Emile Massie-Vanasse | Visual Effects

The project

This project was insane ! I got contacted by the director to do some TX or time displacement. I signed up for a full weekend of my time. I would give the production 48h and would deliver about 8-10 shots.

In the end. The project took a complete other turn and everything changed. The production now needed 13 shots with cracks on the walls, camera shakes and green screens.

In the end I had to deliver 15 shots in the 48h they gave me. I was nervous for render time since some of those shots where long (300+ frames) and the plates where 3200X1800 (3K) but it ended up working super well. We were constantly in contact me, the director, the production and the Editor and even if they did chose to cut some of the shots in the final edit, we were all super happy with the results and the amazing work we put into this project.

Stretching the corridors

One of my main task was to stretch the corridors so that they would look longer and more straight. Hopefully that was super easy and I was able to track the shot in 3D and place a quick paint on at the end of the corridor.

I still had to roto the character even if they are 5px large just to make sure there was a presence in the long tunnels.

Those two where the first shots I tackled since they were crucial to the story telling.

Casual Green screens

Hopefully, the green screens assets were shot in the same location as the backplates. This helps tremendiously my job in comp and I had asked production to do so from the first day I heard about those shots.

There were three shots where the characters are on green screens. They had to shot it this way because they wanted me to animate the background differently from the foreground. The intention is to detach the characters from the reality and have them feel separated from the environment.

Motion Blur and Retime

It is not very common to do the retime only in the VFX software but since our deadlines were super short. it was better for us to let me do the effect and address the notes for 3-5 roundtrips than editorial choosing the retime without being able to see the final results.

I would have loved to render all the iterations with a much high sample count but this had to get out and I had a lot more to render. I think I ended up rendering with 12 samples where 24 and 32 gave me much better results but timing was to short and decisions had to be made.

Conclusion

In conclusion, deadlines were super short but we made it and it was a way nicer ride than I thought it would be. This surprise was a more than welcome one and this project was made possible because of the amazing editorial team, mainly Thomas, the editor. Communication is key and I think this project proved that to be hella right !