SFX for spots and TV: Book them early, test them… trust them - special effects companies present tips on getting the best work

Post, March, 2002 by Ann Fisher

Everybody already knows, or should know, the ONE tip that all special effects houses have for getting the most brilliant work possible: call them early. This is such a universal thought that all those interviewed for this article said it without hesitation. However, this truism is but the tip of the iceberg. There's more to it than that, and the following scenarios give examples of how each special effects house solved particular challenges when creating effects for recent spot, music video or television series work And, as always, Post catalogs what tools the artists are currently working with, as well as what they will be looking for at next month's NAB show.

SPECIAL EFFECTS HOUSE: THE ORPHANAGE (www.theorphanage.com), San Francisco Bay Area

PROJECT: Bubba Sparxx music video Lovely for Partizan Entertainment

CHALLENGE AND SOLUTION: Two days before shooting the music video, the client called from Atlanta. Could The Orphanage visual effects artists re-create a Jeep spot effect that showed a vehicle shaking off mud like a dog? The video producers wanted a 4x4 to splatter mud on a record executive. The Orphanage had less than 10 days to turn it around.

A quick conference call explained what the client needed to do on set technically Director Chris Robinson was given explicit instructions so he could deliver the proper plates. In-house, CG artist Kevin Baillie modeled the truck, painted it, texture mapped it, animated it and then comped it into the shot that was about :04 long. He used Alias/Wavefront Maya V.x4 on a Power Mac G4 dual 800 MHz with 1 GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce 2MX dual 1.7 GHz Pentium 3 Xeon with 2 GB RAM and an nVidia Fire GL4.

"We actually overdelivered," explains executive producer John Benson. "We were so concerned with such a short turnaround, the only part we thought we'd be able to complete was the car shaking and having the mud fly off, and not actually have it settle in and be completely clean. But Kevin decided to take it beyond what we had promised, so he delivered the full shot of the car starting to shake, the mud flying off of it until it was completely clean and settled in to a still car. The cut used it all... They were very happy that they got more than what they were actually anticipating."

The Orphanage was founded in 1999 by three former ILM visual effects artists, part of that ICM's Rebel Mac group that discarded its SGIs in favor of Macs. That philosophy still holds at The Orphanage, which offers production, post and proprietary technology called Magic Bullet (shoot DV and make it look like film). The Orphanage is beta testing to get Maya fully up and running on Mac. Its visual effects work -- everything but character animation -- is used in features, television, spots and music videos.

TIP: The Orphanage sticks to the Rebel Mac philosophy of "one artist, one shot." "All of our artist are generalists," says Benson. "We have some who are a little bit stronger in one thing than another, but it's very important for us to have artists who can take a shot, bring it online, model it, animate it, comp it in and handle all the traditional TD lighting," says Benson. "From a client perspective 'one artist/one shot' actually saves time, which translates into saving money. Because one of the biggest constraints in commercials and music videos is time, it's very important we're able to do as much as we can given whatever the constraints are."

TRUISM: "Whenever possible, the greatest outcome is going to happen when we're brought in at as early a stage as possible," says Benson. "If clients wait very long they get stuck at a position where they might not have the same options available to them if they would have approached the visual effects company earlier on in the process. If they bring someone who technically knows what's available and what could happen, then I think they're going to squeeze more out for their budget. With agencies and commercials we love to get on board even before they've selected a director."

NAB SHOPPING LIST: The tech team will be looking at I) the status of new rendering solutions, specifically those with support for Maya and Global Illumination (e.g.Brazil r/s, the software it, is using for Path to War, an HBO original production scheduled to air by early summer); 2) the progress of realtime solutions for editing, compositing and color correction; Quantel's iQ, da Vinci, Piranha and Discreet among others; 3) Electric Image Universe with new rendering support for Global Illumination and Mac OSX; 4) updates to 24p HD and SD cameras by Sony, Panasonic and others; 5) the progress of Adobe's support for Mac OSX.

SPECIAL EFFECTS HOUSE: A52 (www.a52.com), West Hollywood

PROJECT: Nissan Altima Side Effects :30 spot for TBWA/Chiat/Day, Go Film and director Radish (Austrians Christoph Chrudimak and Mortiz Friedel)

CHALLENGE SOLUTION: The agency challenged the directors to capture the car moving in a visually unique way. The result was a car as viewed by a camera on a bungee cord. The challenge for the A52 team, headed by visual effects supervisor and Discreet Inferno artist Simon Brewster, was to do the impossible: find some way to use a virtually unusable shot of very violent movement, clean it up and track it with the car.