Greenlight for inCartainment

IBC

Self-driving cars are an inevitability and will unlock the potential for vehicles to transform into a new market for immersive media.

It’s time to stop thinking of the car as a Jetsons-style entertainment pod. Autonomous vehicles are the next entertainment frontier and content producers are being urged to get in the fast line.

https://www.ibc.org/consume/driving-content-into-vehicles/5363.article

“Self-driving cars will turn us all into passengers and make the ‘moving living room’ a reality,” says Sol Rogers, CEO and founder of UK-based immersive content producer REWIND. “A media revolution is on its way.”

For the content industry, the car is a new revenue stream enabling new advertising models and new consumer experiences. Broadcasters and content suppliers should be incentivised to take their content on the road and become a part of a true TV Everywhere experience.

“People are already watching entertainment in the car via 4G, and soon 5G, as well as via in-car WiFi,” says Neale Foster, CEO of automotive software developer, ACCESS Europe. “But soon consumers will be able to enjoy a hyper-personalised in-car entertainment experience that combines the lean-back experience of TV with deeper relationships with car manufacturers.”

As passengers shift from being drivers to riders, their connected-device time, including video-viewing, will increase. This new ‘passenger economy’ could be worth U$800 billion by 2035, according to Intel, and a staggering U$7 trillion by 2050. It includes a U$200 billion pot specifically related to video entertainment that will emerge as pilotless vehicles transform the ‘cabin’ into an immersive entertainment platform.

“The in-vehicle experience is the most important differentiating feature for car manufacturers,” says Ivan Dimkovic, senior solutions engineering manager and co-founder at German software developer Cinemo. “Screen real estate will increase and the general aim is to convert as much space as possible into some entertainment enabling device.”

Coming in from the rearRear seat entertainment (RSE) has been around for nearly a decade primarily through disc and video played back on passenger phones and tablets. Latterly vehicles with built-in 4G connectivity and rear seat entertainment units have become more prevalent – particularly in the luxury and Multi-Purpose Vehicle car categories but it’s in the mid to budget range where the biggest shift in in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) will occur.

“Car buyers want seamless access to whatever media sources they use when not in the vehicle,” says Steve Crumb, executive director at GENIVI, a cross-industry IVI development group supported by Honda, BMW, Daimler, Garmin, Qualcomm, Nvidia and more.

In-car solutions should be able to push content from one connected device to another and continue from the exact same point in time, while compliant with studio requirements for content protection – just like connected media in the home or on the smartphone. They should also enable multi-screen experiences for different passengers. The car itself may ‘learn’ how to provide better responses to the driver’s voice commands and recognise who is in the car at any given moment.

“The performance of the streaming will also be important,” Crumb says. “Does the car stay connected and recover quickly when connectivity is compromised? 5G will help but it may not always be available everywhere.”

Cars with larger and better integrated radio antennas will enjoy superior reception. Devices within the vehicle connected via in-car WiFi hotspots will in turn benefit from this more reliable connectivity. However, cellular network coverage and data rates do fluctuate and technologies such as Adaptive Bitrate streaming, local caching and pre-downloaded content libraries will help to deliver a consistent user experience.

Elastic contentWhile regular streaming services like Netflix and Spotify are beginning to be ported to the car (Telsa has announced Netflix and YouTube streaming in its cars though not yet a date) more transport-specific content experiences are being imagined.

“Video services will begin to be edited on-the-fly to provide content and information tailored to an individual’s journey and interests,” suggests Foster.

School drop-offs and longer commutes will necessitate a different type of media. German manufacturer Audi calls this time ‘The 25th Hour’ and suggests that media formats like feature films are compromised by travel – in much the way we have to terminate a movie on an aeroplane when landing.

“With more electric vehicles on the road there’s an incentive for producers to produce specialised content for drivers/passengers waiting for the car to charge,” says Dimkovic.

Holoride, a spin-off from Audi, has defined an entirely new media category of ‘elastic content’. This connects mixed or cross reality (XR) content with data points from a vehicle as it moves. These data points include GPS travel route and time, along with driving data from a car, such as steering, acceleration, and braking.

“Journey-based XR experiences open up a whole host of new opportunities for consumers and creatives,” says Rogers.

REWIND was engaged by Universal Pictures and Ford to develop content built on Holoride’s technology using Universal property The Bride of Frankenstein. Once inside the vehicle, riders put on VR headsets and experience ‘interactive monsters and obstacles’ in an ‘elastic’ VR experience, in which sound effects and visuals react and adapt to the navigation of the car.

It’s far from the only marriage of Hollywood with carmakers. Warner Bros. and Intel partnered to showcase a BMW equipped with a large-screen TV, projectors, sensory and haptic feedback, immersive audio and Batman-themed content.

Music may be the most popular form of in-car entertainment, but video and gaming experiences are poised to overtake.

“When drivers can fully divert their attention from the road, suddenly windscreens can be turned into projector screens, in-car gaming console docks are an inevitability, and video streaming will take over from the radio,” suggests Rogers. “Immersive technology offers a huge opportunity to turn the car into a new kind of stage.”

Technology from Swiss firm WayRay can project augmented reality on the windscreen as an aid to driver navigation. It’s also developing ways to project more immersive animations onto the side windows for passengers and lists Hyundai, Porsche and Honda as partners.

