VFXTalk.com Interviews Jim McVay & Colin Epstein; Hellboy Lead Compositors Part I –
June 27th, 2004,08:04 AM
Jim McVay
Firstly, I would like to thank you for your time and willingness to share your thoughts with all of us here at VFXTalk.com
It's my pleasure.
Could you please start off by introducing yourselves and giving us a little background information pertaining to your current job/role, and your background in the industry.
I'm Jim McVay, co-compositing supervisor on Hellboy here at Tippett Studio. I've been compositing and supervising at Tippett for about 8 years on both movies and commercials. Before joining Tippett as a compositor I worked as a CG 'jack of all trades' for a few different companies doing animating, modelling and lighting. Before that I worked as a freelancer doing set lighting and occasional camerawork on low budget features, TV movies and a Honeycomb Hut commercial, though that was in the art department. When I was just out of college I had some entry level jobs on a few tv shows, which was hard work for very low pay but I got to meet some very cool people like Jim Henson and Lauren Bacall. I basically tried a lot of different things in the movie business before ending up in CG.
What is your educational background, and what of it would you recommend or not recommend in hindsight?
I attended the film production program at USC (University of Southern California) where I concentrated on lighting, camerawork and animation. They even had a WWII era optical printer that I got to play around on, which was a lot of fun and was also my introduction to compositing. USC was great because I got the chance to try a lot of different areas of film making in a short time. That was very valuable to me because I wasn't certain what I wanted to do in the film business. It also helped when I got out because I didn't have any connections in the industry except through my friends at USC. They got me some jobs in the early days when I was starving for work.
That said, I strongly recommend making a movie of your own before heading off to film school. You'll find out very fast if film making is right for you because it's a lot of work! You'll either love it and not mind the work or you'll find something else to do with your life.
What made you choose compositing, what was the primary inspiration, and how long did it take before you finally 'made it' to the big league?
I chose compositing when I made it to the 'big league'. I'd been doing it in various forms beforehand but it was just one of the things I did. When Tippett hired me as a compositor for Starship Troopers I thought "I'll do this for this movie and then move into animation". However, by the end of Troopers I was hooked on compositing.
How much pure IT / programming experience do you have, and do you see a need for cross platform knowledge (i.e.: Mac / Linux / win32 etc) and the ability to program / script for an aspiring compositor?
I had no programming or Unix experience prior to joining Tippett. Since then I've learned a lot about scripting and how powerful the command line is. My advice is to learn at least the basics of some kind of scripting language - C shell, perl, python. You'll be glad you did. Also, these languages work on all the different computer platforms nowadays, not just Unix.
Most of the computer platforms seem to be converging now as far as basic functionality. The main thing to remember is they're just tools and should be used the way you'd use any tool. Learn a bit about all of them, at least how to navigate directories, launch apps and move files around.
What is the best & worst thing about working on feature films as compared to commercial/advertising/video work, and are there any funny stories that we just have to hear?
Feature films are great because the money is there to do complex, challenging shots. You get to do fun stuff like have a 300 foot tall amoeba burst out of the ground in the middle of a housing subdivision and crush everything. That was fun!
The worst thing about big feature films is that usually the writing is terrible. It's like there's a rule in Hollywood that as the budget rises the intelligence of the film must decrease, which means you end up doing great FX work in terrible movies that nobody cares about.
It's hard to generalize about commercials since they're all so different. The biggest influence on a commercial is usually the client. If you have a good relationship with the client then the commercial is likely to be fun to work on. The bad thing about commercials, especially local commercials, is that the ideas can be pretty stale. When I was doing those the clients frequently wanted a red, white and blue logo to fly out from behind a sphere of some kind. You can only get that request so many times before you want to tear your hair out!
What is your preproduction process before you turn on the computer?
Read the script. After that go through the script again with the storyboards, if you have them yet, and figure out what additional elements you might want beside the main CG element. Basically figure out what effect the CG creature/object would have on it's surroundings. Would it bleed, kick up dust, cause water splashes, make holes or footprints, etc... Then plan to acquire those things photographically or have them rendered by the FX department.
