According to Kevin Baillie of The Orphanage, using boujou lets them employ fewer people to accomplish the same job as quickly as larger studios.

The Orphanage used boujou to help produce this time lapse shot of a New York high rise which builds itself in the Cher video for Song of the Lonely. © Warner Bros Records.

This time, a turn of the century building rises up by itself with the help of boujou in the same Cher video. © Warner Bros Records.

Kevin Baillie, CG Supervisor for The Orphanage, Inc.

boujou has been a mainstay for us from the day we bought the software, whether for television or motion picture projects. By contrast to studios where dozens of people will be working on match moves for weeks, we have one or two artists, depending on the show, who use boujou to track shots reliably in a few hours.

On a recent film, the upcoming sequel Jeepers Creepers 2, we used boujou to track in a CG creature during a nighttime chase scene successfully. The live-action footage featured actors in a speeding car, shot from a moving truck. With irregular terrain and grass flying by, the scene would have taken an inordinate amount of time to track by hand. We fed the material into boujou and the application then calculated a perfectly accurate solution to allow us to place the CG character into the scene. On long, complex shots like this, using boujou can cut two to three weeks off of the completion time.

A music video we created for Cher’s single Song for the Lonely required us to replace New York City structures shot in frame with CG replicas that were animated as if they were building themselves up from scratch in time-lapse fashion. We took HD footage of the camera panning up on the buildings, removed the buildings and rebuilt them digitally. boujou was used to track the shots to place all of the digital elements correctly, as well as to solve for the motion of what the camera was doing for shots involving a green screen set.

As you can imagine, 3D match moving is incredibly intense. Its complexities have often relegated directors to doing locked-off shots instead of interesting camera moves and sweeps. Here is where the availability of software like boujou is making a big difference for what’s being attempted and achieved. From the artist’s perspective, we don’t really think, “Oh, no!” when we get a shot that has some crazy camera move. We actually get excited because it inspires us to test and push the envelope. If we didn’t have new enabling technologies on hand, we might never push ourselves and our jobs would just become boring over time.

Darlene Chan is managing editor of Animation World Magazine. After receiving a bachelor's degree from UCLA, Darlene happened into the motion picture business and stayed for 14 years. She served as a production executive for Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures, Davis Entertainment and Motown. She produced Grumpy Old Men (1993) for Warner Bros. In 2001, she joined Animation World Magazine.