NAME: Andy Hall

NAME: Andy Hall

COMPANY: A52

POSITION: VFX supervisor

AGE: 34

RECENT PROJECTS: The Time Machine, How The Grich Stole Christmas, Lake Placid, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

SOFTWARE USED: Maya, Mental Ray, Inferno, Shake.

WHAT ANDY MEANS TO THE A52 TEAM:

"Although our CG department is small, with Andy onboard, we offer animation, lighting and rendering capabilities that are truly beyond compare.Clients that come to A52 will always work with an extraordinary team, and Andy's unique combination of talents makes him a key member of our team.

“Indeed, he is truly huge for our company. Not only is he talented and creative, he also loves the work and will go to any lengths to come up with interesting solutions. He’s a great collaborator with our other artists,as well as directors and agency creatives. We are seeing that more and more people in agencies are now thinking of him as a creative resource who offers new and interesting ways of looking at things.

“In the past, the role of VFX supervisor has typically been in the 2D realm, but as CG becomes increasingly important, it's wonderful to have a world-class animator who also has the skills and talents to contribute effectively on-set to supervise visual effects... The VFX business continues transitioning into more and more CGI, and Andy has been the driving force in building our current CGI department. I look at Andy as a real partner in developing the company and positioning it for the future." Mark Tobin, Managing Director and Executive Producer, A52

LESSONS AND ADVICE FROM ANDY HALL:

Observe how people communicate, take an interest in non-GC creatives and get the bacon under the grill!

“I’ve worked in the industry since 1995, both in London and Los Angeles, in both film and commercials. I think now more than ever it’s a very exciting time to be in the industry because visual effects, animation and computer graphics play a huge part in the story telling process whether it is film, commercials or video games. So many aspects of production are impacted by CG now that this has really allowed CG artists much more expression in the process.
“One piece of advice that I’ve found to be a vital asset throughout my career is the importance of knowledge about the industry both from an agency point of view, to a production, to a post production standpoint. Though it might seem obvious the one thing I’ve noticed working as an artist and supervisor is lot of people don’t really take much of an interest beyond the aspect of the job they do, especially in the field of computer graphics. I’ve always wanted to know which Director was doing which job, which DP shot that spot and with what agency or studio. This I’ve found really gives you an appreciation for the bigger picture and makes you much more aware of the opportunities, the trends and the work you want to aspire to, also how much you can learn from all the aspects of commercial and film production when you get the chance to interact with those artists and technicians.
“Something else that I’ve always tried to do to help evolve the process and this will sound like a cliché, but it’s so important to observe. Step back and watch, if you get to be on set watching the Director, study how he or she communicates their vision and why they choose to shoot things in certain way. When you’re working with a Supervisor, whether they are 3D or 2D, watch their interaction with the clients and the team and choices they make to best serve the client and job. What I’m really trying convey is being a great artist whether that is 2D or 3D etc… is as all about observing, whether it be a reaction to a shot you’re doing or how you interact with the director or the agency. Because I’ve always found that if you can gain an insight into their process it will make your interaction on that particular job much more rewarding, and I think successful.

“What really at the end of the day makes this industry enjoyable is your team. The people you work with, the ones that you are so happy are there at 3am in the morning with you. The reason I’m mentioning this, is because these are the ones that will inspire you, criticise what you’re doing and ultimately make you better at the job.

“I’d like to finally point out something a little more light hearted but at times equally as important, and it’s to do with those dreaded all night stints of work, which especially in 3D are just one of those wonderful aspects of the job that never seem to go away. My saviour is the fried egg and bacon sarnie (sandwich for people not familiar with England). It’s a little harder to come by in Los Angeles than London, speaking from experience, but it has always been my saving grace, apart from sleep. It might not be what you might expect to being reading right now but this part is one of the many things you have to look forward to when you’re playing around with pixels for a living.”

NAME: Martin Gårdeler

COMPANY: Ghost

POSITION: VFX Supervisor/Co-founder

AGE: 30

RECENT PROJECTS: Island of Lost Souls, Below, Alien Vs. Predator, Stardust, Sony, Nokia, Siemens, Coca Cola, Bacardi, Tuborg, LEGO, Tivoli

SOFTWARE USED: Maya, Mental Ray, RenderMan, Fusion, finalRender for Maya

WHAT MARTIN MEANS TO THE GHOST TEAM:

“Ghost boasts a staff of very talented individuals as most 3D jobs today demands the skills of several people. However, if someone has to be singled out, it would have to be VFX Supervisor Martin Gårdeler.

“Martin is one of the original founders of Ghost, and while the other two founders have more or less moved out of direct production work, Martin is still in the thick of it. Partly because it is what he likes to do, but also because the outstanding quality he delivers makes him very hard to replace.

“His ability to focus on very complex problems, come up with original solutions, exceed the clients expectations, work a 24 hour shift and still have energy for a game of football and a beer is legendary in the Danish 3D community.

“We have often talked about the need to clone Martin. Luckily Martin and his girlfriend are currently working on just that.” Lars Bartkær, Producer, Ghost

LESSONS AND ADVICE FROM MARTIN GARDELER:

Remember that every renderer has its own strengths and weaknesses. Also, splitting up scenes and rendering different masks for comp adjustments can save you valuable time in the long run.

