Joel Pilger
President/Director
!mpossible Pictures
What We Do
Pre-vis on commercials that involve live action, visual effects and/or animation
Why We Do It
It’s a nice way to pull difficult decisions forward in the process so
that we can avoid problems and capture opportunities earlier rather
than later. If there’s time to do it, then we do it. Typically, the
size of the budget is not a determining factor because even though we
spend time and money on pre-vis we usually save that money on the back
end. The biggest factor is when we have a creative concept or vision
where we’re having a difficult time conveying it to the client. So it
gets them comfortable earlier. The other scenario is when we’re facing
a technical, timing or effects aspect in a project that’s just too
difficult to describe through a storyboard and script. We need to
execute this in pre-vis so we know how to best proceed going forward.
We don’t want to do the shoot and afterwards realize we should have
done something different. We don’t go into a shoot and just shoot a
crazy amount of coverage. We approach it in a very planned and
organized way. Pre-vis provides us with that roadmap for exactly what
we need. Often it lets us do things in a one- or two-day shoot that
would normally take three to four days. It just helps us to see things
early before we’re on a set burning film.
How It Works
Most often we’re working in 3D with Softimage|XSI. Sometimes we’ll use
After Effects or Flame if it’s effects-heavy but typically we use
Softimage so we can block out the camera angles and moves, rough actors
and props. First, we create a series of shots that we bring into Final
Cut Pro to edit. It’s very clunky with basic geometry but it gets the
idea across of the basic blocking and basic camera moves. Then we
create a DVD [with DVD Studio Pro] and bring it to the set and use that
as a guide so that as we’re shooting we’re blocking the camera the way
we want to and getting the timing right. The pre-vis will usually have
some sort of voiceover for the dialogue and maybe some basic sound
effects. It’s a very useful tool to have on set. All the crew and all
the talent can see exactly what’s to be executed rather than just one
guy, the director, trying to convey all that information to everyone
and barking out commands.
For some live-action pieces we’ll go out to the location ahead of time,
take digital photos of the camera positions they envision shooting,
with stand-ins for talent and create a pre-vis with the stills. In a
few instances we tried doing those in motion but that tends to create
as many problems as you solve because you have stand-ins trying to do
performance.
For effects-heavy spots we’ll often just take the storyboards into
Flame or After Effects and rough out the effects and create an edit.
You’re often answering questions and solving problems that are usually
reserved for post production when it’s often too late or too expensive
to make changes and solve problems. This kind of pre-vis provides more
clarity right at the beginning and lets us hit the creative target,
within budget and on time.
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