Chinese simulator ride developer OWatch anticipates cars outfitted as ‘9D’ moving cinemas by 2030. 9D includes environmental effects like wind and snow, interactive shooting, dynamic seats and VR.

Intel paints scenarios fifty years from now in which vehicles will become ‘transportation experience pods’ with onboard beauty salons, fast-casual dining, remote vending and mobile health care.

By this point, cars may not be privately owned but subscribed to in emerging transport-as-a-service models being pioneered by Uber.

Business modelsMost new cars will ship with at least 4G connectivity but car owners need an on-ramp to in-car entertainment. Car brands have the opportunity is to offer monthly subscriptions that include data, service and IVI elements. Some might give a Netflix sub away for free to sweeten the purchase.

“This means working with mobile operators to create data plans that suit the typical consumption model plus a platform approach that allows car owners to build out their bundle based on their own, individual requirements,” says Neale.

Entertainment will part of a wider range of connected car services such as real-time traffic and route guidance, automatic payment for parking and electric-car charging points.

Location-based advertising will become more relevant, and advertisers and agencies will be presented with a new realm of possibilities for presenting content matching brands and location.

ACCESS reports that many manufacturers are gravitating towards a standard IVI bundle that is included with the subscription and includes a range of popular channels depending on the region. This bundle is then supplemented by partnerships with music, VOD and gaming services.

“Similar to the smartphone market, car connected services will be enabled through activating pre-downloaded apps within the IVI – along with companion apps for mobile devices,” explains Neale. “This means that services such as Netflix, Spotify, Disney+ can be smoothly implemented into the user experience and distributed across seating positions in a consistent fashion – while benefiting from the sharing of resources like WiFi, caching, shared storage for downloaded content and value-added elements such as cross-service search and recommendation.”

With research [from Counterpoint] suggesting that 75% of cars will be connected to the Internet by 2025 that’s potentially a billion IVI monthly subscriptions up for grabs.

“Don’t forget the safety context in which automakers must deploy this technology,” advises Crumb. “With autonomy, anything is possible, but we won’t be there for some time.”

Specialized camera applications require specific gear

content marketing for Boxx 

Michael Darby of Tricked Out Pictures relies on Boxx Atom to plan and execute unique shots for the most demanding film, TV and commercials

Directors are always on the hunt for fresh angles and open to pushing the boundaries, providing options and implementing complex camera movement solutions is exactly what Michael Darby specialises in.

https://boxx.tv/specialized-camera-applications-require-specific-gear/

The Toronto, Canada-based specialist camera operator and supplier has been refining the art of devising and executing complex camera motion for two decades.

He is a key member of iconic production services house Whites (William F. White) and also runs his own services company, Tricked Out Pictures, specializing in aerial cinematography, motion control and Shotover G1 applications.

“Tricked Out Pictures prides itself on offering professional cutting-edge equipment and solutions that meet the high expectations of the next generation of film makers,” Darby says. “My field experience has provided the background to understand production, technical/creative requirements and how best to achieve exceptional results in onset workflow.”

Of the applications for the G1 light-weight gimbal nearly all require robust wireless video from cameras mounted on kit like Zero Electric Bikes, point to point cable cam Dactylcam Pro or M-Series remote controlled cars. 

“These applications require multiple wireless systems to be effective,” explains Darby. “If any one element isn’t rock solid then our client won’t get their shot and that leads to the potential of losing the entire rental.”

Darby has made the Boxx Atom system Tricked Out’s default and recommended wireless video solution “If a client wants to use their own it’s on them if there are drop outs or interference with other components,” he explains. “The obvious choice is to go with our complete package.  I can provide upgraded antennas for specific jobs and have been able to get video in tough locations using Boxx where other systems have failed.

He continues, “Nothing is more frustrating for an operator, DP or director as losing the image.  Other wireless systems on the market can require re-pairing, delay in syncing showing a black screen and so on. But if the Boxx kit is operating in highly challenging conditions there may be some pixilation, but the operator can still make a shot.  That alone can save a production additional takes, lost time and productivity.”

The Boxx system also plays well with others. “The frequencies are stable and well defined so as to not interfere with other systems when you plan your wireless integration,” Darby says.

“I’ll continue to rely on the Boxx to make our unique setups work.  When I’m hired it’s generally for pretty specialized shots that need to work. They are the shots of the day with potentially elaborate planning and high expectations.  We need reliable video so we use Boxx TV kit.”

Oscars 2020 – a closer look at the Cinematography award nominees

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Period movies dominate the race. Joker and The Irishman repaint New York as a gritty early 1980’s Gotham and 1960/70s era Little Italy; Roger Deakins takes us back to the trenches of 1917 in Sam Mendes’ unblinking take on World War I; Robert Richardson’s 35mm film flashbacks to 1969 in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the black-and-white 35mm film rendering of 1890s Gothic horror The Lighthouse is a tour de force for DP Jarin Blaschke.

https://www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/oscars-2020-a-closer-look-at-the-cinematography-award-nominees/5348.article

The Irishman

Director of photography Rodrigo Prieto faced two challenges in translating Martin Scorsese’s organised crime opus to screen. He had to find a way of visually delineating the different decades of the story’s timespan and simultaneously grapple with the visual effects required to transform the appearance of the principal actors.

The latter consideration dictated the need to shoot about half the movie digitally for which Prieto needed to match the look with material shot on 35mm.

