to create one. The inspiration should come
from the information you've been given via
scriptment, discussions, or other notes.

There is no formula for knowing when the time is


right to begin the process of translating your
ideas from 2D into 3D. “It's a combination of how
each team is most comfortable working, and more
importantly, what the client is most comfortable
seeing,” says Zack. One thing is certain though,
creating these models outside of a pipeline means
the process is no longer expected to be linear.
The design becomes the driving force.

“I've worked in live action films where we needed


to see how a creature might look as it went
through some transformation and animated
features where oddly configured characters
needed to hit certain poses but the intended
design that worked in 2D was prohibitive. In both
cases we used quick 2D sketches as well as quick
3D block-ins to solve the design problems. A 3D
model in ZBrush can be ported to a 2D package
like Photoshop for paint overs, then back again
with little effort." When deciding between 2D and
3D, Zack added that he chooses the option that
gets him to the best solution in the shortest
amount of time.

“Throughout the design sculpt stage, screen grabs can be exported for paint
overs, character lineups, and color tests,” says Zack. “Turntables exported
from ZBrush are another quick way to get informed feedback, particularly
when one or more of the people involved are working remotely.”

With tools like ZBrush's Transpose, characters can be posed before they are
rigged, allowing artist to quickly explore designs and potential movement
constraints. “I also use this approach to prepare the model for rigging, giving
the rigger a chance to have direct input on the specifics of how they'd like the
character posed.”
When a project is ready to make the transition to production, the models
created during the design stage continue to add value, acting as time saving
templates that pipeline meshes can be extrapolated from. “One of the most
beneficial aspects of this approach is that the same finished design sculpt can
be used as a starting point to create both the feature film and game ready
meshes,” says Zack. There are numerous softwares, such as TopoGun or NEX
plugin for Maya, that are specifically aimed at accomplishing this goal. “At this
stage it helps to think of the digital design sculpt as a physical maquette with
perks. The sculpted hair is not there to go through the pipeline, it's a three-
dimensional visual guide set by the art department. Depending on which type
of model you are creating; digital double, in-game mesh, or animated feature
mesh, each studio will have different hair generating options available to
them and can chose what works best.”

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5006[5/20/2010 2:17:12 PM]


CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

   

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CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

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CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

The only downside to creating digital designs is that when you are done, you
do not have anything that actually physically exists. As little as three years
ago, due to the cost prohibitive nature of outputting, that statement might

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5006&page=2[5/20/2010 2:18:11 PM]


CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

have ended the conversation surrounding digital concept designs. Today the
reality is that the cost of 3D outputs continues to drop, while the quality
continues to skyrocket. “It's hard to match the impact a physical maquette
can bring to a presentation,” says Zack. “From large scale hero characters to
four inch leave-behind busts, when it's all said and done, they are just cool.”

With the combination of 2D and 3D becoming common place in many design


work flows, it makes sense that another endeavor Zack's studio has
undertaken utilizes 3D models as training aids intended for both 2D and 3D
artists. His “Form of Anatomy” series is comprised of lectures and
accompanying ZBrush files available for purchase and instant download at
www.zackpetroc.com. “These are the type of study aids I wish I had when I
was first learning anatomy,” Zack says. “The ability to view the skeleton and
muscles from any angle, while hiding or showing specific components makes
for an invaluable learning aid.”

Zack's lectures highlight the origin and insertion points of all the major
muscles, but focus on how they influence the overall gesture and rhythms of

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5006&page=2[5/20/2010 2:18:11 PM]


CGSociety - Zack Petroc Studios

the figure. “The easiest mistake to make with an anatomy study is getting too
caught up in the technical recreation of the figure. For me, focusing on each
muscle but forgetting how they relate back to the gesture and overall form
always makes a character end up the same way... lifeless.”

Making lectures and digital assets available to the CG community is


something Zack has had in the works for quite some time. “This is a global
community at the forefront of technology,” he says. “Utilizing new avenues to
trade knowledge worldwide and making it instantly available just makes
sense.”

As 3D design continues to expand beyond the boundaries of a pipeline, one


point remains clear, it has not yet reached its limit. Techniques and creative
software are rapidly evolving and the artists with the knowledge and ability to
utilize these new tools will have the means to impact a project significantly.

Related links:
Zack Petroc
Pixologic ZBrush

Discuss this article on CGTalk

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Computer Graphics World - Motion Theory Unleashes A Magical Water Extravaganza as Mickey Mouse Conducts A World of Color

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INSIDE THE MAGAZINE Motion Theory Unleashes A Magical Water Extravaganza as Mickey Mouse
Conducts A World of Color
ARCHIVES Category: Online Exclusives
11-Jun-2010
NEWS
Venice, Calif. - Creative production studio Motion Theory creates a stunning, cinematic, CG
GALLERY film, starring a redesigned Mickey Mouse in the launch of Disney’s new show, World of
Color. Motion Theory directors Mathew Cullen and Christopher Leone partnered with
PORTFOLIO Disney and advertising agency, mcgarrybowen, to create an artful, cinematic experience
where a mischievous Mickey Mouse unlocks a stunning world of beauty and magic, as
VIDEOS other beloved Disney characters boldly interact with dazzling fountains of colored water
and light.
BLOG
Motion Theory’s visual effects team was charged with the creative responsibility of
RSS FEEDS conceptualizing and designing the story for the animations. This encompassed directing
the Mickey animation with lead animator, Tony Bancroft from Duck Studios, as well
EVENTS depicting Pixar characters in 3D water form. To re-create the characters in fluid form, as
well as elaborate 3D water fountains and environments, the team articulately rendered
EDUCATION over 150 fluid and volumetric mist elements using beta software to produce massive
volumes of 3D fluid simulations.
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DIGITAL EDITION
The film begins with Mickey approaching a music stand, where he begins to wield a
conductor’s baton. Mickey fumbles, and as he reaches for the baton, the sensational magic
FREE E-NEWSLETTER begins. The action is set in motion as a huge first blast of water erupts. Soon a fusion of advertisement
mighty water fountain blasts and brilliant arrays of colored light explode skyward as
advertisement
animated Disney characters burst onto the screen, magically forming into liquid shapes
that flow and move with the animation and music.

Inspired by “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" sequence of Fantasia, co-director Christopher


Leone says, “After a sneak peek of the World of Color show, we realized that the bar was
high. Mickey Mouse is such a huge, iconic figure in our minds, we wanted to look beyond
the icon and rediscover Mickey as a character -- a character capable of mischief, daring,
and surprise. We approached the blocking and designing of our animation with a live
action sensibility so that our camera angles captured both Mickey’s performance and the
epic scale of the show."

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Computer Graphics World - Motion Theory Unleashes A Magical Water Extravaganza as Mickey Mouse Conducts A World of Color

Each character had to be modeled, rigged, and match-moved. Buzz, Simba, Eve, the
Princesses, Crush, and the other characters each comprised up to a dozen different
simulations, formed from millions of particles. The full 3D environments that set the scene
were a complex mixture of 3D water tricks, fountains, background mist projection
screens, along with shafts of water shot 150-200 feet in the air under extreme pressure.

Visual effects supervisor John Fragomeni adds, “There are always challenges when you
integrate traditional 2D animated characters into a photo-real 3D world of water. The key
to success was finding that unique balance where the two styles could creatively coexist
and retain the fantasy edge that makes Disney magical. From the onset we knew we
would be pushing the boundaries of CG fluid simulation technology to meet these
challenges. We developed a very lean and streamlined process to produce amazing 3D
fluid simulations. It was a wonderfully rewarding project and the hard work by our terrific
team of artists is reflected in the on screen quality.”

The production timeframe for World of Color spanned February through June 2010.
Production included concept, storyboards, pre-visualization, technical R+D, animation,
fluid simulations, light, rendering, and final integration of all 3D elements.

RealFlow lead Andy Cochrane says of the process, “Six months ago, this project was
technically unachievable on a commercial schedule. We were able to deliver the massive
amount of fluid simulations required only due to our access to the pre-release of
RealFlow5. We created more CG water elements in this commercial than the last two
features utilizing CG water that I worked on…combined. Disney’s World of Color
commercial will be the first to showcase this technology; it was a great opportunity to
push the new software to its limits.”

Gustavo Sanchez, RealFlow technical consultant, Next Limit Technologies, says: “The
Disney project was a great test to demonstrate that RealFlow 5 was ready for release.
Motion Theory and their team of water-wizards really did push the boundaries. Their
experiences and constant feedback and it has been a pleasure for us and has helped us
get to where we are with RealFlow 5 and now the rest of the RealFlow community can
benefit from that.”

Motion Theory’s 3D team chose a workflow using beta RealFlow5 Software coupled with
Houdini: both new to Motion Theory’s pipeline. The number, complexity, and weight of all-
3D elements amassed more than 12 terabytes of data. In addition to using RealFlow5 and
Houdini, the production tool kit included RealFlow Renderkit (RFRK) for Mantra (alpha
testing), and Maya and Zbrush for modeling.

Houdini lead Marion Spates adds, “The final lighting and rendering was done in Houdini’s
Physically Based Renderer (PBR), well known for its photo-real qualities. Despite the
complex nature and sheer volume of the simulations we had to manage, the results are
beautiful and speak for themselves in terms of the look of the 3D water delivered.”

There were many complex moving parts required to deliver the final result. Motion
Theory’s composite team, lead by Andrew Ashton, strived to integrate 2D and 3D
elements, flawlessly embracing the best of both worlds to create a cinematic short film as
unforgettable as the World of Color experience itself.

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Disney “World of Color”
Client: Disney Destinations, LLC
SVP Global Marketing Advertising & Creative: Marty Muller
SVP Global Marketing Operations: Doug McGuire
VP Global Broadcast & Print Productions: Sally Conner
Disney Parks Production Director: Cory Stone
Director of Account Management: Janice Simcoe
Account Manager: Jim St. Amant
Disney Glendale Creative Director of Special Projects: Dave Bossert
Producer: Roger Petrusson

AGENCY
Agency: mcgarrybowen
Executive Creative Directors: Ned Crowley, Jonathan Moore

PRODUCTION/POST PRODUCTION
Production/VFX Company: Motion Theory
Directors: Mathew Cullen, Christopher Leone
Executive Producer: Javier Jimenez
Creative Director: Mathew Cullen
VFX Supervisor: John Fragomeni
Art Director: Ram Bhat

http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/Online-Exclusives/2010/Motion-Theory-Unleashes-A-Magical-Water-Extravag.aspx[6/20/2010 2:57:47 PM]


Computer Graphics World - Motion Theory Unleashes A Magical Water Extravaganza as Mickey Mouse Conducts A World of Color

Comp Supervisor: Andrew Ashton


Producer: Christina Caldwell
Designers: James Levy, Satomi Nagata
Illustrator: Carm Goode
Pre-visualization: Simon Dunsdon, Christopher Leone
RealFlow Lead: Andy Cochrane
RealFlow Artists: Jennifer Hachigian, Klaus Seitschek, Parker Sellers, Karen Smith
RealFlow Technical Consultant: Gustavo Sanchez Perez (Next Limit)
Houdini Lead: Marion Spates
Houdini Artists: Brandon Lester, Ahmed Hassan, Val Kharitonashvili, Klaus Seitschek, Tom
Allen
3D Generalist: Parker Sellers
Modelers: Gil Hacco, Trevor Tuttle
Rigger: Gil Hacco
Matchmovers: Brandon Lester, Gil Hacco
AE Compositors: Aaron Frebowitz, TJ Sochor
Nuke Compositors: Krista Benson, Ryan Geist Bozajian, Rachel Keyte, Daniel Raschko
Matte Painters: Ram Bhat, Jason Dunn, George Fuentes (print), James Levy, Reina Sparks

Finishing: Danny Yoon


Rotoscope Artist: Megan Gaffney
Storyboard Artist: Yori Mochizuki
Production Manager/HR Director: Tina Van Delden
Production Coordinator: Paul Pianezza

2D Production: Duck Studios


Executive Producer: Mark Medernach
Producer: Dan Ridgers
Lead Animator: Tony Bancroft
Digital I&P Technical Director: Kyle Borth

SOUND DESIGN + MUSIC


Composer: Mark Hammond
Audio Mix: Margarita Mix

Other News
Cornucopia3D.com Unveils Artist
Portfolios
2-Mar-2010

Wacom Introduces New Cintiq 21UX


Interactive Pen Display
2-Mar-2010

Report by Game Developer Research


Reflects Growing Interest in Forming,
Joining Smaller Video Game
Development Studios
11-Feb-2010

Real-time Rendering Ushers in


Paradigm Shift
21-Apr-2010

Matrox Announces Multiple Graphics


eXpansion Module Support to Drive
Even More Displays
1-Feb-2010

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Meet the New Physician's Assistants

 Meet the New


 Physician’s
 Assistants
 New York-based BioDigital Systems uses CG
 animation to create accurate medical simulations.
 by Evelyn Jacobson

On a typical Friday Aaron Oliker is port real date from Computed Tomogra- accurate come from
often in one of the operating phy CT) scans that allowed him to come medical centers the
rooms at New York University’s up with and accurate surgical model for company partners with,
medical school, standing alongside a the CD-ROM, which is now considered like Memorial Sloan-
sur- one Ket-
geon observing intently as a knee re- of the foremost training tools for the sur- tering Cancer Center Aaron Oliker
placement is started or as a heart sur- gery. and St. Luke’s Hospital's
gery is completed. Oliker witnesses pro-    Seven years later, Oliker is using his Image Reading Center.
cedures performed by some of the coun- skills and combining his abilities with To create a stem cell
try’s most talented physicians as part of those of partners John Qualter, a medical animation that explains
his research for creating some of the animator who heads BioDigital Systems’ how using stem cells af-
most anatomically accurate 3D medical animation division, and Frank Sculli, a fects the brain for Stem
simulations available. bio- Cell Therapeutics, a
   “To be able to do the animations, you medical engineer who leads the compa- small Canadian biotech Frank Sculli
have to know the surgeries just as well ny’s informatics department (who gath- firm, the team used real
as ers and plugs the data into the data from Magnetic
the doctor,” says Oliker, technical programs), Resonance Imaging
director to create peer-reviewed products that (MRI) scans to create
of 3D simulations and partner in are on the cutting edge of technology for the animated brain.
BioDigi- a range of clients that include hospitals,    
tal Systems, a New York city-based pharmaceutical and medical device com- John Qualter
com- panies and medical schools.
pany that specializes in creating every-    
thing from 3D simulated surgical
training

“The more people see these animations, the more


people will see the value of 3D medical visualization
and how it can be used to educate, plan surgeries
or create new procedures.”
                          —Aaron Oliker, partner and tech director
                          of 3D simulations at BioDigital Systems

tools to animations that show how drugs    To create their nonfiction 3D    The company’s prod-
work to databases for cancer institutes. visualiza- ucts take anywhere
“You have to see it, and when you tions, Oliker, Qualter and their from two weeks to sev-
create respective eral months to create

http://www.biodigital.com/press/06-11_AnimationMagazine.html[6/21/2010 2:46:55 AM]


