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Navigating 'The Triangle' for Efficient VFX

Tara DiLullo gets pulled into SCI FI Channels The Triangle with Volker Engel and Marc Weigert of Uncharted Territory.

Uncharted Territory is a different type of visual effects production company, with no full-time employees, permanent workstations or R&D. Above are creations of Columbus ships. All images courtesy of SCI FI Channel 2005.

The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle is one that has captivated imaginations since the late 60s, when the triangular-shaped watery grave for hundreds of unexplained sunken ships and crashed planes in the Atlantic Ocean was first documented and dubbed as such in print. Since then, numerous investigations, documentaries, television shows and films have detailed the vast selection of theories, from the bizarre to the mundane, for what could have caused all those boats and planes to come to their watery end in such a seemingly harmless, yet geographically specific area for the past 100 years. For those that like some paranormal possibilities spicing up those explanations, SCI FI Channel offers their epic six-hour dramatic miniseries, The Triangle (airing Dec. 5-7), which has Sam Neill, Catherine Bell and Eric Stoltz teaming up to uncover the truths of the oceanic graveyard with some surprising truth revealed. Night One was certainly a ratings triumph, as SCI FI's most watched miniseries premiere since Steven Spielbergs Taken.

While The Triangles unfolding mysteries are captivating to watch, the revelations of what it took to bring this monster miniseries to life are just as interesting. Covering three nights, six-hours and involving more than 900 visual effects shots, the responsibility of bringing all of those visuals to life fell on the shoulders of The Triangle producers and visual effects supervisors, Volker Engel and Marc Weigert. Co-founders of Uncharted Territory, an independent film production company based in Los Angeles, Engel and Weigert have been heavily involved in the visual effects world for the past 15 years. The pair first worked together on Independence Day (1996), where they forged a relationship with producer Dean Devlin, which eventually led them to The Triangle (Devlin exec produces with Bryan Singer). Engel explains, I got a phone call from Dean to get together and have a meeting. Mark and I met with Dean and he sent us a script of The Triangle and that was the key for us to take the project, because [screenwriter] Rockne S. OBannon had written an incredible script a great page-turner. Weigert enthusiastically continues, Its rare that you read something thats like 420 pages and you read it all in one go. Usually, we get so many scripts and sometimes we think, Do we really have to do this? Yet this one was the exact opposite.

Marc Weigert (left) and Volker Engel, co-founders of Uncharted Territory, became producers on the project. The advantage to the production is that they didnt serve just as vendors but as efficient producers.

The pair signed on as producers and the visual effects supervisors for The Triangle, which meant they now had a unique approach on how they proceeded with the project.

Weigert offers, Coming on board as producers, its was an advantage for Dean and Bryan [Singer], as we were not looking as the project as a pure vendor. Engel continues, There is a fundamental difference in views because a visual effects houses interest is to make as many shots for as much money as possible because thats what an effects house lives for. As producers, our interest is the opposite. We dont want to do as many shots; we want to do them as efficiently as possible. Wed rather not use the visual effects and try to do it for real, so it makes sense from a producing standpoint. We look at where we get the best possible production value and how to do it.

Uncharted Territory also has a very different dynamic for a visual effects production company. Aside from the pair, there are no full-time employees, permanent workstations or growing R&D departments. Surprisingly, the company literally lives and dies with each of its projects. Weigert details, We arent a visual effects company. Volker and I come on as producers of a project and set up for each project that we do basically, setting up a visual effects house from scratch. It means literally buying all the hardware, all the software and developing our own tools and then getting all the people in as freelancers and at the end of the project, we sell it all and then move onto the next one. Engel explains their approach saying, It mainly works for budgetary reasons. It has its disadvantages that you dont have an ongoing R&D effort like bigger houses can afford between projects. The advantages are that we dont have the overhead to pay for between projects and buying and selling the equipment is a lot cheaper than even renting, so it saves a lot of money. We can also custom hire exactly the kind of people that we need for each project. An existing effects house may have 20 compositors and 20 3D artists, but it may be the wrong combination for a specific project. When we work on the breakdown for a project, we know in the first couple of weeks the field of expertise we need to hire and we hire exactly who we need and pay for what we need.

Uncharted Territory literally lives and dies with each of its projects, and, as a result, Weingert doesnt consider UT as just a visual effects company.

On The Triangle, that handpicked team also had to work fast. Weigert continues, We had extremely little time. We started in April (2005) and knew the show was airing in the beginning of December (2005), which is a very short time frame for basically three feature films of 90 minutes each. It also had a multitude of effects. Usually, its nice and easy if there is one thing to concentrate on, like we have to do just ocean water, but this has so many things: underwater, over water, in the air, on land, helicopters exploding! There was a multitude of different things and that was the biggest problem to make it all happen. Engel points out, This is a project where you would normally involve five or six companies that focus on different fields and come with different fields of expertise. We just combined it all under one roof here. On this project, there was also so little pre-production time. A lot of it had to be done on the fly. So we split the task. I stayed here in Los Angles to prepare everything here and Mark went down with the crew to Capetown, South Africa, to work on the set. We also set up a little previs team in Capetown and another team here in L.A.

