Previs Starts in the Flame Suite at Mr. Wonderful

Creative Director Beirne Lowry on a Fast, Photoreal Workflow for OLN's Stanley Cup Coverage

By Bryant Frazer

August 11, 2006    Source: Film & Video

When Beirne Lowry, creative director at Mr. Wonderful in New York City, sat down earlier this year to work on a package for OLN's coverage of the Stanley Cup finals, he worked in Flame as much as possible, starting with previs, partly because it's a very fast way to visualize and figuring out lighting schemes. "My main tool is Flame," he explains. "I [also] have a G5 with Cinema 4D, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, various modeling programs and all that. Flame is a good tool for bringing everything in and putting it together quickly." Elements that might have been conceived in Photoshop originated in Flame so Lowry could trim the fat from his workflow instead of spending Flame time recreating Photoshopped designs for his animation artists. (He also saved time by repurposing some existing motion-capture footage of hockey players.) The final elements were delivered to OLN on a two-week turnaround schedule at 1920x1080 resolution. Watch the video, below, then read on as Lowry explains the process.

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F&V: Tell us about doing previs in the Flame.

BEIRNE LOWRY: For the previs, we originally took little models of hockey players and shot them with a digital camera. We put it all together in Illustrator and Photoshop and then brought that into the Flame. You have a nice 3D environment so you can light things quickly and colorize them. The tools complement each other. I can get a lot of the same results using Cinema 4D and After Effects, but sometimes it takes longer to move the lights around. The render quality isn't as good as a dedicated 3D program, but you can light things very quickly and get a sense of whether things will work. I use Maya a lot, but lighting it in Maya would take a while. My previs was able to get a finished-looking piece out in a day. The designed frames look like the actual product.

How did you create the Stanley Cup itself?

I made a rough 3D model of the Stanley Cup from high-res photographs showing a 360-degree view of the actual cup. The model wasn't super-detailed, but it was proportioned the way the cup should be. I brought that into Flame and used Flame's projector to project that high-resolution image of the actual cup onto the model.

What platform do you work on?

I was running the newest version of Flame on Linux. It goes incredibly fast, much faster than the SGI machines used to. I was using a very high-resolution image on the model and we did the whole package in HD, and it didn't feel like it was slowing down or anything. We had a photographic, shiny Stanley Cup with reflections and lights. All the titling was done in Flame, too. In the end, we animated a CG hockey player lifting the Cup in Maya, then we brought it in and matched our cup to their player.

It sounds like you prefer to work inside Flame whenever it's practical.

The nice thing about Flame is you have access to a lot of 3D and lighting tools that work well for doing boards. You can composite in 3D space. You can use Flame just for compositing. A lot of facilities use it as just a finishing tool. They never use 3D, never turn on the lights, and you don't have to. But I use it as a creation machine, and I use all of the elements.

What about handling video clips?

If you're dealing with lots of clips of video, you have to scroll through the clips individually, frame by frame, and line up the action. And you can't beat the Flame for that too. You have this robust clip library with footage management that you just don't get with something like After Effects. In that Stanley Cup open, which highlights the great history of the Stanley Cup — Messier lifting the Cup, things from the 1950s to just a few years ago — that archival footage has to be incorporated in the cup move. The player from the 1950s has to be coordinated, the name of the team is burned into the cup, and it coordinates with a CG move of the Cup spinning into another section.

What kind of technology challenges are facing you?

Networking is a very important thing that we've gotten to work in new software upgrades. The Flame will now speak directly to the Mac. We don't have to go through Fetch — the machines talk back and forth through a big central server so I can save things right off my desktop on my Mac and access them directly from the Flame. We're trying to coordinate using different types of 3D software with the Flame, but I personally haven't had a lot of success. Bringing camera data into the Flame, rendering in one system and then adding more [in another], having the same camera tracking between two different software packages — it always works in the demos, but it's hard to get it to work for real.