Meet the New Physician's Assistants

it, it has to be right because [these ani- teams use the same tools as a and can cost $10,000
mations are] what people will be using Hollywood and up depending on the
to animator: After Effects and Combustion length of the project, and
train with.” for compositing; Mental Ray for exactly what's involved.
   Oliker began observing procedures rendering Often, for medical
while and Photoshop for texturing. Maya is centers
working on a training DVD that the, and teaching hospitals,
launched backbone for the firms’s 3D the
his career in 3D medical visualization. animations,but company works with
In they’ve created plug-ins specifically for money from grants used
1999, he became involved with medical animation, as well as to
SmileTrain a charitable organization that proprietary develop these tools.
provides free cleft palate surgeries to technology and techniques that are used Qualter
children who would otherwise not to is currently working on a
receive import real-time data and accelerate project with New York
care. Working with Dr. Court Cutting, processes. The datasets that allow their University School of
he work to be anatomically Medicine called Web
developed an animated CD-ROM to Initiative for Surgical
show Education (WISE-MD)
doctors in Third World countries how to where he is creating
perform the surgeries. He created Maya
plug-ins to im-
76 November  2006 ANIMATION MAGAZINE www.animationmagazine.net

library of medical animations


used to give third-year medical
students an overview of
ently according to what’s
different surgical procedures.
plugged think of it as
“We have video footage of
internal motion capture. It’s
surgeries, and we create
been used in a simulation
animations of surgeries and
that shows cardiothoracic
sync the animations to the
surgeons how a device for
video,” explains Qualter, who
heart surgery works.
also often observes surgeries in
   But for now the biggest
order to animate them.
challenge is educating their
“Students can log on the night
future clients physicians,
before to see a particular
hospitals and other health
proprocedure so everything is
care providers about what
clear to them. [They’re looking]
these 3D visualizations can
at a bloodless field, it’s colorful
do, especially in an industry
and we label the structures
that is slow to adapt to
they’re seeing, so when they
technology. “When people
look over the shoulder of a cently BioDigital Systems helped the Boston
read something, it’s an
doctor, they’re not so lost.” Police Department digitally recreate the head of a
effective training tool, but
   Originally created as a murder victim. “That’s a potential new market
to see something it’s a
teaching tool for NYU, the that's evolving,” says Qualter. “This could be a
much better learning
project has gained national whole new way of doing sketches for police
device,” says Oliker. “The
interest and educators are departments around the world.”    Long term, the
more people see these
looking at ways to incorporate company is part of what they call the race to
animations, the more people
digital learning into curricula. develop the complete virtual patient a digital
will see the value of 3D
   With consistently improving human model where all systems work and can be
medical visualization and
technologies in such as nascent manipulated to respond to different stimuli.
how it can be used to
field, applications are BioDigital Systems has already developed a
educate, plan surgeries or
constantly developing, even beating heart simulation where once data is
create new procedures.
outside the scope of medicine imported can behave differ

http://www.biodigital.com/press/06-11_AnimationMagazine.html[6/21/2010 2:46:55 AM]


Pixar The Incredibles Animator: Victor Navone

Animation Colleges
Choosing an Animation
School
Animation Jobs
Animation Career
Pixar Animator
Animation Job Board
Victor Navone: 3D Animator

3D Animation
Tell us about yourself Victor; where are you from and when and how did you get started in animation?
I was born and raised in San Diego, California, and I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine. Learning 3D Animation
I've been involved in 3D production (be it design, effects, modeling, lighting, etc.) since 1994, but it wasn't until 1998 that I started teaching 3D Animation Tutorials
myself character animation on my spare time.  
3D-Modeling
Are you a traditional artist turned 3D animator or did you just jump right into the 3D Software? Lightwave Animation
I am a traditional artist though I have never done any 2D animation. I do find, however, that my art experience strengthens my animation. Maya Animation
It allows me to plan my animation on paper and design appealing poses.
  Animation Schools
Video Game Design Search for Animation
Do you think that artists with a formal education in animation
or illustration have an advantage over self-taught artists? Schools Near You &
Yes, I do. A solid foundation in art informs any creative work you do in both Video Game Salaries Request Free
subtle and profound ways. Also, employers like to see that you have a Game Design Schools Information!
degree in the field they will be hiring you for. Animation.CollegeSurfing.com
Video Game Design
 
How to Become a Video Study Media &
Yes, I do. A solid foundation in art informs any creative work
Game Designer Animation
you do in both subtle and profound ways. Also, employers
Learn Media Arts &
like to see that you have a degree in the field they will be
Traditional Animation Animation at an Art
hiring you for.
Institutes School.
I can't speak much about game companies any more because I've been out
Apply Now!
of that industry for years, but I imagine their needs would be more technical. 2d Animation
www.artinstitutes.edu
They're probably most interested in people who can do good locomotion Learning 2D Animation
cycle animation, convincing physics, etc. An animation studio is going to be Have Great Product
more interested in acting ability. If you want to get into a place like Pixar you Animation Links Ideas?
have to be able to portray thought, emotion and personality through body Get Invention Help
form Experienced NY
http://www.animationarena.com/pixar-the-incredibles-animator.html[6/16/2010 9:47:00 PM]
Pixar The Incredibles Animator: Victor Navone

language alone. Lip-synch exercises are important too. You have to be able Web Animation
to tell a story through action, and you have to have a sense of humor. They Consultants. Free
like to see some drawing ability if possible. Modeling and rigging skills are Flash Animation Invention Kit!
fine to have, but not necessary. www.NewYorkInventionHelp.c
Learning Flash
  Academy of Art
How hard is it for a self taught animator to break into the University
business? Instruction by Pros at
There is a lot of competition out there right now, so it's not going to be easy. Pixar. Request
A great demo reel will speak for itself, whether you have schooling or not, Animation School
but it's still important to network and to be willing to work your way up from a Info.
lesser job. I got very lucky - I don't think that I could get a job at Pixar today with the demo reel I had in 2000. I think timing was a large www.AcademyArt.edu
factor, since Pixar was expanding and I got in before the dot-com crash. Networking is also very important. Sometimes a good demo reel Online Animation
is not enough - you need people in the industry to know your name and help you get in the door. Degree
  Get Your Animation
What steps should an inspiring Animator take to break into the business? Degree Online Career-
Focus on being a good animator first. Practice, practice, practice. Get all the feedback you can to improve your work. There are lots of Focused, Flex
good forums on the internet for displaying your work and getting critiques. If you can meet people in the industry and get feedback from Schedules.
them, even better. This is good for networking as well. Once you have a good animation reel it's time to start sending it around and go to www.Westwood.edu/Animatio
all the big CG conventions, like SIGGRAPH.
 
What's it like working for Pixar? What are some of the projects that you've worked on?
Pixar is the dream job for an animator. It's the best place in the world to work. It has a casual, fun atmosphere, lots of talented and friendly
people, and we get to make some of the best movies ever. I myself have worked on Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles
(November 2004) and various short projects.

 
Working for Pixar I would imagine that you're surrounded by the best of the best of the Animation industry, is it
an intimidating work environment?
It can be intimidating but mostly it's inspiring. You want to learn from these people and impress them with your work in return. The bar is
always set very high. It's great to be able to get feedback on your work from some of the best artists in the industry.
 
How does working at Pixar compare to working at Presto Studios? Which environment is the more creatively
inspiring?
They were very different experiences, both enjoyable. Presto was a very small company made up almost entirely of young men ages 24 to
30. This made the atmosphere very playful and occasionally raunchy, and the small size meant that I could try out a lot of different roles
and gain a wide variety of production skills. It was a great place to grow as and artist and make plenty of useful mistakes. Many Presto
alumnus have gone on to jobs in the film industry at places like ILM, Lucasfilm, Weta and Pixar. Pixar has a lot of the same playful spirit
that Presto did, but of course its population is much larger more diverse. They employ about 700 people now, so sometimes you may feel
that your contribution to a project is relatively small. Then again, it's very exciting to be involved in such big, widely-viewed productions.
There's a lot more exposure and prestige than I could ever get at Presto, so professionally it's very gratifiying. The animation department
consists of about 60 men and women; it's a tightly knit group, and it often feels a lot like Presto used to. We are definitely the spoiled
children of the company. Both Presto and Pixar have been creatively inspiring to work at; Presto for it's freedom and because I was new

http://www.animationarena.com/pixar-the-incredibles-animator.html[6/16/2010 9:47:00 PM]


Pixar The Incredibles Animator: Victor Navone
to the industry, and Pixar for it's talented staff and amazing craftsmanship.
 
When working for a major Animation studio or Gaming
company how much creative input do you actual have on
projects ?
It depends on the project and your role in it. At Presto I was sometimes the
creative director on a game, so I would have lots of input (just enough rope
to hang myself with, as they say). As an animator at Pixar I have much less,
and my role is much more compartmentalized. Being an animator is by
nature, however, a very creative job. I get to work directly with the Director,
and for any given scene I have a lot of latitude to improvise or introduce
new ideas, as long as I satisfy the story and emotional goals of the scene.
Of course a Supervising or Directing Animator will have much more input,
but ultimately we are all working with what's been handed to us from the
previous department. Working in the shorts department at Pixar can be
more like Presto was; because of the small size of the teams there may be
opportunities for an animator to contribute to the production in ways outside
of his or her job description. There is also the potential that an animator
could spend some time in another department, such as story, layout or
modeling.

What mediums have you created animations for??


Actually I've never done animation for games, only for film and personal
work. My work on games included concept design, special effects, modeling,
texturing, lighting, rendering and compositing, but no character animation.

What Programs and Hardware do currently work with? And


why do you choose to work with these software packages?
At Pixar we use proprietary software running on Linux-based PC's. At home I have a Mac G4 and a Pentium PC (both in need of an
upgrade). My favorite software includes Photoshop, After Effects and Animation: Master. I like A:M for it's simplicity and it's great
character animation tools. It also runs on Mac and PC and doesn't have demanding CPU requirements. I did my first animations in A:M
and I've stuck with it ever since. The guys at Hash, Inc. who make A:M are friends of mine.

Who's work do you admire?


In no particular order: Hayoa Miyazake, Brad Bird, John Lasseter, Tony Fucile, Doug Sweetland, John Kahrs, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball,
Glenn Keane, I could go on.

Where do you get the inspiration for your art?


Life. And other art.

Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new animation project.
I don't have a regular process for this yet, but I usually start a project or an animation scene by doodling on paper. Small thumbnails just
to get an idea for camera angles, poses, characters and how shots will flow together. For a story I will write out a brief outline. Once I have
an outline and enough thumbnails I will start storyboarding. For Big Bang I drew about 400 storyboards, scanned them, and edited them
together with After Effects and Final Cut Pro. I added temporary dialog of my own voice as well as some generic sound effects. I did many
revisions to this story reel, and the feedback I got from some fellow artists at Pixar was invaluable. Next I started finalizing designs for
characters and vehicles. Once I have everything modeled I will start laying out the shots in 3D and animating them. I can imagine it will be
a challenge just to manage and track all of the assets I will be needing to complete the short.

Could you tell us about your new animated short Big Bang?
It's a work in progress. It's 6 minutes long and I have no idea how I'm ever going to finish it. I got the idea in 2001; so far I have the entire
story in animatic form, and I've done some of the character and vehicle modeling. I haven't actually started animating anything yet, so I've
got a long way to go.

How was the concept of Big Bang conceived?


I thought of it while watering the lawn. I just like the contrast between a giant, powerful, child-like being and a tiny race of aggressive,
impotent aliens trying to conquer his head. Once I had this juxtaposition in my mind the story worked itself out pretty easily.

http://www.animationarena.com/pixar-the-incredibles-animator.html[6/16/2010 9:47:00 PM]


Pixar The Incredibles Animator: Victor Navone
How long will it take to complete Big Bang?
I have no idea. Probably another year or two. Sometimes working at Pixar doesn't leave me with much leftover time or creative energy.

What software packages are being used in the creation of Big Bang?
So far I'm using Animation: Master, Photoshop, After Effects and Cinema
4D.

Have you run into any major production problems during the
creation of Big Bang?
Mostly just not having enough time and being too picky about the details.
Faster computers would help, too.

Are there any other animated shorts your working on?


I have a few other ideas, but Big Bang has been my exclusive focus for the
last few years.

What's next for Victor Navone? Are there any new projects
on the horizon?
I'm not sure what my next project at Pixar will be after The Incredibles. As
for personal work, I look forward to being done with Big Bang so that I can
draw and paint more. I need some instant gratification.

Do you have any advice for the aspiring Animators out there?

Learn the traditional principles for animation. Read The Illusion of Life and
The Animator's Survival Kit. Read books on filmmaking in general. Practice,
practice, practice. And keep it simple.

Thanks to Victor Navone(http://www.navone.org ) for agreeing to answer the


questions I had for him.

Are you an Artist/Animator? Have your art featured on Animation Arena... Find out how

Animation Arena : Contact Us |  Link Exchange |  Advertise on Animation Arena |  Submit your Art | 

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http://www.animationarena.com/pixar-the-incredibles-animator.html[6/16/2010 9:47:00 PM]


Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 1) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

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WEDNESDAY, 21 APRIL 2010

Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 1)


Trevor Hogg profiles the career of filmmaker Ridley Scott in the first of a five part feature...

“I spent three fantastic years at the Royal College [of


Art],” reminisced British filmmaker Ridley Scott of his
student days in London. “I went in specifically as a
graphic designer. But what was particularly good about
the RCA was that it allowed you to move around and
investigate different areas. I used to build a sculpture,
do some photography, and look in on the school of
industrial design. Do a bit of this, and a bit of that. The
DVD GIVEAWAY...
RCA was an incredibly stimulating, well-rounded
environment.”

Chosen as one of six students to make a short film on


the budget of $600, Ridley recruited his younger
brother and future Hollywood director Tony Scott
(Crimson Tide) to star in Boy and Bicycle (1961). “It was a fictional piece, about a half hour long, about
kids growing up against an industrial yet somehow romantic landscape in a town on the Northeast coast of
England,” recalled the South Shields-native of his directorial debut. “The film really didn’t do anything – it
was shown at a few festivals – but a gong went off in my head and I thought: That’s what I’m going to do.”

Rewarded with a traveling scholarship in 1961, Ridley Scott headed to New York to observe the advertising
SEARCH...
and fashion industry; while there he worked as an editing assistant at Time/Life Inc. for documentary
filmmakers Richard Leacock (Tread) and D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back). A year later, Scott returned Search

to England and was hired by the BBC. “Those days in the early sixties were a terrific time for a TV powered by
designer,” stated the filmmaker. “I was building elaborated double-decker sets with cameras on the second
story, but I eventually discovered that there were only a few good directors and I became very frustrated
by what I considered to be mishandling of my constructions.” YOUR FAVOURITE RIDLEY SCOTT MOVIE
IS...

Enrolled in a four month director’s course, Ridley Scott began his quest for a new career path. “I knew I The Duellists (1977)
had to do something fairly remarkable. Otherwise, it would be back to the design department.” The project
Alien (1979)
that the young filmmaker had in mind was a ten minute condensed version of Paths of Glory which was
adapted into a feature length picture by Stanley Kubrick in 1957. “TV, by encapsulating, often has the Blade Runner (1982)
effect of making mediocre things seem really good,” observed the director. “It worked, it clicked, and as a Legend (1985)
result I was offered the direction of a couple of episodes of a popular police-action series called Z Cars Someone to Watch Over Me
[1962 to 1978]. After that, the hierarchy said I had to go back to the design department, so I resigned – a (1987)
frightening decision, because during my three years at the BBC I’d married, become a father, and gotten a Black Rain (1989)
new house.”
Thelma & Louise (1991)
1492: Conquest of Paradise
Fortunately, within a short period of time, Scott was offered the opportunity to direct a few episodes of
(1992)
The Informer (1966 to 1967, ITV) which he described as being “a very intelligent semi-detective series
White Squall (1996)
starring Ian Hendry [Get Carter] in the role of a disbarred lawyer.” The reprieve did not last long, as
frustration soon set in again. “You can’t ever totally control what you’re doing in episodic TV.” Having art- G.I. Jane (1997)
directed a number of commercials, as well as directing a half-dozen of them, the moviemaker established Gladiator (2000)

http://flickeringmyth.blogspot.com/2010/04/hard-to-replicate-ridley-scott-profile.html[5/20/2010 2:29:01 PM]


Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 1) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

Ridley Scott Associates (RSA); he hired his brother Tony as the first of five other directors to work for the Hannibal (2001)
fledgling production company which specialized in television ads. “[I] loved the idea of being able to play
Black Hawk Down (2001)
around with details and really present, even if it was only for thirty or sixty seconds, something I could
totally control.” Matchstick Men (2003)
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Proving himself with spots for Benson Hedges and a series of period costume ads for Hovis Bread, Ridley
A Good Year (2006)
Scott and his group of directorial talent were receiving assignments from Paris, Berlin, and Munich. “If
you’re a filmmaker and you’re not filmmaking that’s a fallow period. It’s like being an athlete. If you’re not American Gangster (2007)
running around the track, you’re losing your edge. It is like doing a pocket version of a feature film. The Body of Lies (2008)
advantage with advertising is that you don’t have to live with something for months on end.” There is also
  Show results
another benefit. “My training in commercials was really my film school. It helped build my awareness of
how to present suspense and – ‘manipulation’ is a bad word – fascinate the audience and hold it in a kind
Votes so far: 390
of dramatic suspension.” Days left to vote: 4
Vote

