At the beginning of the year, Glenn Melenhorst talked to us about his work on JUMANJI – WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE. He is back to show us his work on TOMB RAIDER.

NOTE: The work was made at Iloura that now is Method Studios.

How did you and Iloura get involved on this show?
We had worked with the VFX Supervisor Paul Linden before on JOHN WICK 2, and Scott Shapiro on DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK.

How was the collaboration with director Roar Uthaug and VFX Supervisor Paul Linden?
As we weren’t the main VFX vendor for the film, we were not required on set. Our work with Paul on JW2 was very recent and I think his familiarity with our work and capabilities served as a good foundation for the collaboration. Ineke Majoor and I flew to London to meet with Paul, Scott and, more importantly, Roar to discuss the VFX requirements of the film which proved to be a useful undertaking.

 
What was his approach and expectations about the visual effects?
We were given some loose concept art but significant creative freedom, so, together with RSP who we collaborated with, we were able to bring a lot of our own ideas to the sequences.
 

What are the sequences made by Method Studios?
We created a large number of digital sets including the tomb descent, the pagoda, the tomb corridors and the ladder crossing (with all the skeletons below). We also designed the withering FX and wide explosions of the pagoda (while its internal destruction was created by RSP), Himiko mummy, spikey log trap, floor spikes, and a whole lot of bluescreens and keys and production fixes.

 
How did you work with the art department for the tomb?
Art department provided us with some concept work, but there was also art from RSP to work with and our own internal concept art. We did a lot of work on the pagoda to bring it a sense of scale and Japanese details.

 
What was the real size of the sets?
For the pagoda sequence, even though the set was large (impressive really), the scale of the games usually work on a much grander scale than is achievable in a studio set. We took the plates, split and scaled them and laid them inside our vast CGI spaces in order to give a broader scope and amplify the grandeur.

 
Can you explain in details about the design and the creation of the tomb?
Asset Lead Sam Jensen and Environment/DMP Lead Alex Popescu ran point on our set extensions and tomb design. We had a ton of available data to pull from in assembling the rock formations, including our own reference photography and an internal library of models, so we could quickly place pieces together like Lego bricks and show the client different iterations. Once the shape was approved, we go into heavy textures and details.

There isn’t much light inside the tomb. How does that affect your lighting?
You have to be really subtle with the lighting, and, most importantly, calibrate your equipment so that when we review our work, its light levels accurately represent the final pictures.

 
There are many deadly booby traps. How did you create them?
We created the rolling log trap and the spikes in the ground trap, and as much as I’d like to talk them up, they were pretty simple to make. The hardest part of the process was the dust / debris interaction with the actors who were on a clean partial set. Making the corridors seem dusty, and dirty was almost harder than the traps.

Which part of the tomb was the most complicated to created and why?
The pile of skeletons in the chasm below the ladder crossing was our most complicated set piece. Besides the research we did into armor from feudal Japan and sculpting the mutated bones for countless skeletons, we needed to simulate the pile and keep it ‘live’ for interactions and simulations of the flare hitting it and Vogel falling into it. The design of the walls in that sequence also took time. They needed to be sheer enough that someone of Lara’s skill couldn’t climb, yet hold enough craggy interest to be believable.

 
Aside from that, the withering effect we created was the most technically challenging. When you have actors trembling in high frequency under aggressive torch flares with stringy hair and beards, it’s no small feat to track veins and decaying flesh onto them. That was a real challenge.

 
How did you design and created the terrible disease brought by Himiko?
FX Lead Daniel Hourigan and Paul Buckley, along with Thijs Noij in comp, came up with the design. We did extensive lookdev and played with a number of approaches to create an iconic look that would still fit within the film’s PG-13 rating. Our early passes were pretty gory, but we pulled it back, ultimately landing on the withering effect.

 
Can you tell us more about Vogel’s death?
Our original brief was that the withering effect was to be an echo of the effect first seen on Himiko when the tomb is opened. We worked on the idea of a rapid decay carried through veins, starting with a darkening vein pass, which spots decay here and there on the surface of the skin. Those spots spread and connect and deepen into charcoal-like depressions that sink, until presumably the flesh ashes away and all that is left is the skeleton. Vogel has Himiko’s finger crushed inside his mouth so the effect was aggressive, spreading much faster than the other characters so by the time he joins the skeleton pile he’s well under way. We iterated with many different looks and amounts of decay trying to achieve a gruesome result without pushing the effect too far into another ratings bracket.

 
What was the main challenge on this show and how did you achieve it?
In terms of tools and techniques, we used our usual bag of tricks. Tracking the virus FX onto the actors required some scrutiny, but the challenge of the film was more conceptual than technical.

 
What is your favourite shot or sequence?
Definitely the ladder crossing. I think from a staging point of view, it was a pleasing sequence to be involved with.
 
What is your best memory on this show?
We were given a fair amount of creative license in terms of the set extension, which was really cool. Our artists developed how the interior of the cave was structured, the intricacy of the pagoda and the virus withering effect; we got to stretch creatively.

 
How long have you worked on this show?
The bulk of the work was completed over a four month period.
 
What’s the VFX shot count?
We completed 352 shots, about 12 minutes of screen time.

 
What was the size of your team?
I supervised the project jointly with Comp Lead Matt Omond. The team size was 85 artists.
 
What is your next project?
We are currently working on CHRISTOPHER ROBIN and AQUAMAN.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Method Studios: Official website of Method Studios.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

The post TOMB RAIDER: Glenn Melenhorst – VFX Supervisor – Method Studios appeared first on The Art of VFX.

Interesting video by WIRED featuring VFX Supervisor Daryl Sawchuk talking about the VFX work of Method Studios on BLACK PANTHER:

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Method Studios: Dedicated page about BLACK PANTHER on Method Studios website.
Andy Brown & Todd Sheridan Perry: My interview of Andy Brown & Todd Sheridan Perry, VFX Supervisors at Method Studios.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

The post BLACK PANTHER: WIRED Making of about Method Studios work appeared first on The Art of VFX.

Greg Steele began his visual effects career at Rhythm & Hues in 2004. He has worked on films such as NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, X: FIRST CLASS and DJANGO UNCHAINED. He then joined Method Studios in 2013. He took care of the effects of films like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, ANT-MAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, GHOST IN THE SHELL and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2.

How did you get involved on this show?
Our Method team was finishing up work on the final battle sequence in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR for Dan DeLeeuw and Jen Underdahl when they started talking to us about potential involvement in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. We had an amazing experience working with them on that project, so of course we leapt at the opportunity to work with them again and be involved in such an epic film.

What was your feeling to be back on the MCU?
Method has been very fortunate to have worked on many of the Marvel films for the last 5 years. I’ve personally had the opportunity to collaborate on GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, ANT-MAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR and now AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. Each film has its own unique challenges and tone, but consistent among all of the Marvel creative teams is the overall goal of making the best film that can be made.

How was this new collaboration with directors Russo Brothers and VFX Supervisor Dan DeLeeuw?
Dan DeLeeuw was always our point of contact on the film. Dan would manage the process of determining what he, the Russo Brothers and the rest of the Marvel creative team needed the assets, shots and sequences to be. Both animation supervisor Keith Roberts and I have been fortunate to have worked with Dan many times over the years, and he has always been an incredibly creative, patient and experienced collaborator. I always walk away having learned an enormous amount on each project.

How did you organize the work with your VFX Producer?
Andy Foster was our producer, Julie Osborn our associate producer, and Luis Guevara our digital producer. Together, they kept the show scheduled and running smoothly.

Senior Animation Supervisor Keith Roberts, worked with Animation Supes Daniel Mizuguchi in VAN and Chris Perkowitz in LA, to lead two groups of character animators.

Our digital supervisor, Chris Kenny, looked after all technical aspects of the show, and Fernando Zorrilla was our asset supervisor, overseeing all of our character, prop, vehicle and environment builds with his multi-location team of artists. Pouyan Navid was our FX supervisor, managing all aspects of the effects work via his team of FX artists in both locations.

Because of the large number of shots and different environments, we broke the shot work up into three sequence teams headed up by Brandon Nelson, Pieter Van Houte and Kodie Mackenzie. These teams would take the shots to final, working with the animation, FX and asset teams.

How did you split the work amongst the Method Studios offices?
Between our Los Angeles and Vancouver offices, we designed the workflow to allow flexibility at the department level and could, for example, animate a shot in LA, run the character tech simulations and FX elements in VAN, and finish the lighting and comp in LA. The same was done for assets and allowed us to leverage the most appropriate artists for the tasks, no matter which city their desks were in. This allowed for a more unified team workflow and atmosphere.

What are the sequences made by Method Studios?
Our work followed the Rocket, Groot and Thor storyline from when the Guardians find Thor in deep space, Thor and Guardians’ interactions on the Guardians’ spaceship, the travel to Nidavellir in the escape pod, and ending in the set pieces that take place in the Nidavellir forge. Since we were the only vendor doing the Rocket and Groot aspects, we had some shared shots in Wakanda with ILM, DNEG and Digital Domain; we provided lighting pre-comps of the characters for the other vendors to add to the final comps.

Can you explain in detail about the design and the creation of Rocket and Groot?
For Rocket, we started with the asset we had used on GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 that was originally created by Framestore. Dan DeLeeuw didn’t want to change the character, but he wanted us to refine certain aspects where possible.

Adolescent Groot was designed by the Marvel art department for this film and a beautiful maquette was sculpted by Legacy Effects.

Can you tell us more about their rigging and animation?
Rigging/Techanim Supervisor Ryan Rogers and his team re-rigged Rocket based on animator feedback from the previous film, and also implemented a full body skin slide system that allowed for much more sophistication in the distribution of the skin over the musculature and bone structures. It also allowed the fur to move much more realistically when it was simulated. Extra attention was paid to the deformations around the eyes and implementing an improved corneal bulge deformation effect.

For Groot, scans were taken of the sculpt and we proceeded to build a production model. All of the vines were connected through his body and appendages so we could have separate vine distribution and slide between the vines as he moved. The original maquette had the plates covering his body in tight armor-like appearance, but it was requested to open up the gaps so he aligned more closely to his previous two incarnations (old and baby). For his face, we used a technique to hold certain sections or planks of his bark to different amounts of deformation, so as he spoke or emoted through his brows, there would be a subtle rigidity and slide between the different sections

Groot is now a teenager. What was the main challenge with this aspect?
Finding the right tone for Groot took some time. Editorially, his character and attitude was defined as much by his responses to others, as it was in the way Groot is treated by the rest of the team. Early on, he and Rocket had a more bickering back and forth interaction of a cranky emo teen and his frustrated parent; editorially eventually evolved that relationship into one where Rocket looks after Groot and is much softer in his approach with him. It made Groot a much more engaging character.

