RISING SUN PICTURES SHAKE'S UP VFX PRODUCTION PROCESS ON "RED PLANET"

Rising Sun Pictures, is a visual effects production house based in Adelaide, South Australia specialising in feature film digital effects creation, 3D animation and providing unique software solutions for visual effects production. The Company has amongst its film credits "The Old Man Who Read Love Stories", "Cut", "Risk" and "The Real Macaw", to name but a few. One of the first effects facilities in Australia to use Nothing Real's Shake compositing software, Rising Sun recently used Shake to finish a package of visual effects for the feature "Red Planet" [A Warner Bros Pictures/village Roadshow Pictures Production] With exteriors filmed at Coober Pedy in South Australia's far north."Red Planet" stars Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore and was release in Australia on December 7.

According to Didier Elzinga, senior compositor at Rising Sun Pictures, the work included creating a number of 3D animated helmet retraction sequences and a series of visor replacement shots, required where it was not technically possible to achieve the desired look and reflections in-camera. The sequences included a number of green screen shots and a fight sequence, which required tracking a 3D helmet and/or visor to a rapidly moving actor, with camera motion to deal with as well.

Shake was used to solve problems throughout the production pipeline and allowed for a tighter integration between 3D and 2D processes. A number of team members were using Shake for the first time on this project. 3D animators, Ben Paschke and Jason Madigan, rotoscoped their own background plates and produced test comps to aid in finessing the animation, lighting and tracking of the 3D helmet. Ben Paschke commented that...

"Shake's documentation was not only of outstanding quality, but entertaining as well."

With the fight sequence, integration of the 3D elements was particularly challenging because of the high level of movement of actors and camera, producing plenty of motion blurs. Shakes motion blurred roto-splines were a huge asset here, allowing matching of the camera movement every step of the way. Shake was very useful throughout the production pipeline, with Didier Elzinga describing it as "the Swiss Army knife of production tools". "Shake was used across a network of windows NT and Unix workstations, as a flipbook for previews, for file conversions and to create test output as QuickTimeT movies.

Rising Sun has been working with Nothing Real to port cineSpaceT to Shake as a plug-in, providing colour calibration and correction from within the compositing environment. [For more information, please check out http://research.rsp.com.au].

Final compositing of the fight sequence, comprising about 14 shots from two camera angles, was streamlined via the advantages of Shake's interface design. Elzinga elaborated to say, "Shake's procedural nature allowed us to set up a complex chain of effects and adjustments on one shots and readily apply the same effects across all shots from that camera angle in the sequence. This was a huge bonus in coordinating the production workflow, as it was possible to create a repeatable sequence of parameters, chained together through expressions which could be tweaked and refined for individual shots, or across all of the shots."

"Shake was such a useful addition to our software resources, making itself indispensable throughout the effects production process with its versatility in meeting a range of tasks." Elzinga reiterated, "I think
my previous 'Swiss-Army knife comment' says it all."