Emile Massie-Vanasse | Visual Effects

Scene Tracking

At first, I got contacted by the On Set VFX artist Philippe Toupin to track the shot. He was smart enough to add some circle stickers and the prop beluga they had made. I was hard to start the track tough since the camera frame did not include any markers and most of the elements where moving and could be tracked.

In the end, this is what I send Phil. This video as a proof of track and a full alembic that included the camera and the markers so he could rebuild the scene in CG.

Rendering

After solving the track issue I did not hear from Phil for a good two months. He was busy working on the 3D model for the beluga and only called me at the end of the project for help exporting all the assets and rendering them.

All of his work was consolidated in blender and it made it very easy for us to wrap the project with the assets inside and sending it to different machine. Phil had used online farm to render but because the project was not too well optimized, it ended up costing a lot in rendering time and the production was having issues with paying such a huge amount of money for one single render.

Phil ended up splitting the one long shot we had into 1000 frames bits. This made it possible for him to pack the blender project and send it to a friend of his and myself to render at home and trying to save budget and time costs.

At this point I showed Phil that he could get a Google Cloud machine and render on it. Since he had never done it, He asked me to test it and see if it worked.

The final render of the beluga took so so long to render but the google cloud allowed us to get from 1 week render to 2 days renders. Having the machine crunch for us 24/7 was very nice since we all needed our workstation in during the day.

Final touches and compositing.

At the end of the project, the director was able to get an extension for doing more VFX work on the shot. Sadly, Phil was already on another project but he was nice enough to fallow trough sending me a whole lot of plate, pre-renders and AE comps.

As I use nuke lots of trouble went into gathering back the work Phil had done. In the end because of the tight deadlines I had to work on a pre-comp of his and had to 2D track on top of his precomp for most of the work.