Post is Prep

My Access Pass,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Still a bit drowsy I planted my ass in the front row of the König-Karl Halle and knew I wouldn’t be getting up for a long time, not even for Pixar’s Career Gears (they don’t need compositors, I got the message last years). So at 11 a.m. “The Role of Visualization in the VFX Production” by Kevin Todd Haug, VFX Designer at FX Cartel and Ron Frankel, president of Proof Inc. begun.

And it began with some heavy, uncommented statements right in the beginning that made me gulp a little and sit there a bit shocked and concerned.

• Post is Prep.
• Compositing is dead.
• Avatar cheated.

The speakers started off with describing the status quo, that currently everything except the production itself happens in a purely digital environment, although the direction towards a fully digital approach is present also in the day-to-day life of the film-making process on set. Yet this reality asks for a paradigm shift towards the non-linear workflow of pre-production on set as well.

“All the steps from pre-production towards the reality of the live-action set are a question of creative communication.”

There have always been paradigm shifts within the VFX industry, such as the switch from analogue to digital in post production in the past twenty years. Now we are headed towards having the virtual reality (VR) of the feature not only available in pre-production and post production but also in the production itself.

Some prominent features already have arrived at that step. Whereas James Cameron used these previsualization techniques to see the virtual set through the camera while shooting, Tim Burton was offered a similar approach on the stage of Alice, yet “he just turned the screen away and preferred looking at the green-screen footage.”

“Doing an animation paradigm doesn’t solve the problem, doesn’t treat the actors in a respectful way. The question is how to bring everything into a virtual world. And what does that mean for us VFX people? [...] Most things belong in post, you shouldn’t do matte paintings afterward, they need to be known by the director before the principal [shoot], so it needs to happen in prep.” In fact quite a lot of assets get worked on (and finished) in preproduction, not only matte-paintings, but also models, textures, characters and so on. So why not use everything that’s already there on set?

Tod and Ron then showed a hands-on example of Conan or as they jokingly put it: “The adventures in Low-Budget-Land”. It was a shoot of a sci-fi-esque sequence set in the Prohodna Cave, an enormous cave near Karlukovo village in Bulgaria. “This cave is hundreds of miles away from your local anything“, so shooting directly on location would’ve been way too expensive. So instead of wasting loads of money bringing the set to the cave they brought the cave to the set. The cave was recreated in VR and could be used as a virtual set.

To make this work, position and settings of the live action camera needed to be tracked in real time. Looking through the camera means looking at your actors and a replacement of the green screen with the virtual set. This allows the DP to set light, angles & composition of the live action parts much better because s/he always has a near-final background when looking through the lens without the need of eventual re-lighting in post.

“It’s there to enable a creative dialog instead of people just guessing what to do and how to do it. It’s all about the discussion, not about the technical tools itself. So DP and CG artists can work together in both prep and on-set and eventually all boundaries collapse into one united effort from the beginning.”

Then the statements of before flashed across the big screen again, but this time with remarks that evaporated my concerns.

Post is Prep

Entrance Hall,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The amount of work in post has no business in being in this environment. The whole point of being a Big Company assumes that you will bring a mass of problems from set to make them solve them — for a price. And that will change. The decisions will be made on set, hopefully diminishing a lot of problems. So post production will be much about “making it look nice” instead of “doing somebody else’s dirty laundry” as I like to express it.

Compositing is dead

Boy, that was a downer to me the first time I read it. Not so much a downer as “No, you won’t get a pony!”, it was much more like “There is no spoon.” Luckily Tod and Ron cleared it up what they inferred by that bold expression.

“Fixing a problem by ‘painting something out’ is not an option anymore. Since there’s an unstoppable shift towards stereoscopic features happening you have to make everything to work in stereo. And that makes a big difference when setting up a pipeline. Instead of everybody being a tiny cogwheel in the machinery, you will have more high-level artists working on shots from start to finish. And those shots will be cool!”

Avatar cheated

“Avatar isn’t really film-making. Rather it’s an animated movie with people who aren’t animators in funny suits. Essentially it is an animated movie with some live action in between.”

Wow.

Somebody really said it. But since there was all this pro-Avatar bias in the media and the industry I got a first glimpse of how the tremendous efforts of the making of Avatar where kind of equalized by the statements of some speakers.

“Everything on [Avatar ] was really expensive and if you do it again you get another Toy Story. And Pixar is way more efficient than Cameron. That paradigm just won’t work again.” And it is true: Everything on the set of Avatar only works in that particular stage and location. But in the day-to-day life of making movies (especially cost-effective) you need your equipment robust enough to travel. “The longer you stay in one location, the more you fuck it up [because] film crews really have a tendency to use up locations.”

I used the term “virtual set” quite a lot so far but Ron stressed that there is no such thing as a virtual set. “Since it is built somewhere it is real. In the end everything that’s being recorded is virtual. The bottom line is what’s on screen in the end and that’s what everybody’s there for.”

Personally I didn’t see anything strikingly new to this, although the quality and speed of displaying the virtual set though the video-playout improved over the years. But what was really impressive to me was employing (rather) simple camera projections onto simple geometry to make it possible to wander through concept art and matte paintings literally in one’s office.

And I even learned that there is a Society of Previsualization out there. Who knew?

The New Art of Virtual MoneyMoviemaking

Without much time in between Maurice Patel from Autodesk continued the previs-morning of that day. Maurice started of stressing that it is the tools you need to enable interactivity such as real-time motion capture, real-time processing and real-time playback. Since teams need to work closer together and need to collaborate bringing everything together is of key importance, since “communication is the most powerful in visualization”.

In today’s digital production there is a wide range of different elements that need to work together like art, mo-cap, previs, CGI, rendering and what you get from the practical production on location. Not until post you start putting everything together. And we all know by now that making changes in stereo is difficult if possible at all.

There’s a lot I didn’t note down what followed because in the end it was just an ad-laden lecture of Autodesk technologies and previs-services, probably nothing one wouldn’t find out by browsing their website.

What I understood the bottom-line was “Build the technology. Or buy it from Autodesk. Then work with different departments to implement it.”

Still: I see that there is a trend evolving in the industry to get things right from the beginning by employing various previs-techniques just to minimize the workload of “fixing it in post”.

Abyss to Avatar

The Slide,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Director and VFX legend John Bruno was talking about his role in the industry and being more or less the right hand of James Cameron in a number of films such as The Abyss, True Lies, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and last but definitely not least Avatar. In the talk he showed clips from each of the movies and explained some of the techniques they used. The face made of water from The Abyss for example was composited optically, in the original render it resembled a chrome-tentacle instead of being seemingly (and rather convincingly) made out of water.

Unfortunately this was another lecture where I wasn’t allowed to take some pictures so you have to endue the rather boring title slide I photographed. My apologies.

Disney’s Tools

The next lecture by Disney’s Andy Hendrickson was titled a bit clunk “Blend (Art+Science) = Technology at Disney” but had some interesting aspects.

