These days, you might hear VFX artists talking enthusiastically about boujou. No it's not some new French food trend. It's software designed by 2d3, which allows CG companies to accomplish what was previously painstaking work in record time, and with relative ease. boujou (boo-zhoo') is the industry’s first fully automated camera calibration and tracking system.

This Emmy award-winning software has been used in many major feature films including Scooby Doo, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Sum of All Fears, Black Hawk Down and the VES Awards sweeping Dinotopia mini series. Also used extensively in commercials, music promos and in architectural and industrial visualizations, boujou offers complete automation, accuracy and the ability to track difficult material. Now, VFX supervisors no longer cringe when a director conceives of a seemingly impossible tracking shot or special effect. Instead they say, "Bring it on. Let's boujou it!" We asked three VFX specialists for their opinion of the software and why they're fans of it.

Casey Conroy of Ring of Fire Advanced Media recalls how boujou tracked through a plane of leaves to save the day on a Toyota commercial.

Casey Conroy, Senior VFX Producer for Ring of Fire Advanced Media

As a visual effects boutique consistently working on high-end commercials, television, feature films and music videos, we frequently need to integrate photo-realistic CGI work into live-action material. This is an area where boujou really helps. boujou is also a great tool for complex tracking in 2D composites. In fact, it has become a verb in the jargon at Ring of Fire: "Let's boujou it!"

When we receive a backplate with a large perspective move, one of the first things we do is to set a camera track in boujou. We use the software for everything from the hardcore to the mundane, from spots for Toyota, Sony PlayStation 2 and Bud Light to TV episodics to music videos. It's an invaluable tool and an accepted part of our workflow.

boujou allows users to track through shots automatically, eliminating tedious hand tracking.

A recent project example involving boujou was a Toyota commercial filmed in Prague. The concept was that the Toyota Avalon gives you a lot of personal space. So the spot featured a man walking through an open courtyard lined with trees where leaves clear away around him as he goes by. The practical plates were shot with a big, booming camera move and several different motion control passes. To round out the shot, the agency wanted to put leaves across the entire ground plane not just where they had existed during the actual location shoot. We created a new plane of leaves in Inferno with production elements and used boujou to track this with the ground plane. The track in boujou was spot on from the get go, and the shot looked beautiful and totally natural. It was a great "save" by boujou, completed in under a day.

A recent episode of The Drew Carey Show presented a similar situation, where we had this big camera move and needed to add CG elements and new practical elements to the original live-action plates. The storyline featured office workers having a bit of fun doing the Riverdance on the street below while other office workers heave computers off the building above, causing computers and monitors to go smashing to the ground around them. As the scene developed, the producers wanted to add more and more computers. We created a number of CG computers and also shot computers practically striking the ground and shattering. boujou tracked the scene very quickly. Our expectations are pretty high with boujou and we were happy to see that the additional practical computers tracked in perfectly, giving the clients what they wanted.