John Gaeta's latest Revolution: this audio aims to create feature length animated films for less than the norm … a lot less - Special FX - Cover Story

Post, Nov, 2003 by Daniel Restuccio

PLF also passed the 3D files from the visualization to ESC Entertainment, which began scene set up in California. They would replace the visualization set components with the real APU and sentinel models, maintaining the camera moves and the cuts of the shots. That way they could ensure that the animated CG elements would match when composited with the greenscreen shots.

The sentinel/APU siege alone contained 300 shots, more than a third of the total in Revolutions. "It was really massive," says Gaeta. "It's the most extensive use of visualization ever in a movie in terms of [guiding] the visual effects. The grips would come in and calculate if they could fit things within a certain stage space or the art department would see how sets had to move around in limited spaces."

The APU shots were a blend of animated CG models combined with full size robotic props operated by humans. With PLF, Gaeta devised a method of exporting the data from the moves in the animation to a motion control seat that the human operator sat in. This synchronized the motion of the live-action plate to the computer generated APU.

"In the siege sequence there is a massive amount of procedural animation and intelligent animation where there are rules on how creatures behave and interact," describes Gaeta. "When an APU shoots a round of ammunition, they would attach a semi-automatic procedure that created a tracer that goes to a location and causes an effects event, like blowing a hole in a piece of concrete. That also triggers other events.

"We were essentially running simulations," Gaeta acknowledges. "It's very much like a videogame but at a higher resolution and complexity of motion." By doing that they were able to get a lot of peripheral, mid-ground and background events, which made a richer looking scene. "At one point," he says, "we realized we were making an animated movie."

FULL CG ENVIRONMENTS

For Revolutions, Giant Killer Robots (www.giantkillerrobots.com) did full CG environments for Zion, says Gaeta, supervised by Mike Schmitt. The San Francisco-based visual effects boutique is a PC-based shop (Dell, HP and custom boxes) and Windows networked. They use off-the-shelf software like Maya, Softimage|XSI and write their own plug-ins and shaders. GKR also uses Eyeon's Digital Fusion 4 and Apple Shake for compositing, and Mental Ray for rendering. They maintain an open architecture infrastructure for maximum production and post production compatibility.

Sony Imageworks worked on a number of shots supervised by Jim Berney, including the tunnel interiors in Revolutions as well as the hoverships Nebuchadnezzar, Mjolnir, Logos and Vigilant.

DANIEL RESTUCCIO

dansweb451@aol.com