Did you received specific indications for teenager Groot?
Post-viz was done for most of the character shots in the film so editorial could work out the scene pacing and character beats before turning the shots over. Animation Supervisor Keith Roberts’ son, Quin, was 15 years old at the time and provided fantastic video reference that Dan DeLeeuw responded really well to. The drooped head, and long dangly arms of someone growing into their teenage body really captured the teen angst he was looking for. In shot production, we did some motion capture sessions with Quin and also based a good deal of the performances, both for Groot and Rocket, off animator reference we shot at the studio. Additionally, production had Sean Gunn and Terry Notary on set and in shots for character reference that we would also use to base the performance on.

How did you handle the fur of Rocket and the branches of Groot?
For Rocket’s fur, we switched to an XGen system based fully inside Maya. Simon Yuen, David Lo and Ilyoung Jeong built a workflow that allowed the character techanim team to stay in the same software for cloth and fur simulations and also allowed animation to do quick fur renders to check the deformation results of a furred Rocket vs. the traditional polygonal playblast representation.

All rendering happened in V-Ray and we spent extra time and effort to refine the fur shaders to get more of a natural specular response from the fur. We also went through all of the soft tissue aspects such as teeth, gums, nose and eyes to increase his realism.

Groot’s vines stretching out to form Stormbreaker’s handle were handled in rigging. The animation team was initially going to block out the movements with the intention of switching to an FX Houdini simulation once the motion was blocked in by them. But the animators did such a great job with the performance and timing of the growth, that we ended up just needing the FX Houdini artist to rework the surface to grow along the anim curve and create an age transition from green to brown vs. sliding down the curve as it was in anim.

How did you manage the lighting challenges with Rocket and Groot?
The on-set production team was very thorough in terms of capturing the information needed to accurately place characters in scenes. For every setup, they would capture clean plates, passes with character/prop stand-in reference, color charts, grey/silver balls and HDRI stills.

For the lighting on the show, CG Supervisor Brandon Nelson and Lighting TD Tadao Mihashi built a workflow in Nuke that allowed the lighting artists to draw rotoshapes around lights in the shot’s HDRI that they wanted to be isolated, then run a tool that would auto extract the isolated lights, clean up the HDRI and setup a lightrig in Maya with all of the extracted lighting images on cards in the correct orientation. Then, based on the lidar, they could then move the lights in depth to match the on-set lighting. It was a quick way to get an accurate starting place before going in and making artistic decisions.

Many of the shots on Nidavellir and when Rocket is alone in the escape pod were fully CG, so everything was rendered together to get accurate lighting and interaction.

The Guardians have a new ship. Can you tell us more about it?
We worked on two vehicles for the show. The large ship that the Guardians travel through the galaxy in, and a smaller escape pod that drops out of the belly of the main ship, and is used by Rocket, Groot and Thor to travel to Nidavellir and start up the Forge.

The Guardians’ ship and the escape pod were designed by production designer Charlie Wood and his Marvel art department team. They created beautiful artwork that explored the look and surfacing and also put together some rough models for general volumes and shapes. While we were in Atlanta filming the Nidavellir sequence, Dan and Jen arranged for us to spend some time with Charlie in the art department to go through many of the vehicles, and environments they had designed for the show. It was an excellent opportunity to discuss shape, visual language, material properties, histories, and areas that they wanted us to expand on for the final assets.

On set, the Guardians’ ship was broken into two sections: a two story flight deck mounted on a gimbal for slight movement and vibration, and a galley section where the majority of Thor’s interaction with the Guardians takes place. As the two sections couldn’t be connected because of the gimbaled flight deck height off the ground, we merged the two sections via 2.5D set extensions based on photography projected on accurate geometry. Our Art Director, Ming Pan, came up with beautiful designs for the nebulas and distant space environments across all of our sequences that Chris Sanchez, our matte painter, refined and broke into layers for the comp teams.

How did you created this ship?
Not all aspects or angles were fully fleshed out, so our Art Director Ming Pan would do paint-overs to develop what needed to be built and how things could work, making sure everything stayed true to the original design and visual language. Asset Supervisor Fernando Zorrilla worked with modeling, texture, rigging and lookdev to prepare the assets for shots and sharing with other vendors. A massive effort went into building all of the individual paneling to get the correct oil-canning effect similar to a WW2 warbird, aging the surfaces and giving everything a history, and working out the mechanics of the engines, wing pivot connections and all of the other geometric details that would hold up in both wide shots and two feet away from the surface.

What was your approach for the shots featuring Eitri interacting with Thor?
On set, a section of the forge surrounded by a massive bluescreen was built to shoot as many of the Thor, Rocket and Groot plates as possible. It also allowed the staging of Eitri and Thor’s interactions. For those shots, because of time challenges with the talent, the directors were willing to restrict themselves to nodal camera moves, which would allow us to quickly move through fairly simple forced perspective setups of the A and B sides of the shot. We would shoot the A side with Thor, then in the same place on set and in the same lighting conditions, we would bring in some portable bluescreens and shoot the Eitri plate, accounting for the scale differences by scaling down the camera relationship to the origin point that Eitri was standing on. For wide shots of the characters moving through the environment with Thor, we used a digi-double of Eitri so we had more flexibility with the camera motion.

How did you design and create the huge environment of Nidavellir?
Nidavellir was our largest asset build on the show. It is a massive space station buried in a deep corner of space surrounded by gaseous nebulas and asteroid fields. The challenges revolved around building an environment that could be easily animated or posed per shot, having enough detail that we could be a foot from the ring surface and also pull out and across long distances and still retain the sense of scale and detail necessary, and in the end be efficient enough to render in many shots.

The Marvel art department had provided beautiful concept designs that we needed to combine together and really define what the surface looked like up close vs. far away. Amazing detail closeup tended to look like noise from further distances, so we really needed to balance the relationships of the shapes and have an almost recursive fractal quality to the surfaces.

To build the surfaces and structure, we used a V-Ray proxy geometry method that utilized efficient memory handling and rendertime optimizations. Atomic pieces were bundled together to create larger logical shapes and areas. We chose to build the modules by hand vs. procedurally as it afforded a more aesthetically driven and logical layout of the parts. These modules were then replicated procedurally through the ring structures to avoid repeating patterns.

At the shot stage, any of the modules could be adjusted, and all the parts down to the atomic level could be manipulated and rearranged as the shot composition called for. Animation and lighting would never need to see the high resolution geometry, as it was represented by lo res geo and would only get called at rendertime.

Thor is restarting the dying star and the forge. How did you create this stellar FX?
Animation worked with our layout lead, Juan Colon, to build a geographical coherence across the sequence. Where characters were on the rings, the continuity of the rings spinning, and the spatial relationships took a good deal of effort and organization, especially as the edit was evolving and things needed to hook up.

FX Supervisor Pouyan Navid and his team crafted an enormous amount of element passes for the sequence teams in this part of the story: the massive blue/purple emission of the dyson gasses, the beams and energy blasting Thor as he holds the dyson sphere doors open, the nebulas and floating ice particulate, escape pod thrusters, crucible fire, melting uru, solar winds, steam and blue space particulate in the forge. All of the simulations and volumetric rendering was done in Houdini and in some cases, such as the melting uru metal and floating ice and asteroid chunks, data was passed back to the lighting team for V-Ray rendering.

Thor gets burned really hard. How did you enhanced his wounds?
On set, Chris Hemsworth had a base of makeup applied, but we ended up substantially enhancing it to give him a much crispier look that would support his dying state at that point in the story. We needed to create more burn coverage, skin blistering and suit damage/hot embers augmentation. This was accomplished by projecting painted elements on 3D matchmoves and also using smart vectors in Nuke to track and warp the material to his skin and body shapes. Effects smoke simulations and practical smoke/steam elements were added to give him that “fresh out of the bbq” quality.

Which sequence or shot was the most complicated to create and why?
During the sequence in which the hero characters are trying to get Nidavellir’s ice encrusted rings to move, Thor is dragged along the surface of one of the rings by Rocket in the escape pod. Across several shots, Thor tears through the high tech solar panels and machinery, creating a rooster tail of zero-G debris and ice until he is able to grab hold at the edge. The shots involved a digi-double, long stretches of unique Nidavellir surface level detail, tearing metal simulations and destruction, atmospherics, sparks, etc.

Is there something specific that gives you some really short nights?
When we started on the project, it was necessary to get up to speed extremely quickly as we needed to complete a part of the sequence where the Guardians meet Thor for the Disney D23 event and Comic-Con. It required us to build and develop adolescent Groot, the Guardians’ spaceship, the look of jump space and exiting it, and the debris field wreckage of Thor’s ship all in a very short time period. It was a real race to the unveiling deadline, but the team did an amazing job in pulling everything together, and it really kicked the show off for us in a high gear.

What is your favorite shot or sequence?
The arrival of Thor, Rocket and Groot in the escape pod to the Nidavellir space station. It contained wide expansive space vistas with some closeup shots of the rings, dyson sphere and forge that showed off some of the incredibly detailed work the asset team created. That, combined with the atmospheric lighting, FX and compositing the sequence team merged together, created a very moody and mysterious introduction to Eitri’s Nidavellir forge.

What is your best memory on this show?
My best memory would be working with our incredible multi-location team based in Vancouver and Los Angeles. Our Method production team, supervisors and artists put everything they had into the work and strove to create the best imagery possible for the sequences.

Additionally, the positive reaction people have had to the finished film. It’s a real testament to the artistry, skill and creativity of the filmmakers and all of the visual effects vendors involved.

How long have you worked on this show?
June 2017 to April 2018 – about 10 months.

What’s the VFX shots count?
410 shots.

What was the size of your team?
Around 220 people, including supervisors, artists, and support staff.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Method Studios: Dedicated page about AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR on Method Studios website.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Cute trailer for CHRISTOPHER ROBIN:

The VFX are made by:
Framestore (VFX Supervisor: Carlos Monzon)
Method Studios (VFX Supervisor: Glenn Melenhorst)

The Production VFX Supervisor is Chris Lawrence.

Director: Marc Forster
Release Date: 3 August 2018 (USA)

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

The post CHRISTOPHER ROBIN appeared first on The Art of VFX.

Sean Konrad began his career in visual effects in 2000. He worked in several studios like Prime Focus, Zoic Studios and MPC before joining Method Studios in 2016. He worked on films such as TRON: LEGACY, GODZILLA, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and JUSTICE LEAGUE.

John Likens began his career in motion design 10 years ago. He works in many agencies like Perception NYC, The Mill and Blind before joining Method Studios in 2014.

What is your background?
Sean Konrad // I come from a compositing background mostly, but I’ve done work in pipeline and technology project management.

