I woke up early. Too early. My room is located under the stairs to the third floor so it’s needless to say that it’s noisy. The day started off rather cloudy. But it got better along the way. The last two conventions where as sunny as California in any orange-juice commercial so it was okay this year that the weather took leak a break.

Hotel Hottmann,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

When roaming the Stuttgart streets again it didn’t feel as nice as last year. It was cold, it was foggy and some drunk junk was shouting profanities and bugging people on the Schloßplatz. A sharp turn took me to Starbucks where a friendly caramel macchiato was waiting for me and where I decided today’s program amidst men in fancy suits and a flock of girls skipping school.

I was among the first few visitors who showed up at 9:30 to view the introductory selection of short films from the Filmakademie Ludwigsburg featuring Urs, Something’s Coming, Lebensader, a short for the Cartoon Forum and finally the long version of the fmx’s visual jingle, Frequency Morphogenesis. Conference chair Thomas Haegele bade us welcome and without a transition the first presentation started: “Previsualizing 9/11″ about the previz process of Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

John Scheele and Ron Frankel talked about the long and thorough previz on that film because there was no room for stylization because we all know the disturbing pictures by heart; “Documentary footage becomes the iconic reference of an event”. The previz they created was used by all departments throughout the production phase and was like puzzling together what was happening on a grand scale and what the real survivors experienced. “It was understanding what really happened vs. what the two survivors thought they saw”.

It was not possible to shoot on the real Ground Zero for all the terrible memories the scenes would evoke, so the production needed to pursue a different approach. High resolution HDRI photographs were taken from the surroundings so they could be used to populate the digital recreation of the site. The film was entirely shot in Los Angels, partly on Lebanon Street, the only street that looked somewha Broadway-ish.

The previz was divided into a practical previz for the different departments e.g. what the camera crew needed to know, the set decorators and so on, and into a post-viz meaning where buildings needed to placed correctly after the shoot was done. Ron Frankel re-created a large part of Lower manhattan in XSI up to the details needed for getting the big picture as well as what the survivors saw — they believed until their rescue that a bomb went off in the garage.

My ticket,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I skipped “A Global Production Pipeline” Xavier Nicolas from Lucasfilm Animation for some more java at Starbucks before returning just in time to Sony Imageworks’ “Animation and VFX” by Bob Osher from Sony Imageworks. His presentation felt at first like its target audience was potential shareholders and the emphasis on “Innovation in Support of the Filmmakers” sounded as cliché as does the slogan “The Future — Now!” ¹. Thing got a little more interesting when the Arnold renderer was briefly touched, although a little too sketchy but what really blew me away was when Bob introduced Sony Imageworks’ inhouse post-production tool Katana ² which I understood as an optimization tool that interconnects 3d and compositing back and forth and saves big amounts of time and, effectively, money. In the course of the presentation I saw a the node tree of the wide shot in Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan blows up, well, Manhattan that was also done with Katana. Speaking as a Nuke compositor I have to admit that it made me kinda frisky.

Generally speaking: Sony has a lot of sophisticated in-house tools to help the artists and is very proud of their upcoming feature Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Bob showed us the Jell-O scene and after 30 seconds he won us all for it. Can’t wait to see it in “mouthwatering 3D”.

Now we all were hungry so I got me a nice hot tomato soup with bread for lunch and roamed the stretching shopping boulevard, eager to find some place where I could by a shaver and some eyeliner.

After the break followed a little panel titled “I Got A Job Abroad… Now What?”
hosted by Jan Sjovall and featuring thee more Germans who made it abroad. The room was already full when I arrived so I was cramped into the back and sat rather uncomfortably close to the floor and the informational value of the panel was scarce. Still they dropped a few things to consider when working abroad like that you only realize in comparison how different your own cultural background is.

Over the day I met some folks of rise fx where I spent last summer four months as part of my internship. It was fun chatting a little and so I decided to see their presentation that was part of a broader presentation of the VFX and animation facilities in Berlin-Brandenburg. I already struggled a little with my sleepiness — four hours definitely are too little.

