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“A continual paradigm shift” is how Sam Nicholson, founder of Stargate Digital, Pasadena, Calif., describes the shift in the visual effects world. “[It] requires the engine to continually go faster, and those of us in this industry to continually reinvent our thinking about what is achievable, and how quickly.”

Nicholson points to the 5:30, live-action/CG short film, Digital Odyssey, Stargate Digital made earlier this year as a prototype example of this paradigm shift. Digital Odyssey was made in eight weeks at the invitation of Sony, in order to show it at NAB 2004 in April during Sony's CineAlta Night presentation of works shot in HD. While there were several clips shown that night, Digital Odyssey was the only one produced especially for CineAlta Night.

During production, Sony's digital 4:4:4 RGB HD camera system (the portable HDC-F950 camera and HDCU-F950 camera-control unit) was used to record to the HDCAM-SR format via Sony's SRW-5000 recorder. Although use of Sony HD technology was central to the production, Nicholson says the project ended up taking Stargate artists on an intense “digital fusion filmmaking adventure.” The piece was largely built in computers, mixing equal parts of live-action background plates, live-action reenscreen performances, and CG elements.

“We used the project to prove to ourselves that the latest digital filmmaking technology and techniques can be efficiently used by filmmakers on tight deadlines and strict budgets to create high-concept type imagery,” Nicholson says.

Nicholson served as the film's writer/director and co-DP, along with Peter Vazquez. Nicholson calls the short film a textbook example of digital filmmaking, particularly in the areas of lighting greenscreen, matting, compositing, and managing data.

“The concept was to demonstrate the capabilities of using HD cameras and a mixture of CG and other formats and material, including the HDCAM-SR format, to create what I've been calling ‘digital fusion cinematography,’” says Nicholson. “By that, I mean we essentially created a five-minute visual effect, utilizing as many techniques as we could get into it — our virtual backlot capability, frozen time, motion blur, slow-motion, CG water and animals and planets.”

The Plan

Digital Odyssey tells a simple story, set to music, of a goddess on a mountaintop who releases a butterfly to free a frozen world, setting life in motion once again across the globe. One of the key goals was to help Sony explore the capabilities of HDCAM-SR technology by producing a visually stunning piece.

“Eventually, we all agreed that a high-concept fantasy project would fill the bill because it would require so much greenscreen and virtual elements and fusion photography, all of which, we felt, would play to the visual strengths of this format,” says Nicholson. “Therefore, we wanted to blend different HD formats and other video with some 35mm film footage, digital stills, and tons of CG into a seamless mix, finished to HDCAM-SR. Before we had the story, we made a list of effects and elements we wanted to incorporate — slow-motion, CG, high-dynamic range, greenscreen. I then wrote the story concept, and then we got to work. From that point, the project became very practical in terms of planning a shoot to get virtual background data in London, Paris, and Tokyo, planning our greenscreen shoot in Los Angeles, and starting production on the CG elements, which had to begin at the earliest stages.”

Nicholson warns that you have to start the CG early to make complex animation work on a project with a turnaround similar to Digital Odyssey's. “It was a tight finish,” he says.

Stargate relied on artists in its Los Angeles, Vancouver, and London offices to build a template for how to complete projects in this timeframe. “It worked well,” he says. “We shot still photos in Paris, for instance, of carousel horses, and emailed them to our studio in Vancouver, where our CG artists began modeling those horses for the end of the film, in which the horses have to fly off the carousel. Although the flying horses were eventually rigged and animated in our Pasadena studio, we didn't wait to start that process until postproduction. This kind of project can't be done that way.”

Global Tour

Nicholson and a small team that varied from two to four people sprinted through London, Paris, and Tokyo shooting background elements. No actors went to any of those locations. Nicholson, Yasuhiko Mikami, Sony's producer on the project, and Victor Scalise, Stargate's editorial supervisor and the film's editor, dragged along an assortment of camera systems. During the course of the project, the filmmakers used HDW-F900 and HDC-F950/HDCU-F950 systems, along with the SRW-5000 HDCAM-SR recorder and an HDWF-500 HDCAM recorder, as well as an assortment of monitors, an Arri 435 motion-picture camera, a Phantom V5.1 high-speed digital camera, and a Canon EOS-1Ds digital still camera.

“In each city, we hooked up with small production teams that coordinators put together for us,” says Nicholson. “We mainly got off the plane, met with our drivers and technicians, were guided directly to the different locations, and just began shooting day and night. We spent no more than 48 hours in each city, covering about 12 locations a day. Our big question going in was, could we take that much hardware and three people and travel the world, shooting enough elements to convincingly put actors into those locations, and do it all on time and on budget?”

The HDCAM-SR technology was a defining factor in making the global trek efficient, Nicholson says. Filmmakers used the new RGB camera and portable SR recorder in Tokyo, and again during the Los Angeles studio shoot to capture greenscreen elements. In fact, according to Nicholson, the portable SR recorder used in Tokyo had never been used in an actual production situation before. The system proved useful for collecting elements for 3D backgrounds.