Andy presented in the beginning a typical Disney concept art in a purplely-brown and uplifting tone, depicting a stone tower and trees with a brook in the foreground, a waterfall and very picturesque rock-formations behind it for the upcoming feature Tangled, formerly known as Rapunzel. You can see the original artwork by clicking here.

The following hour Andy broke down the painting into several details such as the waterfall or the lighting which were created part by part to match the concept art as closely as possible. “At Disney it’s not so much about rendering something photo-real, it’s more about staying true to the artwork. And for that we need different technologies.”

Now check the concept art from above with the final CG-version which can be seen right in the beginning of this teaser right here on YouTube. Pretty darn close, huh?

“Our concept artist boasted that he could paint these artworks in the evening after having a six-pack in one or two hours, which would take us weeks to figure out on how to recreate them digitally.” Andy added with a smile.

Disney uses a combination of xGen (whatever this is), RenderMan and IRender. They also plan to release their old classics in stereo and have developed a technology that more or less automatically produces usable depth maps, however they also employ 3d-models to project the 2d imagery on.

Personally I am not so much a fan of Disney’s policies, economic decisions and certain aspects in their style, yet they decided to release some of their technology with open source, so that’s something new to the whole proprietary-focused industry.

So I recommend taking a look at Disney’s Open Source site for the Ptex texture mapping system that doesn’t need UVs (That’s a bingo!), and I strongly recommend browsing through Disney’s publications on that site as well.

You are not welcome here

Being a big fan of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and knowing that the movie’s VFX were comparably low-budget made me stay for the next presentation by Dan Kaufman’s “Inside District 9″.

So there was not much money for the VFX, yet their quality and integration into the wild live-action plates is stunning and seamless.

The design process went through many iterations, at first the shape and physiology of the aliens would allow a guy in a suit to double for an alien but this turned out to take out a lot of the anticipated realism because the audience would always be able to tell that, well, it was a guy in a suit, even if his face would have been fully CG. So the early marquettes defined the overall style. The final appearance of the aliens featured a more rigid exoskeleton even on the face, yet these overlapping scales were attached to the underlying geometry and animating facial expressions was not that big of a challenge.

A lot of tests of various animals were made for the appearance of the eyes, in the end the team settled on a human pupil and iris but on a black eyeball.

The main part of the characters was performed with Maya. In order to minimize cloth simulations their garments were applied very tight-fitting on the characters so that only certain bits needed to be simulated as dangling on the hero characters. Further they had stickers and make-up applied as an additional pass which all helped in diversifying the aliens while keeping them least troublesome in post.

The compositing was done in Nuke and required a lot roto’n'paint as well as 3d-tracking and projections: Most of the shots in the movie were hand-held and had actors as stand-ins for the aliens to help the other actors as well as the cinematographer to know what was going on and where. Later, the stand-ins needed to be removed from the wild plates by geometry projections, sometimes requiring exhausting and complicated paint work.

And there’s one slide of the presentation I recorded, in my opinion the most important one:

Staying On Schedule And On Budget

Use the simplest approach that will achieve the goal. Plan the entire pipeline

• Build in flexibility
• Make it as foolproof as possible
• Assume things will go wrong and have alternate strategies
• Keep communication flowing

Work closely with director/production

• Discuss trade-offs
• Come up with alternatives that still achieve artistic/story intent

Now that’s what I am talking about!

Rolling Shutter?

Ben Grossmann,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Ben Grossmann from CafeFX jumped right into talking about the VFX on Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island”. I really liked the fact that many applied techniques were more traditional thanks to his way of movie making, nevertheless he was very open to new approaches in it. In the end there was a lot of forced perspective and model-work in the feature, composited either even in-camera or in Nuke.

There’s an excellent interview with Matthew Gratzner and Ben on fxguide that I recommend to you if you are interested in the whole making-of stuff behind Shutter Island, because the lecture itself was nothing more than a narrated feature, although there is one technique described that wasn’t in the interview:

Details and “tiles” of the sea crashing against New-England-shore-rocks were filmed from a crane on a location that “looked just right”. This location was shot from all angles, starting from looking directly down onto the shore until up to sky, producing what Ben called “salad bowls” of tiles that could be re-timed to match each other and be projected onto a semi-sphere in Nuke and be used in/for matte paintings.

When asked about the work with Martin Scorsese Ben told that it was incredibly exhausting but totally worth it, because everybody knew that he was a legendary director and knew exactly what he was doing. In the end, so Ben said, “Marty got 200% of the VFX he asked for. For free.” Incredible, how being a legend helps in keeping the costs down in some way.

Crosseyed Avatar

Before getting his grip on Nuke Christian Kaestner was first outlining the situation of the current trend with stereoscopic pictures: They are box-office hits (e.g. Avatar) and, what’s probably most important to the industry, limits piracy because you can’t download a feature in stereo and enjoy it at home as you would in the theater (yet!). So, like it or not, it’s here to stay.

But stereo is expensive. Not so much if you are dealing only with a live-action film totally shot in stereo, or a full CGI film in stereo, no, the spending gets out of proportions when you mix live-action and CGI. For example, match moving takes three and a half times as long as in a traditional show, compositing (especially scene salvage) gets at least twice as long and, alas, annoying.

The on-set experience of Avatar was extraordinary for it was being in production for more than four years. The set itself was more like a full studio with all its custom-developed technology for and by James Cameron. But he needed the time to plan for single shot in detail, and also in stereo depth because you can’t afford mistakes at that scale. The previsualizations he approved became “the Bible” for how shots needed to be carried out, not even minor differences between previz and final in, say, distant mountain in the matte-painting were allowed (“and Jim got quite a temper!”). So quality control passes needed to be reviewed and green-lighted as well which essentially were the keyed live-action shots with un-shaded geometry but a 100% correct and tight track for each eye.
Most of the shots were composited in Nuke and rendered with Pixar’s RenderMan. Because so many studios were working with the same assets, which also partly existed as animatronics on set, all of them needed to be matched in appearance. The most complex shot in Avatar was hg016_0065, Jake Sully rolling out of the carrier after arriving on Pandora with a bypassing mech: 250,000 files needed to be rendered and were comped in a Nuke script with over 3,500 nodes. “Yet it rendered on our farm in about ten minutes. Nuke is incredibly performant!”

Let’s get physical!

It is often (if not always) the case that even matched lenses and cameras differ in their color fidelity and lens warping. So what needs to be done in the first place is to get rid of the lens distortion by a lens correction node. Then the problems in color can be addressed which is the tricky part: Some areas in the image match, some don’t and in the making of Avatar “a group of skilled people was locked into a room without windows for many weeks to match those kind of shots by hand”.

At this point in the presentation Ben from The Foundry took over and showed some nodes of Ocula 2.1 to tackle exactly this kind of problems. Despite some of them not even being in beta, everything worked out just fine for the presentation.

