News

VES Announces Special 2019 Honorees

The VES announces the 2019 inductees into the VES Hall of Fame, the newest Lifetime and Honorary members and this year’s recipient of the VES Founders Award. The names of this year’s VES Fellows will be announced later. The honorees and Hall of Fame inductees will be recognized at a special reception in October.  

“Our VES honorees represent a group of exceptional artists, innovators and professionals who have had a profound impact on the field of visual effects,” said Mike Chambers, VES Board Chair. “We are proud to recognize those who helped shape our shared legacy and continue to inspire future generations of VFX practitioners.”

VES Hall of Fame

This distinction is bestowed upon a select group of professionals and pioneers who have played a significant role in advancing the field of visual effects by invention, science, contribution or avocation of the art, science, technology and/or communications.

Walt Disney (1901-1966)

Walter Elias Disney was an American entrepreneur, animator, voice actor, TV and film producer. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced a score of innovations in the field of animation.  As a film producer, Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards earned by an individual, having won 26 Oscars.  His creative vision gave rise to the groundbreaking theme park Disneyland and Disney Brothers Cartoon Studios, the origin of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is frequently cited as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinematic history. His filmography includes SPARTACUS, LOLITA, DR. STRANGELOVE, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Academy Award winner for Best Special Visual Effects), A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and THE SHINING.  All of Stanley Kubrick’s films from PATHS OF GLORY until the end of his career, except for THE SHINING, were nominated for Academy Awards or Golden Globe Awards.

Stan Lee (1922-2018)

Stan Lee was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher and producer.  He became Marvel Comics’ primary creative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics industry. In collaboration with others at Marvel, he co-created numerous popular fictional characters, including superheroes SPIDER-MAN, THE X-MEN, IRON MAN, THOR, THE HULK, THE FANTASTIC FOUR, BLACK PANTHER, DAREDEVIL, DOCTOR STRANGE, SCARLET WITCH and ANT-MAN. Lee was an inductee into the comic book industry’s Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, and a recipient of NEA’s National Medal of Arts as well as the VES Lifetime Achievement Award.

Founders Award Recipient

Awarded to any individual member of the VES who has significantly contributed to the success of the VES.

Susan Thurmond O’Neal

Susan Thurmond O’Neal joined the VES in the late 1990s and has served as a member of its global Board of Directors and the Executive Committee. For many years, she served as the Chair for the global Education Committee and currently chairs the Membership Committee – and she has been instrumental in the work to grow the Society by leading the bi-annual membership review and approval process. 

O’Neal is currently a recruiter for BLT Recruiting, Inc and has worked as an Operations Manager at The Mill, Operations Director at Escape Studios in Los Angeles and as an Account Manager at Side Effects Software, Inc.  She started her career in visual effects at Digital Domain in 1993, where she worked in finance and operations before turning to production.  O’Neal’s credits include T2: 3D – BATTLE ACROSS TIME, TITANIC, THE ITALIAN JOB, WEST WING, DEUCE BIGALOW 2: EUROPEAN GIGOLO as well as a host of music videos, commercials and other works.

Lifetime Member

Awarded for meritorious service to the Society, the industry and for furthering the interests and values of visual effects artists around the world.

Michael Fink, VES

Michael Fink began working in film on THE CHINA SYNDROME.  He was hooked, and worked on films such as STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE and BLADE RUNNER before becoming a Visual Effects Supervisor on WAR GAMES (BAFTA Nomination).  He has since worked on THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION, BATMAN RETURNS (Academy Award and BAFTA nominations), BRAVEHEART, MARS ATTACKS!, X-MEN, X-MEN 2, THE GOLDEN COMPASS (VES Award nomination, BAFTA and Academy Award winner), AVATAR, TRON: LEGACY, TREE OF LIFE and LIFE OF PI.

Fink directed the first Coca-Cola Polar Bear spot in 1993, which was one of the earliest widely seen examples of 3D fur on a CG creature. Fink is a founding member of the Visual Effects Society and a former VES Board Member.  He is a member of the Visual Effects Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and has served on the Executive Committee.  He is currently a Professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and Chair of the Division of Film and Television Production.  He holds the Georges Méliès Endowed Chair in Visual Effects at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. 

Honorary Member

Awarded for exemplary contributions to the entertainment industry at large, and for furthering the interests and values of visual effects practitioners around the world.