John Likens // In college I studied Graphic Design, and just before I graduated, I taught myself how to animate to pursue my interests in motion and film.

How did you get involved on this show?
Sean Konrad // Dan Glass (studio side VFX Supervisor) actually hired me at Method, so when he got involved in the show, we ended up having a few preliminary discussions to talk about the work he was considering giving to Method.

John Likens // Dan Glass, who had been at Method Studios for many years, needed help to develop some graphic elements that they wanted for the flashback montage showing what Deadpool has been up to. During that time, I decided to visualize a concept for an idea I had for a Bond-esque opening title sequence. After creating about 20 different style frames showing how the sequence could work, I pitched it to David Leitch, the Director, and Dan Glass, they both really responded it. They had a piece of music written for it, which was ultimately recorded by Celine Dion, and we got to work bringing this sequence to life right away. 

What was your feeling to be in the Deadpool universe?
Sean Konrad // I was pretty excited to be involved — Colossus and Cable were both characters that I loved when I was younger, and I appreciated a lot about the structure of this movie. It’s a bold move to make the main point of conflict in the film not with a villain character, but surrounding a situation. Deadpool as a character provides a great opportunity to mess with conventions.

John Likens // For me it was pretty surreal. I’ve been a Deadpool fan for a long time. In fact, when I was in school and teaching myself to animate, I once scanned some pages of a Deadpool comic book and tried to bring him to life. I’ve come a long way since those days, and I feel extremely fortunate to have had the chance to work on DEADPOOL 2. 

How was the collaboration with director David Leitch and VFX Supervisor Dan Glass?
Sean Konrad // David and Dan were both very in sync with each other, so the direction was always pretty clear, and if we had alternative ideas that made sense for the movie, they were pretty receptive. I found that they were able to make evaluations of rough materials pretty well, so it allowed us the freedom to explore ideas with animation or FX and get meaningful feedback quickly.

John Likens // It was extremely collaborative, and in the best way. They trusted me and my team to come up with and execute our ideas. They also gave us many of their own ideas as well to work into the sequence. There was a lot of back and forth about the jokes, figuring out what was funny, what visuals we should include or not include, if it was working for the storytelling, etc. 

What was their expectations and approaches about the visual effects?
Sean Konrad // Dan and Dave wanted to get a lot in camera. In the end, we only had a single all CG shot in the entire film, which was a top view of Deadpool jumping between two buildings in Hong Kong. The last few shows I’ve done have all had at least 15-20% all CG shots, so this was a pretty big paradigm shift.

It’s sometimes easier to work in heavily plate-based shots, because it’s pretty clear when an element isn’t photographic or doesn’t move correctly — however it can also make finishing details that much more time consuming. I had a great compositing sup, Andrew Brooks, so we figured out the best techniques early on. But in general, the direction was get as much in camera as possible and use that as the basis for the VFX.

How did you organize the work with your VFX Producer?
Sean Konrad // Chris Anderson and myself knew pretty early on that there wasn’t going to be a lot of time between the director’s cut and the final delivery date, so we jumped on any targets of opportunity to answer creative and logistical questions at the outset of the show, and tried to get as much face time as possible while the client team was available to us. That made a huge difference near the end of the project.

How did you split the work amongst the Method Studios offices?
Sean Konrad // Vancouver was the primary facility, New York tackled the opening sequence and the final credits, and also helped us out with a few FX gore tasks in the bath house sequence. Pune did a chunk of the plate prep/roto and tracking work, and Los Angeles was involved in conceptual work for the afterlife sequence.  

What are the sequences made by Method Studios?
Sean Konrad // We did the “9 to 5” opening mercenary mission sequences where Deadpool travels from Hong Kong around the world tracking down baddies, a couple of Colossus sequences after he’s brought back to the X-Mansion and later in the movie when he’s hiding from Deadpool in his bedroom, the prison break sequence including the aftermath where the guys are tumbling down the mountain, the afterlife, and a few other miscellaneous shots throughout the movie.

Can you explain in detail about the creation of the opening and end titles sequences?
John Likens // For the opening, we did many rounds of design revisions, to figure out which images we should showcase in that title sequence, getting all of the ideas out in the open and seeing which ones would stick. Once we made the final shot selections, I moved into an animatic phase. Creating a greyscale version of the sequence allowed me to quickly block out all the shots, see how the character would move, and how the camera would animate from shot to shot. Once we received approval, I was able to bring in the ultra-talented VFX artists and animators here at Method Studios, to start crafting the final sequence. The opening sequence required help from every department; everyone was able to bring something to the table, it was one of those jobs that everyone was so excited to be a part of it pushed us to do our best work.

About three weeks before the film was due, David asked us to pitch ideas for the main-on-end title sequence. I got to work right away and came up with a few design directions that we could pursue. Everyone really responded to the idea of showcasing crude Deadpool drawings and hand-written credits. There was lots of room there to fit in a ton of extra little jokes, funny drawings, and even work in some Deadpool memes.

I drew about 60 unique drawings for the sequence and about 30 of them ended up in the final edit. It was a blast coming up these drawings, going back and forth with David and Ryan Reynolds about what jokes we should include and what should be written on certain cards. 

What kind of references and indications did you received for these titles sequences?
John Likens // Knowing that we wanted to pull off something that was Bond-esque, I studied just about every Bond sequence ever created. Digging through the original works by Maurice Binder and Daniel Kleinman gave me a good foundation of reference to start creating my own compositions. 

The opening sequence is taking place in various locations. How did you create these environments?
Sean Konrad // The opening shots were photographed on rooftops in Vancouver — we modified the plates to look like Hong Kong. The subsequent action that takes place in the Triad bar was shot on a blue screen set at Mammoth Studios in Burnaby. We returned to nearby rooftops to shoot panoramas (we weren’t sure what time of night we would settle on so we spend about 4 hours capturing panos), the buildings were then modified with signage so that it felt like a busy Hong Kong street.

Similar approaches were done for the Yakuza bath house scene, the rest of the opening sequence was either done on set or on location.

Deadpool is really gory. How did you enhance the various fight and extreme wounds?
Sean Konrad // We had a lot of dismemberments and decapitations in our sequences. We knew that we wanted to have some flexibility in where the chops were going to happen, so we fit an ecorche to all of the character models that we knew we had to damage, which we would then chop up and add detail to once we had an initial pass of animation done — this gave us a correct anatomy for the muscles/bone structures.

The blood itself was intentionally kept a little cartoonish and light in order to maintain the light feeling of the scenes. We wanted the wounds to be graphic and a little gross, but we didn’t want the majority of the crowd to start feeling nauseous.  

One of the bigger/grosser effects that we did was on the head wound that Wade suffers while sliding down the mountain where we exposed some of his brain and skull. We’d built a digidouble for Wade for a few digital takeover shots so this provided a good base to build from.

Although not super gory, we also did a few limb breaks in the prison sequence — the shot where Wade breaks his back on a picnic table got a big reaction from the audience screening I was in, and the later shots where he strangles Cable with his own arm were pretty interesting to do. They used a rubber tube on set to block in the action with Brolin and Reynolds, and then we modified or replaced the plate arm as necessary.

Later in the movie, Cable arrives in a prison. How did you create his eye and arm?
Sean Konrad // The eye and arm were originally created by the team at DNEG. They gave us a basis for the asset, and while we were working through some specific challenges with the movement and the way that the eye optically registered, we ended up sharing examples back and forth until we had a refined product.  

Cable has really cool toy such as his gun and shield. Can you explain in detail about the creation of these various FX elements?
Sean Konrad // The gun blast look evolved from references of sonic weapons in other movies as well as cymatics videos that Dan showed us early in the process. DFX Supervisor Sean Schur worked with the FX team to create a physical logic that we applied to the effect; we decided that the sonic weapon would create a concussive force by compressing the air. There would also be a secondary impact driven by the debris in the environment being sucked into a vacuum behind the front wave.

The cymatics ended up being the basis of the surface of the energy wave, but we ended up barely seeing the pattern through the motion blur of the shots that ended up in the movie.

The shield was developed by DNEG, but we gave it a unique energy signature for when it interacted with the sonic weapon; we tried to sell the idea that the shield was diverting energy around Cable, rather than dissipating or reflecting. 

Can you explain in detail about the creation of Colossus?
Sean Konrad // Framestore was the primary vendor on the show, so they’re better to talk to about the evolution of the look and the divergence from the first film. However, while we were waiting on a final version of the asset, we started to do a few character studies (supervised by Animation Supervisor Alex Poei) to define the way he moved, especially in more mundane situations (we didn’t have any fight scenes).

We wanted to know how a guy who is over seven feet tall and weighs a ton will move around an environment that isn’t built for him — archways are occasionally too small, chandeliers will be in his path, and he has to be gentle when he transfers his body weight (for instance, when he sits down in the den on the writing table).

Method did create a ‘casual’ clothing look for Deon in the ‘Say Anything’ scene in the bedroom of the X Mansion.  The costume department designed the garments, which we fit to Framestore’s model.

Can you tell us more about his rigging and animation?
Sean Konrad // Because we didn’t have very many highly active shots, we used a very simple muscle system and built shapes for key poses so that the rings didn’t stretch or deform too much.  Framestore had a lot more active material and, as a result, they would often increase the size of the gaps between each of the rings sets in interesting ways. We didn’t have as many of these more extreme poses, so when we did that kind of thing, it’s kept fairly subtle.

How does the shiny aspect of Colossus affect your work?
Sean Konrad // There were a lot of challenges with the reflective nature of Colossus. Because he’s 95% reflection, the way he looks from scene to scene can change greatly depending on the energy coming from the lights.  

We found a lot of the time that when he was reflecting the real-world domes, he ended up looking kind of bland so in some cases we painted details into the HDRIs to get more interesting shaping on his face or arms. We figured this is kind of what a DoP would do if the reflections weren’t looking great in a shot.  

Our lighting supervisor, Christian Emond, figured out a way to get caustic reflection lights coming off of the head and key areas of the body, so that he was having an impact on the lighting of the environment. 

Can you explain in detail about the face animation of Colossus?
Sean Konrad // Method rebuilt their entire FACS system for this show under the guidance of our facial animation lead Andrew Park (who specializes in facial animation), in collaboration with our rigging lead Ehsan Hassani Moghaddam and modeler Charlie Kim. Originally, we’d planned to do a blend of facial capture with the voice actor, but his physical mannerisms weren’t sufficiently stoic and he was more expressive than the filmmakers wanted from the character. As a result, we grounded a lot of the mannerisms in aspects of his performance, but muted and slowed down a lot of the broad movements. In the end, the facial animation is entirely keyframe animated in our shots.

In general, the scale of Colossus felt a lot more believable if he moved a little bit more slowly than a real human. I believe Framestore went with a number of around 20% slower than the reference they were using; in our sequence, we found it was occasionally even slower.