“The project I did for Nokia recently presented a few challenges. The agency was quite vague in their brief on what they wanted for this spot. But after talking to the agency we could see that this would test our computers to the limit. We had to animate and render a large amount of phones and phone parts invery high resolution. All of the parts of the phone, even the parts that are under the shell needed to be presented. We were provided with the CAD data from Nokia that we started to optimise. But the models were so detailed that we only could have about 1.5 phones open in Maya at the same time. We needed about 50! So what to do? We decided to do try to move around Maya and load all the high resolution models at render time. But that required a renderer like RenderMan and its Ribbox functions, witch we didn't have or really know how to use. But we hoped that we would learn it in those three weeks we had to complete the job. So we made low resolution models for the animator to start up with, which could later on be switched to the high resolution versions at render time.

“The Cad data we were provided with were the actual mould data. It was delivered in an IGES format and was perfect for RenderMan. Both Maya and Mental had problems translating the heavy NURBS geometry without creating hole or gaps. But RenderMan loved it. On the other hand, it wasn't very easy to learn! But after some long nights and RTFM we finally got the hang of it. What could have been a total nightmare, actually turned out to have a happy ending. Our theory with the Ribboxes worked and we could finish the spot on time and with the details of the mould data. I don't think we could have done that without taking the step over to RenderMan. The lesson here is that all renderers have their strengths and weaknesses. If you know what they are, you can get the best out of any situation.

“When I was doing a pack shot for Danish beer Turborg we only had two weeks of production from start to end, so it was a difficult task. They wanted us to pour beer into ‘invisible’ containers that reveal them selves in a rotating motion... All in a 100% 3D generated photo realistic scene. Sure! First thing I did was figure out how to get the beer to look somewhat realistic. It has to look real and with foam and everything. I also knew that simulation is time consuming and difficult to get right. So I divided it up into ‘fluid motion’ and ‘beer feeling’. By that I don't mean the feeling you get when you drink it, but rather the feel of watching it. It has to be believable. So I decided to do use a relatively simple real flow simulation for the pouring to help in defining the bottle. Then I decided that the only way to make this shot look right is to get something in there that actually is real. Yes, lets fill up a mid-size aquarium with beer and film it! Brilliant! That is actually pretty much what we did. We shot it on HD so we could save the time to develop the film. The filmed plates were then mapped onto the simulated fluid. The whole shot were then comped together with CG bottles revealing the final bottle.
“In short, the human eye is very sensitive to ‘fake’ things. However, if you put one small ‘real’ thing in your shot, like a filmed texture, your eyes find it easier to accept the rest of the image.
“When we made the Island of the Lost Souls intro it used a 1250 frames long camera move starting above the clouds with text and logos. It then went through the clouds past an old windmill, settling just above the grass looking towards Copenhagen in the 1700's, with a horse and wagon driving past. The horse and the wagon were filmed and the rest was built and rendered in 3D. There were only three people on the team, one doing clouds, one doing the models, and me. For a shot as massive as this we needed to split the scenes up. The windmill, grass, trees and everything else in the environment alone made the poly-count skyrocket. So when it came to rendering I decided to do it on an ‘add layers’ basis. By that I mean that instead of rerendering the whole again scene you render a new layer that you add on to of the old one, or use as a adjustment layer to tweak in the comp. Sort of like when you retouch an image in Photoshop. I found this technique to be very useful in heavy scenes and scenes with complicated light setups. It creates a little more work in comp but it saves loads of hours of rendering. It also gives you more options to tweak when you have the director or VFX Supervisor beside you. Small changes can be made faster.”

NAME: Steve Thomson

COMPANY: Blitz

POSITION: Art direction manager

AGE: 37

RECENT PROJECTS: SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab, The Adventures of Batman and Robin, Pac-Man World 3

SOFTWARE USED: Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, Mudbox

WHAT STEVE MEANS TO THE BLITZ TEAM:

Steve is one of our longest serving members of staff and has always been an enormous asset to the company. As well as being a highly skilled and talented artist, he is also loyal, humble and never afraid to keep learning. He is one of the primary people who have made the launch of the Blitz Academy a huge success, pushing himself to learn new teaching skills and pass on his ‘guru’ knowledge to the rest of the company.” - Philip Oliver, CEO, Blitz Games

LESSONS AND ADVICE FROM STEVE THOMSON:

Fool the eye, develop correct asset creation pipelines and get involved in training colleagues.

“The first time I really pushed 3D visuals on a game title was way back in the mid-nineties on the Sega Genesis. The title was The Adventures of Batman and Robin. Early on in the game design we knew we wanted to produce never seen before visuals. Our Technical Director was heavily into scan-line visuals and came up with a way of producing pseudo 3D backgrounds using 2D art drawn in a certain way, skewed and copied across the screen in conjunction with his scan line routines, made to scroll horizontally. A lot of experimentation was needed to get this to work, but the end result looked breathtaking, with a great sense of depth, on a machine that wasn't built for anything 3D.

“The second major hurdle I overcame was the transition between PSOne and PS2. Correct asset creation pipelines were key to getting great performance out of the PS2. As is always the case with a new machine, the media speculation ahead of launch always gets everyone expecting way more than is actually possible, but we soon realised that the key to making the most of the PS2 was detailed planning and preparation of all the art assets. Along with several of my colleagues at Blitz, we really pushed our tools and pipelines, and ensured that detailed performance benchmarking was a key part of development.

“Because the industry is now moving so quickly, making judgments on what the next big innovations in real time 3D art creation will be is tricky but that’s my current job. Realism is the current trend, and many companies are striving for the perfect in-game avatar. Making complicated assets like these needs a lot of research so I joined our technology team over a year ago to help shape our next generation tools. On top of helping to craft the tools, we also need to make sure all the staff knows how to get the most out of them so we’ve been actively supporting the Blitz Academy, our internal peer-to-peer training solution. Developing my skills in a new direction to help me to train other staff has been a big challenge for me this year but a very rewarding one.”