“One of the first things Scorsese and I talked about was memory and how we could portray that,” Prieto told IBC365. “He mentioned home movies so I started exploring amateur stills photography as a way to convey the passage of time.”

Research into different film stock resulted in emulations of the 1950s and 1960s Kodachrome as well as reviving a negative developing technique (for the 70s sequences) in which colour gradually drains from the picture to mirror the melancholy of protagonist Frank Sheeran’s life.

Prieto helped design a bespoke rig comprising two Alexa Minis on either side of a Red Helium camera to feed infra-red data into ILM’s VFX pipe.

“One of the privileges of a cinematographer is being right there a few feet from the energy of an actor giving their first performance,” Prieto reveals. “It’s more than a front-row seat in a theatre. You are participating in the moment. Everything – the costume, the production design, the virtuosity of the acting – is seen first through that lens and you are responsible for capturing it.”

The Mexican was Academy Award-nominated twice before, for Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Scorsese’s Silence in 2016.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Hollywood’s golden age collides with the rise of counter-culture in Quentin Tarantino’s story which is as much a paean to the lost world of LA as it is about events surrounding the Tate-LaBianca murders.

Robert Richardson, the director’s regular cinematographer (Oscar-nominated for Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight), delved into the era’s often obscure TV history to recreate a series of looks for the different elements of the story.

There are elements of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill (also lensed by Richardson) as the picture essays through genres (Butch and Sundance to Texas Chainsaw and B-movie exploitation), and between fact and fiction mixed with pastiches of TV shows and commercials.

“I knew if [Tarantino] wanted a contemporary look for the series of commercials or whether to create a less slick feel,” he told IBC365. “The answer was different for the various commercials. One was to be black and white, another with a period feel, another more modern but not stunningly clean.”

For the Western TV series Lancer featuring Leonardo Di Caprio, Richardson attempted to create a blend of film and TV from that period.

“I was hoping to have a smooth quality but with limitations visible. Quentin and I wanted a 70s’ retro feel, something not perfectly definable so that when watching the film, it feels off balance.”

He shot mostly in 35mm using anamorphic lenses to achieve high colour saturation.

“We’re pushing colours to places we do not ordinarily go to these days,” Richardson says. “A touch more grit and grain than we’re accustomed to. There’s a blend of past and present in the wardrobe, set design, hair and make-up which all greatly influenced the overall aim to look toward the past without sliding into cliché.

“I was given the final of the script a month or so after reading the previous pages at Quentin’s house. I went into a room at the office as the final pages were delivered. The door was shut - and I did not exit until I had finished the final act.”

Anyone who has sat through the final reel will feel the full force of this pay-off.

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse is a salty sea yarn spun into an intense psychological horror by director Robert Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (who both previously made The Witch) in startling black and white 35mm.

The time period itself is not stated though it would appear to sometime in the late 19th century, but the filmmakers succeed in spinning an apparently straightforward account of two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) into a descent into madness that may be in the mind of one or other of the protagonists.

Set entirely in or around a lighthouse, Blaschke selects a square (5:6) aspect ratio to confine the vertical building and the characters inside.

Instead of shooting on colour and converted to black and white (as last year’s art favourite Roma was), Blaschke wanted to emulate the look of early silent movies and to emphasize the texture of his actor’s faces.

He shot on Kodak Double-X, a 60-year old film stock, with an original 1930s set of Bausch and Lomb Baltars lenses reworked to fit a Panaflex Millenium XL2 camera and with a custom made orthochromatic-emulating filter from Schneider.

This combination wasn’t particularly sensitive to light so required that Blaschke use about twenty times more light on the set in Nova Scotia to get the look they wanted.

“I actually wanted the Double-X to behave like an even older film stock, so a filter was made to prevent all red light from reaching the film,” Blaschke said. “This emulates pre-1930s orthochromatic film that couldn’t see orange or red light. Therefore, skies become much brighter and skin tones become darker and more rugged/textured. This was another critical element that makes the film feel more broken-down and distant.”

Joker

A character study rather than genre convention was the starting point for DoP Lawrence Sher’s and director Todd Phillips’ take on the DC Comics clown. They revisited movies like Serpico (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976) to produce a gritty visual aesthetic dripping with malice.

Sher shot scenes for the climactic Murray Franklin Show with seven cameras. “Alongside our A and B camera ARRI 65 bodies and the Alexa LF we had four Alexa Minis hidden inside prop cameras that represented the TV studio cameras so we could shoot the show just as we would if we were shooting the actual TV show,” he explains.

“We even had a TV director (Saturday Night Live director Don King) who would live cut the show in a booth behind the set using those four cameras as if he was calling a live tv show. Additionally, we also used old Betacam cameras for TV news footage and even VHS for the comedy club footage of Arthur performing.”

Using the Alexa 65 gave Sher a more narrow depth of field, isolating Arthur in his environment – an effect augmented by shooting in 1.85 to pen him in just a little more.

Joker is Sher’s first Oscar nod and sixth collaboration with Phillips following The Hangover series, Due Date and War Dogs.

1917

If anyone can control the skies it is Roger Deakins. The British cinematographer is favourite to land his second Oscar after securing an unprecedented fifteenth Academy nomination for World War I drama 1917.

“The audience may not notice, but in the very last shot of the film we were trying to time the shot for the sun to come out of the cloud - and it did - just where I wanted it to,” he told IBC365. “For me, that was gold dust.”