How did you design and create the Afterlife sequences?
Sean Konrad // The conception to execution of the afterlife is probably one of the more interesting journeys we took on this show. Early on, Dan had shown me some footage that they’d shot in the first weeks of the project with Wade in a dimly lit water tank, either surrounded in complete darkness or in a submerged version of the set. There were a lot of ideas thrown around in the initial conversations, but we vaguely knew that we wanted to mimic the feel of deep water photography where organic shapes exist as silhouettes and where cardinal directions are ambiguous incorporate memories into the environment in some way make it unclear if this is an actual afterlife or if this is just completely in Wade’s head

We initially did a round of concepts with Philippe Gaulier, one of our Art Directors in LA. He did some very striking images that became the basis of some initial postvis that David Leitch whipped up with the editors. We hit a few speed bumps when we got to the idea of how the memories were incorporated into the environment. Initially we wanted to have the shapes that were floating in the environment to resolve to memories of Wade and Vanessa in their apartment, but in general the reaction was that it was too literal. As a result, the memories evolved into a projector carousel effect that Wade moves through in a couple of shots, rather than something that’s sustained.

Because we knew that there was going to be a lot of (necessary) creative churn with this work, we wanted to make the approach highly iteration-able with my comp lead Daniel Bartha. We did most of the work in this sequence in Nuke, using particles, a 2D fluid solver, and the Nuke V-Ray plugin, along with a whole bunch of elements.

When Wade eventually gets through the environment, he finds Vanessa in their old apartment behind an invisible barrier that he can’t get through. These scenes were shot with a pane of glass in the middle of the room so that Ryan had something to make contact with. Whenever he makes contact a burst of energy is visible on the barrier surface. This was achieved in Houdini using particle and flip solvers. We took a lot of inspiration from bioluminescence and tried to get the slightly self-illuminated/refractive look moving through the distorting surface. The surface itself needed to have a viscosity that didn’t look like any kind of natural liquid, so we time warped the simulations until things looked right.

Near the end of the movie, he makes it through the barrier, which also heals all of his cancer. We had a lot of trouble getting the right patterns coming off of Wade; in the end we did an approach where we simplified the geometry that was colliding with the surface, and even created some layers where the liquid was pouring around a static version of Wade.

Which sequence or shot was the most complicated to create and why?
Sean Konrad // We did one shot that was incredibly complex and was ultimately shortened for the movie version. In the opening montage, Deadpool finds himself in a bathhouse in Tokyo facing down with a bunch of near-nude Yakuza. We did a two-minute-long shot with elaborate fight choreography, CG dismemberments and invisible transitions; the shot itself took a team of 15-20 people to complete and was held together by Comp Lead Allan Lee. Its complexity mostly came from the length, but also because managing the re-times in a sensible way was a project unto itself.

Is there something specific that gives you some really short nights?
Sean Konrad // I think the afterlife work was something that kept everyone who was involved with it up at night, in part because it just required a lot of thought. I remember at one point near the end when we were stumbling through the carousel idea, we started watching experimental films late at night to get our heads in the right space.

What is your favorite shot or sequence?
Sean Konrad // The shot of the meth lab boss (played by Thayr Harris) running away from Deadpool in the lab was a lot of fun. The shot was done with a motion control rig, Thayr’s element was shot at 96FPS, where the background was all happening in real time.

The background is absolute mayhem — a gas canister explodes, as does a fire extinguisher (both CG), and a guy is on fire (the narration notes that it isn’t CGI, which is totally true, they decided the night before that it would be a cool element for the shot, and once the choreography was locked we did a single take with him on fire and it worked perfectly). The trick was figuring out how to time everything in Thayr’s element so that he was reacting to the rest of the scene choreography.

We blocked out the hero moments with markers and audio cues, and then to make sure that things were synced, I live comped from the monitor feed on the day. There were a few moments that we had to correct, but in the end, it was a few frames here and there.

Our job after that was to roto Thayr off the CG plate, add some interactive lighting to him from the fire, throw in muzzle flashes, sparks and extra squib hits, as well as a bit of blood from the chainsaw near the end.

What is your best memory on this show?
Sean Konrad // I absolutely loved working on the meth lab shot with the stunt team, and then seeing that shot from start to completion. I’d been involved here and there and got to give some opinions while we were doing some minor setup on a few shots, but because of the complexity of this shot and the logistics involved, I ended up being at the rehearsal and tried to help figure out some of the problems of the shot and threw around ideas with the team. It was also great to see those folks in action. When the choreography was running long, they ended up pivoting and changing a lot of the content of the shot.

John Likens // The first time I edited the opening animatic together with the music, and it locked in perfectly. That’s when I knew we had something special.

How long have you worked on this show?
Sean Konrad // I was brought on board in July 2017, but I was finishing up another project. Fortunately, we were shooting in Vancouver so it was reasonably easy to hop over to a shoot location for key shots or important days. We are still doing some work for the home video release.

John Likens // All in all, we were on board for this film for about 9-10 months. 

What’s the VFX shots count?
More than 300.

What was the size of your team?
Sean Konrad // In the end, we had around 100 folks working on the VFX for this project.

John Likens // The team scaled up and down based on the workload of the moment, but about 24 different artists here at Method executed the opening sequence. The end titles, however, were created with a nimble team of just two other artists.

What is your next project?
Sean Konrad // I’m not allowed to say quite yet.

John Likens // I’m working on a new title sequence that should be out on HBO/Cinemax later this year.

What are the four movies that gave you the passion for cinema?
Sean Konrad // I don’t think there’s any specific movie that made me want to be involved in the industry, but movies like HIGH AND LOW, PERSONA, NAUSICAA, and THE HOST are all inspirations for me.

John Likens // TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (1990), SE7EN (1995), THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) and BLACK SWAN (2010).

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Method Studios: Dedicated page about DEADPOOL 2 on Method Studios website.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Godzilla is back in this first trailer of GODZILLA – KING OF MONSTERS:

The VFX are made by:
MPC (VFX Supervisor: Robert Winter)
DNEG (VFX Supervisor: Brian Connor)
Method Studios (VFX Supervisor: Daryl Sawchuk)
Raynault VFX (VFX Supervisor: Mathieu Raynault)
Ollin VFX (VFX Supervisor: Yabin Morales)

The Production VFX Supervisor is Guillaume Rocheron.

Director: Michael Dougherty
Release Date: 22 March 2019 (USA)

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2017

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Finally! Here is the epic trailer for AQUAMAN!

The VFX are made by:
Industrial Light & Magic (VFX Supervisor: Philippe Rebours)
MPC (VFX Supervisor: Darren Poe)
Method Studios (VFX Supervisor: David Nelson)
Scanline VFX (VFX Supervisors: Bryan Hirota, Roland Langschwert & Harry Mukhopadhyay)
Rodeo FX (VFX Supervisor: Philippe Soeiro)
Weta Digital (VFX Supervisor: Dan Macarin)
Proof

The Production VFX Supervisors are Charles Gibson and Kelvin McIlwain.

Director: James Wan
Release Date: 21 December 2018 (USA)

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Big news! Method Studios has just announced the acquisition of Atomic Fiction!

Here is the press release:

Deluxe’s Method Studios to Acquire Award-Winning VFX Company Atomic Fiction in Continued Global Expansion

–Influx of top talent and presence in key locations will further extend creative capabilities and capacity–

Los Angeles, CA – July 26, 2018 – Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire award-winning visual effects (VFX) company Atomic Fiction, with studios in Montreal, QC Canada, a growing epicenter for VFX, and San Francisco, CA. Atomic Fiction will join Method Studios, Deluxe’s global VFX brand, as part of its strategy to deepen the company’s talent base and capacity to take on the biggest and most challenging VFX projects for features, episodics, advertising and brands.

Founded in 2010, Atomic Fiction has built a reputation for creating high-quality VFX efficiently, by powering top creative talent with innovative technology and a focus on craft. Some of the studio’s standout projects have been collaborations with Director Robert Zemeckis, including The Walk, Allied, Flight, and the upcoming Welcome to Marwen, as well as Star Trek Beyond for Paramount Pictures, Deadpool for 20th Century Fox, Ghost in the Shell for Dreamworks, VFX-Emmy®-nominated work on Stranger Things 2 and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, along with episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and the upcoming season 3 of Netflix’s Stranger Things. The company also contributed to the Oscar®-winning VFX on Blade Runner 2049.

Academy Award®-winning director Robert Zemeckis said, “Throughout my career, I’ve always felt that it’s important to surround myself with the best of the best in their craft. Kevin (Baillie) and the team at Atomic Fiction are exactly that and, with the resources of Deluxe and Method behind them, I’m excited to have an even stronger team by my side.”

Bringing together Atomic Fiction and Method extends capacity and talent for both studios, enabling the combined entity to take on the biggest VFX sequences and even full features, spread work across global studios to match talent with project requirements, and offer clients the most advantageous cost structure through incentives and low-cost production centers. Atomic Fiction’s Montreal location will become a flagship studio for Method as part of a larger global strategy that also includes a substantial expansion of Method’s VFX capacity and capabilities in Pune, India that is already underway.

Ed Ulbrich, President, Deluxe VFX and VR/AR for Method Studios said, “We’ve been fans of Atomic Fiction’s work for a long time – it is outstanding and clients love them. When we started talking and met (Atomic Fiction founders) Kevin (Baillie) and Ryan (Tudhope) we learned what a great culture they’ve built, and our vision for the business resonated with them as well. It was clear to all of us that we will reach our goals faster together.”

Atomic Fiction Co-Founder Ryan Tudhope will continue to lead the Montreal team creatively with the new title Executive Creative Director, Method Studios. Atomic Fiction Co-Founder Kevin Baillie will take on the new role of Creative Director and Sr. Visual Effects Supervisor, Method Studios, and will continue to be based out of San Francisco. Both will report to Ulbrich. All of Atomic’s approximately 300 full-time and freelance employees are expected to join Method Studios when the transaction closes.

Tudhope said, “We set out to become the best visual effects company in the world, and, from the outset, committed to a forward-thinking approach that places uncompromising value on our people and culture. Joining Method gives us an opportunity to build upon that approach and reach our shared goal of being the best even faster. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Ed and his team to do just that.”

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, regulatory approval and is expected to close in Q3 2018.

