The producer of K-19: The Widowmaker used previs images to win a greenlight. All K-19: The Widowmaker images © Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of Keyframe Digital Prods. Inc.

Pixel Liberation Front (www.thefront.com), which did the previs sequences for both films, used Softimage|XSI to create the sets and virtual actors. Creating the sequences involved extraordinary coordination between all of the parties involved in the film. “We worked very tightly with the production designers, the set builders, the director and art director,” adds Frankel. “We even got involved with the grips. In one scene in Minority Report, with the spiders in the tenement, the camera shot would normally have mandated a custom-made motion control rig. The bids for such a rig were astronomical. Instead, we worked with the grips by running through previs sequences with different camera angles and found a way to track it with a regular crane. The grips practiced using the previs sequences, and nailed everything in one day of live shooting.”

Show Me the Money
Although previsualization is not cheap — the costs can range from $10K-$20K for a simple shot to more than $500,000 for an entire feature, the benefits of using previs nowadays have tremendous leverage, considering the costs of a major studio film. The rule of thumb is that a typical Hollywood film costs $100,000 a day to shoot, which means that an hour of discussion on the set to clear up confusion can cost more than $10,000. A major mistake — being suddenly unable to shoot a scene because a section of the set or a 20-foot crane is necessary but unavailable — can easily cost several days of shooting, not to mention frazzled nerves.

In Panic Room, previs helped the director and camera crew figure out a tracking shot.

The savings caused by previs doesn’t end with smoothly planned camera operation, but extends to the building of the set itself. “When we were working on X-Men, the production crew was in the process of building a very expensive 40-foot stone wall and a huge bluescreen,” says Darren Cranford, the founder of Keyframe (www.keyframe.ca), the first Canadian company that specialized in previs (their credits include X-Men, Driven, Exit Wounds and Bulletproof Monk). “But by creating the exact camera view — looking out of a jail cell — we noted that most of the wall and the area behind it were not visible on camera, so we were able to save a huge amount of construction. We use a mesh of five-foot squares as overlay on each scene, so we can tell exactly what size the practical (physically constructed) set really has to be.”

Previs is also useful for budgeting VFX shots, as seen here in X-Men 2. TM & © 2003 20th Century Fox. Courtesy of Keyframe Digital Prods. Inc.