Festival of Visual Effects: Day 3

The last day of the festival! This was by far one of the more star studded days, if you consider VFX luminaries like Richard Edlund and Doug Trumbull and others, stars! But we'll get into that shortly. Our first panel is with a familiar ogre.

10:00-11:30 Shrek through the Ages

Ah, the green ogre is back! This panel showcased how Shrek and his cohorts have managed to become higher res and more complicated over the years. While not as dramatic a leap from Shrek 1 to Shrek 2, Shred the Third has some very subtle additions, that one wouldn't know unless you attended this panel! Most of the improvements were in the crowd duplications and setups for crowd characters. They had the ability to take several man and woman bodies, and adjust the proportions much easier than in the first two films. There was a huge improvement in environments from Shrek to Shrek 2, which is definitely apparent when you put the two films back to back! As well, Shrek the Third contained some great visuals of their cloth simulations. They were able to rig tight clothes with controls to allow the animators to keyframe them, as well allow for simulations of dresses and hair, to name a few. The panel consisted of Philippe Gluckman, VFX supervisor for the film, Guillaume Aretos, art director and designer, Tim Cheung, animation supervisor, and Lucia Modesto, character TD supervisor.

1:00-2:30 Pirates with John Knoll

John Knoll was the only one on this panel, which consisted of him describing some of the complex situations that have happened over the past three Pirates films. Originally, he was slated to just jump on this film between his bigger projects, but in ended up taking him all the way to the end of the trilogy! He described the various challenges the team had to meet, from ships and environments, to character animation and effects. In the first film it was mostly ships and environments, with the skeleton crew as well. There were numerous shots of miniature elements, most familiar the governors mansion (which only existed as miniature save for a very small facade) and the Black Pearl. One of the popular sequences was the skeleton fight near the end of the movie. All the skeleton sequences in this film required the actors to pantomime their performances. Once with their adversaries, and then again with nothing. The skeletons were added after in post, and surprisingly, it worked wonders. Unfortunately it made for a very tough time on set, since the actors had nothing to gauge their own actions against! This changed in the future films.

In Pirates 2, we see Davy Jones, as well as improved miniature sets and environments. And lots and lots of roto! The entire sequence on Cannibal island was an amazing feat of rotoscoping, and those guys don't get as much credit as they deserve. Kudos! Again, the Black Pearl and similar ships were miniatures, with several partial full size sets for on deck scenes. There is a lot of information about Davy Jones, so I won't get into him, but I will delve briefly into the Imocap system that they used, which you I posted about yesterday. This matchimation system involved getting trackable data from the main camera while shooting, and this allowed the actors to perform with Davy Jones' crew. This made it much easier for the actors. Knoll said that usually there are two witness cameras in addition to the main camera while shooting, in case they need to fill in pieces behind other actors. Overall a great technology, and I have a feeling this will become much more prevalent in the future for CG actor integration.

Pirates 3 boasts even more goodies. From even more ships and miniatures, to the maelstrom sequence, there was a plethora of goodness. Knoll showed footage from the sets in Palmdale for the sequences, and the lighting rig which was used, as well as the bluescreen setup. It was very elaborate! This panel only consisted of ILMs work on the three films, as there were several other houses that worked on it but have not discussed their work in the film. Knoll mentioned that previously on Pirates 2 they were able to achieve a high level of realism for Davy Jones, and as such, were able to hand off his character to some of the more junior lighters, while the seniors tackled a huge task, the Maelstrom. Because of the volume of data that had to be rendered, the team came up with an innovative way to get the detail in such a huge volume of space without killing the farm. Because you're only seeing a portion of the maelstrom, specifically the surface, they were able to do away with a huge volume to calculate, and instead, flatten the volume of the maelstrom and use adjustable gravitation forces. Once that was complete, they were able to stretch it back out to the correct size. Innovative and very cool.

3:30-5:30 VES 50 Most Influencial VFX Films
Moderated by John Knoll

This amazing panel was the reason to come to this years VES Festival. It was a roundtable discussion of the Top 50 Influencial visual effects films. While a few of the panelists did not know the final 50, each of them mentioned that the most influencial films are different from person to person. The panelists were John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, John Knoll, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston, and Doug Trumbull. In an interesting set of events, John Knoll had an issue of Cinefantastique from back in the day, of which several panel members had interviews in, which Knoll had signed, as it was his inspiration to get into this business. The panel started with the discussion of Star Wars, and why it was so influencial.. It eventually boiled down to the five of them (excluding Knoll for a little period) talking about the good old days of what it was like on set, and what they had to do to accomplish a certain effect. It was extremely eye opening, and definitely worth attending. After a brief period they began to discuss how they started in the industry, and talked about the past. It was so good that soon, John Knoll received a message from the crew that there were only 15 minutes left of the panel! He jokely mentioned that they needed to get through the other 46 films! A great two hours, and I could listen to these guys talk to each other for an entire day.

6:30-9:30 2001:A Space Odyssey Screening, with Doug Trumbull
Doug started off this panel by showing us some never been seen production photographs from the creation of 2001, from massive 65mm cameras to 35mm projection cameras for the color readouts in the space station, as well as the centrifuge, and the camera tricks they used to accomplish such monumental tasks. It was unfortunate that he was rushed for time, as they had to start 2001 on a 35mm print, or else we'd run out of time!

Overall this VES weekend was a blast, and I saw some familiar faces, and met new ones! If you get a chance, attend next years, as I'm sure it'll be just as good. The VES Festivals are getting bigger and better as time goes on.