First Ben showed how to create a disparity map by connecting a DisparityGenerate to a O_Solver node; nothing new here: The result still is an image whose pixel values in the first two channels describe how the pixels from image A need to be transformed to become image B. Ben then set the analyzer to a single frame and added a keyframe. One can now generate image B from image A and check it against the actual image B for errors and mis-alignments; although moving objects (such as actors) should be left out.
So if you can build a better image out of it, it works. The node even offers two options, “Normal” intended for motion and “Severe” which checks the edges, and I think it was in the O_newView or TuneDisparity node (provided the latter one even exists). The image generated from the disparity can be written to an EXR and then color matched with the “real” image from the other eye.

Unfortunately some flickering in can be observed, but there is a way to multisample the ColorMatcher by frame-blending the disparity for a couple of frames and/or by applying five or more ColorMatchers, each with slightly different block-sizes. Then merging them with each other by Plus, multiplying the result together and removing the original image. The result may appear a bit blocky, but it can be blurred and combined with the footage. The blurriness is almost invisible, yet this approach only works for footage and areas with low self-occlusions of the object. The Ocula 2.1 node, however, has now a multisampling-option for exactly that kind of merging a number of ColorMatchers together.

A similar approach can be made to perform depth grading, generating new virtual cameras that lie between the recorded eye-positions. Lastly there is also a DisparityViewer which shows the disparity vectors. Ideally they have the same length, are horizontal and have an offset by 180° in their angle.

A click on it takes you to a bigger version at DeviantArt.

I chuckled but I couldn’t forget about this little conversation. While her statement was not always true it still bears some truth. As the VFX keep getting bigger and better their underlying plots degenerate and become more one-dimensional than the comics most of them are loosely based on. The money of the production is mainly spent on stars and on post-production sweatshops facilities on the west coast. The companies make good money and so nobody ponders: Is it all worth the effort?

Techno Breed

Every couple of years there’s a new breakthrough in technology that the upcoming movies feature. Disney’s Dinosaur was prominent for the dinos having digital muscles under their displacement-mapped skins; Lord of the Rings was one of the major features to use sub-surface scattering on Gollum and Watchmen showcases that live-action tracking finally works. So what’s next?

Nowadays computing speed has more or less leveled out, you can’t get considerably faster than 3.5 GHz (by staying somewhat economic in your efforts), so for the last couple of years we experienced and still experience a shift towards multi-core CPUs. You won’t get more MHz for your buck, but more parallel processes. So instead of doing things faster and faster one after another, especially in real-time environments we do more and more computations simultaneously which imposes better programming on what’s already there. This may be one reason why there is nothing really groundbreaking going on in the visual department in the last few years except the usual “bigger” and “better”. Whereas bump-mapping, anti-aliasing or HDR rendering really were obvious to the occasional gamer, better physics, ambient occlusion or parallax mapping aren’t that much of a blast compared to what we’re already used to. I won’t go much deeper into the gaming sector because it is a topic of its own, yet film and game share the same efforts in making things look more real.

Photoreal Seductions

So can we get more photoreal? I bet. In games we’re already there. In movies, well, we’ve already arrived: Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 were trailblazers for VFX-flagships auch as Cloverfield, Watchmen and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Do we want to get more photoreal? What’s beyond photoreal?

Stylization — that’s what’s beyond and I see this as a big trend in the upcoming years and, frankly I can’t wait for it to happen if it is done with thought and consideration. Since anything’s possible in CGI, well, anything’s possible and filmmakers (as well as some game designers) aren’t inclined anymore to find creative ways around showing something that’s technically not possible. You don’t have your protagonists worry about how terrifying a monster is, you just show it. But is this really more terrifying?

Fig. 1: Typical blockbuster plot.

This trend has started around ten or twelve years ago when most films wrapped their plot around visual effects (consider Godzilla). I like good movies but I feel that this technology-driven way of film making opened the door for hollow shells, fancy CGI with a plot that lacks mostly of a plot (see fig. 1). Let’s face it: Transformers was just a CG-showreel with enormous budget and had a plot that insulted anybody with an age of more than one digit (or an I.Q. with more than two digits).

Of course, there are exceptions, but in general the more “groundbreaking” CGI is in a movie, the more holes has a plot. More than the antagonist after the final battle.

So am I proposing to ban CGI from movies and do it as Quentin does, edit your masterpiece on a Steenbeck and the only “optical effects” in it are titles and credits? Of course not.

Visual Storytelling

I am not the only one (and by no means the first one) to notice. So what is visually interesting enough to burn a bonfire of visual effects, yet still has something one can call a plot? Comics. It started with Spiderman, along came X-Men, Batman, a bomb of Superman, Iron Man, Hancock, Watchmen… and I am sure I missed some. Do you see a pattern there (apart from the Men ¹?)

There’s a lot of good will to adopt the comic style in films and some bold attempts do succeed. Just look at Sin City! In my opinion Frank Miller is not a really good comic author nor artist but, hey, it’s a step in the right direction. If you want to know who I feel is the best comic artist at the moment then read David Mack‘s Kabuki series. It is so good that I hope there will never be a movie.

CGI can do so much more than just enhance movie reality. It can create one. But why stop there? It doesn’t have to create anything realistic. Today’s audience grew up with television, movies and animé, they know about film language, have an instinct for how story arcs work (even without attending an overpriced Robert McKee lecture) and they are familiar with all kinds of crazy shit. They don’t need to be shown the devastation a hostile army can create ². They don’t need to be treated like idiots!

What are films about again?

Having all that eye candy surround you in every film it is hard to take a step back and see the big picture (pun intended): Films are about people. They are about emotions, feelings and relations. Consider Terminator 2: It’s not about the T-1000 being able to morph into anything it wants to, it is about John Connor who is terrified of this machine, yet he has to trust the T-800, another machine, the only person in his life that is more father-like than any human. This movie would work even without the CGI. Transformers on the other hand would just be silly. It already is silly.

Fig. 2: Still from Ryan, (2004)

But well placed CGI and visual effects may help to transport the feelings, emotions or perceptions. A good example I feel is Ryan (fig. 2). Just the opening shot tells so much more about the characters than dialogue ever could. The inner workings are visualized and are in interplay with the traditional film making techniques. And Ryan is not the only attempt into this direction. The more indie a film is, the more experimental it can be.

This way CGI shifts from being the silver coating of a turd ³ to becoming a wheel on the delicate cart where the plot is pushed along.

Yet we all know: As soon as a film has to accumulate money the producers lack the balls like a mule and rather please the 8 to 22 year old males who are prone to bring their sorry girlfriends along.

So?

Think beyond! Use your imagination! Feel! VFX are more than wire removals, rotoscoping or giant dancing robots. VFX are art and craft. VFX are a wonderful tool to create and reveal what can’t be captured by any other medium in the world.

Be indie! Be involved in pre-production. Find fellow artists who want to be more than roto-monkeys in the guts of some galley. For transforming VFX from just a finishing tool to a source for inspiration and art it is crucial that “post-production” should become “pan-production”.

And that’s tonight’s word.