Once you figure out what you think you might need, start looking at a lot of reference material that shows those same things happening in the real world. The real world is the reference point that everyone seeing the movie will have, no matter how wacky the film is. The elements in your comp need to have some of those real world characteristics or they'll look fake.
Often we'll grab a video camera and go shoot our own reference. That's a really good thing to do as you'll usually end up discovering things you never would have imagined.
What experiences as Lead Compositors do you find the most rewarding?
That's easy - working with the rest of the crew. Film making is a group activity and I really love it when everybody has the same vision and we all work toward accomplishing it co-operatively. I like working with the compositors most of all because we speak the same language and it's exciting to me when somebody in our department really pulls off something great entirely in the comp. I also enjoy learning from the other compositors. We all have different backgrounds and strengths so my eyes are always getting opened up to new ways of solving problems.
What kind of responsibilities (if any) do Lead Compositors have during the recording of live footage that would be used for FX shots? (not just blue screen, but any kind of live footage).
If you're really lucky then you'll get to request certain things you need before a scene is shot. You can have an element shot on the set as opposed to having to fake it later. Or you can avoid having to do green screen if they shoot the scene in a certain way. Usually you don't get that luxury.
Any tools you swear by, and what about them you'd wish were better?
Shake, Maya, Photoshop, Linux/OSX, Twixtor for Shake, Renderman depth & normals renders, my digital still camera, mini DV and probably more that I've forgotten. They're all great tools but they could all use a lot of improving, too! The thing is to recognize what the right tool is for the job.
For Hellboy, are there any shots that you are particularly fond off. What could you have done better given more time?
My favourite sequence to lead was the underwater scene where Abe is collecting monster eggs and gets attacked by Sammael. The plates were shot dry and I got to design the procedures that made them look underwater. Something that I really wanted to do but didn't have the time or budget for, was to shoot smoke elements to overlay on the plates of the rooms. I know they did that on 'The Abyss' and I was hoping to give that a try.
The other thing we didn't have time to try would have been to extend some of the caustic light patterns in the original plate into our water treatment. That's not too hard to do given a static camera but these shots have some very big camera moves in them and there wasn't time to work out the technique.
I don't think the sequence suffers at all for not having those things, they're just some techniques that I'll have to try on some future show. I'm very proud of that sequence and the great work all the departments did on it. It also wouldn't have looked as good as it does without the extremely valuable direction from our great CG supervisor, Blair Clark and our fantastic director Guillermo Del Toro. Those are two very talented, artistic guys to work for!
Could you share your thought process on Colour Correction...i.e. When you look at raw footage, how do you go about correcting/analysing and then beautifying it later. Is it a numbers game or just is it more visual?
At Tippett we're lucky enough to have a great film IO department that color corrects all our plates for us. They work very hard to make sure all our shots exactly match the surrounding, non-effects shots in the film. I know from working with them very closely on some shows that it's a bit of both numbers and visual 'taste'.
Do you use most of the extra channels provided by .rla or proprietary file types often. Has it changed the way you work or could you do without them?
I would hate to have to work without depth and normals files. There are a tremendous number of uses for those two kinds of renders. Our standard output from the lighters is to get separated diffuse, specular, reflection, depth, normals, shadows and various masks of creature/object parts. We get those for everything we render and we use them all!
All of those render layers let us make the best looking CG possible in the shortest time. While the lighters could conceivably achieve all the same things we do in the comp they never have the time do so. Our 2d Shake renders are just an order of magnitude faster to revision than are 3D renders.
Apart from following strict guidelines whilst working within a post production team, what effects do you like to pursue and experiment with? How far do you like to push things visually & do you have a certain style or technique that you really like?
I don't really have a favourite effect though I do seem to end up with a lot of water sequences, which I do really enjoy working on. Probably my favourite tool is color curves because it gives you such specific control of the image. I'm always pushing that one on the new compers.