Director Sam Mendes had conceived the idea of shooting as if in one continuous shot, but his script was conventionally written with no real clues as to how this would be achieved. It was down to Deakins and fellow heads of department including production designer Dennis Gassner and editor Lee Smith to proof the concept and then meticulously plan each shot to segue seamlessly to the next as far as possible before beginning principal photography.

“During rehearsal with the actors we finessed what we wanted to show and what we didn’t, and with Dennis, we mapped how the cameras would move through the sets,” Deakins says.

The camera is constantly moving as it tracks the soldier protagonists behind enemy lines and no location was used twice. An ARRI Trinity stabiliser, smaller than a traditional Steadicam, was employed for most of the picture and the film was the first to use the Alexa Mini LF, a lighter version of ARRI’s large-format camera which enabled Deakins to shoot with a longer lens while maintaining an epic quality to the frame.

Of the decision to choreograph as a single shot, he remarks: “For me, it was about not giving the audience a release from the violent and disorienting environment the characters are in. So, we don’t give them a wide shot, everything is from the character’s perspective, there’s no get-out clause.”

Oscars 2020 – A closer look at the Editing nominees

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Le Mans ‘66

The real-life story of Ford’s attempt to build a race car that could beat the Prancing Horse stars Matt Damon as American car designer Carroll Shelby and Christian Bale as British-born driver Ken Miles.

https://www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/oscars-2020-a-closer-look-at-the-editing-nominees/5343.article

“It was never intended to be Days of Thunder,” says editor Michael McCusker. “We wanted the same visceral experience as that film but it’s a little less flash than what [director] Tony Scott was doing.”

Nor was director James Mangold interested in telling the story of man versus machine which is the focus of Hunt v Lauda drama Rush: “Like all of his movies, Jim is concerned about character.”

In this case, the main editorial challenge was laying out the groundwork at just the right length and depth for the relationship between Carroll and Ken to take over.

“The task was to introduce everyone, get the expository work done in an efficient way and then move to the more straightforward narrative. We moved a couple scenes around until we found the right order. You could just feel there was a momentum to it. When it clicks like that you know you have the movie.”

McCusker joined the project a couple of months before principal photography to develop the race scenes in pre-viz.

The film’s opening sequence and the first race among other scenes were edited by Andrew Buckland, who graduated from assistant editing on several Mangold projects like Wolverine to full editor credentials (with McCusker) on The Girl on the Train.

“I’m not the fastest guy in the world so we’ll divide scenes up, particularly if I’m trying to finish another scene, and Drew will run with it,” McCusker says. “We are very good friends."

Parasite

Director Bong Joon-ho’s home invasion thriller explores class divide in Korea, with the struggling Kim family occupying the luxurious Park family mansion with violent results. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Parasite is tipped by many critics as the best film of the year too.

Editor Jinmo Yang worked with the Joon-Ho on previous films including Okja and is familiar with the director’s storyboarded style of shooting for a cut that’s almost pre-designed.

“What usually happens is we create the assembly on set, editing in rough sequence, and then move on to the actual editing, where we find the right music and recut the sequences there,” Yang  explained to Indiewire.  “We tweak the timing of every shot, perfecting the rhythm, even if it means stitching together various takes together as one shot.”

The most difficult shot to edit was the look on Mr Kim’s face during the climactic birthday party when his emotions tip over into violence.

“Bong and I went through so many takes and versions. We dissected it and looked at the expressions Ki-taek was making,” Yang told Variety. “We had to sell that emotion and where he was coming from. The entire film hinges on that very moment.”

The Irishman

Martin Scorsese may switch cinematographers, actors and genres but the one creative constant on all his features since Raging Bull has been Thelma Schoonmaker. The three-time Academy Award-winner returns with the director to New York’s mean streets in a time-hopping narrative complicated by copious de-aging visual effects.

In an interview for  American Cinema Editors, she calls Scorsese’s concept for this film “daring” because of its slower pace and without the flashy camera work and editing with which the Scorsese/Schoonmaker partnership has become renowned.

“I was worried about it at first. We moved a few minor scenes and dropped a few, but the beautifully thought out structure of the film worked so well that the film came together more quickly than we expected.”

They toyed with building in an interval for the film’s theatrical run but in test, screenings found audiences so engaged that they left its three-and-a-half-hour time in intact.

“The long slow build of the film was so original, and paid off so movingly at the end, that we felt an intermission would ruin the movie,” Schoonmaker says. “In fact, we only dropped about 10 minutes during the editing process.”

The pivotal scene is when Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) instructs Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) to assassinate his best friend, Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino).

“The language is deliberately opaque. DeNiro barely moves as he begins to understand he is being sent on a terrible mission, but you feel exactly what he is feeling. These scenes were shot very early and so I knew right from the beginning that Irishman was going to be an exceptional movie.

It’s fair to say that Taika Waititi’s anti-hate satire has divided critics with some citing the triteness with which they believe the writer-director has approached such a touchpaper subject, with others commending its connection with audiences. It won the people’s choice award at the recent Toronto film festival, following in the footsteps of Green Book, and has landed several Oscar nods too.Jojo Rabbit

Walking the line between the gravity of the holocaust and the absurdity of the situation as its presents to the mind of a 10-year old child was the chief editorial challenge of editor Tom Eagles.

“It was a constant balancing act, all the way through the edit,” he told Deadline. “We were constantly recalibrating, taking jokes out, adding jokes back in. How much humour was too much? How much darkness was too dark?”

