Smart Spots

Producers Share Their Best Budget-stretching Tricks, From Pre-Vis to CG

By Sharon Kennedy

June 1, 2004    Source: Film & Video

Budget constraints and tight schedules continue to pressure commercial producers and their suppliers to re-evaluate their production MOs. More and more, this means they’re looking to their laptops and to crack VFX artists for help.

“[Commercial] budgets are tight,” admits Steve Golin, founder and CEO of Anonymous Content. “A lot of stuff that used to be done practically is now done more cost-efficiently through compositing or CG.”

Product beauty shots and sets are often completely synthesized. Locations are tweaked and lighting conditions are simulated, all in the name of spending less time agonizing over the shoot. Pre-vis, migrating from feature production, has begun to take hold as a way to make sure that effects-heavy spots composite well in post, so that laptop sitting on set may be used to show the director how one of his new ideas will come together, even during the shoot. Who would have guessed that the craft of effects simulation, so long considered a big line item on the budget, could actually save money during the lifespan of a spot?

Not too far back, previsualization was reserved for mapping out complex sequences and camera moves on the big screen. As feature film directors became more comfortable with the tool, they used it more extensively and in various capacities. For the commercial world, pre-vis is on a similar path.

"[Commercial pre-vis] is where the feature film industry was about five years ago when you had to convince someone on every movie that they needed pre-vis. Now it’s an accepted part of the production pipeline," says Sean Cushing of Pixel Liberation Front (PLF).

There’s No Biz Like Pre-Vis

But post houses are changing how commercial agencies and directors balance their visual effects budgets. NY-based Rhinofx recently went public with a pre-vis division, despite having used the technique in-house since they started business. Rhinofx’s partner and managing director, Rick Wagonheim, points to a recent project where the cost consultant had never seen pre-vis in a budget before and wanted to cut the $10-$15,000 price tag. "I pointed out that the pre-vis was going to save two to three days in the Inferno because we were eliminating a lot of guesswork. By offering pre-vis in the budget upfront, we saved them money on the back end."

Pre-vis has proven efficient in mapping out CG animation projects, because changing animation during the lighting or compositing stages is time-consuming. But pre-vis is also traveling to the live-action arena. Rhinofx has used pre-vis as a substitute for not only storyboarding but also shooting boards and 2D animatics, all the way to the editing process. PLF’s Cushing has also used pre-vis in lieu of storyboards, often finding the boards to be wrong "perspectively," putting production at an immediate disadvantage. "You begin to unlock issues that you wouldn’t address if you just worked from the boards, [such as] pacing and composition problems. I would almost advocate not using boards. You get a much better sense of what needs to be done."

PLF is able to hand off 3D files to post house Method Studios, so the artists can continue working on the files instead of beginning a scene from scratch. "There’s a tremendous amount of 3D elements in our work," says Cushing. "Our pre-vis will have the CG element in its correct spot, usually animated, so [ Method ] can just add more detail to specific scenes and just swap our model for a higher-res model. That can be a major time-saver."

Even directors who in the past have felt tied down by pre-vis are warming up to its benefits. "Projects now are very competitive in the bidding stage, in the budgeting stage, in the delivery stage," says Rhinofx’s director, Harry Dorrington. "We’re trying to educate directors that with tighter schedules and lower budgets, they can use this sketchpad to really work things out."

"I think that’s a large part of what our jobs are— to continually offer these tools to directors and remind them that it’s not going to inhibit their shooting," agrees Chris Jones, creative director and VFX compositor at Zoic. Once they’ve used it, and they realize that it’s their creative vision that we’re implementing, they begin to embrace it. They’re able to experiment without risking the end result of their commercial."

Laptop Pre-vis

FX crews are getting so comfortable working in pre-vis that it can be revised at any stage of production. Wagonheim views it as a work in progress: "We present it the first time, and [the agency] doesn’t like the camera movement, the pacing, or the angle. So we make adjustments until the pre-vis is signed off." Even during the production stage, effects supervisors can experiment with new approaches. PLF’s Cushing tries to have a team available on set if problems arise or the director wants to move in a different direction. For these situations, the team will bring a "shuttle" on set, basically a small PC loaded with Softimage XSI along with PLF’s pre-vis software and the scenes that have already been shot. "Then we either make a new [virtual] camera, or we do an animation of the new element. We’ll make a QuickTime of it right there." Depending on the change, the crew can sign off on the new shot right on location in anywhere from a matter of minutes to an hour, with pre-vis minimizing set-up and post guesswork.

CG Matte Paintings

Digital matte paintings allow commercial production access to locations, both real and imagined, that couldn’t have been shot via live-action.

"I think the reason we call it a matte painting, instead of a virtual set, is because with a matte painting, it looks real to you," says Radium’s creative director and co-founder, Jonathan Keeton. "If you tell people that something’s going to have a virtual set, they’re going to go,‘Oh God, wah wah wah.’" Why? Because it’s a lot more work. If a director needs a composite shot of a house, digital matte paintings allow him to achieve perfect photorealism without all of the texture work normally involved in virtual sets. In a slightly more traditional approach, he would model the whole house and then slowly apply a brick texture, then a window texture, and then a glass texture. This equals a lot of wah wahs.

With matte paintings, a director can take a photograph of that same house, and project that photograph onto a geometry that matches its topography. In other words, where there’s a door, there’s a door in the wireframe, and a photographed window can be projected onto a 3D wireframe of a window. "It looks photographically real because it’s based on a photograph. It’s not based on shaders. You arrive at perfect photorealism instantly," says Keeton.