To me the best effects are invisible to the viewer, they're just accepted as real. I guess that would mean my favourite style or technique is adding an organic 'feel' to CG renders, what we refer to as 'mussing up the renders'. One of the most fun ways to do that is to add photographic elements of dust, water, blood, fire, sparks, etc... in the comp and working on them until they're indistinguishable from the original plate.
How much you can alter on a director's mind and vision?
That depends entirely on how much they want your input. You can't push something on a director that they don't want, all you can do is tempt them with delicious images. Hopefully you both meld your visions together into something that's better than either of you could achieve on your own.
Every film can provide its own set of challenges, but for each of you, what has been the greatest challenge to overcome on Hellboy?
My big challenge was the look of the underwater fight between Abe Sapien and Sammael that I describe above. I'm very pleased with how the final shots look and how (relatively) easy it was for the other compers to pick up the techniques I developed for the underwater 'look'.
Who do you look up to, who / what inspires you creatively?
I look up to my co-workers, who are an incredibly creative group of people. Certainly my biggest influences when I started at Tippett were Phil Tippett and Craig Hayes. Phil's focus on what a shot was about, on refining that idea until it was unescapably clear and completely natural was something I'd never been exposed to at such a high level before. Craig opened up my eyes, literally, to seeing color and detail with far more precision than I knew was possible. He really showed me how to dissect an image and then add to it in a very natural seeming way.
What does the next 12 months have in store for you guys, and where would you like to see your self in the short to midterm?
Even though we just finished 'Hellboy' I've been pretty busy. I helped out with five shots on 'Stepford Wives', comped one shot for a 'Kibbles & Bits' commercial and am currently supervising the compositing of the shots we're doing for 'Catwoman'. Once we're done with 'Catwoman' I'm hoping to spend some time documenting a lot of the techniques that the comp department has developed in the last year. After that I'm open to whatever comes along at the studio.
Where do you see the Post Production industry in the next year or so?
We've delivered our last three films digitally as well as on film negative so I expect that will become the norm. Digital isn't just for special effects anymore. More theatres will probably being showing films digitally, too, though I hope they can continue to improve the projectors.
Do you feel that the recent boom in VFX is just a 'tech fad' or is it here to stay and remain in such high demand, and what is your opinion on the popularity of full CG features?
No, VFX is not a fad, it has been a part of films since the birth of cinema. What I hope is a fad is this idea that a film doesn't need a good story or characters as long as it has expensive VFX in it. That road leads to disaster so the sooner the studios drop it the better. Pixar understands this very well and makes wonderful all CG features. I hope more studios follow their lead. And I hope Tippett does a feature of it's own, too!
People, especially film reviewers, don't seem to understand that CG is just a set of tools. If people want to use those tools to make entire movies then I say 'Great!', but don't blame the tools when the film is bad. Just look at films like 'Finding Nemo', 'The Triplets of Belleville' and 'Spirited Away'. Those were great stories with wonderful characters that used a combination of CG and cel animation. All three are beautiful to look at but that was because of the talent of the people using the tools, not the tools themselves.
Can tell that this is a sore spot for me? Grrr!
What sequences was Tippett responsible for on Hellboy?
We worked on all the fights between Hellboy and Sammael, Sammael hunting down BPRD agents underground, Abe in his tank at the BPRD, Abe collecting eggs and being attacked by Sammael, the baby Hellboy at the start of the film and the Behemoth monster at the end of the film.
What were the major challenges unique to Hellboy's production? Why? How were these challenges overcome?
There were so many challenges on this film. The creation of the underwater environments, the close up acting of our CG stunt doubles, the interaction of CG creatures fighting in real water, visualizing Sammaels 'kirby energy' and the all-CG shots at the end of the film were all big challenges. Each one of those situations uniquely challenged different departments.
The underwater environments were very compositing intensive since we were changing the look of the plates quite a bit. The close ups of the CG Hellboy and Sam were major challenges to the animators, modellers and painters since they had to cut very closely with close ups of the real Hellboy and Sammael. The FX animation department had a similar challenge in making CG water for the multi Sammael fight that could cut directly with shots of real water sloshing around fighting stuntmen.
