Black Box effects Simone - Black Box Digital

Post, Sept, 2002 by Daniel Restuccio

SANTA MONICA -- Armed with Apple Macs, cramped space and considerable talent, visual effects designers Kent Demaine and Will Robbins formed Black Box Digital (www.blackboxdigital.com). And in the three years they have been in business, they went from designing interfaces to doing major effects work on features like Simone Minority Report, Mr. Deeds and Master of Disguise.

On this particular day, Black Box Digital digital artist Ricardo Torres is talking about their latest feature film, NewLine's Simone; Demaine is busy working on the Minority Report DVD; and Robbins was holed up in a hotel in Florida with his Mac G4 a cinema display and Combustion working on the interfaces for Bad Boys 2.

HALF-HUMAN HALF-PIXEL

Black Box started working on effects for Simone almost two years ago, even before they worked on Minority Report. Robbins called Torres and asked him if he knew of any 3D compositing systems that worked on the desktop. Torres suggested Discreet Combustion.

So Black Box started building just interfaces for Simone on a beta version from Discreet. They had also been contracted to do some of the projection on the set of this film about a producer's film becoming endangered when his star walks off and decides to digitally create an actress to substitute for the star and subsequently the digital thespian becomes an overnight sensation that everyone thinks is a real person. In the movie, Al Pacino communicates with Simone on a computer system, set up on a soundstage, connected to three large display screens. However when the dailies came back, director Andrew Niccol did not like the look of the projected version of Simone. So they decided to comp the Simone footage into the screens in post.

Torres had to go back and remove all the projectors from the principal photography. That was one of the biggest challenges said Torres, because it wasn't planned. "I had to build what was behind the projector from scratch, track it on and make it look accurate, with the camera moving and with a perspective change."

Niccol also had a very specific idea of how he wanted Simone portrayed. So he asked a couple effects houses to pitch "a look". The creative team at Black Box, supervised by Robbins and Demaine, crafted the look that came closest to what Niccol wanted. So with that and the shot fixes, Black Box went from doing 30 to 200 visual effects shots on the movie.

They had originally planned to do all the shots in Combustion and After Effects, but with that much work they decided to get a Discreet Flame system.

When they got the Flame they had to integrate it into the rest of the network Black Box is a boutique house, not a big effects facility with terabytes of space and dedicated IT people. They do their own network engineering. "That's one of the reasons we're on a Mac platform -- it's easy for us to network all these machines and move data around. Now it's really easy with OS X." (They recently purchased Mac dual 1.25 GHz machines with Jaguar [OS 10.2] installed.) They used PC Mac LAN to connect the Macs, SCI and NT render box.

Torres used the Flame to do all the final shots. A lot of the grunt work, he said, was done on with Combustion and After Effects. Once that was done and rendered out, and we're talking thousands of frames here, they moved those shots onto the Flame where they were comped in with the principal photography.

"The filters that were used to make the actress look like Simone was a generic effect that acted on all of her. There were certain areas that we needed to enhance more than others. So after that effect was done we used Combustion to rotoscope back into the character some real parts, like her hair."

Niccol wanted to walk a fine line between the look of say Final Fantasy and a real actress. Things they would do on the Flame, like take out jaw twitches or eye blinks, nuances that make people human, they had to put some of them back in so she didn't look too artificial.

Most of the work done on Simone was completed using Combustion V.1.0 and V.2.0. The newer V.2.0 offers increased compatibility with other Discreet products like Flame. "It's a handy feature," explained Torres, "where you can do a lot of the routine work, like create look-up tables or rotoscope without having to pre-render and work in native 10-bit Cineon, and then pass on the files to the Flame to do the more processor-intensive finishing."

So how real is Simone? "Well it's no one that you've seen in any movies [before]:" said Torres emphatically "We definitely did modify her quite a bit What we like to say is that the Simone you saw in the movie will never walk into any room. Right now she shying in four boxes of DLT and DTS tapes."