Mike Brodersen

Mike Brodersen is one of the owners of FotoKem, currently serving as its Chief Strategy Officer. Thanks to Brodersen, FotoKem has been a valuable longtime partner with the VES, including serving as the Los Angeles site for the VES Awards nomination events for many years. 

In his 25-year tenure at the company, Brodersen has helped incubate services including film scanning and recording, digital intermediate, digital restoration, software development and file-based dailies. Established in 1963 and one of the last remaining full service film laboratories in the world, FotoKem provides color grading, digital imaging, VFX, graphics, audio, and a variety of other post-production services from dailies through finishing.  In recent years, the company has been able to provide post-production, imaging and VFX support services on titles like ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, AQUAMAN, STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI, DUNKIRK, VICE, GREEN BOOK, KONG: SKULL ISLAND, BETTER CALL SAUL and HOMELAND. 

INTERVIEW
with Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Theo Bialek
by Jessica Fernandes, Spark CG Society
© 2019 · Spark CG Society
August 22, 2019

Meet SUE: a Super Uber Elemental

In Spider-Man: Far From Home, our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man is unwillingly thrust into the spotlight, battling a power-hungry, tech savvy, vengeful adversary and his legion of drones. With a shot count of 320, and crew size of 200, Sony Pictures Imageworks was responsible for the bulk of the impressive third act of the film. Theo Bialek, VFX Supervisor at Sony Imageworks, sat down with us to chat through their work on the project.

Having VFX supervised both Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Far From Home, what struck you as the biggest differences between them?

The scope. Homecoming was a much simpler FX film for us in the sense that it’s really just one character (the Vulture) against Spider-Man. In Far From Home, it’s Spider-Man against Mysterio, Beck, thousands of drones, and the final Elemental creature (which is a complex set of different FX phenomena — water, fire, wind, clouds, lighting, lava). It was a much more varied and complex set of characters and circumstances, seen from a lot of different angles. And unlike on Homecoming, our Far From Home scenes occurred in daylight. There’s less that you can hide when it’s bright, especially when you’re trying to recreate or extend a live action set.

I had been cautioned that with Marvel films especially, as the story is continually refined that changes to the sequences would be inevitable up till the end of post. Having recently finished on Spider-Man: Homecoming, another 3rd act joint Marvel project, I was confident I knew the drill. We took precautions, overbuilding key assets and staffing up for complexity increases we felt were likely to come our way. However, it didn’t take too long before our team realized this time was different and the precautions we undertook were only the start of what would be needed. Keeping our production team flexible was the best way to absorb all of the new ideas and constructs along the way.

Can you run us through some of the elements you worked on?

The Super Uber Elemental:
In the final act, Spider-Man battles and flies into the final Elemental creature (we named her SUE, the Super Uber Elemental). As originally conceived, Spider-Man was to swing along the peripheral of the storm, disabling the SUE illusion after confronting Beck and damaging his suit. Later in the production it was decided a more dynamic demise for SUE was needed. When instead an alternate idea of Spider-Man flying into the interior of SUE to disable hundreds of drones constructing her illusion with an electrified web network was pitched we thought maybe it was a joke. It didn’t take long for the reality to sink in when we realized the scope of the challenge. Rapidly prototyping various styles and methods for the interior shell of SUE we endeavored to figure out what the inside of an illusion could look like. Eventually settling on the construct of malleable voxels of light powered by drone holographic lasers to make up SUE’s interior skin shell.

On the exterior SUE had a collection of different effects that made up her form, but one of the most expensive was her water tentacles, these huge streams of churning water with an internal core of fire that go into the sky as lightning crackles along the perimeter. To generate these effects came at a large computational cost, both in the time to simulate and the space required to store the data needed for rendering. As the number of SUE shots grew in excess of 50 it became apparent that custom tentacles for every shot wasn’t going to be feasible. To help keep our CPU and disk space expenditures to a minimum we decided to cache out several long simulations and share them across the shots as opposed to generating unique effects per shot. A single 400 frame sim from our water tentacle, with its associated spray, internal fire core, and lightning, approached 1000 core hours to simulate and 5TB of data on disk. A large amount of data to keep on disk for the duration of the show, but it still ended up saving considerable time versus creating bespoke FX per shot.

To facilitate the fire effects on SUE and elsewhere in the sequence we created Inferno, a proprietary tool developed in Houdini, that allows us to run distributed fire and smoke FX simulations across multiple machines on a queue (versus having to run sims on a single machine). It also allows the artist to run a lower res setting, get feedback on the results, and then if approved, iterate, refine to a higher res and render. Typically, when you have low res simulations for these types of phenomenon and effects, there is a lot of wasted work to add the higher resolution back. But, in our tool, the rough version was a good indication of what the high res would be. That was a new stage we developed specifically on this show, to help us verify our sims. It’s now being used on multiple projects.