The editor has worked with Waititi before, notably on Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and this is his first Academy Award nomination. They found black and white footage of Nazi propaganda cheering for Hitler and a German version of Beatles hit, I Want to Hold Your Hand. These are paired at the beginning of the film to illustrate mass hysteria.

“It’s easy to forget that a lot of people loved Hitler and saw him as a father figure,” Eagles commented to Awards Daily. “We originally had the real Hitler in there. In the end, it was better to play shots of the back of his head or cut away just as he appeared in the shot. We focused instead on the hands and communicated this mass hysteria of people just wanting to touch him.”

Joker

Few films caused as much controversy in 2019 as the origins story of Batman’s nemesis whether because its sequestering of Martin Scorsese’s acerbic King of Comedy felt unearned or its use of a Gary Glitter track betrayed its snowflake-provoking pretentions. Either way, Joker hit a nerve.

“Because he is the main character you have to be sympathetic with him and his situation to even watch the movie,” editor Jeff Groth told IBC365. “The character is kind of romantic. He doesn’t want things to be the way they are but the world dumps on him and it gets worse as he discovers more about his life.

“He is ultimately always destined to be Joker but when he puts on the Joker mask he is, in fact, taking off the mask of Arthur.”

Groth picks out a pivotal scene in Arthur Fleck’s transformation when he first puts on white make-up but is yet to fully add the Joker’s face. “It encompasses so much emotion and tension, horror, and humour. His face is so beautiful and at the same time kind of tragic.”

In an unusual move, Groth cut the movie as consecutively as possible, working on set for much of principal photography. “I found this helpful because you can see the progression of the character and story, from beginning to end,” he says.

Near misses

Marriage Story

In writer-director Noah Baumbach’s drama, a coast to coast switch becomes the straw that tips the couple, played by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, over the edge into divorce.

“I found it fascinating that the script functions almost like a thriller,” editor Jennifer Lame told CinemaEditor. “The procedure of divorce itself drives the plot. You want to find out what happens next.”

There are several dialogue scenes of almost screwball comedy, notably one in which Driver’s character is served divorce papers.

“I wanted to make sure that the energy and humour were high leading up to Adam’s entrance, but that it wasn’t so distracting that the audience wouldn’t be ready for the emotion of what comes next. It’s the feeling of being so blindsided, and of having an out of body experience when your world as you once understood it is turned completely upside down in a moment, which we worked hard to get across.”

Next up for Lame: Christopher Nolan’s latest, Tenet.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

In 1969, struggling actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his buddy Cliff (Brad Pitt) happen to be neighbours to the beautiful, fast-rising star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie).

“The story is basically a slice of life for these characters,” explains editor Fred Raskin. “You see them go about their days but there’s a sword of Damocles hanging over them because you know that at some point the Manson family is going to show up.”

Director Quentin Tarantino’s script rejects conventional movie structure. The first couple of hours are virtually plotless, making it tricky for the editor to find a rhythm and tone that would repay the viewer’s patience in the third cathartic act.

“Finding the movie and getting it down to reasonable length was honestly the greatest challenge,” Raskin says. “He always writes and shoots more than he necessarily intends there will be in the theatrical version. We go into the edit knowing that certain things, certain characters even, are not going to end up in the final cut. That’s kind of an elementary part of editing any film.”

Oscars 2020 Nominees – VFX

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The frontrunners for a VFX Oscar is probably a shoot-out between the groundbreaking virtual production of Disney’s live-action animation hybrid The Lion King and ILM’s extensive work in de-aging actors while minimising the impact of their on-set performance in The Irishman.

https://www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/oscars-2020-nominees-vfx/5340.article

Avengers: End Game spun an epic story with extensive VFX and came away as the biggest grossing film of all time, toppling Avatar this year to reach $2.8 billion but Star Wars, another ILM gig, may get Academy sentiment since the franchise hasn’t won an Oscar for 35 years. The surprise package is 1917, an avowedly non-VFX heavy treatment where the skill lay in planning and blending post-produced shots into the background.

The Lion King

Entirely animated and featuring singing, talking animals, Disney’s feature is designed to look as if it were shot out of Africa. Its DNA has confused the industry with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association nominating it for Best Animated Feature at the Globes, ignoring Disney’s marketing of the film as a drama. It’s also symbolic of the astonishing photoreal qualities of CGI and the blurred boundaries between shots made in-camera (nominally real) and those created in post (supposedly fake).

On The Lion King, UE4 was the games engine of choice into which CG landscapes (digitised from real Kenyan safari vistas) and pre-built character animation were rendered. Viewing this in VR, the filmmakers did everything they would normally do from location scout to blocking scenes and shooting multiple takes for coverage.

Director Jon Favreau believed physical simulations of traditional film equipment like a Steadicam would help key crew feel as if the film were being photographed, rather than made with a computer.

“Even though the sensor is the size of a hockey puck, we built it onto a real dolly and a real dolly track,” Favreau explained. “We have a real dolly grip pushing it that is then interacting with [cinematographer Caleb Deschanel] who is working real wheels that encode that data and move the camera in virtual space. [When you do this] there are a lot of little idiosyncrasies that occur that you would never have the wherewithal to include in a digital shot.”

Rob Legato, the film’s overall VFX Supervisor, explained that the whole idea of virtual production is where new multi-user workflows meet old school cinematography and filmmaking.