After enjoying the breakfast a little too long I was rushing down Königsstraße in my car so I would make it to Pixar’s RenderMan presentation. I already knew what it was going to be considering last year (“The Über-Sprite”, the rocket, the fast-rendering motion blur) but Pixar is rather generous in handing out posters and presents and I wanted me to get another teapot for my collection ¹. I was too late, the room bursting with people. Obviously, word had spread that you get presents. People can be so greedy. I asked if I could make a reservation for the afternoon but it was in vain.

There I was standing, lacking a teapot and a clue of what I wanted to see instead. I headed to the biggest hall and ended up in “PhotoReal Facial Animation” by Patrick Davenport and Steve Caulkin of Image Metrics. They showed the sample clips I already knew so it was no surprise to me that… (click “show” to view spoiler) [spoiler]…Emily’s head was CG.[/spoiler]

You can find the clips also at YouTube if you’re interested.

The crazy stuff Imagemetrics does is providing face tracking with only the use of a video camera. The tracked regions of the face are then moved on a CG model. Tweak the keyframes and you’re done. It’s that easy! Well, it’s not. Steve Caulkin laid out the long way to their Emily demo which occurred to me as not really time saving: Apart from photographing the actress’s face for the texture, there also had to make a cast of her teeth but the molded teeth wouldn’t necessarily fit correctly so you end up taking x-rays to learn how to place the teeth correctly. And that’s only the beginning.
When scanning the different expressions of the actress the data was anything but coherent so somebody had to clean up all the meshes (about 55) and get the details out: Pores and such can only be done with a bump or displacement map. It would be just too much for the statistics-based tracking algorithm.

Steve Caulkin owes me a venti Caramel Macchiato. His presentation was in-depth and very interesting but, alas, Steve is more a guy you put in front of a C++ compiler than in front of an audience and it was hard to follow his low pace.

So I ended up at Starbucks with an iced caramel macchiato before making another attempt at getting into one of Pixar’s presentations. I queued up 20 mins and before they opened the doors there was already not much oxygen left. And I felt the urge for another caramel macchiato.

Pixar’s Carreer Gears was a again a valuable information on how to apply and how to put your reel together for Pixar. Right in the beginning the panelists ² asked the audience to raise their hands of what position at Pixar they’re interested in. To sum things up: Two thirds were character animators, many wanted to become story artists and only a few people were interested in the other stuff. And I bet I was the only compositor in the whole room. Here’s what’s strange: Last year I was told that Pixar doesn’t really do compositing which I thought was a joke or they wanted to pull my leg. Today they also didn’t say anything about job openings or positions in compositing. Very strange.

The panelists talked about their experiences at Pixar and how they got their job and spread the usual tales of people who were hired right off the college. Then they took questions. I must have dozed off somewhere in between but it was mostly asked on the process of applying and what Pixar is looking for. Here’s the stuff I remember:

• Don’t send in a reel when you have nothing to show.
• Put your name on everything.
• Have the DVD region-code free and tested to play on a standard set-top DVD player (NTSC and PAL both are fine).
• Apply for a certain job instead of just applying for the database.
• Send every 8 to 12 months an updated reel to show how you progressed.
• Don’t send every week new reels.
• Write a decent cover letter. They’ll read them.
• Don’t forget the all-important shot-breakdown. Preferably even on screen.
• Don’t chase the ostriches on the front lawn (I guess that’s where I dozed off).

Interestingly I gradually lost my interest and my caffeine addiction kicked in hard after an hour so I left for a chili dog and a precious cup of coffee. At Starbucks they either love me or hate me.

For lack of motivation to look for the right screening room for “Analog Artifacts in CGI” I went with the crowd to witness “Skin & Lighting Research” by Christophe Héry of ILM whom I already know from last year.

Holy moly! In his presentation I saw more formulas than in my whole college education ³ In fact he told nothing new about subdermal distribution and the models on how to calculate them (although I didn’t understand much of the math). So far, so good. But what If you can’t afford raytracing because, say, your artists produced more vertices than the final rendering will have pixels (see Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest)? You’ll have to have an point cloud based approach to dodge memory demanding raytracing. And when you don’t have raytracing going on RenderMan really does the trick fast and good.

Cute as a Button

That lecture served as the perfect introduction to what we all have been waiting for: The Curious Case of Photoreal Head Replacement.

Jonathan Litt had a huge presentation explaining the lighting, rendering and compositing of that huge task. How do you start? They started with a artfully crafted latex-maquette of Brad Pitt’s face made old, for it had a really realistic appeal in subsurface scattering and served as most valuable reference when comparing renderings of the CG head to it.

The head itself was done in Mudbox (yay!) and in it’s highest resolution had about 4.5 million polygons. This high level of detail was preserved by using displacement maps, that further were driven by curves so wrinkles would get stronger or weaker depending on the facial expression. The eyes were modeled and textured anatomically correct (I’ll just throw some expressions at you of what they considered: caruncle, meniscus, conjunctiva, sclera, cornea). As further reference they had a extreme-high-res photograph of Brad Bitt that you could see the micro-wrinkles between his pores. “That’s thousand dollar pores!” Jon joked.

But this perfect model also needed to be lit in perfect coherence to the on-set instruments and light sources. So additionally to the high res long-lat-HDRs that were taken on set, there were extensive survey data on each shot of all the light sources and scene geometry so that the HDRI could be mapped back in Maya onto this surveyed geometry.

The maquette of the head was photographed in LightStage with light from all possible directions (separately). A script then made it possible to color and blend these separate light-passes together based on the information of the on-set HDRIs. Why the hassle? Because the renderings were put next to this near perfect reference and the artists could check on how close they got.

The next obstacle was to choose the right approach on how the HDR sampling should be done, either Inside-Out (I-O) or Outside-In (O-I) from the HDR. The I-O approach is usually used to sample the environment for Global Illumination. You have to fire a lot of rays to cover correctly bright light sources. So you need to find hot spots and treat them as emissions. I-O works well with spheres but with other geometry you get shadow bending ⁴. The solution to this problem was to scatter the origin of the emission-positions during rendering (see the paper of Kollig & Keller, 2003).
probably guess that it didn’t simplify things that the head was moving through the scene.

The solution to all this blocking and head-movement was to reposition the HRDIs on every frame on the position of the body-double’s head. Because there was enough tracking data of the head moving through the scene the mapped HDRI in Maya was rendered in Nuke to match the position of the head which was much easier than doing it from scratch.

What comes now is really sexy: To single out light sources the direct practicals and instruments visible in the HDR were blocked or painted out in Nuke resulting in an HDR image of the ambient lighting. The missing “hero lights” were then positioned as area lights in Maya and given a HDRI texture. This was also very important for the eye-lights.

Still there had to be adjustments made for the eye sockets and eye-lights because on set the lighting was done on the body actors.

I really realized that I want to work at Digital Domain: They value Maya, Mental Ray and, most important Nuke. Adopt me!