During the late 1960s, word spread to North America resulting in RSA producing ads for Diet Pepsi, Ford
Motor Company, Schaeffer Beer, and Pit Stop. “There’d be a preliminary transatlantic phone conference,
QUOTE OF THE WEEK...
the storyboard would be air-freighted over, followed by another call to discuss it, then I’d fly over on a
Sunday night, spend Monday in conference with the agency and looking at location or studio facilities, "I was thinkin', it really don't matter if I

usually start shooting the next day, and be back in England by Friday night. The change of pace was lose this fight. It really don't matter if this

exciting but there were drawbacks, too,” recounted Scott of his routine business visits to New York and Los guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I

Angeles. “In England, I was used to controlling the project to completion through my own company and wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's

being in on the dub and the editing. The agencies in the US were perfectly happy about my disappearing as ever gone the distance with Creed, and if

soon as the shoot was over; they’d put it together their own way after I left.” I can go that distance, you see, and that
bell rings and I'm still standin', I'm gonna

Recognizing that the heyday of TV commercials was dissipating, Ridley Scott wrote a screenplay “a very know for the first time in my life, see, that

black, very violent comedy-heist somewhat influenced by Performance [1970], which I greatly admired.” I weren't just another bum from the

A second script co-written with Gerald Vaughan-Hughes (Sebastian) was about the Guy Fawkes neighborhood"

Gunpowder Plot. The heist project, Running in Place, was to feature Michael York (The Four ROCKY BALBOA, ROCKY (1976)

Musketeers) until it was aborted in preproduction. “‘You really ought to go back and do a little more
filmed TV,’ they [major British studios] kept telling me,” said Scott in reference to the attitude he
GET INVOLVED...
encountered with the major British movie studios. “Which I felt – I’d pushed through more celluloid in the
previous ten years than say, Roman Polanski [Chinatown] – was a bit like teaching your grandmother to If you enjoy writing about movies
suck eggs. I knew they were wrong – these blue-suited assholes – but I figured: If that’s the name of the and would like to feature on
Flickering Myth, please drop us an
game, okay, I’ll do some filmed TV.”
email. We are always open to
contributors and would love to hear
Forming a new organization with his brother Tony to develop television series ideas, Ridley Scott soon
from you.
discovered that the British networks were resistant to accepting independently-created programming.
Approached by a French TV company, the siblings set about adapting The Author of Beltraffio for the
We're also keen to hear from
classic literature series Nouvelles de Henry James (1976); the episode directed by Tony Scott was so independent filmmakers; if you'd
successful that the Scotts were sought after for a second collaboration with a production budget of like to see your film featured or
$250,000. “Somehow I’m going to make a feature out of this,” remarked Ridley Scott who had not given want to get the word out on
up on his big screen ambitions. “It was the same thing as with my first TV exercise: you’ve got to make upcoming projects then please feel
people aware of the fact that you’re good and give yourself creditability.” free to get in touch.

Exploring various literary classics which had entered into the public rights
ALSO SHOWING...
domain, the director found a Napoleonic War story to serve as the basis for
his feature film debut. “To be truthful I am not an admirer of [Joseph] And the nominees for the 82nd
Conrad,” confessed Ridley Scott. “I find him heavy going, because I think Academy Awards are...
that generally he has a low level of humour. But The Duel is very tongue-in- UK Box Office Top Ten - weekend
cheek. I love the humour, the idiocy of two men dueling over a period of
commencing 13/03/09
twenty years.”
UK Box Office Top Ten - weekend
commencing 19/06/09
Collaborating on the screenplay with Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, Scott
presented the project to British producer David Putnam (Chariots of Fire). A Nightmare on Elm Street
Putnam passed on the script which had been renamed The Duellists (1977) Retrospective
to Paramount president David Picker; the Hollywood studio executive British Cinema: Cemetery
suggested a pair of actors who shared the same agent for the roles of the Junction (2010)
two feuding French Hussar officers – Keith Carradine (Nashville) and Harvey
DreamWorks Animation Update
Keitel (Reservoir Dogs). “They were the baseline of my pyramid,” remarked
Night at the Museum's Rexy hits
the filmmaker. “The rest of the casting was simple: you simply began to stockpile talent. Albert Finney
[Under the Volcano], who’s tremendously constructive in the sense that he will help if he thinks the London
project is worthwhile, did a one-day cameo in exchange for a framed cheque for twenty-five pounds UK Box Office Top Ten - weekend
inscribed ‘Break glass in case of dire need.’” Other notable British performers who joined the production commencing 06/03/09

http://flickeringmyth.blogspot.com/2010/04/hard-to-replicate-ridley-scott-profile.html[5/20/2010 2:29:01 PM]


Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 1) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

were Robert Stephens (The Inspector), Edward Fox (A Bridge Too Far), Alan Webb (King Rat), and Short Film Showcase: Papá
Jenny Runacre (Goodbye, Mr. Chips). Wrestling
Superhero Showdown 2009:
Often compared to the big budget period picture Barry Lyndon (1975), The Duellists was created on a
Watchmen vs. Wolverine
much smaller scale. Shot over a period of fifty days in France and Scotland, Ridley Scott began his tradition
of storyboarding the entire script before the filming commenced, and he served as his own camera
operator. “In general, I found there was far too much time wasted pontificating and politicizing with
FOLLOWERS...
[camera] people who really didn’t know what you wanted.”

A year after the principle photography, Scott began to


question the chemistry between his American and
British cast members. “The English actors took to their
roles more naturally than Keith and Harvey,” observed
the director who also wanted to avoid making the
picture seem like a theatre stage production. “Possibly
because he was slightly intimidated by the material,
Keith was more prepared than Harvey to approach it
‘classically,’ that is play the script. Any improvisation
that Keith and Harvey did had to do with the physical
action rather than dialogue.” Addressing complaints by
Harvey Keitel that his role was being significantly
altered in the edit suite, Ridley Scott commented, “He
tended to milk things; at one point he touched a child
on the cheek, apparently to make his character more sympathetic. But I don’t feel that character was
changed substantially and there were certainly no ‘big’ scenes of Harvey’s that were cut.” SUBSCRIBE...

Posts
Having ten weeks to assemble the picture for its Cannes Film Festival premiere made for a hectic post-
production schedule. “Two editors worked on the film, splitting it roughly in half and working Comments
simultaneously,” revealed Scott. “It’s a great way to work, even without time pressures, because one
doesn’t always have to be waiting around for footage to look at. The editors gave me a perspective on pace
and kept me from falling into a standard commercial director’s trap, that is, from feeling that you have to
have a payoff every thirty or sixty seconds.”

Famed New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael speculated in her review that the scene where the horses nuzzle
one another while Keith Carradine and Cristina Raines (Russian Roulette) kiss was “the luckiest shot a
beginner movie director ever caught or the most entranced bit of planning a beginner ever dated.”
Responding to the remark by Kael, Scott replied, “The mare was in season, so we knew the animals would
be a handful, but both Keith and Cristina were Robert Altman [Short Cuts] veterans and I trusted their
ability to get through it okay. We did three takes and all three times the horses nuzzled each other. So it CONTRIBUTORS...

was a combination of planning and fantastic good luck.” Gary Collinson


Trevor Hogg
Made on a production budget of $1.5 million, The Duellists won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival Gerry Hayes
for Best First Work; it also competed for the Palme d’Or. The BAFTAs nominated the picture for Best Santosh Sandhu
Cinematography and Best Costume Design; and in Italy, Ridley Scott received the David di Donatello Award Amy Flinders
for Best Director – Foreign Film. Elspeth Rushbrook
Jon Dudley
“After the completion of my first film, The Duellists, I prepared to do another period piece, Tristan and
Tom Conran
Iseult,” recalled the director. “While this was in progress, I was in the United States and saw the opening
Rory Barker
of Star Wars [1977]. It impressed me so much! It was innovative, sensitive, courageous – I saw it on
Richard J Moir
three consecutive days, and it didn’t diminish at all.” The epic space odyssey caused Scott to have an
Roger Holland
artistic epiphany. “Star Wars convinced me that there was a great future in science fiction films. So I
Harry Loney
decided to terminate my development of Tristan and Iseult.”
Luke Owen

Around the same time he cancelled his sophomore project, the moviemaker received a script which allowed Rosie Cammish
him to find out whether or not his belief in the science fiction genre was well-founded. Russell Hill
Andy Pope
Part two David Bishop
Sheila Seclearr
Please take the time to vote in our poll with your favourite Ridley Scott movie. Tressa Price
Vicki Isitt
Short Film Showcase - Boy and Bicycle (1965)
DVD Giveaway - Blade Runner: The Final Cut
LINKS...

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WEDNESDAY, 28 APRIL 2010

Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 2)


Trevor Hogg profiles the career of filmmaker Ridley Scott in the second of a five part feature...
read part one.

Influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Dark Star (1974), and Star
Wars (1977), British filmmaker Ridley Scott set about designing a science
fiction tale called Alien (1979). Nostromo, a commercial-towing spaceship,
intercepts a transmission from a derelict vessel. Given corporate orders to
investigate, the crew finds itself hunted by a vicious alien life-form. “I was
looking for something like 2001 not the fantasy of Star Wars. I wanted a
slow-moving, massive piece of steel which was moving along in deep, silent
DVD GIVEAWAY...
space. We ended up adding sound because the footage couldn’t stand on its
own.” Scott wanted to emulate the 1968 classic for another reason.
“[Stanley] Kubrick was fantastic in the way he gave us that nothingness [a
timeless future],” explained the director, “especially with the costumes. He
didn’t have zippers all over the place, or satin fourteen-tone jerkins. The
suits they wore looked vaguely different, but not all that different from
today.”

“I think the crew members of the Nostromo seem spirited only because of their argumentative nature,”
observed Scott, “which is due to the fact they can no longer stand the sight of each other.” Casting the
picture, scripted by Dan O’Bannon (Total Recall) and Roland Shusett (Freejack), required the South
Shields-native to adopt an unusual tactic. “I knew I wasn’t going to get much from having actors come in
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and read,” remarked Ridley Scott, “because Alien isn’t the type of film where there are going to be
prolonged speeches. Here the dialogue was so abbreviated and staccato that it wouldn’t be fair. So I Search

researched the actors who were being considered by seeing their films. Once we narrowed the list down, I powered by
had the actors come in for a meeting. I tend to cast my actors as a group, getting a physical balance
between their types.”
YOUR FAVOURITE RIDLEY SCOTT MOVIE
To help Sigourney Weaver (Working Girl), Tom Skerritt (Contact), Veronica Cartwright (Barry Dingle), IS...

Harry Dean Stanton (The Green Mile), John Hurt (The Elephant Man), Ian Holm (Chariots of Fire), and The Duellists (1977)
Yaphet Kotto (Brubaker) with their performances, Scott constructed a past for them. “What I usually do,
Alien (1979)
even if it’s only for my own peace of mind, is draft a short bio of each character and give it to the actors
before I go to work with them,” said the moviemaker. “The bios did help, because they immediately Blade Runner (1982)
started the actors thinking about their characters.” The performers embraced the idea. “We had about five Legend (1985)
days of continuous discussion in my office with the seven actors of the original cast, which at the time Someone to Watch Over Me
included Jon Finch [Death on the Nile] instead of John Hurt. In that time we pretty well managed to iron (1987)
out and agree on the various characterizations, and managed to get some satisfactory reads out of the Black Rain (1989)
script.”
Thelma & Louise (1991)
1492: Conquest of Paradise
“‘If you have women up there, how come there’s no love interest?’ It’s
(1992)
a pity that the one scene we had in the screenplay that had sex in it
White Squall (1996)
had to be cut,” revealed Ridley Scott. “It showed that you can’t afford
to have love affairs in deep space. If you do, you immediately have two G.I. Jane (1997)
groups aboard, the pair who are in love and the rest of the crew. That’s Gladiator (2000)

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 2) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

the beginning of problems unless you are a space pioneer and settle Hannibal (2001)
down with your family.” A far more serious and lethal threat appears in
Black Hawk Down (2001)
the story. “What gave us the cocoon concept was that insects will utilize
others’ bodies to be the host of their eggs. That’s how the alien would Matchstick Men (2003)
use Dallas (Skerritt) and each of the crew members it kills. This Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
explains why the alien doesn’t kill everyone at once, but rather kills
A Good Year (2006)
them off one by one; it wants to use each person as a separate host
each time it has new eggs.” American Gangster (2007)
Vote
Body of Lies (2008)
Introducing the title character required going beyond normal horror
  Show results
genre conventions. “We wanted to do something so outrageous that no
one would know it was coming,” said Ridley Scott. “It’s not a door
Votes so far: 390
being wrenched open with the monster behind it, or the monster Days left to vote: 4
coming roaring through some metal sheeting or grabbing somebody from behind.” The end result was the
notorious chest-burster scene. “We had to make a living creature spring out of a man’s chest and keep it
from being hokey. Well, we did it, and that’s why it’s so staggering. From a technical point of view I think
QUOTE OF THE WEEK...
we worried more about it than any other effect in the film. If we hadn’t gotten it right, we might as well
have forgotten the whole thing.” The sequence accomplished what Scott had hoped to achieve. “The film "I was thinkin', it really don't matter if I

took on a more serious identity.” lose this fight. It really don't matter if this
guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I

“The original concept was constructed around the notion of Ten Little Indians [1965]. In the planning and wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's

writing stages there were to be seven major sequences, one of which was the chest-burster,” recalled ever gone the distance with Creed, and if

Ridley Scott. “As the script was reworked, and as we shot the film, however, other sequences that were I can go that distance, you see, and that

equally powerful, such as the airlock depressurization, the flamethrower death of Parker [Yaphet Kotto] and bell rings and I'm still standin', I'm gonna

Lambert [Veronica Cartwright], and the cocoon scene with Dallas [Tom Skerritt] were cut altogether or know for the first time in my life, see, that

changed.” The design of the alien was revised numerous times. “We had gone through various sketches in I weren't just another bum from the

the preproduction phase, and I’d seen drawings that other people had tried as well. They always seemed to neighborhood"

be of scaly bodies with claws or huge blobs that would move across the floor. There was no elegance to ROCKY BALBOA, ROCKY (1976)

them, no lethalness. What emerged was an H.R. Giger-designed humanoid with distinctly biomechanoid
tendencies.”
GET INVOLVED...

“The sets were difficult,” confided the filmmaker, “because I wanted to create an oppressive, claustrophobic If you enjoy writing about movies
atmosphere of low ceilings.” Adding further to the onscreen tension are the sound effects, such as the and would like to feature on
Flickering Myth, please drop us an
opening and closing of the iris-type cutoffs in the airshaft sequence. “The idea was to make you feel
email. We are always open to
uneasy. We tried to use something that reminded you of a guillotine, something that wasn’t pleasant so
contributors and would love to hear
maybe you’d start thinking, ‘Is the beast coming this way?’” The camerawork assisted in setting the tone
from you.
for the picture. “If you ever analyze a shot, everything is always slightly moving. It’s never still, which I
think makes the audience slightly uneasy.” There is one thing which Scott regrets about the film. “There
We're also keen to hear from
were no speculative scenes or discussions about what the alien was…I believe audiences love those, independent filmmakers; if you'd
especially if they’re well done. They give the threat much more weight.” like to see your film featured or
want to get the word out on
“With Alien we had big arguments over the last three reels of the film. Some people felt they were just too upcoming projects then please feel
much,” said Ridley Scott. “I know it’s never too much, not when you get the proper balance. You’ve got to free to get in touch.
keep topping yourself. So if you start at a level that’s already pretty heated, you’ve got to keep going and
going. That is the nature of this film.” The reaction at the Dallas, Texas screening left film editor Terry
ALSO SHOWING...
Rawlings (Entrapment) stunned, “It was the most incredible preview I’ve ever attended. I mean, people
were screaming and running out of the theatre.” Audiences flocked to see the science fiction-horror picture R.I.P. Karl Malden (1912 - 2009)
causing the $11 million production to gross $105 million worldwide, thereby, turning unknown Broadway Bringing Star Wars to the
actress Sigourney Weaver into a female action-hero star. Screen: Episode VI - Return of
the Jedi
Alien won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; it was introduced into the National Film Registry of
Extreme Cinema - Irreversible
the Library of Congress in 2002, and the American Film Institute listed the picture 7th on the Top 10 Sci-Fi
(2002)
Films of All-Time in 2008. Three sequels were subsequently released, Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992), and
Alien Resurrection (1997); for film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, they do not compare to British World War II Movie
the original version, “The 1979 Alien is a much more cerebral movie than its sequels, with the characters Giveaway - NOW CLOSED
(and the audience) genuinely engaged in curiosity about this weirdest of life-forms…Unfortunately, the films British Cinema - City Rats (2009)
it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking.”
Movies... For Free! Häxan (1922)
Five Essential... Boxing Movies

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 2) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

For seven months Ridley Scott developed a science fiction classic by author Frank Herbert for the big
screen. “Dune was going to take a lot more work. And I didn’t have the heart to attack that work,” Hong Kong Cinema DVD
confessed the filmmaker of the picture which was released in 1984 under the direction of David Lynch Giveaway... NOW CLOSED
(Blue Velvet). “I felt I couldn’t sit around for another two and a half years on Dune, which is how long I Movies... For Free! D.O.A. (1950)
thought it was going to take...I needed immediate activity, needed to get my mind off my [older] brother’s Capturing Kubrick: A Stanley
death. So I went to Dino [DeLaurentiis to tell him] I had to depart Dune and that the script was his.”
Kubrick Profile (Part 2)

Not leaving behind the science fiction genre, Ridley Scott shifted his attention
to Dangerous Days, an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric FOLLOWERS...
Sheep? by novelist Philip K. Dick. “In the book, he’s [Rick Deckard] a bit of
a renegade, a freelancer, with a bonus for each job,” stated the director.
“But in the film he’s part of bureaucracy. We thought it would be nice to see
this character gradually emerge as a very efficient exterminator who is
almost Kafkaesque.”

