Videa created this tunnel for Marcinelle, the story of a real coal mine disaster.

This work was an unprecedented use of time and creativity that could have been avoided if the supervising staff had been involved during the shoot. Moreover, we would have had a better starting point if they had used good film stocks such as Kodak SFX200; it is a special negative that has a better response for green and bluescreen shooting, but not too many people know of its existence in Italy.

Anyway, the up and coming digital intermediate process is giving a great hand in this sense, because cinematographers have now more chances to become familiar with new tools and techniques, and it will probably help educate them more deeply. In this regard, Cinecittà Studios, which owns a large DI department with great equipment and professionals, is conducting good work.

Fortunately, our experience on Marcinelle, a true life story of a coal mine disaster which utilized 27 minutes of CGI, was a much better project. It wouldn’t have been possible to face daunting work like this without suitable pre-production planning, and for that reason a meticulous supervising phase and carefully planned shoot were precious and irreplaceable. This show comprised fog, haze, fire, water, digital backlot, digital stunts and more, so I spent about a month inside a big soundstage supervising the second unit with the stunt coordinator, and writing lots of vfx log pages.

Those scenes included dropping stunts, greenscreens, real fire blasts and water pumping sequences. Obviously we shot thinking in advance what we would have put in post to enhance this hell.

During post work, though, we realized that some original sequences seemed very unrealistic, so we tried to reproduce them entirely using CGI. The final results were really amazing, and after the director’s approval we were pleased to substitute the original shots with ours. They included sequences depicting digital stunts falling into precipices (3D digital backlot) and eaten by flames that we realized in CGI or shot in a backstage and then composited.

Almost every operator from the company worked on this show, facing difficult sequences to matchmove, especially those comprising digital backlot of the elevator’s shaft. This was due to the subtle waves of the motion picture camera on set, which was not well locked to the fake lift; so this burdened the matching work. Several scenes needed also to enhance debris, so we went for a hybrid solution with CGI elements and other real stuff captured in front of our bluescreen.

By the way, the bluescreen stage is the real “tip of diamond” of the company; it satisfies a great deal of our shooting needs, also offering a reliable lighting system that is driven by a dedicated digital console. Moreover, video cameras such as Digital Betacam or HD that you can use in the blue box can be directly linked to framestore systems or the main server, allowing fast captures of the footage.

Originally, the digital-unfriendly director of Francesco was set on cutting out all the backlot Videa created, but instead used everything.

In Marcinelle and other productions we felt the need to optimize our production processes in order to reduce bottle-necks while always keeping a higher quality of work. One method was to develop new proprietary software plugins, so recently Videa signed a very important partnership with the Mathematics and Communication Science and Media department of the University of Tor Vergata of Roma, allowing an R&D team to be created inside our company. This profitable collaboration permits new graduate students to practice their ideas while serving our needs, marking Videa as one of the first Italian companies to enlist an R&D department inside its facilities.

Coming from different backgrounds, the first step was an alignment of their knowledge with ours by showing them our results and expectations. We had to educate them about “visual results” because very often scientists are more prone to study events or simulation with scientific points of view that are not necessarily visually-based. We also had to teach them that sometimes a good simulation can result in a bad visual result even if mathematically correct.