“The closer the technology gets to imitating real life, the closer it comes to real life. It’s kind of magical when you see it go from one state to another and it just leaps off the screen.”

The Vancouver division of MPC which helmed much of the VFX on this project as well as Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, was closed by parent company Technicolor before Christmas citing competitive pressures.

The Irishman

Much of the talk ahead of release was whether the de-aging of actors Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino would stand up to the scrutiny of a dialogue heavy drama. Far from getting in the way of the audience’s engagement, the VFX blended with the performances justifying director Martin Scorsese’s decision to make the story his way with the backing of Netflix.

“This was a movie about conversations and we needed a new system because the actors wanted to be themselves,” ILM’s VFX supervisor Pablo Helman told Indiewire.

The Irishman’s achievement is to create 1,750 shots using unobtrusive markerless performances with normal theatrical lighting. Critical elements of the technique included a three-headed camera rig designed by ILM with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and ARRI. The rig was made 30-inches wide so it would fit through a standard 32-inch US doorframe.

“We wanted to be sure Scorsese was not limited in any way in the design of shots,” Prieto explained to IBC365. “We failed the first time. After some trial and error, new motors and more lightweight materials we got there.”

ILM spent two years developing software called FLUX to read the infra-red information about lighting and texture thrown onto the actors on-set by the two witness cameras. It then converted the data, alongside the primary image photographed on Red Helium, into 3D geometry and retargeted each actor’s performance into versions of their younger selves.

The characterisation of the actor’s in relative youth wasn’t shortcut by working from any of the films in their extensive back catalogue (Goodfellas, Home Alone or Carlito’s Way). For example, Frank Sheeran has a wider face than De Niro had aged 40; Pesci is depicted thinner than he was aged 53.

“It was really important that the characters looked as natural as possible, so we didn’t use any keyframe animation to change any of the performances,” Helman says. “What you end up with is the raw performance of the actors, and then a reinterpretation of that performance that is designed to look like a younger version of those characters.

1917

MPC Film land a second nomination this year for its work on Sam Mendes extraordinary war drama. Universal have embargoed any specific detail of MPC’s work until January 24, which is not unusual with the film only just out on cinema release, but with Oscar voting closing on less than a week later it’s not easy to market this aspect of the production.

VFX Supervisor Guillaume Rocheron led MPC Film’s work on the drama which included digital environments, extensions and effects in collaboration with the movie’s special effects and editorial team. One such collaboration is a scene depicting an aerial dog fight far in the distance which turns dramatically into action at close quarters as one of the plane’s crash lands. The VFX team also had work to do in blending shots which were filmed at the Govan Docks in Glasgow and on Salisbury Plain as if all were shot on the western front.

Avengers: Endgame

 A mammoth hit, earning more than $1 billion at the box office, Disney’s MCU opus drew to a climax with a final battle featuring hundreds of heroes and villains. Weta built digital doubles of all the characters and all the creatures — essentially a kit they used to create the battle.

“There’s a shot when the two armies clash with each other at the start of the battle [which] is one of the longest shots we produced,” Matt Aitken, VFX supervisor at Weta explained to Post Perspective. “There are plate elements, but essentially it’s a CG shot that easily could have become muddled. Instead, our animation team produced something spectacular and very easy to watch.”

Of the 2700 shots in the entire movie, 2500 contain VFX with VFX supervisor Dan DeLeeuw enlisting the skills of 13 facilities including ILM, Digital Domain, Framestore, Cinesite and Dneg.

The performance-captured animation of Thanos (Josh Brolin) and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) was advanced too on previous Marvel movies.

Scans of the actor’s faces formed the basis for underlying facial shapes onto which ILM, Digital Domain and Weta applied new software for more subtle interpretations of performance. ILM also used two head-mounted cameras positioned in front of the Ruffalo’s face enabling facial animation to be acquired on set.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

ILM has been nominated for each film in this latest trio of franchise reboots as well as the spin-offs Rogue One and Solo but has secured no wins. In fact, the saga hasn’t won any Academy gongs since the Return of the Jedi landed a visual effects achievement award in 1983. Could this be its year?

The finale features the familiar but no less accomplished blend of special (practical) effects, creature effects and 1,900 VFX shots.

One of the challenges was how to include Princess Leia in the story given that Carrie Fisher died in 2016. “It was a gigantic puzzle,” VFX supervisor Roger Guyett told Business Insider. “When you see Leia in ‘Episode IX,’ basically it’s a live-action element of her face with a completely digital character.”

Far from a cut and paste of Fisher’s face onto a digital body, the team tracked her posture and body movements from The Force Awakens and had to work back from actual lines of dialogue they had in the archive, like ‘Never underestimate a droid’ which writer-director JJ Abrams then wove into the script for Skywalker.

The Battle of Exegol alone required more than 1,000 Star Destroyers and 16,000 Galaxy ships while ILM’s creature dept. designed the largest range of practical characters for any Star Wars film, including Ewoks, while sister teams devised digital creations like the horse-like Orbak.

Near misses

Alita: Battle Angel

Having passed under the radar on release, Alita: Battle Angel is well worth a detour as its depiction of a manga-infused universe is inventive and a lot of fun. Adapted by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez, Alita combines performance capture with live-action filming on set. The star asset is a female cyborg reactivated after being junked who spends most of the movie rediscovering her superhuman powers and her artificially intelligent identity. It’s a marvel of design from Weta Digital which counts Alita as its first fully CG humanoid.