Visualizing the kirby energy that symbolized Sammaels soul was probably toughest on Blair since he had to take a stationary 2D effect from the comic book medium and translate that to film. Guillermo wanted it to look the way the great comic artist Jack Kirby drew energy (hence the name 'kirby energy') but it had to actually move like it was alive, too! That was one of the first effects we started work on and almost the last one to be finished.
The all-CG church set for the Behemoth fight was very tough on the painters because there were so many parts to paint, plus the usual problem of cutting directly with shots of the real set. There was very little time left in the schedule at that point and the Behemoth, with all its tentacles, was also not finished. It took some superhuman effort to accomplish those tasks and still finish the film on time.
Colin Epstein
Firstly, I would like to thank you for your time and willingness to share your thoughts with all of us here at VFXTalk.com
More than welcome 
Could you please start off by introducing yourselves and giving us a little background information pertaining to your current job/role, and your background in the industry.
I'm Colin Epstein, one of the Compositing Leads at Tippett Studio. As such, I've either supervised or co-supervised the compositing for a number of shows here. My entire film career has been here at Tippett, since 1996, when I was hired to work on "Starship Troopers" after learning what little I knew at the time working on industrials and videos at a small video post house in Los Angeles.
What is your educational background, and what of it would you recommend or not recommend in hindsight?
I have a BA in English, which obviously has little bearing on what I do these days. But I took lots of studio art classes throughout high school and college, which has had a pretty big influence on my profession. Also, I got a bit of an automatic film history education, as my father taught film history at UCLA and later at Loyola Marymount University. So without trying, just by going to "dad's work," I got fantastic exposure to all sorts of visual storytelling techniques going back to silent film.
Since I wasn't going to school expressly to end up working in film effects, I don't regret any of the choices I made in my education. I pursued whatever interested me, what I had a passion for, and it's that impulse, combined with a good dose of luck, that got me to my current job. Obviously, someone who has their heart set on a career in visual effects would choose a different path, and probably should, but I always encourage people not to shut themselves off from strange but fascinating opportunities, as you can never tell where they might lead. I ended up in this line of work through a series of events that all hinged on wanting to try obscure things that just seemed cool, from theatrical costume design to sword fighting.
For anyone aspiring to our line of work, along with all the standard software that's taught, I heartily recommend a good dose of studio art, which teaches you a lot about observation, composition, and attention to detail. I also recommend film history and production, so you have a lot of visual and practical information to draw from. Knowing what other people have done, you can either steal from the best when you need to, or avoid repeating what has been done before. The wider the frame of reference you bring to the job, the more effective a storyteller you'll be with your shots. Now that there are schools for visual effects popping up all over the place, we get a lot of reels from people who may know how to fire up a copy of Shake or Maya, but don't seem to bring anything else to the picture. It can be maddening to refer to a movie that existed before Star Wars and draw blank stares.
What made you choose compositing, what was the primary inspiration, and how long did it take before you finally 'made it' to the big league?
I just sort of fell into compositing by virtue of becoming the main 2D guy at Motion City, the small post house Jim McVay and I worked at years ago in L.A. It was very uncompartmentalized there, and everyone (all three of us!) were just called animators, and we all did several different things. Because my first tasks there were complex 2D shots, I just ended up doing lots of 2D animations and morphs. So after three years there, doing a smattering of 3D, but mostly 2D stuff, I applied to Tippett. After surprising me by hiring me, they rightly figured I'd do the most good in compositing. I had never worked anyplace with such a segmented pipeline (which shows the level of my experience), but it worked out really well.
As to how long it took me to make it to the Big Show, I guess that would be about three years. With no digital skills, I was hired at Motion City to answer the phones, and started learning Photoshop between calls. After two months of learning on my own (and not being the best receptionist), I was bumped up to the catch-all position of animator, and I learned everything else entirely on the job. I had to learn every new piece of software while doing a shot on whatever was in house at the time. It was a great way to learn how to create polished work and solve problems while under very tight deadlines. After three years, and one too many industrials, I put a reel together. I answered a Cinefex ad for Tippett Studio which was crewing up for Starship Troopers, and got the job.
