Scaling Workflow From TV to 2K

What does a young visual effects studio specializing in episodic television and commercials do when offered the effects lead on a feature film? "We had to grow up," says Zoic Studios co-founder Loni Peristere. That meant shifting from television to a feature-film workflow for Serenity, the film version of Joss Whedon’s sci-fi series Firefly. Zoic repurposed some of the show’s digital assets and part of the pipeline, but needed dozens of new hires (including VFX supervisor Randy Goux), 400 new processors, 20 additional TBs of storage, a new 3D platform and a high-end renderer to jump to 2K. Illusion Arts and Rhythm & Hues worked on several sequences, but it was still a trial by cinematic fire for the Zoic crew.

On Firefly, Serenity‘s TV incarnation, a core group of 12 artists led by LightWave 3D guru Emile Smith, did all the work – each artist took an individual shot from start to finish. For Serenity, the studio hired 85 more artists and built out a VFX pipeline that could handle the 2K work. Goux, who had been a sequence lead on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring at Weta Digital and CG supervisor for The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions at ESC, decided Zoic would need three times the render nodes and 10 times the network storage in order to do a 300-shot show at 2K.

Film resolution would push LightWave to its limit, so Goux chose Mental Images’ Mental Ray as a high-end renderer, and some of his colleagues from The Matrix helped set up the pipeline. Steve Avoujageli, a former technical director at ESC, became Zoic’s TD and co-wrote Z-logic, Zoic’s rendering pipeline, with Markus Stokes, whose film work included I, Robot, Spider-Man 2, and Star Wars: Episode II- Attack of the Clones. LightWave was a known commodity, so Zoic also built a custom system for getting it to produce 2K frames. Most of the spaceships that would appear in the movie, however, were rebuilt in Alias Maya, then moved into LightWave via a custom script for animation, lighting, and, often, rendering.

Meanwhile, Goux addressed compositing with Patti Gannon, compositing supervisor, who felt that Combustion could handle a 2K project. (Autodesk agreed.) However, Gannon had to train new people, most of whom were familiar with Shake rather than Combustion. Peristere believes the trade-off meant compositing took longer than it might have, but the result was good. "We couldn’t put 25 Shake licenses into the budget," explains Peristere. "We re-fitted tools to match our needs, not our wants."

This meant rather than filming live action against green screen, getting shots in camera. To previs a hovercraft chase, Zoic brought in previs supervisor Rpin Suwannath and his crew. They removed rigs from plates, replaced the road- an old highway north of Valencia, CA- and added 3D vehicles and smoke. Suwannath’s crew covered the terrain with grass and trees using a custom Mental Ray tool that pulled plants from a database. "Most of it was shot with live action using two Technocranes and actors on wires going 40 miles per hour," says Peristere. "We didn’t have the money to use virtual backgrounds."