Blogging,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The last presentation I saw before going to my car for some sleep was by Steve Preeg on the Animation and Performance of Benjamin Button. The big issue was on how to capture the performance of Brad Pit and have it applied to the digital head. And because the show was a $ 150 million Fincher/Pitt movie there was no room for error. If you’d mess it up, they would mess you up.
To get all the muscles in Brad Pitt’s face right Preeg thought about CAT scanning him but his manager just told Steve to think of something different. And so he did. Initially Digital Domain got the guys from Mobile who had developed a volumetric capturing system and captured various key poses of Brad Pitts face as basis for the blend shapes in Maya. When everything was tested and worked on they needed to capture the actual performance by Brad for the digital head.
They had him watch the clips from the movie with the body actor so he knew what was going on around the him. During his performance his face was filmed from four different positions, his cues were given brad via in-ear monitoring. In fact, Digital Domain even tried Imagemetrics but the result was too ‘dead’ to them, however it helped much in timing the animation which was all done by hand. Thus it was guaranteed to keep the intent of the performance rather than applying it with strange results. “Sometimes is just a millimeter more or less on one of the eyelids between creepy and cute”.

What I have learned today:

• That Steve from Imagemetrics probably wouldn’t pass a Turing test.
• That you can capture the facial performance of actors during motion capture by having them wear head-mounted camera-rigs with a light source both pointed at their faces.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering the resolution of the buffers matters a lot (bigger = better).
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering you should keep the buffers separate, meaning that nothing that’s not part of the skin may cast shadows inside the skin.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering won’t let you have your precious raytracing. So nobody does it anymore.
• That you best take texture photographs of skin by having polarization filters on your lights and one (90° out of phase) on your camera. Thus you block out the specular highlights and only get the diffuse light. Still you need to paint out shadows. Use 6 soft lights when you don’t have the luxury of having a Light Stage.
• A big deal in believability in CG skin are oil layer and peach fuzz. If you can’t nail it down why something doesn’t feel right then it’s usually one of those things.
• That working on 64 bit machines with 16 gigs of RAM really saved Digital Domain’s ass in producing Benjamin Button.
• That the UV-Space in Nuke (if kept in the EXRs) can save much time for last minute changes on textures.

What surprised me today:

• That you can talk passionately about human emotion without showing any.
• That Image Metrics also use Eurostile as their house font. Like me. And they’re not the only ones so I really should think of a new font then…
• That relatively few people who want to work at Pixar are interested in lighting, shading, layouting, rendering, controlling, software engineering or cinematography. They all want to become animators, character designers or, cough, directors.
• That I used working with z-buffered renders a lot in the hey-days of the late 90′s. I feel old.
• That not a single CG spotlight was used for the lighting of Benjamin Button.
• That Brad Pitt’s teeth were too white to pass as a 70-year old. For the digital head Steve Preegs teeth-color was used. That’s why he quit smoking on the show.
• That it was the first time that I read ‘LOL’ in a presentation. It is 2009 and netspeak finally conquers offline-speech.

Along with some peers we came just in time to the Metropol theater where the screening of the stop-motion adaption of Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline was rolling. In stereo. The film remained quite close to the book and featured some very inspired and inspiring designs (keep your eyes open in the garden scene — lovely!). In my opinion the film still got a little too American but hey, it’s a big production after all. The animators did a tremendous job: The cat really moved like a cat and Coraline was most convincingly animated in the top-shot when she creeps into her parents’ empty bed. Further I’m thinking about buying the soundtrack. So if you consider yourself only a minor Gaiman fan and are not following him on Twitter ¹: Go for it, it doesn’t hurt your brains.

Back at the convention center Chris Williams of Disney was talking about story telling in his short Glago’s Guest that I already knew from yesterday. At least that’s what the schedule said. After seeing the short again Chris showed us the final storyboards first, then what story ideas were thrown away along the way of improving it until it worked. He went on to the designs, the color script and the overall style of the film until he showed it one more time. One thing that still bugged me personally is the action of taking out the garbage because it is such a deep rooted American suburbian tradition that it felt really off in the setting of Siberia in 1924. And the garbage can itself was as American as Uncle Sam on 4th of July reciting the Bill of Rights. I will finish my nitpicking on this one by stating that this lecture didn’t really deal with story telling that much.

Richard Edlund ,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

After the lunch break where I enjoyed a chili hot dog, Eric Roth, chairman of the VFX society talked to VFX legend Richard Edlund about his work in the early days of visual effects in movies such as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Poltergeist and also Die Hard and Ghost. Nowadays when everything is so easy and every 16-year old with a computer can make stunning VFX, one forgets that in those old days visual effects were as complicated as they were time consuming. The imploding house in Poltergeist took an artist eight months to rotoscope. Hell! To my regrets this interesting panel passed way too fast.

Syd Mead,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Syd Mead, the one and only, held his presentation (the same he gave on the Siggraph Asia before) about his rise from early childhood scribbles to the latest designs. His childhood images already showcased his early fascination with cars. It was incredible to see his futuristic visions of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s with car designs that look familiar with today’s eyes. Syd really knows what he’s doing and has a story for every of his paintings. In a near photorealistic rendering of his Hypervan he points to a chrome-like disk somewhere on the outskirts of the painting “This is the security droid in this marina”. Every painting he showed us had a story and he could talk in detail about every detail. Except for the bathroom design for Blade Runner. “Do you know what this is? I don’t either. It just looks like it belongs in this bathroom.” He has funny explanations for anything, not only in his paintings. “Do you know what Gouache means? It’s French for ‘bitchy medium’.”

Habib Zargapour,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Habib Zargapour was in the unfortunate position to speak after Syd Mead still he pulled it off quite well. From his experience, coming from films to games, he outlined the similarities and differences between designing for games and designing for movies. Still, a lot of principles are alike, yet the biggest uncertainty factor is that you can’t control the camera, so you have to control the environment and make sure it works from every angle. Further you can’t work on a shot-by-shot basis.

“Visual Storytelling in Computer Graphics” by Harrison Ellenshaw had the charm of one of Fraser McLean’s seminars: He talked passionately about the principles, underlining them by showing clips of great movies including ancient Disney features. The films that he showed to the audience (Ryan’s Daughter, Cinderella, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) he commented with such a passion and enthusiasm that you couldn’t help but feeling it yourself: Wow, movies are the greatest and purest thing mankind has ever produced.

Again, this year Shelly Page from Dreamworks brought the fat of the land (mostly France though) of animation to us in the last hour in her “Shelly’s Eye Candy” presentation. Here’s a complete list of all the presented films:

• Yankee Gal, the moments in the life of a WW II pilot in a crashing airplane.
• French Roast, very funny, very French animation about an unappealing protagonist. I love those kind! And the coughing clochard!
• Steel Life, so very abstract and visually strong, like a remake or homage of Koyaanisqatsi would look like. And, no surprise, the music really drives it home. I mean *really*! Composer was Mathieu Alvado.
• Carver Audi Commercial by Framestore CFC. As usual visually very strong and makes you wonder before the payoff.
• Avatar Coca Cola Commercial, also Framestore CFC. The connection to the product itself was totally random, I guess somebody just loved the idea of populating the world with avatars.
• Stork Monster commercial, another Framestore CFC thingie. Very good idea, very well executed. As always.
• Flap Flap, German short about two ravens. If you’re into toilet humour you’ll laugh. In my opinion: crappy (pun intended). Found no link, sorry!
• They Will Come To Town, as seen yesterday. As impressive as yesterday.
• Guerre Naïve, very French with nanoloop musics and, yes, F-Zero countdown sounds about a racing boy. Strange. The French try to imitate the Japanese and vice versa ² in animation. I guess they have a crush on each other — cute!
• For Sock’s Sake, a Calarts graduation animation about a lost sock and his family of other clothes trying to find him. A very fresh idea and witty, expressive animation.
• Ex-E.T., about an alien child that’s just not in sync with his environment. Very good payoff. You’re gonna like this one (or at least the end).
• Dix, about a neurotic’s torment to overcome his compulsion. Very gory and disturbing at many points. Top notch!