Rick Deckard is dispatched by the government police force to hunt and


eliminate a group of androids called replicants who have illegally come to
earth. As the story evolved with screenwriter Hampton Fancher (The Minus
Man), Scott came to a conclusion, “I finally said to Hampton, ‘You know, we
can’t keep calling Deckard a goddamn detective.’ And he said, ‘Why not?’ I
replied, ‘Because we’re telling a story in 2019 for Christ’s sake. The word
‘detective’ will probably be around then, but this job Deckard does killing
androids, that requires something new. We’ve got to come up with a bloody name for his profession.’”
Fancher’s solution was to use the title Blade Runner: A Movie from a book written by William Burroughs.
The rights to the title were subsequently purchased for a nominal fee. “I thought the words ‘Blade Runner’
very well suited our needs,” approved Scott. “It was a nice, threatening name that neatly described a
violent action.” SUBSCRIBE...

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“Sci-fi presents a wonderful opportunity, because if you get it right, anything goes,” observed the
filmmaker. “But you’d better have drawn up your rule book for the world you’ve created first. Then you’d Comments
better stick to it.” A critical decision was made in regards to the futuristic tale. “We drew a line [in the
screenplay development]. We wouldn’t explore the laboratory details, the genetic explanations. Instead we
asked, ‘What if large combines in the next few decades became almost as powerful as the government?’
Which is possible. They’d move into all sorts of industries – arms, chemicals, aerospace – and eventually
they’d go into genetics.”

Describing the environment of Blade Runner (1982),


which takes place in the Los Angeles of 2019, Scott
remarked, “Our vision was really of a clogged world,
where you get a sense of a city on overload, where things
CONTRIBUTORS...
may stop at any time. Services may give out – in fact,
they already have ceased in at least some parts of the Gary Collinson
city. Everything is old or badly serviced, and the Trevor Hogg
bureaucratic system running the city is totally Gerry Hayes
disorganized.” Selected to play the main character of Rick Santosh Sandhu
Deckard was Harrison Ford (Witness) who performs Amy Flinders
alongside Rutger Hauer (Ladyhawke), Sean Young (No Elspeth Rushbrook
Way Out), Daryl Hannah (Splash), Edward James Olmos Jon Dudley
(Stand and Deliver), M. Emmet Walsh (Blood Simple), Tom Conran
William Sanderson (Coal Miner’s Daughter), and Joanna Cassidy (Under Fire). “Batty’s [Hauer] death Rory Barker
scene is in a way the final demonstration of his superiority over Deckard [Ford],” said the moviemaker. “He Richard J Moir
could have taken Deckard’s life – Deckard had just killed Pris [Hannah] – but decided as a gift to let him
Roger Holland
live. The white pigeon that he sets free into the sky is, of course, a symbol of peace and life.”
Harry Loney
Luke Owen
In the July 24, 1980 draft of the script by Hampton Fancher there is a sixth escaped replicant. “The woman
Rosie Cammish
is pretty, a touch of grey in her hair, kind and blue-eyed. Mary looks like an American dream mom, right
Russell Hill
out of Father Knows Best.” Cast to play the part was Stacey Nelkin (Bullets Over Broadway) who was
Andy Pope
subsequently devastated to learn that the role had been eliminated due to financial reasons. “I still feel a
bit badly about that,” confessed Ridley Scott. “Mary was going to be the only replicant that the audience David Bishop
would have gotten to see naturally fade away. What we’d come up with was a situation that took place Sheila Seclearr
early on in the film. In a dark room, with the other replicants watching, Mary dies. That’s how we were Tressa Price
going to introduce the replicants.” Vicki Isitt

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 2) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

For Fancher and co-screenwriter David Webb Peoples (Unforgiven), the idea of Rick Deckard being a
LINKS...
replicant was a result of their work being misinterpreted by Ridley Scott; their intention was to invoke
empathy by emphasizing the similarities between humans and the artificial creations through the main /Film
character. In reference to the dream sequence featured in the Director’s Cut, Scott said, “I’d predetermined 3D Total
that the unicorn scene would be the strongest clue that Deckard, this hunter of replicants, might actually be 3DVF
an artificial human himself.” Harrison Ford disagreed with his director on the origins of the government- Ain't It Cool News
sponsored assassin. “[Ridley] wanted the audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant,” stated Ford. “I Animated Views
fought that because I felt that the audience needed somebody to cheer for.” CGSociety
Cinema Assassin
Ford’s misgivings were well-founded as the picture was a commercial flop, earning $33 million worldwide Dark Horizons
while costing $28 million to make. “Blade Runner taught me that the American public tends to favour a Empire Online
high-fiber diet which infers that the American system is one containing a certain degree of optimism,”
Go Into The Story
stated Ridley Scott. “I, on the other hand, tend to be a bit darker…Not because I’m a manic-depressive, but
IMDB
because I find darkness more interesting.”
Joblo
Large Association of Movie Blogs
Blade Runner was nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Direction and Best Visual Effects at the Oscars;
Mania
while the BAFTAs saw the picture win Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design-
myPDFscripts
Art Direction as well as receive nominations for Best Editing, Best Make Up Artist, Best Score, Best Sound,
and Best Special Visual Effects. Pixar Talk
Richard J Moir's Film Blog
After the failure of its theatrical screening, Blade Runner experienced a rebirth in the home video Rotten Tomatoes
marketplace, causing the American Film Institute to list the picture 6th on its Top 10 Sci-Fi Films of All- sineFX
Time in 2008. “Blade Runner works on a level which I haven’t seen much – or ever – in a mainstream Sofluid
film,” declared Scott. “It works like a book. Like a very dark novel, which I like. It’s definitely a film that’s Stare Into Space
designed not to have the usual crush-wallop-bang! impact.” The director added, “I think Blade Runner is The Disney Blog
a good lesson for all serious filmmakers to ‘stand by your guns.’ Don’t listen to acclaim or criticism. Simply Total Film
carry on. Hopefully, you’ll do some worthwhile work which stands the test of time.”

Though he had established himself as a feature film director, Ridley Scott produced his most celebrated
commercial in 1984. The sixty second spot introduced Apple Computer’s Macintosh personal computer and
it was only aired once during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. Borrowing the name as well as
inspiration from George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, Scott created a dystopian tale starring a nameless
athletic heroine (Anya Major) who carries a large brass-headed hammer while chased by four agents of the
Thought Police; she breaks into a private assembly and tosses her weapon at a large screen image of a Big
Brother figure (David Graham), thereby shattering the picture in a blaze of light and smoke. “One of the
problems was to find a girl who could throw a hammer and look business-like,” remarked Scott. The ad was
so successful that in 1999 TV Guide called it the “Number One Greatest Commercial of All-Time” and in
2007, 1984 was named the best Super Bowl spot in the game’s forty-year history.

Not wanting his next project to be “profoundly European”, Ridley Scott


contacted the American author responsible for Angel Heart and Gray
Matters about writing a screenplay centred around “a young hermit [Tom
Cruise] who becomes a hero when he battles the evil Lord of Darkness [Tim
Curry], rescues a beautiful princess [Mia Sara] and frees the world from its
icy winter curse.”

“The characters really came from left field,” recollected novelist turned
screenwriter William Hjortsberg. “We discussed the hero in many forms
before deciding on Jack O’ The Green [Cruise]. Then Ridley decided we
should have a quest. He also wanted unicorns and thought there should be
magic armor and a sword. I came up with the idea of having the world
plunged into the wintry darkness. So we had all these elements which had to
be woven into a story.” In describing Legend (1985), Ridley Scott stated, “It
is not a film of the future, or of the past. It is not even a story of now. The
conflict between darkness and light has been with us since creation…and will remain with us through
eternity.”

To devise the villain of the story, the director turned to a picture he saw during his childhood. “The beast in
[Jean] Cocteau [version of Beauty and the Beast] is never horrible. When I was a kid, the beginning of
the movie made me very afraid, but very soon you realize there is something else. I wanted that with
Darkness. I didn’t want to put a barrier between the audience and him…I wanted Darkness to be healthy,
not disgusting psychologically and physically, because I had a feeling that Evil treats itself better, more
often than not, than Good.” For the part of Darkness, Scott considered casting Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 2) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

Arabia) whom he concluded lacked the right physique for the role; he then set his sights on hiring Tim
Curry who had garnered acclaim for his performance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). “I like
the control he has over himself,” remarked Scott on his reason for selecting Curry. “He is very physical and
powerful, theatrically speaking. He knows when he needs to stop. It was great to work with him.”

“What I am trying to do, even if I start with a complicated story, is to bring it back to its primitive
linearity”, revealed Ridley Scott. “In fairy tales there is always an element of the nightmare.” Fifteen
hundred icicles were added to the set varying from one foot to eight feet; they were made from resin and
hot wax. Just two days before finishing the principle photography, a fire broke out on the famous 007
sound stage at Pinewood Studios, destroying the forest set. The art department had to rebuild the section
of the forest which was needed to complete the filming at a separate location.

“It was a huge risk,” admitted Ridley Scott. “Did I think that the film worked? Absolutely I thought the film
worked. Did people get it? Again, no, they didn’t, even though there was an enormous amount of
absolutely brilliant work in it.” Part of the story confusion for moviegoers may have resulted from the
American theatrical version being severely shortened. Legend proved to be an even bigger worldwide box
office disappointment than Blade Runner had been as the movie earned half of its $30 million production
budget.

Venturing into new cinematic territory, the British director selected a contemporary thriller as his next
project.

Continue to Part 3

For more on Ridley Scott visit RSA Films, or check out Ridley Scott's Legend FAQ and Paul M.
Sammon's Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.

Five Essential Films of Ridley Scott


DVD Giveaway - Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Apple Macintosh 1984 Superbowl Commercial:

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 3) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

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WEDNESDAY, 5 MAY 2010

Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 3)


Trevor Hogg profiles the career of filmmaker Ridley Scott in the third of a five part feature...
read part one and part two.

Inspired by the title of a George and Ira Gershwin song (sung on the movie
soundtrack by Sting, Roberta Flack, and Gene Ammons), filmmaker Ridley
Scott produced his first modern-day picture Someone to Watch Over Me
(1987). Filming an American thriller was not a daunting task for the British-
born director, “There are a lot of things that Americans live with that they will
never really see, because they are such a part of their culture, because they
are so ingrained in their lives.”
DVD GIVEAWAY...

Vincent Canby of The New York Times summarized the storyline, “Beneath its
elegant mask, Someone to Watch Over Me is a commonplace melodrama
about Mike Keegan (Tom Berenger), a happily married New York Policeman
who has an affair with Clair Gregory (Mimi Rogers), the beautiful Manhattan
millionaire whose body he’s been assigned to guard. Claire has had the
misfortune to witness a murder while attending the opening of a fashionable
downtown art gallery, and the murderer (Andreas Katsulas) wants her dead
before she can testify.” Canby’s film critic colleague David Denby, from New York Magazine wrote, “Ridley
Scott holds back on the erotic tension between Berenger and Rogers. And he loses himself in the décor and
visual clutter – the steam hissing onto Manhattan streets, the Disneyland of crystal, mirrors, and windows
in Rogers’ apartment. He keeps shooting into the deluxe glass as if the mystery of all the ages could be
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found in its reflections.” Earning $10 million at the U.S. domestic box office, the movie was a third
consecutive commercial misfire for Scott. Search

powered by
“I read a lot of newspapers and the movies I am drawn to both as an actor
and as an actor-producer tend to have a current-events mode,” explained
Oscar-winner Michael Douglas on why he attached himself to the Ridley YOUR FAVOURITE RIDLEY SCOTT MOVIE
Scott-helmed Black Rain (1989). “I’m thinking about The China Syndrome IS...

[1979] and Wall Street [1987]. I felt that there was something between us The Duellists (1977)
and Japan that was unresolved, that was a mixture of hostility and
Alien (1979)
admiration on both sides – really confused. It involves Japan’s cultural
imitation of the United States, followed by its economic supremacy over the Blade Runner (1982)
United States, all of which are coloured by lingering memories of World War Legend (1985)
II.” Douglas saw the thriller, which is named after the combination of ash Someone to Watch Over Me
and precipitation that fell on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1987)
after they were nuclear bombed, as the cinematic means to address the Black Rain (1989)
complicated relationship between the two countries. “I thought this particular
Thelma & Louise (1991)
picture, as a cop-action picture, could explore some of the differences in
1492: Conquest of Paradise
customs and behaviour – explore some of the hostilities that our two cultures
(1992)
and societies have for each other.”
White Squall (1996)

Two American law enforcement officers (Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia) transport a mobster (Yusaku G.I. Jane (1997)
Matsuda) to stand trial in his homeland of Japan only to have him escape their custody. “The way in is the Gladiator (2000)

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 3) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

conflict between police methods,” stated Ridley Scott as to how he portrayed the cultural differences Hannibal (2001)
between the East and the West. “Michael – as Conklin – is a New York homicide detective with a certain
Black Hawk Down (2001)
disgruntlement, a certain dissatisfaction with the system and a certain renegade quality. It even suggests
that he’s on the take in a minor way. Ken [Takakura], on the other hand, is a thorough, by-the-book, Matchstick Men (2003)
hardline bureaucrat who is part of what seems to be this wonderful machine in Japan.” Over the course of Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
the story, the two opposing figures experience a profound transformation. “Michael, I think, reestablishes
A Good Year (2006)
some lost values in himself – traditional values, which somewhere along the line have been lost in the West
but which I think still exist in Japan, such as a sense of honour and a sense of family – through his American Gangster (2007)
experience with this Japanese character. And Ken – who plays the Japanese Everyman, the salaried man, Body of Lies (2008)
the bourgeois, what we think is the automaton – loses his rigidity and opens up through his contact with
  Show results
Michael and Andy Garcia. For Ken Takakura – both as a character and as an actor – to stand up and sing is
an incredibly alien and painful thing.”
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A major difference between the nations during the selection of the Japanese cast for the movie. “In Japan,
actors do not audition,” revealed associate producer and Japanologist Alan Poul. “The idea of having to put
yourself in a position that’s potentially humiliating is very disagreeable.” Recalling the experience, Scott
QUOTE OF THE WEEK...
chuckled, “Each actor would arrive with his manager. The manager being fairly angry at having to be there
at all. But because we were so well promoted, they were torn between not coming at all and coming to see "I was thinkin', it really don't matter if I

what was going on.” The director’s first choice for the Yakuza villain Koga Sato was Jackie Chan (Rush lose this fight. It really don't matter if this

Hour) who turned down the role out of fear it would adversely affect his positive film image. Initially, guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I