It was an amazing jump to go from such small, low budget video projects to this massive multi-million-dollar film. Since it was my first movie project, there was a lot more on-the-job training involved, I learned a lot during the year Troopers was in production, and have been at Tippett ever since.
How much pure IT / programming experience do you have, and do you see a need for cross platform knowledge (i.e.: Mac / Linux / win32 etc) and the ability to program / script for an aspiring compositor?
I have virtually none, sad to say. I can doctor some of the basic scripts we have here when I really need to, but I'm not the technical guy around here by any means. I do work on different platforms, with a Mac and a Linux box on my desk, and can pop around in a command line shell pretty well, but that's just stuff I've learned to get me through the day. I think having programming skills is a definite plus, and compers here with those skills have built tools that really help. I wish my mind worked more in that direction, frankly. But since what compositors do here is put the final touches on images, I'd consider a strong visual eye and efficient problem solving skills more important than being able to comp entirely in code. I've seen technically brilliant people struggle with the look issues, and since images are what we make, that becomes a major weakness. But like all the old school disciplines I mentioned earlier, the more you bring to the plate, the better you can handle what's thrown your way.
What is the best & worst thing about working on feature films as compared to commercial/advertising/video work, and are there any funny stories that we just have to hear?
The best thing by far when comparing film work with video is the insulation from clients. At the video house where I worked before Tippett, you often had somebody who had no clue about what you did giving you "creative" direction.
They always want something "new and different" as long as they've seen it before. I once went mad trying to design something for a TV movie about a flight to Mars, only to be told by the clients that none of my ideas were "futuristic" enough. They finally showed me what they had in mind: the NASA logo designed in the 60's. I gave them something that looked like it came from an episode of "Lost in Space," and they loved it. Very frustrating experience.
Thankfully at Tippett, when we're working on films only a small group of people interacts with the directors or studio producers. When you have a good team of those folks, like we did on Hellboy with Blair Clark as our effects Supervisor and Alex DeSouza as our Effects Producer, they can do all the talking, and accurately and eloquently express what's possible and what isn't within time and budget constraints. This means the demands on the rest of the crew are more realistic and we're free to just do our best work.
What is your preproduction process before you turn on the computer?
It depends on the film. For Hellboy, Guillermo and his little pre-production crew storyboarded almost the entire film with pen and paper, so they'd know just where they'd need to spend a budget that was a lot smaller than most Hollywood films of this sort. So before Tippett was even involved, tons and tons of careful previsualization had been done. A small group of us are then shown the boards with descriptions of just what need to happen in the shot, and we try to figure out how to do it, how many people it will take, how long, etc. That's all part of estimating not only the techniques, but also the cost for each shot. While this is common practice for any FX picture, the level of extremely specific decisions made on Hellboy before we were a part of it was impressive.
Based on the cost and time estimates, shots might be changed conceptually, or cut altogether. On this show, some shots were reassigned to smaller, less-expensive shops so the production could stay on budget and still have certain key sequences handled by Tippett Studio, which Guillermo was very keen on after our collaboration on Blade II. A few of our animators also did complex and beautifully dynamic animatics of certain sequences, which were done on computer of course, but well before I ever fired up Shake for this show.
What experiences as Lead Compositors do you find the most rewarding?
The two aspects of being a Lead Compositors I like best are working with the team, and having a hand in the look and techniques for a given sequence.
The first just has to do with working with the other compositors, making sure they're getting what they need in a timely fashion to get the job done. If they're having trouble with a shot, I lend whatever creative or technical advice I can, usually trying to present a simpler way to achieve an effect that they're struggling with. That makes the process easier to understand and teaches folks how to make a faster, more efficient comp. The reverse is when they show me something I've never seen before, which also rocks. Since you're constantly interacting with the other compers, you can be exposed to a lot of great ideas.
