Watchmen, with its all-CG Dr. Manhattan, contains complex design and vfx pipeline challenges. All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. ™ & © DC Comics.

A significant change is taking place in the film world as the use of visual effects increases dramatically. As we all know, it is not just the number of shots on a project; it is the complexity and scale of those masterpieces that are expanding rapidly. These changes say a lot about where we are heading as an industry.

Change Comes in Waves
If you look back through history, you see certain key films that have had a major impact, set a new style, and helped to revamp production as we know it. Once these became established, a new wave hit and things changed again.

A recent example, Sin City, was certainly a great landmark film in terms of design and visual effects. If we look back at the past 30 years, we can spot the films that made things happen, such as the original Star Wars, Alien and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In different ways, these films pushed the art of visual effects forward. We consequently realized that we could go further as storytellers.

Other waves followed, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Blade Runner in the early 1980s, the first Jurassic Park in the 1990s, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. They changed the way we tell stories, and will continue to do so for the filmmaking pipeline of the future.

Managing Complexity
Years ago, one artist did almost everything. He or she was the only person in front of the computer and controlling everything, right through to the final renders.

Now we're seeing those tasks broken down into ever finer specializations, with people doing rigging, others doing animation, some working on looks or surfacing, while even others focus on cloth, fur and so on.

This is especially true on large-scale films. Today, there are many more artists working on one project, and supervisors have to manage larger and larger groups of people, often in different locations. They have to keep communication flowing and the production wheels turning. For both large and small facilities, the biggest challenge now is turnaround time.

With the growth in the number and complexity of visual effects shots in filmmaking today, the challenge of efficiently tracking, visualizing and managing both data and metadata throughout the entire post-production/vfx pipeline is immense. What shots do you have? What's been approved? In what state is the project at this very moment? This was the thinking behind the development of our system at eyeon. Facilities needed ever more complex and comprehensive shot tracking and production management systems, compounded by shrinking budgets and schedules. This is already true today and will be more of an issue going forward.

You need a professional interface for that type of management. Generation is designed to be that front end -- a customizable system for supervising the whole post-production pipeline.