Ridley Scott had some doubts about finding the right actors in Japan. “When you’re dealing with a good wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's

actor, you known what’s going on,” observed the filmmaker. “I found the Japanese actors were brilliant. I ever gone the distance with Creed, and if

thought I was going to get Kabuki Theatre, and I didn’t get that at all. I got very good, very balanced, very I can go that distance, you see, and that

contemporary, very real performances.” bell rings and I'm still standin', I'm gonna
know for the first time in my life, see, that

Conversing with the one hundred and twenty Japanese working alongside forty-five Western production I weren't just another bum from the

crew members was not a problem for Ridley Scott. “We communicated through interpreters but I found neighborhood"

there’s an international language in filmmaking. Once they know how you’re functioning, they all move very ROCKY BALBOA, ROCKY (1976)

quickly, like an army – they were great.” One issue that did emerge during the principal photography in
Osaka was residential resistance towards the Hollywood film. “People thought that having their store or
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their house used as a place frequented by yakuza would reflect badly on them,” recalled Alan Poul.
If you enjoy writing about movies
As for incorporating a moment which harkens back to a previous effort, Scott readily admitted, “We needed and would like to feature on
Flickering Myth, please drop us an
a clue in Black Rain, and somebody on the crew who’d seen Blade Runner [1982] suggested the sequin.
email. We are always open to
And, I said, ‘No, we can’t. We’ve already done this once.’ But we couldn’t think of another goddamn clue!”
contributors and would love to hear
At the box office the two pictures were polar opposites as Black Rain easily surpassed its $14 million
from you.
production budget by earning $134 million worldwide. Ridley Scott’s first collaboration with music composer
Hans Zimmer resulted in Oscar nominations for Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Sound; and was
We're also keen to hear from
dedicated to Yusaku Matsuda who died shortly after the completion of the film. independent filmmakers; if you'd
like to see your film featured or
Presented with a script from first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri want to get the word out on
(Something to Talk About), the South Shields-native wanted to produce upcoming projects then please feel
the project so he interviewed a variety of directors. “I was getting marginally free to get in touch.
alarmed by the fact that they all wanted to fix it up,” said Scott of the
Khouri-penned Thelma & Louise (1991), “and I didn’t think any of it
ALSO SHOWING...
needed fixing. And they all wanted to know why I wasn’t doing it myself. So
I did it.” Director Profile: Lynne Ramsay
(Part 2)
Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) and Thelma Dickinson (Geena Davis) Classic Movies - Easy Rider
abandon their husbands in search of a better life; trouble ensues when they
(1969)
become fugitives from the law after Louise kills a man who attempts to rape
Seth MacFarlane Talks Family
Thelma. “Because of the nature of the material, the two actresses not only
Guy Movie
had to be great, they had to be great together,” said Ridley Scott who talked
to Jodie Foster (The Silence of the Lambs), Meryl Streep (Kramer vs. TV Special - Star Wars Live-
Kramer), and Goldie Hawn (The Sugarland Express) about starring in the Action Titbits and Musings
$17 million production. “We had Geena [Davis] first – she’d gotten hold of the script and called up to say Commando remake in the
she wanted to talk to us – and the chemistry she and Susan [Sarandon] had together was extraordinary.” pipeline
Movies... For Free! Santa Claus
“I don’t think there’s any difficulty in Hollywood for female-driven scripts,” reflected the moviemaker. “I
Conquers the Martians (1964)
think it’s just that there aren’t any. People haven’t sat down and dealt with it. I also don’t really think of
Thelma & Louise as a women’s film; it’s a men’s film as well. I think there’s something for everybody.” Transformers and Land of the
Attempting to classify the story, Ridley Scott stated, “This is a comedy, and the characters are rather broad Lost lead Razzie nominations
generalizations, but that’s not to say there isn’t truth in them.” Asked whether the road picture was a Forthcoming Attractions: 44 Inch

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 3) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

departure for him, the director replied, “I feel all the films I’ve done have been character-based. But the Chest
events in my films have been a bit larger than life, and those events, and certain exotic elements, have New trailers for The A-Team and
been the engine behind the movie.” The Expendables
Resurfacing: A James Cameron
“What I originally wanted to do was to have one of the subtexts of the movie be the changing face of
Profile (Part 3)
America,” said Scott. “I wanted to shoot in around mall stopovers, modern ghastly hotels, and these
freeways that go straight across the country and look exactly the same every mile of the way. But that
became so depressing I decided that if I wanted to hit this note of Thelma & Louise being about an
FOLLOWERS...
almost mystical “last journey”, then it had to be more like the idea of Route 66. So we consciously set out
to show that landscape at its most beautiful and expansive.”

Emulating the famous freeze-frame conclusion of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is the
dramatic last shot of Thelma & Louise. “We were never pressured for an “up” ending,” declared the
director. “I think the ending was just extending the journey. It’s an emotional choice, and you either fly
with it or you don’t. The alternatives are impossible: Thelma and Louise could have taken out that gun and
started to fire, in which case they would have been shot at by this army of very hostile men. Or they could
have got up and negotiated, and they would have ended up doing ten to fifteen, maybe got out after seven
if they were good girls.”

Moviegoers embraced the film which grossed $45 million at the American domestic box office. Critical
accolades were plentiful, with the picture winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and receiving
nominations for Best Actress (Davis and Sarandon), Best Editing, Best Cinematography, and Best Director.
At the BAFTAs, Ridley Scott was a contender for the David Lean Award for Direction, while the picture was
nominated for Best Actress (Davis and Sarandon), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best
Original Score, and Best Original Screenplay. The Golden Globes lauded the movie with nominations for
Best Screenplay, Best Picture – Drama, and Best Actress (Davis and Sarandon). In France, Thelma & SUBSCRIBE...
Louise competed for the César Award for Best Foreign Picture while in the U.S, Scott received a Director’s
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Guild of America nomination. The Writer’s Guild of America ranked the script #72 on its 101 Greatest
Screenplays List. Comments

Seeking a break from making three consecutive contemporary movies, Ridley


Scott wanted to do a picture about a “larger-than-life character whose efforts
change the world forever.” Commemorating the five-hundredth anniversary
of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America, the British moviemaker
directed the historical epic 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992). French
journalist Roslyne Bosch (Animal) wrote the screenplay for the $45 million
production about the legendary Genovese mariner whom she described as
being “a complex person like all of us.” Recruited for the pivotal role was a
renowned French actor. “Gérard Depardieu [Cyrano de Bergerac] was my
first and only choice for Columbus,” stated Scott. “His natural character CONTRIBUTORS...

seems to dovetail into my perception of who Columbus may have been; a Gary Collinson
strong, physical man, driven by his emotions and instincts, a strong orator Trevor Hogg
with the personality to persuade men to follow him.” To better understand Gerry Hayes
Christopher Columbus, Ridley Scott turned to the period in which the Santosh Sandhu
historical figured lived. “Clearly the socio-political background plays an Amy Flinders
enormous part in forming his character and his views, like it does to all of us today,” said the director. “In Elspeth Rushbrook
that respect, people don’t change much; they are the production of their own environments.” Featured in
Jon Dudley
the supporting cast are Armand Assante (American Gangster), Tcheky Karyo (La balance), Ángela
Tom Conran
Molina (Carne trémula), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), and Sigourney Weaver (Gorillas in the Mist).
Rory Barker
Richard J Moir
“It was extremely difficult to find appropriate locations which would afford me all the elements I required
Roger Holland
for Columbus’ experiences in the Indies,” revealed Ridley Scott. We location-hunted in Mexico, the
Harry Loney
Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Columbia before finally settling for Costa Rica.” One hundred and seventy
Indians from Costa Rica’s four tribes participated in the principal photography. “I feel that the people we Luke Owen
are portraying are both noble and dignified,” remarked Alejandrino Moya (The Mission), a Waunana Indian Rosie Cammish
who plays one of the tribesman who accompanies the famous explorer on his return trip to Spain. Initially Russell Hill
communicating with and coaxing performances out of the native extras was a “nerve-racking” experience Andy Pope
for the director. “With the help of Claudia Gomez from Columbia,” acknowledged Scott, “they became David Bishop
marvelously uninhibited actors who never held back – ever – and portrayed some of the most authentic Sheila Seclearr
Indians I have seen on screen.” Tressa Price
Vicki Isitt
Lacking major studio interest in financing the picture, French producer Alain Goldman (La môme) pre-sold
the foreign rights, allowing the project to commence. “Historical films have always been difficult to mount,”
LINKS...

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 3) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

observed Ridley Scott, “because of the inherent resistance to the cost and modern audiences who seem to
be more concerned with escapism than realism today.” The attempt by the director to create a story that /Film
was both entertaining and educational, like Dances with Wolves (1990), Amadeus (1984), and 3D Total
Dangerous Liaisons (1988), failed at the U.S. domestic box office, earning $7 million. “Why 1492 didn’t 3DVF
play, I really don’t know,” reflected Scott. “But I learned not to let anything overwhelm me. You can sit Ain't It Cool News
and dwell on something and let depression consume you, or you can just shut it out. You don’t allow doubt Animated Views
in. You can’t.”
CGSociety
Cinema Assassin
Drawn to the best-selling nonfiction book The Hot Zone written by Richard Preston, the filmmaker worked
Dark Horizons
on bringing the bio-thriller about the near outbreak of the Ebola virus in Washington, D.C. to the big screen
Empire Online
in 1993. At one point Oscar-winners Jodie Foster and Robert Redford (The Sting) were to star in the
Go Into The Story
production which was scrapped when 20th Century-Fox withdrew its financing. The newly-established Scott
IMDB
Free Productions, formed by Ridley and his younger brother Tony Scott (Man on Fire), had better luck
releasing The Browning Version and Monkey Trouble a year later. 1995 saw the Scott siblings purchase Joblo
a piece of British cinematic history by buying the legendary London-based Pinewood Shepperton Studios. Large Association of Movie Blogs
Mania
“I never thought I’d go back and do another sea story after 1492, because myPDFscripts
that was a pain in the ass,” declared Ridley Scott. “Then the script [for Pixar Talk
White Squall] came floating past, and we picked it up. It was the strength Richard J Moir's Film Blog
of the story that brought us back to revisit the sea. On 1492 we never got Rotten Tomatoes
out on rough seas, but in this instance, I would have to explore every avenue sineFX
of water.” Sofluid
Stare Into Space
A summer school sailing trip led by Dr. Christopher B. Sheldon (Jeff Bridges) The Disney Blog
turns fatal when the brigantine sinks upon encountering a sudden and violent Total Film
windstorm. “The rite of passage has evaporated today, so I felt it was worth
refreshing people’s minds that this did once exist,” explained the director in
reference to his 1996 picture which is based on the story The Last Voyage
of the Albatross. “It’s like a micro-burst,” remarked Scott when detailing
the natural phenomenon that caused the tragic 1960s incident. “In essence
it’s a tornado or a hurricane over a short distance that pushes everything in
its path flat. During the actual event, they went over in ninety seconds and sank in ninety seconds.” Aside
from the cast, which includes Caroline Goodall (Hotel Sorrento), John Savage (The Deer Hunter), Scott
Wolf (Go), Jeremy Sisto (The Movie Hero), and Ryan Phillippe (Stop-Loss), the director had to concern
himself with another element to ensure that the story remained believable. “If there are seven characters in
the film, I treat the environment as the eighth character – or the first. After all, it’s the proscenium within
which everything will function.”

Filming out on the open water, Ridley Scott wanted to emulate a Hollywood classic. “The original Moby
Dick [1956] was really good,” began the filmmaker, “particularly the sea footage of the whalers with their
harpoons in the long boats; I could never work out whether it was real documentary footage or whether
they’d shot it. I compiled documentary footage and started to watch the water, just to see how it behaved,
to try and get around the curse of [shooting in] a tank. Because in the tank, even with a wind machine,
you’ve only got three foot waves.” There were safety concerns that needed to be addressed. “The biggest
problem at sea was all the actors on board. You’re on the high seas, and if somebody goes overboard, you
just never pick them up. By the time you turn around there’s just this little head bobbing around in the
water. We were very careful about that.”

Cinematographer Hugh Johnson (Chill Factor), who made his feature picture debut with White Squall,
stated, “Early on, Ridley and I felt that the film should not be cosmetic in any way. We wanted to shoot in
the hard light, in the weather we had, so you had the feeling of heat and warmth around the film. It’s quite
raw, especially during the boat sequences.” The seventeen minute storm sequence was a combination of
footage staged at a huge tank facility situated in Malta and “big sea” shots captured when the topsail
schooner used in the movie traveled across the Atlantic Ocean. “I’d done a commercial just before we
started shooting,” recollected Ridley Scott of his time spent at Mediterranean Film Complex, “and my
special effects guy had turned up with an engine from a Navy jet, which gave me a wind of six hundred
miles per hour! We found two in Europe and rigged both so we could pan and tilt them. That force took the
waves, which were only three and a half feet high, and whipped them up into this white foam I’ve never
seen before.” Even with the innovative storm solution, the $38 million production failed to generate a box
office frenzy, grossing $10 million in the United States.

“When Demi [Moore] offered me G.I. Jane [1997] to direct, I was drawn to
the military subculture it took place in,” stated Scott. “I also liked the fact

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 3) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

that Jane’s subject matter was so provocative. A woman entering combat


training in a very rarified area of the military, and how she fares against the
obstacles placed in her way, seemed a challenging topic.” The British
filmmaker had a personal connection to the story about Lt. Jordan O’Neil
(Demi Moore) who becomes the first woman to undergo training for the U.S.
Navy Combined Reconnaissance Team. “I almost joined the Royal Marines. I
was very curious about them when I was about twenty. But then, my dad
who had been in the British army, stepped in and said that although it was
all up to me whether I went into the service or not, I really should go to art
school.”

Current affairs made the military action-drama a timely project. “When we


were began prepping G.I. Jane,” remarked Ridley Scott, “the Tailback Affair
was only about ten months old. [A group of female Naval pilots-in-training had accused their male
counterparts of sexual harassment.] Then, a week before principal photography started, another story
broke about the resistance a young woman was encountering after she’d tried to enroll in the Citadel, this
all-male military academy in Charleston, South Carolina.” As much as he is known for his stunning visual
imagery, the director acknowledges that it alone cannot ensure commercial success. “It’s always been my
feeling that one of the hardest things to get right in filmmaking is the script,” said Scott. “David Twohy
[Pitch Black] was the writer I worked on the film with. I think it would be fair to say that Danielle
Alexandra came up with the plot, drama, and the characters. David Twohy came up with the action, as well
integrating my concerns into the script. He did a great job of grafting all of that onto a good story with
humorous and intelligent dialogue.”

“When I start making a film,” revealed Ridley Scott, “it’s as if there’s this little, invisible computer in the
back of my head that switches on and presets the overall look of the film at the very beginning of the
process. It’s not easy to articulate. I tend to think pictorially. Something just drops into place and rolls
down the chute, and I follow it. If you pressed me on it, I guess I’d have to say that because of its military
context and because the subject matter of G.I. Jane was rather somber and austere, we decided to make
the film look somber and austere.” Scott stills utilizes the skill he developed as a college art student and
production designer for the BBC – his ability to draw; he communicates to his film crew through
storyboards nicknamed “Ridleygrams” because, “It’s a way of maintaining visual control, so there’s no
dispute over any point; everybody knows exactly what the end product should look like and is working
towards it.” Certain liberties had to be taken when shooting the picture. “One of the first production design
decisions we made regarding G.I. Jane was to use as many authentic locations as possible,” recalled the
moviemaker. “But then, when Arthur [Max], and I started looking at reference photos of real naval bases
and buildings, it became apparent that these facilities looked dull. So we were constantly trying to make
the locations and the few sets we built visually interesting, while not making them excessively unrealistic.”