About Method Studios
Method Studios, a Deluxe company, is an award-winning global visual effects company built around an exceptional team of artists and innovators servicing high-end feature, episodic television, and advertising/brand clients. Its network of facilities in Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Atlanta, and Pune, India, provide a full range of services including conceptual design, pre-vis, look development, on-set supervision, 3D animation/CGI, motion graphics, matte painting, compositing, and finishing. Recent features include Ant-Man and The Wasp, Skyscraper, Deadpool 2, The Avengers: Infinity War and the upcoming Christopher Robin. methodstudios.com

About Deluxe Entertainment Services Group
Deluxe Entertainment Services Group (Deluxe) is a leading video creation to distribution company offering global, end-to-end services and technology. Through market-leading scale, technology and capabilities, Deluxe enables the worldwide market for premium content. The world’s leading content creators, broadcasters, OTTs and distributors rely on Deluxe’s experience and expertise. With headquarters in Los Angeles and New York and operations in 38 key media markets worldwide, the company relies on the talents of more than 7,500 of the industry’s premier artists, experts, engineers and innovators. bydeluxe.com

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Last year, Andrew Hellen explained to us the work of Method Studios on THOR: RAGNAROK. He talks to us today about his work on ANT-MAN AND THE WASP.

How did you get involved on this show?
I came on board after Method was already involved. The show commenced with Hamish Schumacher at the helm, but he ended up moving to another project.

How was the collaboration with director Peyton Reed and VFX Supervisor Stephane Ceretti?
Stef was great at guiding us through the creative challenges; he has a lot of experience creating unique surreal environments, when you think of other films he has supervised like DOCTOR STRANGE and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2. We had to come up with something unique and Stef had great insights to help us achieve that. I didn’t have any communications with Peyton directly.

What was his expectations and approaches about the visual effects?
In general terms, Marvel likes to try and keep FX work grounded in reality: obviously there is some creative freedom in certain areas like the Quantum Realm given there is no real world reference.

How did you split the work amongst the Method Studios offices?
The work was done in Vancouver.

What are the sequences made by Method Studios?
We had three key scenes: Ant-Man’s suit malfunction at Cas’ school, Scott’s dream sequence in the Quantum Void and we created the Quantum Realm.

Can you explain in detail about the design of the Quantum Realm?
The challenge was to come up with something we haven’t seen before. We had to invent the Quantum Realm based off some fairly loose concepts provided by production, then take a crash course in Quantum physics for some inspiration. The concept provided was very loose and heavily treated in 2D with heavy film grain lens breathing, very short depth of field and lots of lens flares. The idea behind it was that shooting with a camera in the Quantum realm is difficult to capture and the image gets heavily distorted.

One of the ideas in the Quantum Realm was that the environment reacted to what was happening not only from a physical sense but also from an emotional POV. When the pod crashes, the environment reacts. When Janet finds Hank, the tone shifts and the environment reacts. Some of the reactions were covered by the geometry reacting, some was just the colour of the environment shifting.

Everything is moving constantly in this environment. Did you use procedural tool for that?
The geometry was all simulated in Houdini and rendered in Mantra. We used animated textures also created in Houdini to drive colour and displacement, generating around 30 render passes and mattes to give comp control. We worked this way knowing that we’d do multiple versions of the colour and performance of the environment in finding the right tone. We set up a workflow and worked with production to approve simulations before they were coloured and comped, which meant we could try lots of different looks in comp without having to go back to 3D.

How long have you worked on this show?
Six months.

What’s the VFX shots count?
Around 130 shots in the final cut.

What was the size of your on-set team?
Our team size varied based on where we were In production, but we had about 100 artists at our peak.

What is your next project?
Nothing I’m able to share publicly yet.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Method Studios: Dedicated page about ANT-MAN AND THE WASP on Method Studios.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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At the beginning of this year, Jason Billington had explained to us the work of Method Studios on BRIGHT. He talks to us today about his work on SKYSCRAPER.

How did Method get involved on this show?
We had previously worked with Craig Hammack, Petra Holtorf-Stratton and ILM on DEEPWATER HORIZON. Due to the similarities between the two films and the visual effects work required, it was a natural fit to do this project together.

How was the collaboration with director Rawson Marshall Thurber?
We had the opportunity to work directly with Rawson on the very first shot of the movie where the Legendary logo turns into snow, and the camera pans down over the cabin in the woods. As it was the very first shot of the movie, Rawson had an attachment to it and wanted to work closely with us on it. While he knew what he wanted, he left it to us to realise his vision. We added CG falling snow to the entire length of the shot, shattered glass and bullet hits to the cop cars, and an entirely CG landscape for the background set extension.

How was the collaboration with VFX Supervisor Craig Hammack?
We previously worked with Craig Hammack on DEEPWATER HORIZON, so we knew each other quite well from that project. We have a great relationship and both know how and what we are after for the final product. We always seemed to be on the same page which made for an effective and enjoyable collaboration.

Can you explain in detail about the creation of the crane and Hong Kong?
The production designer had a design in mind for what the crane should look like, and this is what the principal photography was based on. The on-set production crew created small sections of the crane for Dwayne Johnson to interact with on a green screen. We then extended the plate photography of the crane in every shot to show the full crane. In most of the shots, the crane was entirely CG.

Our model supervisor visited a local crane supplier and took photos of the various parts for textures and reference. He also spoke with crane operators to find out exactly how a crane operates and moves, specifically when on top of a building. This translated really well into the final crane asset, which was shared throughout the various vendors. Everything about the crane was built as fully functional – all the cables, pulleys and wheels were rigged for animation and moved correctly based on the wind and real-world physics that you would expect at a turbulent height.

A team was sent to Hong Kong to get photography for the creation of cyc’s and background imagery. We created 2 cyc’s for the two different heights of the building – one for the height of the crane sequence, and the other for the top of The Pearl. Approximately 500m and 1000m respectively. Due to the film being set at night time, we found that a lot of the shots had a dark sky background. This wasn’t conducive to representing the height and vertigo of the situation. The audience needed some sort of reference point and variation in the skyline, so we added the Hong Kong skyline into many of the shots. We also added light pollution and gradient into the dark night sky. The horizon line, and especially other building reference points around Hong Kong really help in giving size, scale and location to the audience.

Can you tell us more about the digi-double creation of Dwayne Johnson?
The digi-double of Dwayne was a shared asset between Method and ILM. We needed to develop it further for a few close-ups of Will Sawyer’s leg, as seen in the bathroom scene towards the start of the film. Dwayne was shot wearing a green sock on his real leg, he would tuck that leg out of the way and a prosthetic residual limb was attached to his knee area so Dwayne had something to interact with. We later replaced this practical residual limb with CG renders that we sculpted and textured from real amputee references.

How did you handle the reflective aspect of The Pearl?
Reflecting dark night sky can be quite boring and plain – there is no complexity to it. We needed to force some sort of the street and surrounding reflections of buildings into the windows. Once the audience sees something recognisable in the reflection, it immediately reads as glass. It also helped to have some furniture in the rooms. For the storyline, the rooms about half way up and higher were all supposed to be empty. Adding furniture to the interior of the rooms gave a real sense of scale and texture to the building and the glass exterior.

For consistency across the sequences, we built several 360° and partial cyc’s for lighting and comp, including the massive undertaking of a patchwork stitch background done by our comp and digital matte painting teams. They put together moving helicopter footage that covered all the angles of the city from where The Pearl was supposed to be, then we projected it onto proxy geometry of Hong Kong, which would give us the correct reflections of traffic, buildings and signs, animated lights and the city’s flickering lights.

Can you explain in detail about the FX work and especially the fire?
We created a wide range of effects elements mainly involving explosions, fire, smoke, destruction, sparks and embers… always embers. By shot count, most of the FX work we had on SKYSCRAPER consisted of adding smoke simulations and burning embers to exterior shots around the crane and The Pearl. Because of the quantity of shots, it was very important to create elements that could easily be populated, or setups that were procedural enough, so we could quickly render out passes as soon as we received input from the client. For the shots that involved fire, we started with a base setup that has been developed across a number of shows now which gave us a solid foundation. Creating variation in detail size, speed and scale was the next step to add visual complexity. Crafting the helicopter destruction sequence was a challenging task in FX, there were many elements ensuring that the intensity of the shot builds throughout the scene. For the explosions following the helicopter crash, custom Houdini tools were used to create enough detail in the leading edge of the explosion, and an altered blackbody model for shading really pushed the look for us.

Your sequences have a strong feeling of vertigo. How did you enhance this feeling?
Having recognisable features, however small they might be, really helps with the depth and perspective. Things like cars, trees and roads, objects the audience is familiar with aid in this. When the viewer sees these in relation to everything else, it really conveys that vertigo feeling. Adding in some atmosphere helps too, and sound (or lack of sound) solidifies that eerie isolated feeling that can happen at the top of a building like this.

Parallax helps sell the height and depth of the scene, and when the camera was looking down we made the roof top buildings move separately to the ground, really pushing that parallax. This really gave the viewer a sense of depth. We couldn’t just get away with a 2d cyc in most cases for those shots, we had to have a 3d build of multiple projections for the looking down angles.

Can you tell us more about the helicopter crash in the hangar?
This was one of the most challenging and complicated sequences that we completed for the film. During the initial blocking, we studied plenty of reference material and were surprised at how quickly things escalate in helicopter crashes. This research was vital in providing us with accurate references to use as we pushed and pulled the timing of the helicopter and framing of the camera. Animation and FX worked closely together on this sequence to deliver the scale and intensity of the impact. Once the animation team had completed their initial blocking and timing of the crash, the FX team were tasked with creating the destruction of the helicopter and environment with all the secondary elements that you would expect to see. When the helicopter crashes into the back railing, the explosion and fiery aftermath of that event were also heavily reliant on the FX. A complex rigid body and constraint setup was made which allowed bending and detachment of panels and most importantly the ability to art direct it. Once that was working it then fed into secondary simulations of crumpling metal, debris, dust and sparks all created within Houdini. To make sure it all lived in the same world, the FX team passed all of their elements to lighting, which at times can be a technical challenge of its own, but really paid off in the final renders.

Which sequence or shot was the most complicated to create and why?
Definitely the helicopter crash sequence. It was a group of shots requiring every team in our studio to collaborate closely to ensure it was perfect. The camera angles did not allow for any ‘cheating’ in the VFX work. It’s a violent crash in which the helicopter rolls into the building, collides with a wall and then blows up. The roll was an unnatural behaviour that we had to give momentum to while still making it look real, and the final product is something that we are all proud of.

What is your favorite shot or sequence?
I love the crane climb/jump sequence. It was our biggest sequence to manage, and for me, it really sums up the movie in just that short section. Will Sawyer rescuing his family at all costs, all safe exits are blocked, so the only thing left is to attempt the iconic jump. Part of our initial brief for SKYSCRAPER from Rawson, was that he really wanted to sell the sense of vertigo and height to the audience. This sequence really delivers on that and combined with sound we all get a good sense of what it is like to be approximately 120 stories above the ground in a high intensity moment.