Watch ‘em

Haus der Wirtschaft,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I went up to witness the last minutes of Alex McDowell’s lecture on the Production Design for Watchmen that was followed by John ‘DJ’ Desjardin’s presentation “The VFX of Watchmen”. Those guys are crazy!
I kept fighting against dozing away and luckily I won mostly because “Making of Dr. Manhattan” by Pete Travers from Sony Imageworks was very intriguing: From start to finish it took about nine months to develop the character visually as well as technically while keeping the VFX footprint on set as low as possible.

“If you have developed the best tracking system in the world but it hinders the actors you end up making perfect tracks of bad performances. Which are totally useless.” Pete said.

The actor playing Dr. Manhattan was wearing a suit covered in blue LEDs and tracking patterns and so he became not only source for video motion capturing but was also a very prominent practical light source on set. The tracking was done by triangulating images from the film camera and two Sony HD video cameras that captured the action from two more angles. The biggest problem in this approach was to sync the shutter phases of both the video cameras and the film camera to make tracking possible.

Another problem was the hue falloff of the LEDs: Close they where cyan, further away their light color became indigo. Hence the actor in the suit needed to be painted out on a frame per frame basis it became a huge amount of paint-work because he was a light source and every frame had to be painted separately instead of having a clean plate. So talk about painting hell.

While most of the people went directly to the Metropol theater to see Watchmen I really needed a break from all the highlevel-VFX and stayed for the “Animation Show of Shows”, introduced by Ron Diamond of AWN. I can get Watchmen on bluray at any store but might won’t be able to see some of this great animated films again. So here’s the list. I hope I didn’t mess up with the French titles.

• Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight, a witty stickman Flash animation that shares a lot with xkcd both visually and narratively.
• La maison en petits cubes, a hand drawn animation that tells the story of an old man rediscovering his past. A Japanese animation that looks totally French.
• KUDAN, a very abstract CGI animation about the relationship of a father to his child. Japanese. Weird. Breathtaking.
• La Queue de la Souris, a short minimalist tale of a mouse trapped by a lion. French. Witty.
• I slept with cookie monster, an analog animation drawn with pastels that tells the story of the animator that was abused by her lover and how she dealt with it.
• Franz Kafka: Ein Landarzt, probably one of the weirdest animations I’ve seen lately. Truly, the Kafka-esque spirit was captured very well in this short film.
• Glago’s Guest, Disney’s computer animated short of Russian guard Glago watching over endless Siberian snowfields.
• Hot Seat, The Office meets children’s cartoons. Funny yet true.
• Presto, a Pixar short I won’t get into because all of you know it already.
• Skhizein, my favorite today. The story of a man who is always 91cm besides himself.
• KJFG No.5, a very short animation where you’ll go “wtf?” at first. It is about a band jamming together that gets disturbed by a hunter. Great ending!

That was my day.

What I have learned today

• That foamcore models still are a big part of previz as are low-res interactive environments that every department can access.
• That it probably was a bad idea to jokingly refer to my new styling as “racoony” once — the word spread.
• That on very documentary films it is necessary to make sun and moon studies.
• That Sony’s Katana is da shit!
• That at Sony they deliberately decided against a house style and that they “challenge every assumption”.
• That Germans only realize how German they are if they work abroad.
• That you should start with 3d as early as possible in your previz for any shots that are not static.
• That a good way to ensure consistency in applying tracking-dots on an actors face is to make a plastic mask from his face, drill holes accordingly into it and then have him put on the mask: Make the dots through the holes and you’re done!
• That your VFX tricks on set should do anything but hinder the performance.
• That the scanning of skin textures should be done when the skin is anything but perfect or else you get the typical too-perfect-to-be-true CG-look.
• That eye moisture helps a great deal in the believability of a CG character.
• That instead of simulating rimlights in your shader (I consider that a no-no anyway!) you need to take the extra mile of adding peach-fuzz to your digital character. It renders longer, but looks much more convincing.
• That I really have to get my sleep cycle straight before attending the fmx.

What surprised me today

• That Oliver Stone looks like a chubby Albert Speer. Creepy!
• That my geekiness in terms of comic books is way below what’s common in the industry.
• That Zach Snyder draws really good.
• That I can sleep rather well on the floor of my car.