When it came to selecting the cast which includes James Caviezel (The Thin Red Line), David Vadim (Exit
Wounds), John Michael Higgins (A Mighty Wind), and Scott Wilson (The Ninth Configuration), Ridley
Scott was happy to be collaborating with his leading lady, “I thought it was a good film for Demi. I’d also
always wanted to work with her – I think she’s one of the best actors we’ve got.” Lt. Jordan O’Neil was not
the only major role in the movie. “After Demi, my two major casting concerns were [Senator Lillian]
DeHaven and Master Chief Urgayle, the SEAL instructor. I didn’t want either of these characters to be
caricatures. That’s why Anne Bancroft [The Miracle Worker] was always my first choice for the senator,
who’s a representative of strength and intelligence and women’s rights. Anne’s very good at that. She’s
quite capable of pulling off the tricky balance of being sympathetic while, on the other hand, being tough.”
To play the brutal taskmaster and poem-quoting Urgayle, Scott recruited Viggo Mortensen (Eastern
Promises). “The reason I went with Viggo was because I’d been very impressed after seeing him in a film
Sean Penn [Mystic River] directed called The Indian Runner [1991]. Viggo was designed never to say
much in that film, but I loved his presence.” Helping to cement the casting decision was the fact that
Ridley’s brother Tony Scott had enjoyed working with Mortensen on Crimson Tide (1995). Ridley Scott
does not look upon the character of the Master Chief as a sadistic. “These guys who seem to be bullies, the
instructors on the SEAL courses, are really the candidates’ best friend. They’re preparing them for
something which is going to be much tougher later on.”

“I actually thought the eventual ending of the film, the one where O’Neil lived and Urgayle gave her his
Naval Cross medal, was a pretty good one,” said the filmmaker. “It signified his respect for O’Neil’s
perseverance and abilities and Urgayle’s gratitude for her pulling him out of a lethal situation. It was a nice
wrap-up.” G.I. Jane was a worldwide box office disappointment, grossing $80 million while costing $48

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 3) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

million to produce. “I thought we’d do better with a story highlighting a woman in the lead doing a man’s
job; I felt that sort of thing would generate high curiosity in women and hyper-curiosity in men, who’d go
into a film like this thinking, ‘A female SEAL? Right – prove it.’”

A cinematic adaptation of the post-Apocalyptic I Am Legend by novelist


Richard Matheson, which served as the basis for The Last Man on Earth
(1960) and The Omega Man (1970), paired Ridley Scott with action
superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator). “The parameters of the
book and the script [written by Mark Protosevich] contained a fascinating
idea,” recollected the director. “That man’s arrogance in dealing with genetics
and disease and success with research had backfired on him and resulted in
a mutated airborne virus that got loose and couldn’t be controlled. That virus
then spread to the point where it essentially devastated the world. Now, part
of the beauty of this central idea, where Matheson really came up with
something, was the fact that Legend’s story starts after the fact. You come
in after the plague, into a whole different world. That really appealed to me.”

Ridley Scott associated the sole survivor tale with a literary classic. “I
connected I Am Legend most strongly with Robinson Crusoe [1954], the
story of a man who suffers terrible isolation until he meets his Man Friday. That was the strongest parallel
for me, and that’s why I was eager to work with Arnold on this. I felt I could take usual screen persona
into a new area, one that dealt with this suffering.” The filmmaker set about reworking the tale with John
Logan (The Aviator); the story is situated in a hostile and desolate environment overrun by vampires. “I
felt we had licked the first two acts. We were still working on the third one. There was a lot of talk, of
course, of coming up with an ending where Neville would find his Eve, or another group of normal human
beings. I resisted that. I wanted the ending to emphasize the idea that, among other animals, the human
race is unique – whatever the problems, it will always carry on. So even though Neville has an awareness
that he may be the last normal person, he perseveres. I liked ending on that.”

Contending with the major blockbuster failures of Batman and Robin (1997), and The Postman (1997),
Warner Bros subsequently cancelled the ambitious project. “I think they had some bad experiences,”
hypothesized Ridley Scott, “and our project came along when they were going through a nervous point of
low confidence.” The picture was later revived in 2007 by actor Will Smith (Ali) and Austrian moviemaker
Francis Lawrence (Constantine).

Approaching the new millennium, Scott produced a sword and sandal epic which captured the adoration of
film critics and moviegoers around the world.

Continue to part four.

For more on Ridley Scott visit RSA Films, or check out The Ridley Scott Fan Information Page.

Five Essential Films of Ridley Scott


DVD Giveaway - Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

POSTED BY FLICKERINGMYTH
LABELS: BRITISH CINEMA, FILMMAKER PROFILES, TREVOR HOGG

1 COMMENTS:

behram said...
sweet.
would like to have known more about Black Rain.t'was a fascinating flick

b
6 MAY 2010 10:43

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 4) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

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WEDNESDAY, 12 MAY 2010

Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 4)


Trevor Hogg profiles the career of filmmaker Ridley Scott in the fourth of a five part feature...
read parts one, two and three.

Producing an historic epic about a disgraced Roman


general who seeks to reclaim his honour by becoming a
Coliseum fighter was not originally Ridley Scott’s idea.
“I was approached by Walter Parkes [WarGames] and
DreamWorks,” recounted the British director. “Walter,
one of the great story pitchers, preceded his remarks
by presenting a reproduction of a nineteenth century
DVD GIVEAWAY...
painting by the artist [Jean-Léon] Gérôme. It showed a
Roman arena from the level of the sand, where a
gladiator holding a weapon was standing over his
vanquished foe, looking up at an emperor who was
staring down at them and preparing to give the
thumbs down gesture. Walter really had me the second
he showed me the painting.”

Impressed with the footage from Jake Scott’s feature film debut, Plunkett and Macleane (1999), the
British moviemaker recruited his son’s cinematographer who had been working for Black Dog (a music
video company owned by the Scotts). “I didn’t want to just shoot the battle sequences for Gladiator in a
traditional manner, so we adopted various styles which John [Mathieson] and I talked about. We used
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various techniques in terms of cameras and camera speeds. When you’ve got two thousand soldiers in the
field at any one time and you’re planning to experiment, you’d better make sure you’re right, because you Search

can’t go back and reshoot it.” The reason for adopting an unconventional shooting approach for the fighting powered by
sequences was a pragmatic choice on the part of the director. “People get tired of watching [the same
kinds] of medieval battles, or any battle scenes that have run dry. I think Steven Spielberg did an
incredible twelve minutes [in the opening scene] of Saving Private Ryan [1998]; that sequence felt YOUR FAVOURITE RIDLEY SCOTT MOVIE
absolutely real and documentary. He raised the stakes in terms of the film interpretation of what that IS...

experience might be like.” The Duellists (1977)


Alien (1979)
“[Sir Lawrence] Alma-Tedema, who was painting Greek, Roman and Egyptian environments with great
perception and accuracy, was a big reference,” answered Ridley Scott when asked about the look of the Blade Runner (1982)
movie released in 2000. “It then fell to me to say, ‘Rome was the Golden City, but it was probably dirty and Legend (1985)
grim in parts, despite the architecture.’” Following in the footsteps of Hollywood classics Ben-Hur (1959), Someone to Watch Over Me
Spartacus (1960), and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) was a creative challenge for the South (1987)
Shields-native. “The question is, when you bring a different eye to the time period and [shoot in a] different Black Rain (1989)
decade will the picture look different than previous films? Absolutely. I think through production design, we
Thelma & Louise (1991)
got an interesting view of Roman life that I’m very happy with.”
1492: Conquest of Paradise
(1992)
Selected to play the title character of General Maximus Dacimus Meridus was
White Squall (1996)
Australian actor Russell Crowe (L.A. Confidential). “Russell is a
collaborator,” enthused Scott. “He brings a great deal to the table when he G.I. Jane (1997)
takes on a role, really gives it his all and has a lot of ideas. As soon as we Gladiator (2000)

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 4) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

cast him as Maximus, he started reading Marcus Arrelius’ writings and Hannibal (2001)
familiarizing himself with the history of the Roman Empire. He’s very well
Black Hawk Down (2001)
read on a lot of other subjects, as well.” Cast in the part of the mentor
Antonius Proximo is British acting veteran Oliver Reed (The Three Matchstick Men (2003)
Musketeers). “Oliver was what I’d call a charming scoundrel. He was a Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
wonderful actor, incredibly intense. I knew for that role I needed a Robert
A Good Year (2006)
Shaw-type actor who was as tough as nails, but also had a sensitive side.”
With three weeks left in principle photography Reed died causing the director American Gangster (2007)
to improvise with the aid of digital technology. “I had to shoot most of his Body of Lies (2008)
Vote
scenes at the end of the film using his body double, then for close-ups we
  Show results
superimposed Oliver’s face onto the body double.” Ridley Scott went on to
add, “Oliver went out the way he would have wanted to, I should think, with a pint glass in his hand.”
Votes so far: 390
Days left to vote: 4
Other members of the cast included Richard Harris (A Man Named Horse), Connie Nielsen (Basic), Derek
Jacobi (Gosford Park), Djimon Housnou (Blood Diamond), David Hemmings (Last Orders), and Joaquin
Phoenix (Walk the Line) who portrays the ruthless and scheming Emperor Commodus. “I had a very
QUOTE OF THE WEEK...
specific interpretation of the way I wanted to play it,” said Phoenix, “but at first I didn’t know if that would
fit in with the rest of the characters in the film as a whole. Commodus is certainly a man-child, and he was "I was thinkin', it really don't matter if I

a neglected child. It was very important for me to illustrate that in certain ways. His reactions to the lose this fight. It really don't matter if this

combats in the arena – it’s almost as if he doesn’t comprehend what human life is; people are merely toys guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I

for his enjoyment.” wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's


ever gone the distance with Creed, and if

Gladiator was a global sensation, quadrupling its $103 million production budget by earning $458 million I can go that distance, you see, and that

in worldwide box office receipts. The Academy Awards lauded the film with Best Picture, Best Actor bell rings and I'm still standin', I'm gonna

(Crowe), Best Visual Effects, Best Costume Design, and Best Sound; other nominations included Best know for the first time in my life, see, that

Supporting Actor (Phoenix) and Best Director. The Golden Globes awarded the historical epic with Best I weren't just another bum from the

Picture – Drama, and Best Original Score, and at the BAFTAs, Gladiator competed in fourteen categories neighborhood"

winning for Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, and Best Production Design; for his work behind ROCKY BALBOA, ROCKY (1976)

the camera, Ridley Scott was nominated for the David Lean Award for Direction.

GET INVOLVED...
“Each time, I search for a fresh experience and a fresh meaning,” explained
the director about his method of selecting projects. “They say that nothing’s If you enjoy writing about movies
really new anymore, that there are only seven stories in the world, which and would like to feature on
Flickering Myth, please drop us an
sounds rather depressing, but I’ve got a funny feeling it’s more or less
email. We are always open to
accurate. Fundamentally, you still have the good guy or the bad guy. So it’s
contributors and would love to hear
got to be about the way you look at things.” Turned down by American
from you.
moviemaker Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia), Italian producer Dino De
Laurentiis (The Bounty) approached Scott who agreed to provide his own
We're also keen to hear from
perspective on the iconic villain reprised by Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins independent filmmakers; if you'd
(Howard’s End). “The Silence of the Lambs [1989] was so good I like to see your film featured or
couldn’t forget it. But Hannibal [2001] takes on a life of its own. It’s not want to get the word out on
really picking up right after Silence left off. It’s ten years later and the upcoming projects then please feel
character [of Hannibal Lecter] is entirely different. I don’t even think of it as free to get in touch.
a sequel. It goes in such a different direction.”

ALSO SHOWING...
Serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins) is hunted by Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), a sadistic pedophile
whom he disfigured but failed to kill years ago. Ridley Scott had issues with the “love story” conclusion in Five Essential... Arnie Characters
the six-hundred page novel which sees Lecter slip away romantically with FBI Special Agent Clarice Extreme Cinema - A Clockwork
Starling. “We adjusted the ending, while capturing the essence of the book,” declared the filmmaker. “I Orange (1971)
couldn’t take that quantum leap emotionally on behalf of Starling. Certainly on the behalf of Hannibal – I’m
Movies... For Free! The City of
sure that’s been on the back of his mind for a number of years but for Starling, no. I think one of the
the Dead (1960)
attractions about Starling to Hannibal is what a straight arrow she is.”
Extreme Cinema - The Idiots
Screenwriter Ted Tally who had worked on The Silence of the Lambs with Jonathan Demme declined the (1998)
offer to work on the sequel; so did Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List) who reconsidered his stance when he Mamma Mia and Doubt: Two
was approached a second time. “I found out that David Mamet [Glengarry Glen Ross] was working on it, Faces of Meryl Streep
recalled Zaillian, and I started to feel like, ‘What sort of jerk am I?’”; he agreed with one condition. The
British Cinema: Evil Aliens (2005)
ending had to be reworked. Steve Zaillian, Ridley Scott, and author Thomas Harris spent four days
Transformers and Land of the
brainstorming at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I think the ending is more tonal as to what could possibly be in
Lost lead Razzie nominations

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 4) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

her [Starling’s] mind at that moment,” said Ridley Scott who soon found himself having to recast the role
which was embodied by Jodie Foster (Little Man Tate). Movies... For Free! Carnival of
Souls (1962)
Foster’s rejection to participate in the sequel led to speculation that not enough money was being offered to Walt Disney Company acquires
lure her or that she simply disliked the book. Universal’s president of production Kevin Misher found himself Marvel Entertainment
faced with an awkward situation, “It was one of those moments when you sit down and think, ‘Can Clarice
Welcome to FlickeringMyth.com
be looked upon as James Bond, for instance? A character who is replaceable. Or was Jodie Foster Clarice
Starling and the audience will not accept [anyone else]?’” A-list actresses Cate Blanchett (The Shipping
News), Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted), Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry), Ashley Judd (Double FOLLOWERS...
Jeopardy), and Julianne Moore (Boogie Nights) were seen as possible replacement candidates. Scott
selected Moore because she had “a certain kind of gravitas, an intelligence which is very similar [to Jodie
Foster’s]”.

“I just learned the lines and showed up and walked around as Hannibal Lecter,” stated Anthony Hopkins
who divorced himself from the preproduction turmoil; he was concerned about a more pressing creative
challenge. “I thought, ‘Do I repeat that performance, or do I vary it?’”, revealed Hopkins. “Ten years have
passed so I changed it a bit because I’ve changed.” Dr. Hannibal Lecter may be “a bit mellower” in the
words of the acclaimed British actor, however, his methods remain brutal as with the brain eating scene
involving Starling’s nemesis Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta). “He seems to be a popular cult figure,” amused
Anthony Hopkins. “I don’t know if that makes the whole world crazy, but…there are dark sides to human
nature.” Despite the absence of Ted Tally, Jonathan Demme, and Jodie Foster, Hannibal was a worldwide
success grossing $352 million in box office receipts, while costing $87 million to make.

Journalist Mark Bowden’s chronicle about the fatal misadventures of a group


U.S. Special Forces units assigned to capture two lieutenants of Somali
warlord Mohammad Farrah Aidid served as the source material for the
second film released by Ridley Scott in 2001, Black Hawk Down. "I never SUBSCRIBE...

do anything that I can’t repeat,” confessed the filmmaker when describing Posts
his trade secrets in cinematically faking an explosion. “When you see those
RPGs fly – that’s a rocket-propelled grenade – they’re basically a cylinder Comments
that is turned on a lathe in polystyrene with a small weight in its nose and a
radio-controlled rocket on the back…It runs along a wire [which cannot be
seen] like a model.”