Performance capture was achieved by placing two cameras on actress Rosa Salazar in addition to her full body and hand capture suit. The two-camera helmet cam provided depth information for input to Weta’s facial pipeline.

Weta built a fully textured digital copy of the actress for re-targeting motion onto the character’s body with 8,000 different pieces of geometry.

DNEG and Framestore also clocked up work on this show. DNEG’s 250 shots included cyborg animation for the ‘Factory Gang’ in the crazy bar fight scene, as well as the cyborg, ‘Amok’, in the Ido flashback scene.

In addition, DNEG completed environment work for the climactic rollerball game, as well as all the rollerball skates within that same sequence.

The techniques employed on Alita have informed the production of Avatar 2-4, the long-awaited sequels designed by Cameron with Weta.  He told the NZ Herald, “[In the upcoming Avatar films] there are several live-action characters that go through a lot of the CG scenes so it’s about integrating the live characters into the CG scenes. Kind of the opposite to Alita where we had a few CG characters mostly integrated into live-action settings.”

Gemini Man

In Gemini Man, Will Smith’s government agent confronts Will Smith, his younger clone. Smith’s Junior was ‘de-aged’ by 27 years by Weta Digital but this required far more than just a facial recomposition.

For some scenes, Smith played Junior with only his head and face requiring digital de-ageing using performance capture data. In scenes in which both ‘Smiths’ are together, Junior is played by a stand-in actor and later, on a mocap stage, the scene was replicated with Smith wearing a full bodysuit.

“We’d record that with a dozen cameras to get the references from all angles from which I’d pick the best angle,” explains editor Tim Squyres. “For a long time, our rough cut would feature shots of our stand-in actor below a picture-in-picture of Will Smith’s motion-capture filmed at approximately the same angle.”

Weta’s animation was based on the morphology of aging including more realistic skin simulation and detailed eye work, and the development of a procedural software for skin pores along with robust modelling.

Industry innovators: Garrett Brown

IBC

It all started on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The iconic scene from Rocky has been paid homage to or parodied dozens of times and is rehearsed daily by tourists on what is now known as the Rocky steps - all thanks to Garrett Brown.

https://www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/industry-innovators-garrett-brown/5338.article

The shot he took of his wife Ellen in 1975 running up the steps was a showcase for the invention of a camera stabiliser that has arguably had a more profound effect on camera movement than any other technology.

The Steadicam freed the camera from being bound to cranes and the straight lines of dolly tracks. Instead, the camera could be moved handheld but smoothly for entirely new shots around corners, through doorways, travelling up, down and in any direction. Using it, cinematographers began to transform the rigid language of cinema with complex and fluid compositions.

The Oscar-nominated 1917, filmed as if in one unedited shot, is just the latest motion picture to be inspired by the near half century-old mechanical design which shows no sign of being superseded in the age of digital.

“Steadicam remains the most artfully controllable means for moving a camera,” Brown tells IBC365. “For filmmakers who cherish expressive moving shots, it is the go-to technology — principally because Steadicam shots most closely resemble what humans see through our remarkably-stabilised eyeballs as we navigate our own daily ‘movies’.”

New romanticBrown is first and foremost an inventor though he has always cherished the movies. His affinity with both is romantic. As a child in the 1940s, he recalls the cover of a book in which “the sky was filled with dirigibles, propeller planes and autogyros,” and the foreground with great ‘Streamliner’ locomotives, sleek racing roadsters and motorcycles.

“I dreamed of inventing as a kid and wished to have my name on an ‘apparatus’,” he says. “It’s tragic that we don’t encourage young people to be inventors. We encourage them to be technical and to be engineers, but we don’t romance the idea of invention.”

Perhaps because of this, he left school “with no job skills” and learned about cinema by reading “all the outdated film books” in the central Philadelphia library.

He tried folk singing, agency copywriting, “despairingly” selling Volkswagens, and eventually directed some commercials, finally buying a job-lot of old camera equipment for $1000 which he intended to rent. This included an 800lb dolly called the ‘Fearless Panoram’ which was needed for moving a Bolex camera.

Fed up with how cumbersome the gear was to use, and especially how hard it was to lay level tracks, he determined to do something about it.

“I had the idea for how it should work and had done enough experimenting to have an instinct for what had to happen,” he says of the four-year trial and error. “Other people assisted me in building it. Each version taught me more about what the next one should be like.”

The demo reel titled Impossible Shots featuring the Philly steps sequence found its way to John Alvidsen, director of a low budget boxing movie starring little known actor Sylvestor Stallone, but the ‘Brown Stabilizer’ had already been used on Marathon Man and Bound for Glory. All three films released within a few months of each other in 1976 and Brown and his newly christened Steadicam were suddenly Hollywood’s hottest property.

Dexterous operationBuilding the rig was one thing, operating it quite another. Use requires a dexterity that is easily underestimated, necessitating intermittent severe effort alongside a surprising delicacy of touch. Brown likens its particular combination of art and athleticism to playing a musical instrument.

“It’s like simultaneously moving and playing a piano,” he says. “Both operate at the ‘human/machine’ intersection, both respond to training and practice, and success with either is idea-driven rather than just physical.”

For this reason, he says, “tiny women are among the best operators, and big muscle-bound blokes may initially be among the worst.”