“The new Sony portable HDCAM-SR field recorder can capture two simultaneous streams for 3D on one tape, so this creates a new area of matting without greenscreen,” he says. “This is an important new tool for computer graphics because the portable HDCAM-SR deck can record in 3D, with no penalty of cost. We needed to shoot a lot of footage in these cities to turn them into virtual cities, so this really helped the virtual backlot concept. This is just the newest chapter in the new world of mixed media, where we can blend different video and film systems in certain applications. This is also why new editing/compositing systems like [Quantel's iQ, the finishing tool for Digital Odyssey] have multi-format inputs.”

Greenscreen

Stargate Digital also used the RGB camera system during an elaborate greenscreen shoot of all actors at the company's stage in Van Nuys, Calif., featuring a circular, 90ft. greenscreen. According to Nicholson, the resulting images were much quieter than 35mm film, whether scanned at 2K or HD.

“There is far less noise in the blue channel in the HDCAM-SR format. It is great for greenscreen work,” he says.

The inherent depth-of-field clarity that results from HD cameras, especially the RGB camera, is particularly useful for greenscreen work. “Your edge is less soft,” Nicholson says. “You can soften it later if you need to, but you will get a cleaner edge with less grain using this camera for greenscreen. That makes it extremely quiet with the mattes you will develop. We got flawless mattes, which is crucial in a virtual backlot situation. These massive, stitched ‘mega-mattes’ can reach resolutions of 20k and beyond. That allows us to seamlessly put people in the middle of the Champs-Elysées, or wherever we want in our virtual backlot process.”

Stargate meticulously lit the stage to match the daylight filmmakers captured on location in London, Paris, and Tokyo. According to Nicholson, matching location lighting was largely a function of the company's experience.

“Our stage has permanently hung lights and we have extensive experience with the virtual backlot from our TV work,” he says. “As a DP over the years, I can analyze most images and tell you where the key light, the bounces, and the negative fill are located in an image. That's why having an understanding of cinematography is so important when doing visual effects — it's all about light at the end of the day, whether you are working on-set or on a computer. The issue of what makes daylight look like daylight is a complicated one, but when you composite in the actor, you can tell instantly if you got it right or not. It's very subtle — how to do fill light so that it looks like a real sky — and it involves lots of negative and positive light. We also take care to shoot a 360-degree lighting reference for the CG artists on location and on our stage.”

Frozen Time

The other key element that Stargate created throughout the piece was the frozen time effect. Since the world initially seems entirely frozen, the film is filled with such things as frozen raindrops, balls, birds, and people. Given the project's time and budget limitations, there was no possibility of taking an expensive and time-consuming still-camera array approach to the effect, so Stargate created it using computer-operated, rotating turntables on its circular greenscreen stage.

Nicholson says the company originally developed the technique for an episode of the USA Network series The Dead Zone, and has also used it extensively on other shows, including CSI and Las Vegas.

“You put the actors on the turntable, rotating both the actors and the lights,” Nicholson explains. “The camera stays stationary, but the effect is that you are moving it around the actor. We worked closely with Arriflex to develop high-intensity lighting panels with a match-move motion-control system to run the lights at once as the turntable rotates. We have a rafter rotator device that suspends up to a couple thousand pounds of lights on it. So the notion is to rotate the actors and their lighting to match the light source of the background plate, while the camera stays stationary and moves on a ‘Z’ axis.”

Digital Firepower

Meanwhile, as these other stages moved forward, the CG work continued unabated over the course of several weeks. Stargate relied primarily on Maya (v 6.0) for 3D work, including extensive creation of CG water, butterflies, birds, horses, and dolphins. Nicholson adds that the extensive use of CG throughout the piece was made easier on the project's timeline by advances in processor power, which permitted Stargate to keep pace with a significant rendering load.

“We employed new, 64-bit Boxx Technologies dual processors on about 40 machines outfitted with Wildcat cards,” he says. “This is an example of how quickly the technology moves forward. A year or two ago, it would have been very difficult to render this much CG in just a couple of weeks on 32-bit processors, but now, it wasn't a very significant issue.”

Stargate also relied heavily on proprietary data-management software, dubbed Stargate Shot Tracker, to keep track of data across its network in three cities — Los Angeles, Vancouver, and London. All compositing was performed in After Effects, and Stargate also used Bijou software for tracking shots in 3D camera space, and Realviz Stitcher for building 3D panoramas.

Editor Victor Scalise offlined the piece on an Avid D/S system during what Nicholson calls “an intensive, three-week editorial phase,” and he then finished the piece separately to HDCAM-SR using the Quantel iQ system.

Final Thought

Returning to his “paradigm shift” theme, Nicholson suggests that the visual effects industry is well into the era of making high-concept films digitally on modest budgets and timelines more reminiscent of television and commercials than typical filmmaking models. He won't comment on the exact cost of Digital Odyssey, and concedes Stargate got help from Sony in terms of camera equipment. But even so, he insists the total cost of making a high-end, five-minute-plus piece was less than the cost of producing a typical :30 television commercial featuring computer graphics.

“High-concept, :30 commercials can be very expensive,” Nicholson says. “Digital Odyssey was every bit as high-quality as a very high-concept commercial, yet it is longform entertainment and produced for far less. On a minute-by-minute basis, this kind of work is very affordable by broadcast television standards, even with the costs of traveling around the world, actors, music, and all production costs included. In the past, visual effects have been labeled with the notion of high cost and high maintenance. Our goal is to show they are really quite affordable and fast when designed properly and executed with the best technology. I think that was one of the big successes we had with this film.”

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© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.