Getting the permission to shoot in Morocco as well as the necessary U.S.


military equipment was not a simple task. “You go through the king first, and
the Defense Department,” began Scott. “It got as high up as [American
Secretary of State] Colin Powell at one point to get those helicopters. So
we’re dealing with a very high level to start with. And then you go through the governor of the town and
then the mayor of the district. And then that melts down into the local committees and…permission.” The
CONTRIBUTORS...
whole process took four months. Other things happening simultaneously were the selection of the street
locations, and casting auditions in the Congo, Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia for two thousand extras. Gary Collinson
Trevor Hogg
“One of the reasons to do the film was to make it as accurate as I could possibly understand it to be,” said Gerry Hayes
Ridley Scott. “Those Black Hawks as you can imagine, with their full load and compliment of technology, Santosh Sandhu
are very valuable, as are the little birds with their compliment of gear, which includes mini-guns [like Amy Flinders
Gatling guns].” An American military condition arose which almost scuttled the project. “They wanted one Elspeth Rushbrook
hundred and thirty personnel to accompany the machines. Thirty five of them are actual [U.S. Army] Jon Dudley
Rangers,” groaned the moviemaker. “Suddenly, the wrinkle that comes into it is that it has to go through Tom Conran
the king’s departments of whatever his bureaucracy is at that moment and they’re saying, ‘You mean we’re Rory Barker
going to have one hundred and thirty-five armed troops in here and thirty five are Rangers? And I’ve got
Richard J Moir
eight fully-armed attack helicopters?’ This is getting embarrassing.”
Roger Holland
Harry Loney
“Those pilots that you see [in the film], none of that is special effects,” remarked Scott about the dramatic
Luke Owen
helicopter footage. “All that happens, where they go down the street, land in the street and take off. That’s
Rosie Cammish
all real. And those big birds hanging over the top of the buildings and holding their position then moving
Russell Hill
off, and then even the big birds when they’re in trouble and they’re spinning backwards, that’s all flying.”
The Black Hawk crash sequences were not entirely without special effects. “It only kicks in with CGI Andy Pope
[computer-generated images], which is the tricky stuff, from the moment it [the helicopter] clips the top of David Bishop
the building.” Sheila Seclearr
Tressa Price
“There’s an absolute line of where you will not have somebody in front of a gun being fired with a certain Vicki Isitt
kind of blank in it,” stated the filmmaker of the safety precautions taken during the principal photography.

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 4) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

“There were absolutely no accidents whatsoever. The only thing that drove me crazy was when you would
LINKS...
shout, ‘Cut, cut, cut!’ and anybody who had a full magazine of brass casings wouldn’t stop. They kept firing
because they just loved to fire the guns. It’s spooky how people like to fire guns.” Featured in the large /Film
ensemble cast for the picture are Josh Hartnett (Lucky Number Slevin), Ewan McGregor (Moulin 3D Total
Rouge!), Jason Issacs (The Patriot), Tom Sizemore (Heat), William Fichtner (Strange Days), Eric Bana 3DVF
(Munich), Sam Sheppard (The Right Stuff), Orlando Bloom (Ned Kelly), Jeremy Piven (Grosse Pointe Ain't It Cool News
Blank), and Hugh Dancy (Adam). Animated Views
CGSociety
Though the $93 million production of Black Hawk Down could not compete with Hannibal at the Cinema Assassin
worldwide box office (earning $173 million), the film excelled in the awards circuit; it won Oscars for Best Dark Horizons
Editing and Best Sound along with receiving nominations for Best Director and Best Cinematography. At the
Empire Online
BAFTAs, the film was a contender for Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Sound. The American
Go Into The Story
Film Institute nominated the picture for Cinematographer, Editor, Movie, Production Designer and Director –
IMDB
of the Year. Scriptwriter Ken Nolan contended for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Writer’s Guild of America
Joblo
Awards, while Ridley Scott received a Director’s Guild of America Awards nomination.
Large Association of Movie Blogs
Mania
Boy and Bicycle (1961) was released in a video collection known as Cinema16: British Short Films
(2003) and its creator attended a ceremony held at Buckingham Palace where he was knighted by Queen myPDFscripts
Elizabeth II. “As a boy growing up in South Shields,” marveled Ridley Scott, “I could never have imagined Pixar Talk
that I would receive such a special recognition.” Richard J Moir's Film Blog
Rotten Tomatoes
Venturing into the genre of comedy, the director adapted the novel sineFX
Matchstick Men (2003) by Eric Garcia for the big screen. Con-man Roy Sofluid
Waller (Nicolas Cage), who suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder, Stare Into Space
has his organized existence turned upside down upon learning that he has a The Disney Blog
daughter (Alison Lohman). Commenting on the abilities of his Oscar-winning Total Film
leading man, Scott stated, “He definitely has a chameleon quality that not
too many have. They try, but Nic really succeeds at extremities from
shooting guns to rolling cars to playing an alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas
[1995] or comedy in Adaptation [2002].” Making Waller’s mental condition
believable in the picture was not a stretch for the filmmaker and his star.
“Nic has had some personal experience with it through friends, and I’m a
neatnik,” confessed Ridley Scott. “I find neatness comes out of being lazy.
It’s actually much easier to be neat than a slob. With a slob eventually
you’re going to be walking all over everything. I’m obsessive because it’s
easier. I just do it at the moment and get it done.”

“This to me was more like doing Thelma & Louise [1991],” said the moviemaker. “During Thelma &
Louise I only left L.A. for three weeks when we went to Moab, Utah; the rest of the time we were in
Bakersfield. I loved the script for Matchstick Men and asked [co-screenwriter and producer] Ted Griffin
[Ocean’s Eleven] if he had any objections to moving the locations from Philadelphia to the Valley in
California.” Scott went on to observe, “Doing what you haven’t done is the key. Shifting gears. Some
people always like to do a study of the same thing. John Ford [The Searchers] tended to do a career of
Westerns. My career seems to be of nonspecific subjects which are all over the place.”

“Casting is everything,” declared Ridley Scott. “Alison Lohman [Big Fish] and Sam Rockwell [who plays
Waller’s grifter partner Frank Mercer] were the best candidates for the roles. It’s a visceral choice. I know if
an actor is right for the role from the second they walk through the door.” Alison Lohman, who was in her
early twenties at the time, had serious doubts about portraying a teenager. “When I first read the script I
was like, ‘No. No way, I’m playing fourteen. You can just pass on this,” confided the actress. “Usually, it’s
the first fifty pages and you know. But then reading the whole script for me was like, ‘Okay, I can definitely
do this.’” Lohman had nothing but praise for Scott. “He has an energy that lifts you. Any doubt that you
had is just gone. You just do it – it’s really simple. It was so easy to work with him.” Other performers
featured in the movie which grossed $66 million worldwide are Bruce Altman (Quiz Show), Bruce McGill
(Runaway Jury), Jenny O’Hara (Mystic River), Steve Easton (A Man Apart) and Beth Grant (No
Country for Old Men).

“I find that history tends to be more exotic than fiction,” admitted Ridley
Scott who chose to explore the era of the medieval Holy Wars in Kingdom
of Heaven (2005). “I met the writer Bill Monahan [The Departed], and
proposed doing a Crusades film, to which he replied, ‘That’s my subject and
my passion. I know all about the whole three hundred years of the
Crusades.’ So Bill came back with this idea about the wedge between the

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 4) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

first and second crusades where there was this uneasy truce until Saladin
was forced to come back and take Jerusalem. We found that the man who
surrendered Jerusalem was a local Lord, a Jerusalem citizen called Balian, so
we worked fiction backwards into the foothills of the Pyrenees.” Ridley Scott
was pleased with the performance of Orlando Bloom who portrays Balian of
Ibelin in a cast featuring renowned actors Liam Neeson (Batman Begins)
and Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune). “I think he did great in this, it’s a
big film to walk into.”

Asked about the historical accuracy of the picture, the filmmaker responded, “Many historians are basing
their findings on a priest in France in the fifteenth century writing about events in the thirteenth century.
He wasn’t there. So what was he basing his writing on? History is only conjecture.” Working with William
Monahan, Ridley Scott attempted to depict an authentic story. “We went to great pains to get this right. All
these characters had to be real. Reynald [Brendan Gleason] was a warmonger. Guy de Lusignan [Marton
Csokas] was married to Sibylla [Eva Green], the sister of Baldwin the Leper King [Edward Norton], who got
leprosy at fifteen. Instead of being asked to step down, he insisted on becoming king. He became
impossible to look at by the time he was eighteen and had silver masks made and wore gloves because he
was rotting from the inside out. He functioned until he dropped dead at twenty-four. The boy king [Sibylla’s
son] was then crowned and Sibylla became the Princess Regent. We know the boy became ill within ten
months of being crowned and history states that he was murdered by his mother.” Questioning the theory
that Sibylla had killed her own child, Monahan and Scott looked to resolve the issue. “We looked at the
possibility he had leprosy,” revealed the moviemaker. “She would have euthenased the boy because of the
hideous life that her brother had had over nine or ten years and she was not ready to let her son suffer.
That made more sense to us.”

“In all there are about 800 [visual effects] shots,” stated the director who prefers using practical effects.
“We built three siege towers. Those [in the end battle] are real. Once you build it, you can clone it much
easier. So when you see all that stuff in close-up, and they’re coming up the back, and I’m pulling the
towers down, that’s all real – that’s seventeen tons going over. I made four catapults, the trebuchet arms
of which would swing fifty-six feet and would flip a hundred-pound ball about four hundred meters.”

Utilizing eleven cameras for the battle scenes as well as two or three cameras for the smaller scenes
generated a lot of footage. The first cut of the film was three hours and fifteen minutes long; 20th Century-
Fox had Ridley Scott cut it down to two hours and twenty-three minutes for the theatrical release. “The
enemy of filmmaking is the preview screening, which influences the final cut,” reflected the director. “It is a
tool, but you should use it wisely. The danger is that by the time we reach the preview we have all seen
the film so many times we have lost our ability to judge.” Scott regretted complying with the Hollywood
studio’s request to significantly shorten the picture; restored in the DVD Director’s Cut version were
treasured scenes such as the “whole sequence with the boy king and his mother, Sibylla.”

Kingdom of Heaven was positively received by the Muslim community which pleased Ridley Scott as he
views the overlying message of the film to be about tolerance. “In a sentence it’s about accepting another
man’s philosophy and religion,” declared the filmmaker of the picture which had a production budget of
$130 million and earned $212 million worldwide.

Returning to the world of short films, Ridley co-directed with his daughter Jordan Scott (Cracks) one of the
seven segments for the anthology about childhood and exploitation called All the Invisible Children
(2005); their effort Jonathan is about a British war photographer (David Thewlis) who looks back on his
youth. Other contributors to the project which premiered at the Venice Film Festival were John Woo
(Windtalkers) and Spike Lee (The Inside Man).

Next on the cinematic agenda for Ridley Scott was a reunion with an Oscar-winner who traded his
signature ancient Roman sword and sandals for a contemporary life on a French vineyard.

Continue to part five.

For more on Ridley Scott visit RSA Films, or check out The Ridley Scott Fan Information Page.

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 5) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

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WEDNESDAY, 19 MAY 2010

Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 5)


Trevor Hogg profiles the career of filmmaker Ridley Scott in the final installment of a five part
feature... read parts one, two, three and four.

Reuniting with Russell Crowe (A Beautiful Mind), Ridley Scott produced A


Good Year (2006). “I like to work with Russell,” said the British filmmaker,
“we get on very well and that makes my job a lot easier. Some actors – you
work with them once and don’t even think about working with them again. I
always feel that there is an endless depth to what Russell is capable of doing
in his work.” Crowe chuckled upon reading a magazine quote where Scott
described their relationship. “He believes that we’re both marginally grumpy
DVD GIVEAWAY...
men,” recollected the notoriously cantankerous actor. “But our mood
significantly lightens in each other’s company.”

“I’ve a little vineyard in Provence, and after five years I discovered that the
writer Peter Mayle [A Year in Provence] was my neighbour,” explained
Scott. “We started talking about my experiences and he said he would put it
in a book and out of that I got the film rights.” Inheriting a chateau and
vineyard in Provence, British investment banker Max Skinner (Crowe) revisits
the days of his childhood and discovers romance (Marion Cotillard), a laid-back lifestyle, and a young
woman (Abbie Cornish) who claims to be the illegitimate daughter of his deceased uncle (Albert Finney).

“What you see on screen in this film really is Albert [Finney],” enthused the moviemaker who has worked
SEARCH...
with the veteran actor four times, both as a director and a producer. “He’s full of joie de vivre and I
couldn’t think of anybody who could play the part [of Uncle Henry Skinner] better. Freddie Highmore Search

[Finding Neverland], who plays young Max and spent a lot of time with Albert, adored him too.” No powered by
extensive research was required for the role of Max Skinner. “There’s a lot of stuff about Max that I already
knew and had already experienced,” stated Russell Crowe who is well known for getting into character
through method acting. “In life’s big curve ball I’ve met guys like him. Funnily enough, when researching YOUR FAVOURITE RIDLEY SCOTT MOVIE
other films like The Insider [1999] when I had to go and find a bunch of corporate sharks, I met a lot of IS...

people who reminded me of Max.” The Duellists (1977)


Alien (1979)
"I live fifteen minutes from anywhere you see in the movie,” stated the director. “The region has been a
haven for me. I spent five months there making the movie.” As for what he envisioned for the movie, Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott remarked, “I wanted to make an edgy, romantic, [and] comedic story about this area.” The Legend (1985)
South Shields-native added, “I do like to make films with a political theme but sometimes it’s nice simply Someone to Watch Over Me
to make people laugh. That’s the hardest thing to do in fact. The film is fun; it’s about lightening up and (1987)
enjoying life.” Reflecting further, Scott confessed, “As I’m getting older, I want to make sure every film I do Black Rain (1989)
really counts…I want to make films about the human condition, what we’re doing to the world or
Thelma & Louise (1991)
ourselves.” Unfortunately for Ridley Scott theatre audiences and movie critics did not find the picture as
1492: Conquest of Paradise
irresistible as a fine bottle of wine; A Good Year which cost $35 million to make grossed $42 million
(1992)
worldwide.
White Squall (1996)

Unlike filmmakers Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) and Antoine Fuqua (The G.I. Jane (1997)
Replacement Killers) who were unable to cinematically adapt the New York Gladiator (2000)

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 5) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

Magazine article The Return of Superfly by Mark Jacobson, Scott was able
Hannibal (2001)
to revive the project which was to star Oscar-winner Denzel Washington
Black Hawk Down (2001)
(Training Day). “It’s a great script about Frank Lucas who had a very
successful business in Harlem in the early 1970s bringing in retail heroin from Matchstick Men (2003)
Vietnam in army transportation,” said the director who reworked the original Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
screenplay for his seventeenth effort American Gangster (2007). “It was
A Good Year (2006)
more about Frank Lucas and less about [New Jersey Police Detective] Richie
Roberts. I felt it should be more equally balanced. But great material is great American Gangster (2007)
material, so when I was in the middle of Provence doing A Good Year I Body of Lies (2008)
called [Steve] Zaillian and said, ‘What’s happening with that thing?’ It began
  Show results
then. I passed it on to Russell and once I had him interested I realized I
Vote
could get Denzel back in.” The two Academy Award winners were familiar
Votes so far: 390
with each other as Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington had previously co- Days left to vote: 4
starred together in the science fiction thriller Virtuosity (1995).

“Tony [Scott] has always said Denzel is one of the best,” remarked the director in reference to his
QUOTE OF THE WEEK...
filmmaking younger brother who has consistently worked with Washington. “He’s a method actor who
absolutely gets into his role.” Ridley Scott added, “I think being a method actor just means you do your "I was thinkin', it really don't matter if I

homework and go deeper into the character.” Denzel Washington is well versed in the personal history of lose this fight. It really don't matter if this

Frank Lucas. “From a very early age he began to steal and he worked his way up the line,” began guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I

Washington. “He came to New York and the most notorious gangster in Harlem [Bumpy Johnson] wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's

recognized the talent, if you will, in this young kid, and continued to train him. He was on the wrong side of ever gone the distance with Creed, and if

the tracks, but he was a brilliant student, and became a master of the business he was in.” Asked about his I can go that distance, you see, and that

opinion of Lucas, the actor replied, “It’s not for me to judge him. Basically, Frank’s a human being who’s bell rings and I'm still standin', I'm gonna

done some awful things and paid the price for it.” know for the first time in my life, see, that
I weren't just another bum from the

Speaking about Richie Roberts who defended Lucas as a criminal defense attorney, Crowe remarked, “I neighborhood"

think Richie is a great patriot because he went into the Marines Corps, and it wasn’t quite what he thought ROCKY BALBOA, ROCKY (1976)

it would be. So he went into the police force, and it wasn’t quite what he thought it would be. Then he
worked his ass off and became a lawyer, and then a prosecutor. And he was like, this doesn’t satisfy me
GET INVOLVED...
either. So I’ll do this thing that I know you’re allowed to do in America. I’ll stand here, and I’ll be an
advocate for somebody who has no defense.” If you enjoy writing about movies
and would like to feature on
Flickering Myth, please drop us an
“If I’m excited, it tends to leak out,” stated Ridley Scott. “I think that’s what I’m good at – I’m good at
email. We are always open to
pushing the pace and suddenly everybody is running. It is very easy to do only ten shots a day. On
contributors and would love to hear
American Gangster, we were doing fifty set-ups a day. We wouldn’t have got through it otherwise. I’d
from you.
have to do two takes and say, ‘That’s it.’ Denzel or Russell would go, ‘Once more,’ and I’d say, ‘Okay, let’s
go.’ It’s faster to go again than talk about it.” Commenting on Crowe’s attitude towards the high-pace
We're also keen to hear from
filmmaking environment, the veteran moviemaker said, “I think he loves the fact that I move really fast independent filmmakers; if you'd
and that I know what I’m going to do before I’m there.” Other actors in the picture include Chiwetel Ejiofer like to see your film featured or
(Dirty Pretty Things), Josh Brolin (Mimic), Ted Levine (The Silence of the Lambs), Carla Gugino want to get the word out on
(Snake Eyes), Armand Assante (Q & A), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire), and Rudy Dee (Do the upcoming projects then please feel
Right Thing). free to get in touch.