How long did you work on this show?
It was about 7 months.

What is Method’s VFX shot count?
Approximately 500 shots.

What was the size of the Method team?
We had 170 talented artists and production crew that worked on SKYSCRAPER over the course of the production.

A big thanks for your time.

// WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Method Studios: Official website of Method Studios.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Excellent first trailer for OUTLAW KING directed by David Mackenzie (HELL OR HIGH WATER):

The VFX are made by:
Method Studios (VFX Supervisor: Dan Bethell)
Nvizible

The Production VFX Supervisor is Alex Bicknell.

Director: David Mackenzie
Release Date: 9 November 2018 (Netflix)

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

The post OUTLAW KING appeared first on The Art of VFX.

Excellent casting and trailer for the new movie by Joel & Ethan Coen, THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS!

The VFX are made by:
East Side Effects
The Artery VFX
BigHugFX
Crafty Apes
Method Studios (VFX Supervisor: Josh Simmonds)
The Mill
Phosphene
Zoic Studios

The Production VFX Supervisors are VFX Supervisors: Alex Lemke and Michael Huber.

Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Release Date: 16 November 2018 (Netflix)

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Be sure to look at the before & after pictures by Method Studios (formerly Atomic Fiction) about their work on THE PREDATOR:

Here is the press release:

Director Shane Black’s sci-fi action feature “The Predator” may feature a familiar antagonist, but the reboot’s murderous extraterrestrial is packing seriously advanced technology. Production turned to artists at Method Studios, formerly Atomic Fiction, to help realize key moments featuring the alien technology, including an epic crash landing and high-stakes mid-air battle as well as sophisticated hologram and UI graphics.

Expanding on provided concept art, Method artists designed, modeled and animated the feature’s two main alien aircraft: the Arc ship cargo vessel and the Pursuit ship, built for speed and agility. Artists drew from designs and iconography from the original “Predator” movie, adding a modern look, and also referenced high performance sports cars and military vehicles. The ships’ movements were grounded in physics, with creative variations to support the director’s vision. Design elements from the original feature also informed “The Predator” holograms and UIs. Artists began with a point cloud aesthetic then pulled in significant text, fonts and features from “Predator,” creating militaristic yet ergonomic designs that would appear too complex for human understanding.

While the Predator character was shot practically, its superhuman and invisible-camouflaging abilities were achieved digitally. Method artists augmented the Predator performance, at times inserting a digital double for complex movements that were keyframe animated. VFX Supervisor Ruslan Borysov led the project for Method along with Creative Director (and Atomic Fiction co-founder) Ryan Tudhope. Borysov said, “There was much discussion about how to convey the Predator’s invisibility and how visible he should be at certain moments. After extensive creative research and collaboration, we came up with a sleek design that was dependent on his velocity; he becomes more visible the faster he accelerates, then is invisible when still. The look of the Predator’s invisibility is iconic so we aimed to add contemporary features but maintain the refraction of the original.”

The Predator’s invisibility look is echoed in the Pursuit ship’s force field effect, which Method developed after comprehensive design R&D. Using a hexagonal pattern as the base, artists then applied precise shading based on the look of bismuth crystals. The concept artist team worked closely with FX and Lighting Leads to fine tune the look. Borysov explained, “The crystals served as one of our main references in designing the force field effect. The sharp lines help indicate advanced technology but at the same time the substance is still organic with imperfections and rich iridescent refraction.”

To help streamline the creation of the Arc ship’s crash landing, the team first animated the ship’s movement throughout the full sequence, instead of following a traditional shot-by-shot approach. Establishing this baseline gave artists helpful reference for maintaining a consistent animation trajectory. Method also built an expansive 50 square-kilometer full CG environment populated with rivers, mountains and forests to provide the filmmakers with extensive creative freedom in determining and changing camera movement, location and framing. With most of the shots computer generated except for a handful of plates, artists were careful to match practical photography. Employing randomized and procedural tactics, artists populated the sequence with photoreal foliage and developed a pipeline for those assets to interact with the ship as it plows into the ground, seamlessly blending with in-camera footage.

“Ultimately VFX is a storytelling tool and our aim for ‘The Predator’ was to make the practical and rendered environments and elements match perfectly so that viewers are immersed in the story, regardless of how the action escalates,” Borysov noted. “We have a lot of Predator fans on our team so working on this project was quite special and great fun.”

Method also created the action-packed and FX-heavy dogfight sequence featuring two F-22 stealth fighters battling the Predator Arc ship, as well as a CG Hubble Space Telescope and the opening sequence’s dark matter portal, which was designed by Method concept artists.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Method Studios: Dedicated page about THE PREDATOR on Method Studios website.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Kurt Russell as Santa Claus? Have a look at this teaser of THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES:

The VFX are made by:
Method Studios

Director: Clay Kaytis
Release Date: 22 November 2018 (Netflix)

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Matt Sloan began his career in visual effects in the early 2000s. He has worked on many projects such as DISTRICT 9, AVATAR, THE MARTIAN and MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE.

What is your background?
I entered the film industry in 1991 as an FX assistant on the movie FORTRESS. I progressed in special effects and animatronics, then moved into VFX in about 2000.

How did you get involved on this show?
Because of delays with the release, the current supervisor had to leave for family commitments. I was originally bought on to look after 2nd unit on the re-shoots. Shane and Blondel asked me if I’d like to take over. It was daunting, but hey, its a Shane Black movie!

What was your feeling to work on such an iconic character?
It was a little daunting. We had to take a known and loved creature and then create a suitable nemesis for it in the form of the “Upgrade” Predator. Trying to make something like that fresh after numerous sequels and spin offs is always a challenge. But we loved it every step of the way.

How was the collaboration with director Shane Black?
Shane was great. He is super enthusiastic. Because of the tight post schedule (16 weeks) We would meet with him every other day for reviews, then every day as we went into the delivery stretch. He even travelled to Montreal to meet the crews at MPC and Atomic Fiction (now Method Studios). It was a great thing for him to do. He’s got a good eye and amazing comic timing. It really was a pleasure to work with him.

What was his expectations and approaches about the visual effects?
The great thing with Shane is that he has a lot of trust. As far as shooting went, I could let him know the methodology for a shot with the passes needed etc. and he would say “Sure! If you need it, we’ll get it”. He trusted us that we knew what we were doing and he’d let us go weapons free. It helped speed up the post precess a lot.

How did you organize the work with your VFX Producer?
Blondel (Aidoo) is also great. As a co-producer on the movie it meant that I could come to him with all sorts of requests. He would go and shuffle the spreadsheet and find a way to make it work. He has a very deep knowledge of VFX, so there was never any having to go over the top trying to explain why something needed to be done a certain way. He just made it happen.

Can you tell us more about the previz and postviz work?
The previous and postviz was done by Proof. A lot of it was done before my time there. As we went into the re-shoots, there was not enough time to prefix the hunt, so we just went with storyboards. Post-viz wise, we did some incredibly rough slaps to temp before we started getting blocking from the vendors. We had so little time to get the shots turned around we just went for it. We could not afford the time to post-via properly, so we just jumped right in with the shots. We knew we would lose or have to change some of them, but it was a calculated risk/reward situation.

The movie opens with a space battle. How did you design the ships?
The Predator 1 ship was a design from the Art Dept. that was fairly easy as it had been around since the beginning. The bigger problem was the Upgrade ship. It too, had been designed by the Art dept, but as we started slotting it into shots, we found that from a lot of angles it looked identical to the Pred 1 ship. We 911’d Myriam Catrin, a concept artist from New Zealand to re-imagine the Upgrade ship. Making sure it it was from the same world of design, but distinguishable from the Red 1 ship. Giving it it’s own war paint etc helped a lot.

Can you explain in detail about the creation of the main ship?
Atomic Fiction looked after both of the Ships in the movie. They have a really talented Modelling team and again, because of the time constraints, it was one of those situations where I handed a lot of freedom off to the VFX supervisor there, Ruslan Borysov. Their teams worked hell for leather to get those models made in a timely manner.

Later there is a dogfight between the Predator ship and the US Army. How did you approach this fight?
This sequence had been pre-vized and had been approved, so it was a great case of “Make it look real!”, with very little tweaking. We also had the advantage of the fact that Atomic Fiction were the ones who did the previz, so they were ahead of the game. There was a lot of back and forth about missile hits, brightness, backgrounds and all the FX work, but we were all pretty much on the same page from the get-go. Ruslan is great as you never have to explain something twice. The iterations on those shots were kept fairly low, which was good, because there was a hell of a lot of work to get done there.

There are many graphics on the Predator ship and with his tools. How did you design these elements?
Again, for time reasons, we let the vendors do the development for the holograms. It’s bit of a cheat knowing you will be designing stuff to suit what was shot instead of the other way around. We could tailor the holograms to interact at certain times and use any reactive light in the plate to help bed them in. Again, Atomic did the heavy lifting with the holograms in the ships and in Rory’s basement.

Can you explain in detail about their creation and animation?
Sadly, from a technical standpoint, not really. Animation wise, I’d adjust the base animation to hit certain beats usually via cineSync with Atomic. The animations would be adjusted, then once approved, we’d start bedding them in in comp.

How did you handle the lighting challenge?
Larry Fong was very supportive on set. as long as you make it clear that its helping them and the look of their film, most DP’s get on board… most of the time. For instance, he had his boys create an LED light suit for the stunt actor playing the upgrade while he’s on fire in the woods. Without that suit we would have been in a heat of trouble. Fire really throws a lot of light around and Larry completely got this. They made a great LED flickering fire suit for the Stuntman to wear. It worked a treat.

The iconic invisibility effect is back. Can you explain in detail about it?
We actually kept this pretty simple. For Pred 1 and McKenna’s invisibility, we more or less just updated the original effect. We just made it a little sexier. Like in the last 30 yours their tech has got better. From Motorola flip phone to iPhone sort of feel. The Upgrade has a more intimate effect, with some very designed geometric shapes that spread over his body. MPC and supervisor Richard Little were responsible for all things involving the Upgrade, so they took point on the design and implementation of the cloaking effect.

How did you create the various POV of the Predator?
We cheated! We were going to get a Flir Camera, but it needed too much support. In the end we roto’d and color treated the plates to create the iconic “Heat Vision” look. If you look at them strictly from a heat point of view you’ll see they are not consistent. But they look good! Also, at one point the Upgrade uses echo location to pin-point someone behind a tree. This was an entire CG shot where we see what looks like a combination of heat vision and lidar, basically. There were another couple of these shots in the film, but they got cut for pacing reasons. But we kept one!

