Alex McDowell. Photo courtesy of Alex McDowell.

Production designer Alex McDowell and previsualization supervisor Ron Frankel are on the cutting edge of previs. They have collaborated on Fight Club, Minority Report and The Cat in the Hat, and are currently prepping Steven Spielberg’s Terminal. Separately, Frankel also worked on Panic Room, getting a further taste of working with director David Fincher, who is a renowned previs practioner in his own right. Over the past few years, McDowell and Frankel have expanded the creative possibilities of previs, going beyond the notion of a design and approval tool for the director. When given the opportunity, they have made previs a hub between various departments: assisting with 3D budgeting and the hiring of vfx vendors, and helping to drive the look of the entire production, encompassing all digital assets. In other words, McDowell and Frankel are strategically using previs as a way of breaking down barriers between pre- and post-production.

“The advent of 3D animation tools has just meant you can take that same lineage and keep pushing forward so that what you end up with is a tool that ultimately gives everybody access to a much deeper level of information than has ever been accessible to production…in pre-production,” Frankel insists. “And that’s the beauty of it because you get access to all this information before you’ve committed yourself to anything. So we can do all this planning, we can do the animatics and watch how the sequences play out. The director can make editorial decisions, the production designer can make set design decisions, we can make location decisions. Lighting is still the one area that hasn’t filtered into it yet.”

Fight Club previs imagery were created using Softimage|XSI. Images courtesy of Softimage|XSI. To see the previs work on this film check out Ron Frankel’s demo reel. © 20th Centur

McDowell agrees. Looking back on Fight Club, they had a previs group that consisted of two or three animators and a support person that helped with the building of models, including the explosive climax where buildings in the background collapse. “It was extremely dense,” McDowell suggests, “and everything was planned and composited together with these different buildings from different parts of L.A. So we started setting up the camera angle to inform the 3D, but it all had to be put together in 3D…flattened but made into a Photoshop image that we could translate from. Previs was the only available tool. All told, we worked with half a dozen different sequences involving a few shots that were prevised. Our turnaround time was a day…so we could show Fincher something in the morning and then get comments from him at the end of the day.”

Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report races across mag levs. To see the previs work on this film check out Ron Frankel’s demo reel. © 20th Century Fox.

Minority Report Opened New Possibilities for Previs
McDowell adds that Minority Report became a defining previs moment for this dynamic duo. “We were developing a mechanical, global setting for the story, so we used previs extensively for all the urban planning and the mag lev [magnetic levitation] design and how it was all connected to the geography and the relationship to all of Washington, D.C. As far as animation studies for the way the mag lev worked, we did a lot of that in previs. In the early version of previs, we speed-tested the cars, so it was really this great analytical tool for working out the logistics of the physical set pieces. How much of the car are we going to build? Although a lot of that data was used in post, ILM took stacks of our visual files, which they translated into their final stuff. Apart from getting feedback from Steven [Spielberg] a lot of it was stuff we never saw. Which is to say that back on Minority Report we retooled what previs was from being kind of an animatic storyboard translator for the director into something that was much more integral to the art department for me. But as it happens, every part of that was informing the digital environment. The other great thing about Minority Report was that we got a lot of the other departments involved in previs like the key grip in planning the super techno crane shot with the overhead camera following the spiders in the tenement in a single shot. It was designed with a model of a techno crane and a model of a set, which translated into it being a live camera move instead of a motion control shot. It was so extensively prevised that they just set it up on the screen.”