Drone Battle & Set Extensions:
The third act required vast distances to be covered within a shot given the expected amount of drone and Spider-Man combat throughout the environment. Given this, we needed to ensure we had a large enough CG environment to accommodate all the action. How much of the set to build virtually at high detail was made especially challenging given the scope and complexity of the shots remained fluid and ever expanding throughout the production. Whenever possible we would elect to use plates, however we often found the constraints of the shot design and camera moves required a full CG environment. By the end of the production we had created a high detail CG version of the bridge and surrounding area that could be used for either set extension or full CG.

The majority of the plate work was filmed on the backlot of Leavesden Studios outside of London. Partials sets were constructed to recreate portions of the bridge roadway and the elevated walkway above where Beck coordinates his attacking drones.

Shooting on the actual bridge wasn’t an option logistically as the cost and constraints of shutting down a functioning landmark wasn’t practical for the time a full shoot requires. We were allowed limited access though this was only useful for acquisition photography and reference footage. On this morning the city shut down the bridge for 2 minute intervals roughly every 15 minutes over the course of the morning. This allowed us just enough time to clear traffic off the bridge and run out to various locations to shoot unobstructed pano and tiles along the roadway of the bridge.

Plates were also shot on location during normal hours from the towers and sidewalks of the bridge, but this meant hundreds of pedestrians and traffic in frame, mostly rendering the footage as being valuable reference only. As a general rule, whenever possible we would always try to shoot our plates and reference at three times of day: morning, afternoon, and late afternoon. This was done so we could capture different sun directions from each location. Additional footage was shot from a barge on the river, atop a double decker bus driving over the bridge, from a helicopter above, along the shores both on foot and from atop various neighboring buildings including City Hall and The Shard. By the end of the acquisition phase there wasn’t a spot our team hadn’t trekked across multiple times.

I heard that the different Elementals were based on previous Spider-Man villains (Sandman, Hydro Man, Molten Man, Cyclone). What did you use as reference for yours, as it’s an amalgamation of a number of different elements?

They supplied us with an initial piece of artwork that established the groundwork for her design, establishing the number of limbs and relative shapes of her appendages. What it didn’t do was give a detailed look at how all of the parts connected or the differing phenomena interrelated. As SUE was meant to be derived from the other earlier Elementals in the film and those were also being developed in parallel there was often a wait-and-see component to our character: where are the other vendors with their designs, let’s try to borrow ideas from that.

Originally SUE wasn’t intended to be featured so heavily in the film, only expected to be seen from a distance in a handful of shots. As the scope grew, and the design got increasingly more complex the character quickly became our largest challenge on the film. Originally imagined as discrete segments, the body was to be constructed solely of volcanic earth, the tentacle arms as water and a smokey cloud-like head sat atop. Following this design we approached her creation in the typical serial fashion – concept, model, rig, lookdev, FX, composite. When the direction for her design evolved it was all hands on deck and we rebooted the process back to the concept stage. The updated brief was to create a mixture of all the elements that relate more closely to the other elements now further along in development. This required the previous volcanic form to now include regions of clear earth as rock and mud, water, and smoke.

In terms of additional reference, we took our cues from films like Clash of the Titans, looking at other large types of creatures. We tried to learn from that, as well as graft from the other Elementals being created.

Who came up with the name SUE?

It was an Imageworks suggestion. Some of the early concept work was titled “Uber Elemental”, while another had the name “Super Elemental”. Because we didn’t yet have a unifying name, in jest I suggested we call it the “Super Uber Elemental”, combining both names. Realized SUE would be the acronym it just seemed like a natural fit. They liked it, so it stuck.

Was any mocap used for SUE?

Although some of the other Elementals used mocap, because SUE had multiple arms, even using one of her arms more as a leg, it didn’t really make sense for us to go that route and as a general rule we hand animated her performance.

In terms of process, our animators often act out and record their performances using a modified Xbox Kinect system. In the case of SUE, our animators would pretend to be the massive creature moving slowly as they try to mimic the motion a several hundred foot large monster. This motion is recorded both as video and as three dimensional scans. The 3D scan is then loadable into Maya where it is used as a dynamic reference to help match timing and poses to. This worked quite well in regards to SUE as fast method to block out first pass animation.