Again, I had troubles keeping my eyes open and my mind sharp but I succeeded. Still I had to spend the rest of the evening in my car, sleeping, before paying an fmx party (‘Echtzeitparty’) event a visit with some of my peers. I really don’t like going out. Today I got reminded of that fact yet again.

What I have learned today:

• That it is impossible to find a parking garage that’s more expensive than the one I use.
• That creative argument is the best you can ask for. Any idea only gets better when creative people keep chewing on it.
• That it often helps to get new ideas by drawing without constantly thinking about what you’re drawing.
• That cuts that don’t cut into action are very in your face. If you want it that way, then have the audio have the same harsh cuts.
• That story is about change.
• That you shouldn’t overdraw your storyboards. Only draw what is necessary to the understanding. Then break that down into the least amount of images possible.
• That chroma keying on a chemical basis is like sumo wrestling: You have this huge opponent and you just want him out of the ring.
• That production wise VFX are a tightrope between the producer and the director.
• That you should trust your instincts once you get better.
• That when you draw people in long robes you don’t have to worry about drawing their feet.
• That you got to have a story behind/in your painting, no matter how unimportant it might seem.
• That you get interesting designs when using cliché for you audience to instantly recognize where you are going to take them, then add a new unusual wave to it.
• That constraints help good design.
• That ‘weenies’ in environment design basically are landmarks: They help you navigate the environment.
• That in first person shooters you tell a story basically by how you lay it out.
• That (in games) “story means action” (Habib Zargarpour).
• That ‘Divided Highways‘ is a good book on architecture and, indirectly on level design. So are ‘Learning from Las Vegas‘ and ‘Carchitecture‘.
• That concept art is what helps people to agree on something — thus saves money and time in the end.
• That television is a sales medium. You want people to get involved so they’ll watch the commercials.
• That you should tell as much as possible visually.
• That “action is character”, it is defining the character(s) — (Harrison Ellenshaw)
• That when you move the camera, everything moves. Does your story really wants you to move everything? If not: Keep the cam rigid.
• That “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” really is scary stuff for actors, but so was “Cinderella”. But…
• …CGI is just another tool that won’t replace real actors or real humans operating those tools.

What surprised me today:

• That George Lucas is said to be rather introverted. Just like his chin suggests.
• That short films by the big studios don’t make any money. In fact, they only cost the production a lot.
• That all the helicopters in Die Hard were added in post. All of them!
• That the movie “Ryan’s Daughter” has absolutely great pictures.

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.

You ask “What’s new? What’s cool?” and I tell you: A lot: I’ve been in the trenches with Nuke and fought After Effects so there’s a lot of stuff I want to show and tell what I’ve learned in the past weeks, not only about VFX.

I recorded a couple of tracks for my upcoming album (release: summer 2009). The Samson G-Track is a sweet piece of hardware, it combines a condenser microphone and an USB-soundcard. Finally I am able to record my acoustic guitar and piano work without the “help” of my 5€-headset whose microphone buzzes worse than the wasp hive in Donkey Kong Country 2 and rumbles more than my PS2′s Dualshock 2 controller that surrendered yesterday to material fatigue after nearly nine years of heavy duty service. Got me a new one today.

Between all my private creative work I am tackling 87 effect shots for our student short film “MOSKAU” and have only 4 weeks more to go. Luckily I am not alone with that truckload of effects still many shots end up on my todo-list. I am really honing my skills with Nuke right now. One year ago I only considered After Effects as the way to go and even was surprised that neither Double Negative nor Dreamworks ever came back to me after my enthusiastic applications at the fmx/08 conference.

That reminds me: If I was you (and I am 80% certain that I am not) I would keep an eye on this blog because I’ll be covering the fmx/09 in Stuttgart in detail on this very blog, complete with pictures and serious grammatical errors. So if you won’t be able to see it all in Stuttgart yourself, come back on the 5th of April 2009.

That’s all for now folks. I gotta get some sleep before the weekly meeting tomorrow. Which means I am shredding some Guitar Hero songs on extreme. Yes, you read correctly: I am publicly admitting that I am good at that game. On the upside: I got better on a real bass guitar as well.

So it all boils down to that simple phrase for me at the moment: Practice makes less imperfect.

Take an example: Are you a good singer? I am surely not. If I start singing then birds die and children get nightmares for years. While everybody (including me) hates the noises I produce, I wish I was a famous rock singer and on stage with Led Zeppelin or Kansas. Every now and then in the loneliness of my car with my music on the max, I attempt singing — and it is fun. But I keep it real and know that I will never ever be a rock singer and focus my life on what I am good at and is fun.

I guess it is the same with you. Let’s face it: You are not a good director and when you make a movie our dreams die and we all get nightmares from your way of “directing” and your “vision”. It is perfectly okay if you would get together with a couple of friends, have some beer and then put out the old Betamax camera on a tripod and shoot some silly horror splatter-movie loosely based on a videogame you guys enjoyed that afternoon. The next day you view it with your mates, you all share a good laugh and get back to your everyday life.

It is time for you to look deep inside your heart and realize that you are as much of a film director as I am a rock singer. It is not nice of you torturing people just to feed your ego. Yes, we all know that you *can* do it, make a movie, no matter what critics say — what do they know anyway, right? — or how to finance it via some dodgy investment fonds. But proving that all over and over again won’t make your films better, it makes them only bitter. I think you should really wake up at some point and realize that you are just a stubborn 8-year-old who insists on getting what he wants or else he’s pissed and lets it out on everybody else. And this kind of malign narcissism helps nobody, especially not your development as productive human being in society.

People say nasty things about your films, yes, and they tend to get very personal but the point is not to respond on an even lower level and jump other directors in a childish attempt to disguise your own shortcomings. No, the point is to accept their opinion, and if there are more than 300.000 people that signed a petition that should make you think. So why not let the midlife crisis kick in on you big time and try something totally different in your life like, a return to boxing or why not begin acting, rock-singing or politics? Or how about something that does not affect anybody apart from yourself such as collecting model trains, playing video games or breeding iguanas? Or write a book — after all you hold a doctorate in literature so at least you know about spelling and grammar way better than any of us.

Think about it. And take your time.