A new Predator comes in the game, the Upgrade Predator. How did you work with Tom Woodruff Jr. and his team?
When I join the team we had some concept art of the Upgrade from the Art dept and MPC were already working on the Model. As The Upgrade is entirely CG, Amalgamated Dynamics worked primarily with the Pred 1 and the Emissary’s (Later cut from the film), who were played by the traditional “Men in a Suit”. Although we did add the Red one and replace him in a few shots as we tidied up after the re-shoots.

Can you explain in detail about the CG enhancements for the Upgrade Predator?
The Upgrade was a heap of little challenges. It seemed everybody had ideas about his abilities and “Upgrades”. it was a lot to squish into what is, in the end, not a great deal of screen time. He had the ability to go armoured, echolocation, different styles of vision, backwards dog leg, distendable jaws and needed a “Ton of attitude”. Giving him character was first and foremost for Shane. We kept having MPC add these tics and beats to the animation, just to bed him in an give the impression of his character. From spitting as he’s leaving the school to small shoulder rolls and angry glances. We wanted him to feel more like an actor. At one point he actually looks at the camera accidentally before glancing away. Just a ton of small things that stack up subconsciously.

How did you design and create the Predator hounds?
The hounds were also designed by the Art Dept and we had MPC under way with them as soon as I came on board. The biggest problem we had with them was the dreadlocks. So many Tech animation tests to get them feeling natural. We had to constantly adjust the amount of flex and compression, almost on a shot by shot basis. We decided early on to make the dogs armoured from the get go. They were originally able to armour up and down at will, but decided to leave that ability to the Upgrade. also adjusting the lighting and the amount of dirt to allow us to integrate with whatever location/set we were in.

How did you work with the SFX and stunt teams?
Both SFX and Stunt teams were great. We would have dozens of side meetings and tests so we could figure out where the optimal point for us to take over or enhance what is happening in the frame. My background is practical effects, so its something i’m super comfortable. Even if we are replacing the subject, its always good to have something practical in the frame as a reference. When Baxley jumps on the burning Predator, Marnie Eng, the stunt co-ordinator made sure we had some practical fire either in the frame or on the actor grappling with the Predator actor.

At the end of the movie we discover a new Predator suit. How did you design this new armor?
The final scene was another reshoot, very, very late in the schedule. We had two weeks to get the suit designed. We enlisted the Aaron Sims company and also the Hydraulx Art Dept. The final design was elements from both companies approved by Shane and the studio, then Hydraulx took over the design and began the build. By the time we had the re-shoots, we were less than two weeks out from delivery, so getting the design finale and the build underway was critical.

Can you explain in detail about its creation and its development around the guy?
As the other vendors were going so hard on the other sequences we approached Hydraulx to complete the final sequence. Under the supervision of Colin Strause they managed to pull out the 17 shots needed for that sequence in under 2 weeks. I think it was 9 days from plate turnover to final delivery. It was pretty amazing work. We knew we would have 1 if any, iterations, so it was bit of a hail mary. But Hydraulx managed to pull it off and both the director and studio were very happy with the work.

Can you tell us how you choose the various VFX vendors?
MPC and Atomic fiction were in place when I joined the show. When it was clear the workload was going to increase and with the severely truncated post schedule we also bought on Rising Sun Pictures in Australia (supervised by Tom Wood) and Hydraulx (supervised by Colin Strause). Richard Little and Arundi Asregadoo supervised for MPC and Ruslan Borysov for Atomic fiction.
We also had an in-house team of 6 dealing with over 350 shots. They looked after a heap of muzzle flashes, clean up, window comps and blood. So much blood.

How did you split the work amongst these vendors?
Rising Sun looked after the opening space battle, shots inside the crashed ship, McKennas cloaking and enhancing the woods hunt scene.

Atomic Fiction looked after the ship crash in the opening and Pred 1 capture and escape. They also looked after the “Ark Ride” sequence at the end of the movie as the soldiers are riding the Upgrade ship that eventually crashes.

MPC Looked after the upgrade Predator and the Predator dogs.

Hydraulx looked after the super suit scene at the end of the movie.

Raynault completed about a dozen matte paintings and establishing shots.

The inhouse team looked after cleaning up the multitude of sins of boom mics, camera gear and random crew members as well as the hundreds of enhancement shots.

Can you tell us more about your collaboration with their VFX supervisors?
The vendor supervisors were great. It was clear from turnover that speed was of the essence. Each of the Supervisors took this film on knowing that the heavy lifting would be on them. They all stepped up and ran their teams really well. We got there in the end, but it was a hard road.

The vendors are all around the world. How did you proceed to follow their work?
Endless cineSync sessions and reviews. In the last week we went even into rolling reviews because of the size of the comp teams. Notes we had given at the beginning of the session had been addressed before we managed to finish the hours long review, so they were loaded up and we reviewed them again. It was crazy.

Which sequence or shot was the most complicated to create and why?
Think its a tie between “Upgrade on fire while being stabbed in the face by a guy riding on him” and “Bunch of soldiers surfing a crashing spaceship over Georgia”. Both sequences were very complicated and had a heap of shots. The quantity and quality of the work produced in sixteen weeks was nothing short of amazing.

Is there something specific that gives you some really short nights?
The whole thing! In case I was not clear before hand, we only had sixteen weeks between turnover and delivery. VFX did not even have the LUT’s in place when I came on board. It was a mad scramble to produce anything. I’m amazed we managed to achieve what we did.

What is your favorite shot or sequence?
I have to say that the hunt in the woods is my favourite part. The shot of the Predator biting the guys head off in the trees is probably my favourite. That and the space battle and portal. Pretty cool.

What is your best memory on this show?
Reviews with Shane. He cares so much and has an amazing sense of humour about everything. Plus the blood. When you throw reality out the window and just go for it. The vendors were being reserved, and we were always crying “More blood!”. I ended up using the term “Just take it to 11” a LOT. The over the top gore was something Shane loved. Eventually MPC submitted a shot with an unstoppable geyser of blood pouring from a victim, and Shane said “OK… maybe that’s too much….”. I actually sent an email to all vendors saying that we have finally figured out how much is too much (It was a lot).

How long have you worked on this show?
I was on the show for a grand total of 18 weeks! I had been working with Blondel (VFX Producer) on X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. At the end of that, Blondel moved onto THE PREDATOR. I took three months off, then jumped onto MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE. I finished that movie and a month after that, I was called in to complete THE PREDATOR. It was a crazy short amount of time for me.

What’s the VFX shots count?
I know we finale over 1600 shots. I think about 1370 was the final “In-Cut” count by delivery

What was the size of your on-set team?
For the re-shoots I had Felix Pomeranz to look after 2nd unit as Set Supe. I was on main unit and both units had a Supervisor, coord, data wrangler and PA. So a team of four on each unit, plus lidar/scanning and photography units that we would bring in when needed.

What is your next project?
No idea. I’m in talks on a few things, but of course, can’t discuss those.. yet.

What are the four movies that gave your the passion for cinema?
I like this question! I have to say, when it comes down to it, I’m a pretty simple human. I like big and spectacular. So, if you twisted my arm, I’d have to say… ARMAGEDDON is a favourite. ALIENS. THE ABYSS… and then? Hell, lets go with BLAZING SADDLES. You need the spectacle, but the humour is what makes it human. Also, if you can’t laugh about it, whats the point?

A big thanks for your time.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Method Studios: Dedicated page about THE PREDATOR on Method Studios website.
MPC: Dedicated page about THE PREDATOR on MPC website.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Interesting video by WIRED featuring Danielle Costa, vice president of visual effects for Marvel Studios, talking about the VFX work (by Scanline VFX, DNEG, Cinesite, Digital Domain, Method Studios, Luma Pictures and more) on ANT-MAN AND THE WASP:

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Scanline VFX: My interview of Jelmer Boskma, VFX Supervisor at Scanline VFX.
DNEG: My interview of Alessandro Ongaro, VFX Supervisor at DNEG.
Cinesite: My interview of Stephane Paris, VFX Supervisor at Cinesite.
Digital Domain: My interview of Joel Behrens, DFX Supervisor at Digital Domain.
Method Studios: My interview of Andrew Hellen, VFX Supervisor at Method Studios.
Luma Pictures: My interview of Brendan Seals, VFX Supervisor, and Raphael A. Pimentel, Animation Supervisor, at Luma Pictures.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Be sure to watch those excellent titles sequences for DEADPOOL 2 made by Method Studios:

CREDITS

Client: Marvel

Production: Method Studios
Director/designer: John Likens
Executive Creative Director: Jon Noorlander
Executive Producers: Angela Lupo, Adrienne Mitchell
Producer: Emily Schaeberle
VFX Supervisor: Gong Myung Lee
CG Supervisor: Ivan Guerrero
Compositing Supervisor: Ryan Leonard
VFX Coordinator: Kristin Engdahl
VFX Artists: Ehsan Parizi, Ryan Hussain, Shawn Lipowski, Vraja Parra, Matthew Hackett, Goran Ognjanovic, Christoper DeVito, Frank Grecco III, Brian Dinoto, Sari Rodrig, Daniel Raschko, Irene Kim, Zachery Lewis, Urosh Otashevich
Pipeline Technical Director: Scott Aufderheide

Grade: Company 3
Colorist: Stefan Sonnenfeld

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Method Studios: Dedicated page about DEADPOOL 2 on Method Studios website.
Sean Konrad & John Likens: My interview of Sean Konrad (VFX Supervisor) and John Likens (Creative Director) at Method Studios.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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Bethesda Softworks have released this excellent live action trailer for FALLOUT 76 with the VFX made by Method Studios:

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

The post FALLOUT 76 – Live Action Trailer appeared first on The Art of VFX.

Ready for a PG-13 version of DEADPOOL? Here is the trailer for ONCE UPON A DEADPOOL:

The VFX are made by:
DNEG (VFX Supervisor: Mike Brazelton)
Framestore (VFX Supervisor: Stephane Naze)
Method Studios (VFX Supervisor: Sean Konrad)
Weta Digital (VFX Supervisor: Dan Macarin)

The Production VFX Supervisor is Dan Glass.

Director: David Leitch
Release Date: 12 December 2018 (USA)

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

The post DEADPOOL 2 appeared first on The Art of VFX.

Dan Bethell began his career in 2001 at MPC. He works in many studios such as Rising Sun Pictures, Iloura and Method Studios. He worked on films like BATMAN BEGINS, TERMINATOR SALVATION, SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING and THOR: RAGNAROK.

What is your background?
A bit arty and a bit techy. I loved graphic design growing up and wanted to pursue illustration after school, but had also been programming from an early age, so when I found out I could combine the two I was sold!

I was lucky enough to study Computer Animation and Visualization at Bournemouth University before starting in the industry as a pipeline developer. I was able to apply my software skills whilst learning everything I could about the entire VFX process. From there I moved into more 3D-centric departments like R&D and FX, before some time as a CG Supervisor. Then, a couple of years ago, I made the step to VFX Supervisor.

