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MillimeterVFX Vision
Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Sci-Tech Award winners talk about the future.
Industrial Light & Magic’s (ILM) Image-based Modeling technology was used to accurately create a photorealistic digital double for the young twins who played the role of Sunny in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Photos courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic. © 2004 Paramount Pictures Corporation and Dreamworks LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Ray Feeney remembers the day in the mid-1970s when one of the first computer- guided special effects shoots was done. Fresh from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Feeney wrangled a computer that controlled the camera filming a Levi's “Brand Name” TV spot. That 30-second commercial followed the path of a “dog” (an animated Levi's logo) that literally jumped through hoops. The commercial broke existing records for audience recognition and put Feeney's employer, Robert Abel & Associates, on the map.
Three decades later, Feeney has received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, a Sci-Tech Oscar statuette from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Previously bestowed on effects legends such as Ray Harryhausen and Linwood Dunne, the award follows Feeney's previous honors for contributions to motion control, film scanning and recording, and compositing. It also makes him uniquely qualified to assess this year's Sci-Tech Awards.
Feeney says that the 15 winners of this year's awards reflect a cross-section of movie technology. Among the notable examples he cites are awards for camera technology (Arriflex) and steps forward in digital archiving and restoration (Technicolor Digital Intermediates, EFilm, and Pacific Title). Digital techniques that move the industry beyond photochemical processes were clearly a focus of Academy scrutiny this year, according to Feeney. “We've entered a new phase. No longer do you put visual effects on film to be cut into a movie,” he says. “Now you deliver files. Figuring out the archival plan for this stuff is a problem that's not anywhere close to solved. But we've taken an interim step.”
ILM’s Image-based Modeling was used in the creation of the CryoPrison sequence for Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report.
Photos courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic. © 2001 Twentieth Century Fox and Dreamworks LLC.
Through RFX, the company he founded in 1978, Feeney has been closely involved with the rise of digital visual effects, so he's particularly astute about awards for software. “The Academy has honored absolutely cutting-edge digital edge developments, like those from The Foundry and Realviz,” he says. Realviz makes tracking software that makes it easier to integrate effects into shots with moving cameras, while The Foundry makes a suite of tools for optical-flow image manipulation. “Although their motion-estimation technologies are somewhat similar, their interpretation of the industry's needs were different,” Feeney says. “Realviz built something for most users in our industry. It wasn't aimed at solving all problems, but it was priced in an accessible way to do 80 percent of them. The Foundry stuff was written to address the shots you can't figure out how to do any other way.
“Before this technology — except for hand-tracking, which is always terrible — you either locked off the camera or laid track for doing motion control on the set. Both of those were compromises for directors. Now, you can do it in post. It's not cheaper or faster, but it moves the expense and the effort into an area that's less onerous to the production.”
Feeney laughs when he compares this to that long-ago Levi's shoot. “It amazes me,” he says. “There's a fearlessness now that's stunning.”
Industrial Light &Magic's (ILM) two awards were also significant, according to Feeney. One was for developing the Open EXR software standard that's used for compressing tiled images. “This system has made HDRI [high-dynamic-range images] accessible to product vendors,” he says. “Supporting this unified mechanism brought down the threshold that was acceptable to manufacturers, so the industry achieved a critical mass around a particular method. That's really hard to do, but Open EXR has become ubiquitous in the current generation of products.”
ILM's other award-winner, the Image-based Modeling system, makes it possible to construct 3D models from photographed images. “[Its importance] is that it's a system instead of just being part of ILM's toolkit — it's now the preferred tool,” Feeney says. “It's a major turning point when something is so feasible it becomes standard practice.” (See the sidebar at right for more on ILM's Image-based Modeling system.)
These Sci-Tech Awards clearly show how important digital techniques have become in moviemaking, but Feeney views them in a broad perspective. “There's still a certain schizoid aspect to this,” he says. “Digital is universally established in visual effects and post manipulation, but digital intermediates and digital acquisition are still so new. The majority of exhibition is still print, and the majority of image capture is film negative. But I don't think there's a stigma attached to any form of technology. Once it was really hard for software to get an award, and be thought of as sufficient to change the world. We're not ‘there’ yet with regard to digital capture and DI, but we will be. We're on the rising edge of the arc. You can't recognize the ideas that change the world until the world has changed.”
Image-based Modeling Takes Hold
For visual effects practicioners, the Sci-Tech Award for Industrial Light & Magic's (ILM) Image-based Modeling system represents a milestone. ILM's ability to extract 3D information from two-dimensional images means that a piece of photography — even one not intended as a visual-effects background plate — can have 3D objects accurately integrated. It's as if you'd measured the dimensions of the elements in the shot.
“It's an after-the-fact technology,” says ILM tech guru Steve Sullivan, who shares the Sci-Tech Award with Colin Davidson, Max Chen, and Francesco Callari. “Anytime you have pictures that have a couple of angles on something, and it has enough texture to grab onto, you can use it. We could go out and take three photographs of rocky stair steps with grass and tree trunks. If we ran those through the software, in 10 minutes we'd have the basic shape of the scene, with the texture on it.”
ILM began developing image-based modeling for 2002's Minority Report, which entailed photographing a boy with an array of DVCAMs and later reconstructing a 3D version of the child. (For millimeter's coverage of this breakthrough, visit digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/video_minority_report)
By 2006, Sullivan's team was able to do a pixel-by-pixel reconstruction of a baby — in close-up — for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. “That was one of the clearest cases for needing the technology,” Sullivan says. “You can't laser-scan kids, so we were prompted to push this technology to the next level. Basically, we got the equivalent of a cyberscan.”
The technique was also used to reconstruct environments for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. “It's generally good at reconstructing terrain because you often don't have a ‘Plan B’ for that,” Sullivan says. “It's often not feasible to get Lidar scans for really wide cases.”
Sullivan says image-based modeling also has preproduction uses, enabling art directors to take location pictures and use them to construct virtual models of what they'd like a set to be. “We actually demonstrated this to the Art Directors Guild for shot planning and design,” he says. “If you've taken the right pictures, it's always metrically accurate. Measuring what you're photographing has become redundant.”
— E.W.