If the renders they're expecting aren't showing up, or have issues, I try and see if we can get these speed bumps smoothed out sooner rather than later. This job always comes with stress and deadlines, but I do my best to make sure that there isn't any more needlessly added to the mix.
I also get a big kick out helping design a look for certain effects or sequences. Some sequences are a lot more comp-intensive than others, requiring multiple layers of treated renders to arrive at the final look. Working out what that final look is, and which specific elements we need to get there is extremely challenging. Then you get to design a comp process that achieves that look as simply as possible, then pass that on to the other compers on the sequence so that they can get at least a huge head start by just plugging in the similar renders for their shot. Jim McVay had such a challenge on Hellboy with all of the underwater sequences featuring Abe Sapien. Since I was mostly dealing with fight sequences on Hellboy, I had less of a technical look challenge, though there was some of that for all the water interaction on the Sam Hive fight. I spent more of my time making sure that whatever dynamics we could add to the shots were in there. This usually meant keeping a close eye on explosive dust and spittle elements that added comic book style impact to the blows and falls and making sure they had a consistent feel throughout the sequences without either becoming too repetitive or seeming fake.
What kind of responsibilities (if any) do Lead Compositors have during the recording of live footage that would be used for FX shots? (not just blue screen, but any kind of live footage).
This depends entirely on the show, and what type of footage is being shot when. For Hellboy, all the Tippett plate photography was under the watchful eye of Blair Clark over in Prague, and he had asked some questions about certain comp issues to look out for before going over there. That kind of invitation for input is great. Where we almost always have a hand is in any additional elements shot here at Tippett. We have a shooting stage, and almost every show requires some additional practical element shoots of some sort. For Hellboy, for example, we shot a lot of splashing and flinging drops of water against black to add into the Baby Hellboy sequence for when he's moving around in the rain. I supervised a lot of that, sometimes from behind the camera, and sometimes out front, flinging water around myself.
Any tools you swear by, and what about them you'd wish were better?
We use Shake to comp our shots, and it's a real workhorse of a program. I wish the way it managed things like editing and shifting key frames in time was more robust, and there are a few other snags in the program, but it's both extremely fast and extremely powerful. there are also others we turn to for certain things, like Photoshop and After Effects, that I'd never want to give up.
For Hellboy, are there any shots that you are particularly fond off. What could you have done better given more time?
There are two shots I did personally that I'm fond of. One is the shot in the Library fight where Sam slams Hellboy into the ground twice, swinging him over head like BamBam from the flinstones. It's just such an absurd, dynamic comic book moment, and adding in all the dust and debris and camera wobble was really fun. The other is a much simpler shot, the "group photo" of Baby Hellboy with Broom and the soldiers that find him at the film's opening. It was one of the easiest shots I've ever done, so that part of it's no big deal, but it's an iconic image from the comic, and I was glad to bring it to life. There are shots by other folks I love, like the chaotic splashing battle between Hellboy and all the Sams that was comped by Dan Cayer, or a number of the lovely underwater shots. I would've loved to do some of those as well, but the one big drawback to being a lead is that since you have to keep tabs on everyone else's work and go to meetings and all that, you don't have time to do some of the really juicy complicated shots.
As for what we could have used more time on, I'd have to say the final Behemoth Sequence. Not because I think it looks bad, far from it, but it came at the very tail end of our schedule, and there were certain extra bits of finesse I know we all wanted to add that we had no time for. Since the shots included not only the giant monster, but often a CG version of Hellboy and a CG version of the set, both of which had to cut with the real thing, it was extremely challenging. One all-CG Behemoth shot had four compers working on it at once, each handling a separate part and then combining all their shake projects into one. That was the only way we could get it done in time. Thanks to some great communication and the strength of the team, all those bits came together beautifully and the shot was finalled the first time it hit film, but that kind of mania is something we like to avoid when we can. I personally ended up working straight through the night to get my last behemoth shot done, and that's never ideal. The fact that the Behemoth Sequence came out looking as good as it does is a real testament to our crew since it was all done in about two months.