American Gangster easily recouped its $100 million production budget earning $266 million worldwide.
ALSO SHOWING...
The picture was an Oscar contender for Best Art Direction and Best Supporting Actress (Rudy Dee); and
received BAFTA nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Music, and Best Original Christopher Nolan talks
Screenplay. At the Golden Globes, the movie was up for Best Director, Best Picture – Drama, and Best Superman and Batman
Actor (Denzel Washington). I Sat Through That? #5 -
Castaway (2000)
A thriller written by author David Ignatious about CIA operative Roger Ferris
Action Artist: A Kathryn Bigelow
(Leonardo DiCaprio) who hunts down an Islamic terrorist leader operating in
Profile
Jordan required a name change to Body of Lies (2008). “I quite liked the
title Penetration, but that’ll be confusing,” admitted Ridley Scott. “Everyone 221B - free online game to
sniggers when you say it. The film is about where we are today in the Middle promote Guy Ritchie's Sherlock
East and the crossroads of politics and intelligence.” Expressing his view of Holmes movie
Ferris, DiCaprio stated, “I saw my character as an operative in the Middle Epic Dreamer: An Akira
East who was trying to do his job in a higher moral context than his boss Kurosawa Profile (Part 2)
[played by Russell Crowe] wanted him to.” Ignatious was impressed with the
UK Box Office Top Ten - weekend
cinematic personas of Roger Ferris and his manipulative CIA handler Ed
commencing 24/07/09
Hoffman. “They obviously re-imagined the characters in a hundred different
Movies... For Free! Road to Bali

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 5) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

ways, and that’s now who these people are,” said the novelist. “I’ll never be
able to read the book and read about Hoffman and not think about Russell, (1952)
and the same thing with Ferris and Leo.” UK Box Office Top Ten - weekend
commencing 13/11/09
“Inevitably, the screenplay had to cut a lot of material to make a two hour movie out of a three hundred Robert Rodriguez confirms
and fifty page book,” realized David Ignatious. “But the screenwriter, Bill Monahan [The Departed], found
Predator reboot and feature-
a way to draw a straight storyline through my material and I think all of the main themes of the book are
length Machete!
captured well in the film. I am really happy with the way it turned out.” One of the significant changes was
A Great Reed: A Carol Reed
in the ethnicity of Ferris’ love interest. “The book started off with Aisha [Golshifteh Farahani] being a
national,” said Ridley Scott. “In fact, she was a French girl in the embassy. I asked David how he’d feel if Profile (Part 2)
she was local.” The revision to the story was a wise one. “It started to underscore Ferris’ attachment and
liking for the region that he was in.” Despite the alterations, David Ignatious was satisfied with the end
FOLLOWERS...
result. “Something I’m really happy about is how faithful the movie is to the book,” observed Ignatious,
“both in the interaction of the characters, [and] in its picture of the CIA struggling around the world against
a very difficult adversary.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (Shutter Island) had previously co-starred with Russell Crowe in The Quick and the
Dead (1995); however, he was embarking into unfamiliar territory having never worked with Ridley Scott.
“The pace in which he shoots is really intense, really fast paced, and you have to be prepared for anything
in any given moment,” marveled DiCaprio. “He literally has helicopters on standby circling around, ready to
get an overhead shot of you running through an entire city.” The actor could not help but be impressed by
the director whom he refers to as “a human editing bay.” “It’s amazing to watch him behind the monitor or
in the tent with six different monitors and cameras from every different angle and he’s just snapping from
monitor to monitor, switching and knowing exactly…and really efficiently saying, ‘This is exactly what I’m
going to use in the movie and everything else is a profound waste of time.’” Scott’s professionalism
contributed significantly to Leonardo DiCaprio’s confidence in the project. “You go in every day and feel like
you’ve done a day’s work and everything that you put effort into will wind up for the most part as a part of
the movie.” Costing $70 million to produce, Body of Lies grossed $115 million at the worldwide box office.

Re-imagining an English folktale resulted in Ridley Scott tackling a cinematic SUBSCRIBE...


staple – the legend of Robin Hood (2010). “I think there’s been eighty
Posts
[versions] made over the years and it’s the kind of thing I used to enjoy as a
kid, but when I revisit them, they’re not very good,” revealed the British Comments
filmmaker. “Everyone sniggered because I was going to do a sandal and toga
movie. But I knew exactly how to do it and I know how to make Robin
Hood. You step back and make it real for a start.” Initially Russell Crowe
was to play both the title character and the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham
but the plan was abandoned. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A.
Confidential) stated, “The whole thing was to try to strip away the
goofiness of Robin Hood. What I tried to do was make it feel like this is a
real story and the myth rose out of this, rather than seeing the myth. He’s
not quite running around, robbing the rich and giving to the poor, but you
can see how it evolved into that.” Helgeland acknowledged that knowing
ahead of time that Crowe was playing the role assisted him with his writing. CONTRIBUTORS...

“Everyone has their strengths. Johnny Depp [Alice in Wonderland] as Robin Hood would be a different Gary Collinson
Robin Hood than Russell Crowe as Robin Hood. With respect to them both, they do different things well. So, Trevor Hogg
knowing who it is helps a lot.” Gerry Hayes
Santosh Sandhu
A significant modification to the tale results in the major adversary being not the Sheriff of Nottingham but
Amy Flinders
the country of France. “I play a traitor who basically is trying to stir up enough trouble to create Civil War
Elspeth Rushbrook
so that he can encourage the French to land and consequently achieve power,” said actor Mark Strong
Jon Dudley
(Sherlock Holmes) who plays the fictional character of Sir Godfrey. “[For] the final battle scene we were
Tom Conran

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Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile (Part 5) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

on the beach in Wales for two weeks…We had 72 trailers, 1500 people [to be catered for] lunch, 500
Rory Barker
extras, 120 horses and stunt riders, as well as that there were an extra 200 stuntmen. There were 8 boats
Richard J Moir
landing in the surf. A helicopter. 15 cameras. It was just amazing. So it was old-school filmmaking of the
first order and in the middle of that was Ridley, like a general conducting his troops.” Roger Holland
Harry Loney
The $155 million Hollywood production is already being compared to the picture which was Crowe’s and Luke Owen
Scott’s original collaboration. “It doesn’t matter what we do, everybody always compares it to Gladiator Rosie Cammish
[2000],” concedes Russell Crowe. “We do a little comedy set in the south of France [A Good Year] and Russell Hill
half of the reviews had references to Gladiator. We do American Gangster and Body of Lies and Andy Pope
there’s Gladiator references, so you’re not going to win either way once you’ve made a movie like that. It’s David Bishop
ten years old and it still gets played on primetime television; it’s just one of those films you have once in a Sheila Seclearr
career if you’re really, really lucky.” Tressa Price
Vicki Isitt
Cast in Robin Hood are Max von Sydow (Snow Falling
on Cedars), Cate Blanchett (I’m Not There), Danny
Huston (The Constant Gardener), Matthew Macfadyen LINKS...

(In My Father’s Den), Kevin Durand (Legion), and /Film


William Hurt (One True Thing). Ridley Scott is open to 3D Total
the possibility of returning to Sherwood Forest. “Why not 3DVF
have a potential for a sequel, particularly if it is a genre
Ain't It Cool News
that you absolutely love and has never been fully
Animated Views
explored?” asked the director. “If there were to be a
CGSociety
sequel to Robin Hood, you would have a constant enemy
Cinema Assassin
throughout, King John, and you would follow his reign of
Dark Horizons
seventeen years, and the signing of Magna Carta could be
Empire Online
Robin’s final act.”
Go Into The Story
“Eventually, you come up against the marketplace,” declared Scott. “The reality is that filmmaking is an IMDB
increasingly expensive proposition and while I’m not saying you should trade what you feel are legitimate Joblo
concerns for an increased box office, you do have to keep in mind that what you’re involved in is a Large Association of Movie Blogs
business, as well as a creative enterprise.” The director clarified his remark, “If you’re going to end up in Mania
an art cinema you should stay within the confines of a small budget movie, which will allow you to explore myPDFscripts
most any esoteric idea you wish. But if you’re going to attempt to follow the path of a [Steven] Spielberg, Pixar Talk
then your choice of subject matter and the way you’re going to explain and communicate your story to Richard J Moir's Film Blog
that larger audience is, of necessity, going to be on a slightly more simplified level.” Rotten Tomatoes
sineFX
Future projects for Ridley Scott include a two-part prequel to Alien (1979) and a cinematic adaptation of Sofluid
the crime-thriller novel The Kind One by Tom Epperson about an amnesic who falls in love with a violent Stare Into Space
mobster’s girlfriend in 1930s Los Angeles. On the subject of directing, Scott declared, “A film has to have a
The Disney Blog
guiding mind, otherwise I think it flounders. Of course it is a team effort, but in the final analysis it should
Total Film
cohere round one person.” Life behind the camera is not easy. “You are expected to be an expert on sound,
cameras, wristwatches, shoes, contact lenses, lighting, casting, you name it. When you’re making a film,
everyone asks you every conceivable question all the time, because you’re the conduit which everything
goes [through].”

Pondering what fascinates him as a filmmaker, Ridley Scott concluded, “Because I’m European, because I
think I have one foot halfway into the truth behind documentaries and non-mainstream movies, I can’t
quite shake that mud off my feet. Some people call it perversity. It’s not perversity. Life isn’t a bed of
roses. People die. People get cancer. And therefore one is always reminding the audience that there’s a
dark side to life. That attracts me because it’s the truth.”

Watch the Robin Hood trailer and visit the film's official website.

For more on Ridley Scott visit RSA Films, or check out The Ridley Scott Fan Information Page.

Five Essential Films of Ridley Scott


DVD Giveaway - Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.

POSTED BY FLICKERINGMYTH
LABELS: BRITISH CINEMA, FILMMAKER PROFILES, TREVOR HOGG

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Five Essential... Films of Ridley Scott | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

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FRIDAY, 5 MARCH 2010

Five Essential... Films of Ridley Scott


Gary Collinson selects his Five Essential Films of Ridley Scott…

In a journey that's taken him from South Shields to Hollywood, Ridley Scott has earned a reputation as one
of the most accomplished visual filmmakers working today. The founder of advertising agency Ridley Scott
Associates (responsible for the classic 1974 Hovis advert) and production company Scott Free with younger
brother Tony, Scott is a three time Academy Award nominee with global box office receipts in excess of $2
billion.

With his latest film Robin Hood opening in May [trailer here] and Scott Free Productions’ The A-Team
arriving this summer [trailer here], we present our Five Essential Films of Ridley Scott...
DVD GIVEAWAY...

5. Black Hawk Down (2001)

A dramatic retelling of the Battle of Mogadishu, with a squad of American


Soldiers squaring off against thousands of Somali militia when Black Hawk
helicopters are shot down during operations to capture warlord Mohamed
Farrah Aidid. Borrowing heavily from the visual style of Saving Private
Ryan, the film gave Scott his third Academy Award nomination and features
a host of familiar faces including Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana,
Tom Sizemore and Orlando Bloom.

SEARCH...

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4. American Gangster (2007)


YOUR FAVOURITE RIDLEY SCOTT MOVIE
Another take on true events, American Gangster sees Scott enter the IS...

genre of the crime epic with Denzel Washington starring as drug lord Frank The Duellists (1977)
Lucas. Coming up with the ingenious plan of importing a new strain of Heroin
Alien (1979)
direct from Vietnam and undercutting the competition, Lucas soon rises to
the top of the food chain as Detective Richie Roberts leads a task force to Blade Runner (1982)
bring his empire down. American Gangster stands as the director’s third Legend (1985)
highest-grossing film to date, although it also received its share of criticism Someone to Watch Over Me
with regards to the sympathetic portrayal of Lucas. (1987)
Black Rain (1989)
Thelma & Louise (1991)
1492: Conquest of Paradise
(1992)
White Squall (1996)
3. Gladiator (2000)
G.I. Jane (1997)
After mixed results with previous historical efforts The Duellists (his debut, Gladiator (2000)

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Five Essential... Films of Ridley Scott | Flickering Myth Movie Blog

which was well received) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (not so well
Hannibal (2001)
received), Scott enjoyed his biggest success with the 2000 sword-and-
Black Hawk Down (2001)
sandals epic Gladiator. Russell Crowe shines as Maximus, former Protector
of Rome, who sets out to gain revenge for the death of his family at the Matchstick Men (2003)
hands of double-crossing Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). It was a Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
return to form for the director after a difficult run in the 90s and banked over
A Good Year (2006)
$450m globally, along with five Academy Awards including Best Picture.
American Gangster (2007)
Body of Lies (2008)

Vote   Show results


2. Alien (1979)
Votes so far: 390
Days left to vote: 4
Originally entitled Star Beast, screenwriter
Dan O'Bannon's tale of a hostile alien creature
that picks off the crew of the towing ship
QUOTE OF THE WEEK...
Nostromo one-by-one made a star of its lead
Sigourney Weaver and propelled Scott into the "I was thinkin', it really don't matter if I

Hollywood A-list. Aided considerably by H. R. lose this fight. It really don't matter if this

Giger's unique designs and the successful (and guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I

shocking) blend of horror and sci-fi, Alien wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's

proved a hit both critically and commercially ever gone the distance with Creed, and if

and launched a lucrative franchise that I can go that distance, you see, and that

continues to this day. Coincidently, Scott is bell rings and I'm still standin', I'm gonna

currently attached to direct a proposed prequel know for the first time in my life, see, that

from 20th Century Fox. I weren't just another bum from the
neighborhood"
ROCKY BALBOA, ROCKY (1976)

GET INVOLVED...

1. Blade Runner (1982) If you enjoy writing about movies


and would like to feature on
Flickering Myth, please drop us an
Scott's third feature (and second consecutive sci-fi) is a visual masterpiece
email. We are always open to
that presents a highly stylised and wonderfully realised vision of a future Los
contributors and would love to hear
Angeles. Harrison Ford is Rick Deckard, a 'blade runner' responsible for
from you.
tracking down genetically engineered 'replicants' who have escaped from
their off-world colony and returned to Earth in search of their creator. Based
We're also keen to hear from
on the Philip K. Dick short Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the independent filmmakers; if you'd
film tested poorly and a number of changes were enforced, opening to poor like to see your film featured or
reviews and box office failure. A 1992 Director's Cut and 25th anniversary want to get the word out on
Final Cut did much to rectify the situation, with Blade Runner now rightly upcoming projects then please feel
regarded as a classic of its genre. free to get in touch.

ALSO SHOWING...

Honourable Mentions... BBC celebrates 30th anniversary


of Fawlty Towers
The Duellists (1977) Night at the Museum's Rexy hits
Black Rain (1989)
London
Thelma & Louise (1991)
R.I.P. Farrah Fawcett (1947 -
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
2009)
Body of Lies (2008)
UK Box Office Top Ten - weekend
Related: commencing 12/02/10
Lean Times: A David Lean Profile
Five Essential Films of Tony Scott (Part 1)
Hard to Replicate: A Ridley Scott Profile
British Cinema - Dead Man's
Short Film Showcase - Boy and Bicycle (1965)
Shoes (2004)
UK Box Office Top Ten - weekend

http://flickeringmyth.blogspot.com/2010/03/five-essential-films-of-ridley-scott.html[5/20/2010 2:35:48 PM]

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