Keeping control of such a huge, international project ended up also playing into the strengths of Uncharteds expertise. Engel explains, For our management purposes, we break everything down by sequences. No matter where they are located in the script, we break them down so they fit together in terms of sequences. Like anything that takes place in a storm, we put it all together and we tried to have the same people working on it. Its small teams though. At our biggest, we had 29 artists 16 compositors and 12 3D artists. When you only have that many artists, you cannot afford to build teams that only work on certain sequences, but wed always try to have one 3D artist and one compositor that wed team up together and they would develop the look of something. To manage the details of the many shots and sequences, the company also relied on its automated database system, which was integral to streamlining the complicated production process. Engel details, We are using a database that Mark developed already on Independence Day, where he worked as the visual effects project manager. Its now a largely improved version of that database system that we are using and several processes have been automated and it helps us save time and we dont have as many middle management here.

On each project, UT comes on as producers and sets up for each project from scratch. Above are the Osprey helicopters created for the miniseries.

Weigert adds they had two programmers that created the automated tasks. With such a high number of shots, you cant make the artist responsible for knowing where to save things and how to save it; you have to have good management, in terms of version control. The way it works is that the artist goes into the database and starts a shot that is assigned to him, via a thumbnail or QuickTime files and then they start the shot. A file is created automatically utilizing whatever software is being used and then the artist starts working on the shot. When he is finished, he closes the software and tells the database to render. The database automatically takes the shot, puts the correct version number on it and renders it out via the render farm and places it into the right folder. The artist can look at it by clicking on the button and when he thinks it ready for us to see to possibly final it, then it automatically gets converted to QT, moved over to a HD preview and uploaded so we can see it. When we final a shot, a new version gets created, which automatically adds film grain to it, gamma correction and gets uploaded to the online editing system and put into the right place, then it gets FTPed to the FTP server and an email is sent out to all the producers that the shot is finished. The system has been in development for a few years, but the final touches were really just in the last half-year. As for the systems utilized to create the effects, Engel says, Compositing wise, we used Digital Fusion and After Effects and for a couple little shots, Combustion. It was simple off-the-shelf tools. For the 3D work, we used 3ds Max and a few plug-ins for water, like we used Dreamscape and a plug-in called RealFlow for all the particle animation.

With the database system handling the day-to-day technical management of the project, the Uncharted artists were then able to concentrate more on the creative aspects of the production. Explaining the particular challenges, Weigert offers, Its about the Bermuda Triangle, so theres a lot of scenes with water. We have a whaling ship sinking in some churning, bubbling ocean water. We have Christopher Columbus three ships from 1492 that were entirely computer-generated, which includes everything: the water, the sails, etc. We have an entire scene that takes place with a speedboat and Osprey helicopters chasing it in the middle of a storm. We had to create the storm water and the actual storm vortex with a weather seeker plane flying in good weather and through another storm.

UTs unique approach works for budgetary reasons because theres no overhead to pay between projects. Also, buying and selling equipment is a lot cheaper than renting. Plus, UT can custom hire for each project.

Also, the way that director Craig Baxter works is that he likes to be right in the middle of things. If a plane or submarine is going by, he wants to be from far away to literally a few inches away form the camera, which poses additional challenges to the computer animation because we need to make extremely high resolution texture maps. All the work is done in 2K, not TV resolution; its HD resolution. And like with any film, there were problems like the weather suddenly turned nasty or there wasnt time enough to light a bluescreen right, especially on a project like this... Sometimes, you already know at the shoot, this it is going to be a nightmare! You think, If we get this done at all and it looks good, its going to be a miracle, he laughs. We had a bunch of those things, but we were able at the end to be really happy that we did it and it looked seamless. For us, thats rewarding even though an audience may never know what it took to create.

Engel echoes that his favorite shots were seamless. One example, which was hopefully pretty invisible, were some establishing shots of a Boeing 747, that Mark shot as a miniature in Cape Town. For me, coming from Independence Day and having worked with miniatures a lot, I was very happy with some of the outside bluescreens that were shot in sunlight and we composited here together with cloud backgrounds that we got from still photos. They are some highly realistic shots.

Engel fell in love with some of the establishing shots of a Boeing 747, which were shot as a miniature in Cape Town. He was very happy with some of the outside bluescreens that were shot in sunlight.

Literally finishing the project six days before the airdate, Weigert and Engel are now very proud of what they were able to accomplish with The Triangle. Its about 900 visual effects shots in just about eight weeks of actual post-production time when we had the edit finished, Engel details. But we were running normal eight-hour days and we were very adamant about that, to keep five-day weeks for a long time, only until the very end, in the last two weeks, when we had to do two weekends of overtime. In every movie, even a $120 million feature film, there are always shots where you wish you had more time, but, to be honest, even with this high number of shots, there are very few shots we would want to do over again.

Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI-FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.

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