In the case of Keeton’s work on " Music Video," a spot for Volvo, director Dave Meyers had envisioned ambitious shots that, given the limited time, budget and equipment on location, were nearly impossible to do. A planned shot of a camera floating down to the ground from 80 feet in the air had to be improvised. "[The shot] actually was created by me going up in a cherry picker and taking a bunch of wide-angle digital stills of the entire road," says Keeton. "Those were then projected onto CG geometry, and the camera move was created in post."

Another CG matte-painting treatment involved a long tracking shot down a street. A motion control camera traveling down the road over and over was not an option due to the same budget and time constraints. Instead, the shot was created from two locked-off plates, one farther down the street toward the right, and one down the street on the left. The crowd was shot live, as was a bus stop being broken by a big piece of cement and a car being lifted by a rig.

Afterward, the building and road were projected onto the geometry of the block in 3ds max. While an operated dolly move was shot on set as a reference, the actual camera move was done in Inferno. "It looked like it was shot with a camera because the road has the parallax it would have if you’d really had a dolly there," says Keeton.

Keeton estimates that about five percent of FX commercials use CG matte painting today, with the technique poised to take the industry by storm. He figures that in two years, 20 to 25 percent of FX houses will be busting out their digital cameras.

"I think we discovered it," he says. "We’d been using it for a long time, but there was some new software added to Inferno about two to three years ago where you could project onto geometry as opposed to simply applying texture to geometry. While CG folks have been able to do that for a while, by putting it into Inferno, you can make things very quickly. Now we use both CG and Inferno to do the same effect."

Keeton predicts the advent of virtual camera tracking will play an important role in propelling CG matte paintings. "Having a handheld camera motion that you can track in 3D space lets the director and the DP operate their camera and do whatever kind of wacky stuff they want. They still have half of the scene that’s not real, but it’s perfectly tracked to the shot. That’s what makes this technique so fast."

>> What Big Effects?

Despite advances in visual effects technology and affordability of tools, some spots actually look as though they were shot with Dad’s personal camcorder. Major advertisers are broadcasting DV footage in an attempt not necessarily to save money, but to sneak up on a viewer. DV reads to audiences as reality and so spots that artfully combine lower resolution with slicked-down effects often communicate as more real.

"It’s certainly a trend," says The Orphanage VP/Executive Producer Paul Grimshaw, who recently worked on TBWA/Chiat/Day’s PlayStation 2 spots for Ratchet & Clyne. "People may look down on them a bit, but then they start to see the ingenuity in pulling [the effects] off seamlessly. They think, "What did I just see?" Then it’s effective in making [viewers] pause and evaluate it."

Mark Tobin, visual effects producer at Method, recalls a Powerade spot from a few years back— NFL player Michael Vick throws a football from one side of the field that ends up in the upper reaches of the stands. "We got emails about that spot from all over the world," Tobin recollects. "People had bets on it. Kids in physics class were debating whether [ Vick ] could actually do that. Of course he can’t! But because it’s immediate video, and we’re used to seeing it on the news and reality shows, people say,‘It’s real!’"

Posting DV

Shooting on a lower-res format introduces challenges in post that are different from those of working from film or higher-resolution video. "When we’re integrating something with a film camera, we know the lens, the film stock and measurements that we can record on set," explains Grimshaw. "With a consumer DV camera, there’s no absolute for what the lens setting is, so there’s a lot more work to track scenes and add in synthesized visual effects."

While Grimshaw says the agency and director never entertained shooting on film for the PlayStation spots, they did consider shooting on either HD or DigiBeta to allow more seamless compositing. For creative reasons, they ultimately shot DV to really capture that DV look.

"Because you’re dealing in a low-resolution format with low-resolution color space, compositing gets a little tricky," says Grimshaw, whose team used a combination of Inferno and The Orphanage’s own workstations. "DV is 30 frames a second, and it’s 720 x 480 resolution fields. We would do our animation at 60 fields a second, and this would allow us to add in more detail and resolution. At the end of the process we would drop it back to 30 fields per second to allow for a more seamless composite and integration of visual effects."

DigiBeta Dilemmas

Low-res challenges are addressed on the production side as well. For Method’s work on AOL spots that spoof The Discovery Channel’s American Chopper, the camera crew blocked shots on set very carefully. "It’s important that you get close in terms of positioning," says Russell Fell, visual effects artist. "When you have to move the footage from its natural place [in post] it gets softer than it should be, and it’s already soft because it’s video. Because [the director and crew] carefully blocked their shots on the AOL spots, we were just taking away rigs and didn’t have to reposition what they shot."

While the actual American Chopper program is shot on DVCAM, Method shot the spots on DigiBeta. "We wanted more information to track to do rig removal," says Fell. During post, Method de-interlaced the fields and worked on frame-based footage. "Once you have your effect looking good, you then have to dirty it up to make it look correct when it airs. It’s a strange process."

Highlighting HD

Venice, CA-based Sea Level is familiar with the dirtying-up process. For Wieden + Kennedy’s recent Nike spot "What If?," Sea Level shot live action that was to be matched in a variety of ways to sports stock footage. "Everything was shot with the intention of grading it and degrading it to make it look like broadcast video," says visual effects supervisor/Inferno artist Ben Gibbs. While it was crucial for the spot to look like interlaced sports highlights, the FX team also needed to be able to perform intricate matte work with a clean, high-res image. "It was just chiseling down all the variables, and all of sudden, boom, there’s one answer: we’re going to shoot video and we’re going to shoot HD because we have the resolution we need," says VFX producer Dan Connelly. "We didn’t want to start down with DigiBeta, because if we needed to go in and blow stuff up, it would already be as big as it could be." Sea Level opted for the Sony HDCAM at 60i, which matched the frame rate of the stock footage.

"It would’ve been very different if we had shot film," says Connelly. "There’s so many things inherent with video capture as opposed to film capture that are just a function of 24 fps vs. 30 fps."