I hope I could raise some questions for your personal quest for your Meaning of Life. I feel you should take a break from all the hassle for a couple of months and reflect on your inner self in the solitude of a temple.

Get well soon!
Yours,
Phil

Another convention report, my apologies! I haven’t thought that I would be on so many (= two) conventions in the field of digital film in such a short span of time. But attending the Digitale Cinematographie convention this Thursday in Munich was something way out of the ordinary because a little dream never dreamed came true: Seeing my work on the grandeur of a real IMAX theater silver screen.

Till,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

I have to yell out a big thanks to the head of the video department at the FH Salzburg, Till Fuhrmeister right here in the beginning. Thanks to his good connections he managed to squeeze four of my class’ video productions into the screening at the Digitale Cinematografie. And it wasn’t just a “normal” screening on a standard video beamer in some cheesy seminar room, not it was a HDCAM tape screened onto a huge screen in a former IMAX theater. Impressive!

With Zorica “Zoki” Vilotic, director and co-director of two of the screened productions, I drove fairly early to Munich and arrived perfectly in time at the convention center. Till was already there as was Sebastian Prittwitz, classmate and director of “Zugzwang” with his cinematographer of choice, Kaspar Kaven. After getting our name tags and stocking up on various giveaways Zoki and I headed for the FH’s desk which was on the floor below ground level, riding the escalator felt a little like descending into a parking garage.

Between the countless and immeasurable expensive digital cameras there was a small tables with an iBook and two seats, representing the Fachhochschule Salzburg. While Till and Sebastian were gone getting registered at the front desk, something they totally forgot about, Zoki and I took seat and represented the FH which nobody was interested in.

Zoki and me,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Nobody? Well, that’s not quite correct: One man, a little out of breath, desperately looking for something, skimmed the stands reading the various FH majors such as orthoptics, forest products & timber constructions or midwifery, then took a glimpse at the FH logo. He turned to us and asked with hope in his voice

Zoki and I both pointed at the brightly lit cubicle on the other side of the floor with plasma screens and red carpet and replied uni sono

He smiled, thanked us and off he went. The FH-logo doesn’t look that much like the RED logo, though…

It turned 10:35, ten minutes to go for our grand premiere so Till packed his Notebook and we entered the IMAX theater, getting comfortable while students from the HFF Munich where talking about their previously shown film, shot of 35mm film stock.

Things that hurt

We remembered what Till told us after he came back from mastering our short films on HDCAM: They were all too grainy, they weren’t color graded well and they wouldn’t stand against real 35mm film in a theater. I should point out that none of our productions was natively shot in real 1920 by 1280 full HD:

Visit Zugzwang

Sebastian “Basti” Prittwitz’ short film Zugzwang, which had cashed in quite a lot of awards, was shot on HDV but it really did well competing with big movies shot on film. Basti was very lucky having Kaspar Kaven as a director of photography who lifted an above-average student film to an even higher level. The trailer carried a wide range of emotions and scenes, more like the trailer to a full length feature film.

RADO commercial

We claimed that Jonny Hennebichler’s big commercial for Rado (which consisted solely of tricky chroma keying shots, multiplied to on countless layers in After Effecs) was shot in HDV. The truth is, that the crazy folks shot it in DV PAL! I don’t know how the managed to do it but it looked even better than HDV! And Andi Leitner’s music really gets close to you and grips your subconscience with a catchy melody.

Wii Monastery at YouTube.

Zoki’s Wii commercial was shot on DVCPRO HD, yes, but because of the format of half HD (1280 by 720) I cropped nearly every shot in the post production to this format, mostly because of the heavy motion stabilization that was necessary. For the presentation I had to blow up the whole thing to 1920 by 1080 and, hell, it was blurry! To compensate for the loss in detail I added some more grain to it, so that the noise was in fact the only thing that really was full HD. If asked about the terrible grain I would state that it was the artistic desicion of the director to achieve a 16mm look.
Only my matte painting was executed in full HD but in comparison it looked way too crisp. So to match the bluriness of the blown up live-action footage I had to blur the matte painting, which really hurt, until it blended together well. The additional grain I had to add hurt even more.

The Instant 36 film festival opener, titled “Motel 36″, directed by Zoki and Peter “Pepe” Pflaum, on the other hand was shot and produced in full HD ¹ and looked gorgeous on my screen during the post. For the film festival it had to be scaled down to PAL, even PAL 4:3 letterboxed which also hurt. The Digitale Cinematographie convention provided the one and only chance to show the trailer like it was meant to be presented: In a theater on a real big screen in its native resolution. I don’t have to add that I am really proud of how well it turned out and how well it conveyed the fifties film-noir look, do I?
Fun fact: Kerschy and Max (the guys I was in the Windshield team with) didn’t believe that we really shot the scenes but took them from some old movie. I think Max still isn’t convinced that we really shot it totally ourselves. Although it wasn’t meant to be one, I took that as a huge compliment for my skills in cinematography, editing and compositing. Thanks to you, all you doubters!

15 minutes of fame

Till & Su Turhan,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Presenter Su Turhan announced the next fifteen minute block featuring projects from the FH Salzburg, asked Till down, who apologized for the bad visual quality of the upcoming shorts. Then the lights went out and my heart was pounding: There it was, the instant 36 trailer many of us had worked so long on on the real big screen with real good sound, followed by Rado (which was but a little blurry but posed otherwise no evidence of its DV heritage), then Wii and rounded off well by the Zugzwang trailer. Till was mistaken: Our projects didn’t look like the crappy pixely digital video we all were terrified of to anticipate.

Very polite applause as Till and the moderator asked us down for a couple of questions, like what format we shot on, whether we even think well of traditional film and so on. Then it was over and when leaving the theater all of us wore big smiles, talked too loud and too fast to eachother and were just so very happy that we had the onetime chance of seeing our works in such a magnificent way.

Ship of interns

The following hour we roamed around the exhibition space, collected giveaways, tried out cameras no one of us will ever be able to afford in the near future and talked about how shitty 3D looks in live broadcast.

a man with glasses said who came out of the presentation space of the cubicle of dvc. It was Jürgen Firsching, managing director. We chatted a bit about stereoscopy and compositing, that Nuke 5 is finally able to handle stereo footage and where I come from.

He mentioned some names, unfamiliar to me, what they did within the company and he gave me his card along with a DVD titled “The compositor’s Introduction to Nuke”. I already knew that the tasks at dve don’t interest me much but I told him that I will think about it nevertheless. And I am really happy about the DVD because the sooner I switch from After Effects to some real compositing tool the better. And Nuke has always been on my radar.

In fact, that was the day. To round it off I bought myself four comfy cotton t-shirts at American Apparel and a venti caramel macchiato at Starbucks. Then Zoki and I went back to Salzburg at around noon.