How did you get involved on this show?
The work came into Method for bidding, and given I knew Alex (we worked together on MAD MAX: FURY ROAD) and we had previously delivered VFX on a couple of Netflix features (BRIGHT, FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER), I think we felt like natural fit for the work.

How was the collaboration with director David Mackenzie and VFX Supervisor Alex Bicknell?
The vast majority of our dealings were directly with Alex, although I did get to spend time with David during the shoot, so I already had an insight into his process heading into post.

The collaboration with Alex was fantastic. It’s always a tricky balance of being given enough clear direction, but not at the expense of creative freedom, so everyone can work together to bring shots to life. I felt like on this show we really found that happy place!

What was their approaches and expectations about the visual effects?
The expectations for VFX were established early on; they had to look realistic and photographic, and authentic and accurate. Basically, the VFX should be as ‘invisible’ as possible to the audience.

Given the work was so varied the approach changed depending on the context, but the general philosophy was to capture as much in camera and then augment and compliment the photography with VFX. This extended through to full CG shots; we always tried to capture something in camera, whether it was a camera move or some scale and lighting reference. This ensured we always have a ground-truth to refer back to, and something for David and Alex to compare with.

How did you organize the work with your VFX Producer?
For the most part shot-work was split along sequence lines and divvied up between our three compositing leads: Louis Laflamme-Fillion, Alex Coble, and Ben Wilson. For the other departments the work was basically split between assets and environment work (Stirling, Berwick, London) and the extensive crowd work for Loudoun Hill.

What are the sequences made by Method Studios?
We were involved in every sequence in the movie that required VFX, but the ones that were most involved were the closing battle at Loudoun Hill and the opening Stirling Siege sequence.

The movie opens with a beautiful long continuous shot. How did you approach it?
This shot was huge! Not only was it a logistical challenge (8-9 minutes of continuous footage, shot at 8K on the Panavision DXL camera) but creatively it had a bit of everything! We added set extensions, environment work, crowds, destruction, all the way through to subtle comp fixes.

My usual approach to anything overwhelming like this is to start by breaking the shot down into sub-components. We ended up with 12 sub-shots of varying complexity and worked on just a couple of those to establish the creative foundations, before rolling that work into the rest of the shots, and finally compiling everything into the mega-shot you see in the film.

Can you explain in detail about the creation of this shot?
The first quarter of the shot is Edward’s dialog in the King’s tent and this was basically non-VFX.

After that the Prince of Wales and Robert emerge and have a sword fight. This section involved various set clean-ups, extending the palisade walls around the camp, extending the camp itself, adding tents, flags, crowd, horses and then a couple of moments when the swords (which were a bit bendy for safety reasons) needed straightening up. 

From there we head back into the King’s tent to meet James Douglas, again mostly non-VFX although we did remove some camera shadow/reflection, lights and a person who shouldn’t have been in shot. 

Finally, we emerge from the King’s tent through to see Stirling Castle and the War Wolf. This was the most involved section with the entire environment beyond the War Wolf being replaced with a muddy field and Stirling Castle and Castle Hill which it sits upon. The environment is populated with tents, flags, trebuchets and crowds of soldiers and horses.

The War Wolf started out as a partial-practical (the lower-third of the machine) built on set but was replaced by a full-CG War Wolf as it ended being slightly larger than originally planned to work in the shot. The firing action was animated before FX took over and added the dynamic sling, ropes, fire and smoke. The castle destruction, whilst small in frame, was fully simulated to get the most realistic sense of scale and detail. 

Once all the elements were created our Compositing Supervisor Gabriel Reichle did an amazing job of bring the hundreds of layers back together into the seamless final shot.

We discover many castles during the movie. How did you recreate them?
Fortunately, the production team found some fantastic castles in locations all over Scotland. Most of these were in a ruined (or semi-ruined) state, but it meant that our VFX work had a solid foundation in reality. For the most part, our work was to extend and top-up an existing location rather than creating something from scratch.

When it came to creating the castles, our DMP and Environments team led by Thorsten Rolle, made heavy use of Clarisse iFX to render the imagery. This meant for distant scenes, that may have been traditionally painted in Photoshop, we had a fully rendered CG asset with all the flexibility and detail it brought with it. Even castles on the horizon far away benefitted from being physically-correctly lit and integrated with the plate photography.

And of course you have to destroy most of them. Can you tell us more about that and the FX work?
The FX team, led by Sam Loxton, had a lot of tasks on this movie but fortunately they had delivered some great FX for movies like DEEPWATER HORIZON, BRIGHT and SKYSCRAPER so I was confident they could handle to complexity and deliver to the high quality required – they didn’t disappoint!

The FX work broke down into a couple of areas – we had standalone FX like smoke, fire, and atmosphere, and then aspects like cloth, hair dynamics, blood hits, and (of course) mud interaction. Houdini was instrumental in completing the FX for this show. Not only did it provide the complex simulation tools to create amazing FX, but it allowed us to procedurally and automate large parts of the process. For example, once we found a great setup for the Knight’s cloth simulation or the mud simulation for horses hooves it was easy to roll it out into other shots.

We also discover London in few shots. Can you explain in detail about the creation of the city?
Our assets team had the massive job of building all the period accurate buildings for the London environment. Not only did they have to model them but also surface them all with a variety of period-accurate materials. Fortunately, we had developed a great procedural texturing pipeline using Substance which made this process much easier than it would have been otherwise. Once we had our library of buildings, they were laid out by the Layout department and, like the castles, lit and rendered in Clarisse.

The final battle is really intense. How did you enhance the crowd and the stunts?
Nearly every shot in the final battle involved VFX to some degree. The majority of shots involved adding CG soldiers and horses to the plate photography to increase the numbers to the 6000 that fought in the real battle. Other work included creating fully-CG wide shots to establish the geography of the battle field, takeovers from stunt work to CG deaths, and filling the ground with dead bodies as the battle progressed. Of course, there was a substantial amount of blood and mud to add too! 

How did you work with the SFX and stunts team?
The collaboration with other departments on-set is one of my favorite parts of the job, and OUTLAW KING did not disappoint! The SFX, stunts, and horse teams were fantastic.

Much like our general philosophy towards VFX on this show, our approach to the SFX and stunts was a supporting role; Stunts would lead the choreography of a sequence to see how much we thought we could get in camera. Then, depending on safety considerations and logistics (how many crew/horses were available) we would discuss how VFX could support the photography rather than drive it directly.

Can you tell us more about the animation challenge of the crowd?
The crowd performance was a challenge on a couple of levels. Our animation team provided some great animation cycles for key movements, backed up by a library of motion capture that we captured especially for OUTLAW KING. The next level of performance was the shot as a whole, and once you get that many soldiers and horses interacting the levels of complexity can go through the roof. Finally, we had to work closely with editorial, so the overall performance beats and story were clear to the audience; if one shot works but the sequence as a whole falls down because the VFX doesn’t help the story then we’ve failed in our role.

How did you create and animate the horses?
Horses are really complex creatures to create. The CG horses required for OUTLAW KING needed to be able to perform a variety of motions, from idle standing all the way through to a full gallop, as well as flipping and crashing and everything in between so we had a big challenge; the horses were far and away the biggest characters of the show.

Our rigging and animation team spent time at a local stable studying horse anatomy and physiology to get a really good handle on how the horses moved. From there we built a full horse rig from bones, all the way through to muscles and skin. 

Animation was blocked in before being refined and it wasn’t until the very subtle behavior of the horses was added – the ear flicks, the shuffling weight from one leg to another, the flaring of the nostrils – that the horses really came to life.

The movie is really gory. Can you tell us more about your work on this aspect?
Gore is a bit of a balancing act. Too much and it becomes comical and doesn’t respect the subject matter, not enough and the action often isn’t as effectual as it needs to be. Finding the ‘level’ of gore for this movie took many, many iterations and tweaks, and ended up utilizing a combination of hundreds of live action blood hits and splashes, and simulated CG elements. Some of the most complex work was the horse injuries. Wounds and gore had to be carefully tracked onto the live action horses and blended in a believable manner which is subtle and challenging work. Working on this kind of VFX can also be quite grueling on the artists so we tried to be sympathetic to that.

What was the main challenge on the show and how did you achieve it?
There were a couple! The team would probably say the complexity of the crowd work, both technically and creatively, was one of the more difficult aspects. Loudoun was a massive sequence and had lots of moving parts.

For me, the shear variety of work and ensuring it was all delivered to a high quality, whilst remaining authentic and accurate to the subject matter, was probably the biggest challenge.

Which sequence or shot was the most complicated to create and why?
That would have to be The Battle of Loudoun Hill, for all the reasons I mentioned.

Is there something specific that gives you some really short nights?
Nothing specific, although Loudoun came close. Credit for that really has to go to my fantastic crew who never failed to step up to the challenge.

What is your favorite shot or sequence?
There are a couple of shots in the Loudoun Hill sequence that I feel work really well. They don’t look like big VFX shots but are just a great balance of fantastic camera work, awesome stunts and some seamless VFX. I don’t think the audience will realize just how much VFX went into them, and for me that’s the best result I can hope for.

What is your best memory on this show?
I have two! The experience of shooting in Scotland, in November, with all the mud and rain that entails, was a once in a lifetime moment; I loved it. The second was my team at Method Sydney; they never ceased to surprise me with their creativity, amazing dedication, and team spirit. It was a dream crew to work with.

How long have you worked on this show?
A couple of weeks short of 1 year. I flew out to Scotland for the shoot in October last year, and we wrapped post mid-September.

What’s the VFX shots count?
We worked on over 700 shots but I think the final cut had around the 500 mark.

What was the size of your team?
It fluctuated (as most projects do) but it was around 100 for most of the project, peaking at about 160 including artists, tech, pipeline, production and all our fantastic support staff.

What is your next project?
I can’t tell you right now, but hopefully it’s as rewarding to work on as OUTLAW KING.

What are the four movies that gave you the passion for cinema?
Ha, there are so many but a couple that really inspired me are…
LABYRINTH – what’s not to love about this movie? This was the first movie that completely drew me into another world and opened my eyes to the power of cinema. Plus, it has David Bowie!
GHOSTBUSTERS – this was the movie that got me really interested in VFX. Proton beams, Slimer, Stay Puft!
DUNE – maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but this movie blew my mind. The sets, the costumes, the production design… in every scene I found myself asking “What am I looking at? How did they do that?” It was amazing.
BLADE RUNNER – this is probably on everyone’s list, but for me it really is a pinnacle of cinema. The scene where Deckard and Gaff take-off in the Spinner still gives me goose bumps.

A big thanks for your time.

© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2018

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