Here at Lost Boys Learning we take great pride in our industry connections and three times a year we take our students on a tour of our favorite Visual Effects shops. This gives the students the opportunity to see the broad range of working environments available to them as well as to develop key industry connections giving them a strategic advantage upon graduation. This time through we visited Spin, The Embassy, LUX, and Rainmaker’s Motion Capture studio.
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First up was Spin Vancouver (Spin also has studios in Toronto, Los Angeles and Atlanta). The Vancouver studio’s key television credits include Stargate SG1/Atlantis and Steven King’s Kingdom Hospital. Software of choice appeared to be Maya and Shake.[URL=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462465/]
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Recently their focus has been on another epic VFX Film called Outlander (Vikings, Aliens, and Spaceships… until the film is officially released I can’t say much more). Thousands of shots and over a year later Spin Vancouver is now re-emerging to see the light of day. Doug Campbell, President and VFX Supervisor, took us through an enlightening “making of” montage highlighting some of the more intensive sequences in the film. I’ve been involved in this biz long enough to know when someone deserves a purple heart for a tough battle well fought. My hats off to all that contributed to this challenging project!
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From there we took a quick break for lunch just down the street from Spin in one of Vancouver’s many beautiful parks down at Kits Point.
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After lunch we headed across town to visit the pride of Vancouver’s boutique VFX shops, The Embassy. I remember first taking notice of this shop several years back when the Citroen “Alive with Technology” spot came out (car transforms into robot and boogies down).
I’ve always been impressed with their ability to push the photorealistic rendering on their projects to very high levels. They also consistently leverage motion capture effectively which adds to the illusion of photorealism.
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After all their successes with photorealistic mechanical characters it was an obvious choice that they be awarded work on the recent Iron Man movie. They handled the Mark 1 sequence creating full CG suit solutions as well as fire augmentation and rig removal.
Were were lucky enough to receive a quick demo of their pipeline on Iron Man. The highly detailed model was built in Modo and ZBrush, referencing 3D scans from Gentle Giant Studios. From there the model was brought into XSI for animation (motion capture data applied and tweaked) then point baked out to Lightwave for shaders, lighting and rendering. With final composites into the live action plates using Shake. After attempts to create realistic fluid fire effects using Next Limit’s Realflow for the flamethrower effects Embassy made the decision to outsource the fire to the fluid/fire experts at Scanline VFX for generation in its proprietary dynamics software Flowline.
What a great thrill to have the opportunity to peer behind the curtain on such an amazing sequence. Congratulations to the Embassy and all their artists for all their hard work. It was inspiring to see such a compact Canadian boutique studio standing toe to toe with the big Hollywood studios.
So what’s next for Embassy? All they could do was tease us with the information that it involves bugs and Neil Blomkamp. Sounds juicy!
To be continued...
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Our third tour took place just a few blocks away at the relatively new studio LUX VFX. LUX has been creating VFX for commercials, television series and film. They were currently in production for the SciFi (Channel) series Eureka. LUX started up a few years back and has steadily been building its reputation as a high quality VFX boutique. With several VFX intensive films and a steady flow of television series work they are making excellent progress in their bid to stake out a niche in the competitive VFX industry. From what I could see on the tour their primary 3D software appeared to be Maya.
Best of luck to LUX on their future endevours. It’s good to see more artist driven shops competing in the Vancouver market.
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Last stop on our tour was Rainmaker’s motion capture division. I always enjoy seeing these guys. There is a very good vibe whenever we visit. They operate independently from the main studio and are given the freedom to do things in their own unique style (work hard, play hard). We arrived just as they were finishing up a motion capture session for a popular Mattel production. We were allowed to watch them in action and see how a Director works with the talent to get what he needs. They were running a Vicon optical motion capture system interfacing with Motion Builder.
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Just as we thought we had run out of time the session wrapped. With a little charm and puppy dog eyes we were able to convince the crew to share a little more of their precious Friday afternoon time (not to mention an offering of cold beer undoubtedly assisted our cause!). One of our students, Nick Knudson, quickly suited up and did a little show for us. Nick is particularly interested in character animation and performance so it was quite a rush to see how enthusiastic he was. Skin tight suit covered in shiny balls with 16 cameras all on him. Clearly Nick was in heaven.
http://www.vfxtalk.com/portfolios/data/500/Nick_Mocap.flv
Ed Grimly’s either going to sue you or send you a thank you card… you’re putting him back on the map!
Feel free to ask me for any further details! I'll do my best to get you some answers.
Cheers,
M
Lost Boys Learning offers a one year intensive diploma program, providing Visual Effects Training for Film and Television in a studio environment. We are currently taking applications for the 2008-2009 program. Full details are available on our website at www.lostboys-learning.com.