What I have learned today:

Giveaways,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

• That the FH logo looks a tiny little bit like the logo of the RED cam.
• That the best delivery format for a HDCAM mastering is providing a Targa image sequence with uncompressed audio in 48khz.
• That stereoscopy still poses a problem for live broadcast or sport — and especially for live sports casts.
• That conventions combine both the sophisticated nature of man (gaining wisdom) as well as the archaic (hunting down/collecting giveaways).
• That I am close to having a matching keychain for any of my hawaii shirts.

This Saturday was a big day for me: My first Visual Effects supervision job apart from anything related to my education. Magic Movie hired me for the visual effects to their documentary for national TV which will be aired some time in fall. I can’t tell you about the story (because I’ve signed a non-disclosure contract) but I can tell you about my day.

The day started by missing the first train thanks to a couple of old ladies who were totally inapt when trying to purchase a train ticket from one of the ÖBB vending machines on the ramp. After they somehow managed to get a ticket they got onto the next train to Salzburg city, but I missed my connection and had another hour in the morning to get ready for the day.

Usually I avoid riding in trains but when money is tight there’s not much you can take. On the plus side you have six hours of time for disposal when you’re not the one driving. Luckily there weren’t many passengers traveling to Vienna that day except that one guy who sat across me and nearly finished “Hector’s Journey” by some French author by the time we reached Vienna. I was plugged into my iriver the whole train ride and enjoyed the three hours I had by napping for two of them, the other hour was filled with listening to Calexico ¹, reading the IHT, preparing for my upcoming tutorial-class and, most important, reading and pondering the storyboards for today’s shoot.

I arrived at the studio at around 1pm as the crew just had finished painting the white background to blue. It still smelled of wet paint while I was offered a strong espresso. I didn’t even notice that there was no sugar in it for I was so eager for some java. It was the first time I went to Vienna without paying good old Starbucks a visit.

When the actor arrived too and got his special-effects makeup applied by no less than director Michael Satzinger himself I set up the blue screen for VFX with Christoph Skofic, now a very talented and passionate cameraman and cinematograher I know from school. Luckily he already knows much about working with visual effects so I could spare everybody the explanation what exactly tracking marks are and why I need them so badly. On some DVD commentary track I’ve once heard somebody say “Why did we need a visual effects supervisor anyway? Last time the VFX came out well without one”! I say: That might me true, but it would’ve been much cheaper and faster with having a VFX supervisor. Not to mention the thousands of curses from the guys in VFX…

My last train back to Salzburg was leaving at 8:40pm so we had to carry out the most important and most difficult dolly shots in the beginning – the dolly shots. Usually everybody on set hates a Visual Effects Supervisor but I felt fine with that team: They gave me the time needed to mount the tracking marks on the background, on stand-ins and to perform the tedious measurements of everything and the camera’s gamma-mode. You can’t be too thorough when recording what’s happening on set, especially when you do the post-production of the shots yourself. But this crew was very relaxed and gave me the time I needed which I appreciate much.

Difficult VFX shots are always a compromise between what you can force on set to decrease the workload in the post-production, and what you can’t do on the set which results in hours of clean-up in the post. Working as a VFX supervisor means balancing these two positions. It also means being imaginative enough to tell whether a shot works or not by just seeing two people walking around a blue studio. And it also means that it looks like you’re the only one without a “real” task like grip.

Bewteen two shots our director was asked by Lukas, another old classmate of me and grip/lighter/sound in this team
  “Hey Michi, why aren’t you into commercials at all?”
Michael replied boldly that
  “I am not making films to make money!”, directly followed by a comment from technical director and co-founder of Magic Movie, Jörg Steger,
  “Well that’s exactly the problem!”
Jörg spent about 100 € that afternoon for purchasing 30 liters of buttermilk among other edible props for upcoming scenes the next day. “Nobody drink the wine or eat the prosciutto!” – pause – “It’s poisoned!”.

New Horizons

Time flew by and I could assist on three shots before I had to leave for one interesting train ride home. First, I nearly ended up in a train car to Venice (Italy) but finally found a seat in a cabin with only three older ladies and an older man reading a thick book. I thought that they wouldn’t be trouble when I was trying to sleep. Big mistake. Except for the man with the book (who got off after 15 minutes) they were all drunk. Majorly. Plus their husbands where only one cabin apart — just as drunk and also with an open door towards the aisle. One of them paid cheesy visits and babbled something about “how I love you, Hildegard” and “how I hate you, Hildegard”. Somehow I still managed to sleep a one and a half hour in total, waken up every ten minutes by a high-pitched sharp laugh. When the old men started singing again on the aisle I woke up and harshly shut the door which irritated the old drunks but I couldn’t care less.

In Linz they finally got off and I was alone — at last! I switched seats and just when I had fallen asleep again three young black hip-hoppers with two local R’n'B-styled lower-Austrian girls hopped in and started babbling, partly in French, and insulting each other so bad that I wasn’t sure if they really belonged to the same clique. Half asleep I learned that one of the girls, Kathi, was pregnant and always concerned that her folks would stare at her belly while she was insulting Foma all the time that
  “Africa stinks of all the cows and I’m gonna sue you because you ain’t Austrian.”
Foma kept laughing
  “It’s the corruption that’s so terrible don’t you go to school?”
Kathi growled angrily. Foma looked at me
  “Sorry, man, she just keeps talking and talking and talking.”
He laughed tipsily and one of his “brothers” leaped in and gave him a 2-liter plastic bottle of whine of which he took a big gulp.

Half an hour later their peers found a cabin they had for their own, one without a creepy sleepy blond guy, and went off. Before he left Foma looked at me.
  “Everything alright? You want me to turn off the lights so you can sleep?”
  “Thanks, man. I’m fine. But keep them on, I don’t wanna fall asleep again and miss my station!”
He nodded, smiled and left, keeping the door open, but I didn’t mind. Still after another thirty minutes I got a terrible headache, dimmed the lights and decided to order my thoughts while blankly staring into the dark, ever changing landscape outside as Foma and his folks were merrily goofing around in the aisles. Suddenly one of them looked into my dark cabin, assumed that I was sleeping and silently closed the door before he went back to his friends.

In Salzburg I got off, paid the exorbitant amount of 5.20 € for a pair of hot wieners and went to my train due campus Urstein that wasn’t leaving for half an hour and so I waited more or less alone and more or less awake for it to start moving. I was tired and exhausted and felt as if I was the only one awake around. But I was mistaken. Two stops before I had to get off a goth girly all in black, of course, tumbled in, nearly tipped over her enormous boots and cranked up the volume of her white iPod Nano to the max listening to an old Evanescence track. She opened her bag and dug into it for something. As she finally found a tiny lip-gloss she let out a sigh of relief while applying it. I could tell from the intense smell that it had some very fruity flavor. And I am not sure but I think she even ate some of it.

When I got off at my station there was cold silent fog everywhere. It carried away some of my dizziness as I made my way towards the campus building. As I was making my way to the backside I noticed that it was full moon and with the floating fog around and with the already turned-off garden lamps the place looked nearly magical. Behind many blinds the rooms were lit, probably with awake people inside them, working, talking, still I was certain there was nobody else awake. I was so sleepy that it was enough for the whole campus that night.