Could you share your thought process on Colour Correction...i.e. when you look at raw footage, how do you go about correcting/analysing and then beautifying it later. Is it a numbers game or just is it more visual?
All our plates are color corrected by our Film IO Department, based on the wishes of the cinematographer. That happens before the TD's light the renders to match those plates and before we start comping. So we don't change the plate at all, excepting things like the heavy treatment we gave the flooded factory shots to make dry empty sets look like they were underwater. When we are color correcting, it's usually tweaking a render or a practical element to fit into the plate as seamlessly as we can. In those cases, finding things like the min and max values in each color channel of a plate can certainly help in making sure your characters fall in with the plate. I use such numbers as a starting point and then make fine adjustments by eye, often using a screen gamma tool we have to bang the image around and make sure it doesn't fall apart when made much brighter or darker.
Do you use most of the extra channels provided by .rla or proprietary file types often. Has it changed the way you work or could you do without them?
We have a number of different image and file formats that we constantly use for all sorts of different purposes. It can be as simple as something like masks rendered to separate RG and B channels to allow us to isolate specific parts of a character and make adjustments to them, or something as complex and proprietary as the images we render out that a Shake node we wrote uses to warp a plate to follow 3d animation, which we used for the opening of Reaper maws in Blade II or to add turbulent ripples to some very calm water in Hellboy's fight with all the Sams. Those sort of tools, along with things like depth and normals renders, allow us all sorts of control on massaging our images, and I'm extremely glad to have them. We could probably achieve many of the same visual results without them, but it would take so much more time, involving either complete re-renders of animation, or lots and lots of roto work. So as these various render types have appeared over the years I've been here, it's certainly sped things up and enabled us to do things we couldn't have done in comping before, and has added an incredible amount of finesse into what we do.
Apart from following strict guidelines whilst working within a post production team, what effects do you like to pursue and experiment with. How far do you like to push things visually & do you have a certain style or technique that you really like?
I personally tailor whatever I'm doing to the project. Since Hellboy's a comic book movie, and a Guillermo Del Toro movie on top of that, I knew that "Bigger than Life" was the way to go. If Sam gets socked in the jaw, there needs to be an explosion of drool. If Hellboy falls hard, dust flys everywhere and the camera shudders. I love that sort of stuff. As much as I enjoy and admire "invisible" effects like set extensions and crowd replications and other things that the audience won't notice, I got interested in effects by movies that showed me the fantastic and impossible, and that's a tradition I enjoy being a part of.
Stay tuned VFXTalk'ers, Part II of this Interview with Jim & Colin will have us delving deep into some of their shot breakdowns as well as the rest of the interview. Part II will bring all the magic, the tips 'n tricks of the trade from one of the best post production facilities in the world!
Links: Tippett Studio http://www.tippett.com
Image Above: Tippett proprietary muscle system for Abe Sapien model
Image Above: Original background plate
Image Above: CG Abe. Abe depth maps and edge outline used to make him more blue, wrap some plate onto his edges and blur his body. Palm and hand depth maps used to create palm color changes which show Abe pressing against the glass. Plate itself used as a bluescreen for Agent Myers. Additional window reflections from another plate tracked and keyed over Abe. Lamp reflection over Abes face lowered to chest area.
Image Above: Same treatment as above but more subtle
Image Above: Same treatment as above but a harder reflection plate track
Image Above: CG Sam on wall. Practical steam elements added to back building and behind wall. Depth renders used to subtly push Sam's rear leg into the steam behind him and cast shadows onto it as well. Foreground steam is practical element also. Shadow from the steam onto the wall simply the steam element stretched and tilted into a new position and used to darken the plate. All of the above carefully cut with blurred roto around out of focus Hellboy. CG extension to building, foreground pipe and fire escape
Image Above: Closer shot of same. Most of same tricks apply, though later in shot huge glowing green bullet streaks in and blasts Sam off the wall in a splat of glowing FX animated goo. CG extension to building, foreground pipe and fire escape
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