What can you tell us about the final drone fight in the walkway?

The extended opening shot of the drone fight in the walkway was definitely one of our most difficult shots. Originally envisioned as a reality-only shot, Spider-Man battles the last remaining drones in the confined walkway without the aid of webs. As a single camera take, well over 20 seconds in length, the shot was incredibly complex given the length, dynamic FX and destruction required. Spider-Man’s animation was a combination of several mini snippets of mocap takes and hand animation all spliced together and enhanced with a unifying layer done by hand. Deep into production the requirements changed and the shot design was based on starting in the illusion realm that gradually fades away from a void to reality as the drones are destroyed. This updated twist amplified the already complex shot as FX demands increased to now include the devolving illusion effects and accompanying signature Mysterio green vapor that inhabits the void world. With all of the flashing explosions and blue illusion effects It was a particularly challenging shot to wrangle the visual elements in a manner that didn’t devolve into chaos.

What was the biggest challenge on this show?

The unexciting answer to that is the timeframe and pace we kept. The nature of the project required us to remain extremely flexible and revisit and update shots frequently. With such a large sequence and so many interconnected characters it was logistical puzzle that required large resources to keep under control. On a purely technical side SUE was the biggest challenge for us. It could take six or more FX artists just to generate the elements for one of her shots.

What are you most proud of on this show?

The animation. It’s always a challenge on superhero films to keep the motion both grounded in reality, but still service the ideal that it has to be exciting and out of the ordinary. As Spider-Man was much more active in this film than in Homecoming, we needed to take more risks on how far we could push the performance but still not break the sense of realism. With well over 100 shots needing a full CG Spider-Man, the level and scope of animation was immense.

There are also a large number of shots in the film that required a full CG suit replacement. After the point in the sequence where Spider-Man catches on fire all later shots in our sequence needed to have the suit replaced with a burnt CG suit. As this idea was added late into the production all of the live action footage after this event now needed to have the damaged CG suit. That ended up being an excess of over 70 shots, that all needed rotomation, animation, lighting and comp to swap in a CG version.

Well done, I didn’t notice it.

You wouldn’t be looking for it, so that’s the advantage that we had!

Anything you wish you could have done, if given more time?

There’s a segment in the middle of the battle on the bridge we internally called the car gauntlet that was abandoned. Spider-Man is leaping over and through cars along the roadway as explosions are going off all around. It was a very dynamic and exciting action bit that ended up getting cut due to time constraints. Had we more time I would have loved to finished that bit up.

Thank you so much to Theo for taking the time to chat with us. I was fully engrossed from beginning to end with Far From Home. Well done Sony on wrapping the film up so spectacularly!

Spider-Man: Far From Home – © 2019 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

DIGITAL POWER:  Activism, Advocacy and the Influence of Women Online will focus on the work of women: digital artists, storytellers, designers, gamers, film/video makers and other visionary digital content providers in an exhibition that inspires, empowers, and supports women. The online exhibition is curated by Kathy Rae Huffman, curator of the 2015 DAC online exhibition “Enhanced Vision: Digital Video.” DIGITAL POWER is a project of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community, and is scheduled to premiere at the annual SIGGRAPH conference, 19-23 July 2020 in Washington D.C. 

The deadline for submission is December 16, 2019.

Last Call for Posters to EuroVR 2019:
16^th EuroVR International Conference

23-25 October, 2019
TalTech Mektory, Tallinn, Estonia
https://eurovr2019.eu/
Deadlines:

• Scientific Poster paper submissions: July 3, 2019 23:59 CEST
• Notification to authors: July 19, 2019
• Camera ready for accepted contributions: July 29, 2019 23:59 CEST

The Scientific proceedings  of EuroVR 2019, which will include the papers accompanying the scientific posters, will be edited by Springer as a volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. 

Submission guidelines can be found on the conference web page at:  https://eurovr2019.eu/call-for-papers/submission-guidelines-scientific-track/ 

All scientific contributions have to be uploaded to the Online Conference Service (OCS) of Springer. For the Scientific Poster papers, please use: https://ocs.springer.com/ocs/home/EuroVR2019_Scientific_poster_trackTo contact the posters co-chairs, please mail to eurovr_posters_2019 at cs.uni-bremen.deTo contact IPC chairs, please use OCS or ipcchairs.eurovr2019@taltech.eeFurther information on EuroVR 2019 are available here: https://eurovr2019.eu/