He elaborates: “I’ve always enjoyed thinking about the performing arc of a successful shot in comparison to the arc of great musical performance. Neither good Steadicam nor pleasing music are boringly continuous - they breathe with the life of their driving ideas, subtly retarding and advancing pace.”

This is analogous to Rubato, an expressive shaping of the tempo of classical music, he suggests. “It is the ‘robbing’ of time by slowing and catching up which can be emotionally involving.”

Another musical notation, Sforzando, or sudden loudness, can evoke sharp accelerations within moving shots. “The problem isn’t playing any one note, it’s sustaining a succession of them and setting yourself up for the next one.”

Steadicam expertise often begins with one of the workshops organised by the Steadicam Operators Association he founded in 1988.

The Shining to JediBrown himself has produced some of the most renowned Steadicam moves in cinema, operating for directors (and their cinematographers) including Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Francis Coppola, Warren Beatty and Tony Scott.

He wielded the camera around the corridors and maze of the Overlook Hotel for Stanley Kubrick giving an oily sheen to The Shining. He tracked Robert De Niro’s Jake La Motta from dressing room to the ring in Raging Bull. On Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Brown operated on the rope bridge in Sri Lanka.

“A diabolical set, since it was shockingly real,” he recalls. “300 feet above the river, plunging up and down when anyone moved, with actual six-inch gaps between boards, and all conducted in humid 100-degree heat.”

Highlander remains a sore point. He executed a flawless opening Skycam shot in 35mm, but according to Brown, “the producer inexplicably, refused to pay us and skipped town. I had to sue him to get my dough. And they used my shot!”

One two-minute shot in Casino is among his favourites. De Niro’s character narrates how casino’s handle the money from front of house to the cash-counters in backrooms.

“Documentary-like agility was required in the counting room as the extras appeared unpredictably far from their marks every time I entered the room and then wandered about like gerbils throughout the shot.”

He also shot the background plates for the speeder-bikes sequence in Return of the Jedi by strolling precisely through a redwood forest with the camera turning at .75 fps. “To make that work, I kept the corner of my matte box aligned with a stretched 1000ft green thread as I moved, and I cornered and panned very slowly as [vfx supervisor] Dennis Muren operated my roll-cage at 1/30th speed.”

Played back at normal speed and comped with bluescreen of bikes and actors the tour-de-force was “pleasingly realistic” since the Steadicam shots contained some “camera-car-like vibrations” which George Lucas felt gave the scene additional energy.

Though cameras have shrunk, the ‘vests’ now more comfortable, the monitors incalculably better and the materials lighter and stiffer, all four or the original requirements to build a Steadicam remain essential: expand the mass so that the centre of gravity of the camera pops out from inside the camera like a seesaw, access the centre of balance with a gimbal, support it all with a ‘floating’ arm and provide a remote look through the finder.

Steadicam was just the beginning of his inventions. Brown holds 50 patents mostly for camera support systems. These include SkyCam, the first suspended flying camera system, variants of which are now ubiquitous at major sports events; and Flycam, another wire-borne system invented to provide an overhead view of Pope John Paul’s visit to Mexico in 1979.

MobyCam, the first submarine tracking camera system debuted at the 1992 Summer Olympics. Vertical camera tracking system DiveCam was custom-invented for the 1996 Atlanta Games.

There have also been several iterations of Steadicam the latest being ‘Volt’, a technology that improves horizon and tilt control.

“For years we were obliged to operate with the Steadicam slightly bottom-heavy in order to feedback an idea of verticality when looking away,” Brown says. “The Volt permits operating in neutral balance, which means that level and tilt angle are automatically maintained and we can finally just concentrate on the essentials of great shooting.”

His favourite invention was not a commercial success. Tango is a miniature crane perched on a Steadicam arm that permits floor-to-ceiling shooting and smooth ‘traverses.’

“In the old days I used to take out all of my camera inventions and shoot movies with them to jump-start their success,” he says. “Since I retired from shooting in 2004, unhappily there has been no champion for Tango. I’m confident it will be revived eventually. It’s too exciting and is huge fun to operate.”

Brown was honoured with an Academy Award in 1978 for developing Steadicam and received another Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for SkyCam, in 2006.

He’s the first to admit that business acumen is not his forte: making money was never a motivation.

“I wasn’t smart enough to somehow tie each use of Steadicam to a buck or two of royalties,” he says. “The first patent for Steadicam expired in 1994 but subsequent patents have remained valuable.”

Brown would argue that no-one outside of the industry should ever notice a Steadicam shot. Just like any other technical aspect of production, it shouldn’t call attention to itself. He is ambivalent about so-called ‘one-ers’ – films composed entirely of unbroken sequences “unless both sensible and valuable.

“Filmmakers can now digitally stitch together shots that give the illusion of continuity across any imaginable barrier, but it [can suggest] that the camera has no more substance than a neutron or a quark, and the result is correspondingly trivial. There is something about the massy, klutzy dolly and crane shots in old movies that resonates. Something physical. They felt more important, more meaningful.”

Brown once began to describe his profession as ‘inventor’, “since neither my cinematographic nor directorial chops were ever world-class”, but decades of mockery as eccentric nerds in comic books and films like Back to the Future, put him off. Lately, however, inventors seem to be back in fashion.

“That’s all I’ve done for years, so ‘Inventor’ it is and will be!”