Tag: vfx

Iteration

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Iteration is the creative process of improving the work in incremental steps. I don’t know if it’s truly a buzzword, but from where I’m standing, it’s always buzzing around. But I think that iteration means something different depending on where you’re standing.

In an advertising agency, for example, the creative team goes through their own rounds of iteration, brainstorming ideas, solidifying them visually through thumbs for internal meetings, then a concept board (if it’s a TVC) to be cleared with client, then upon feedback, work the process up to a storyboard. The creative process is completely internal in that they have full control over their workflow with the client giving feedback. Ask the creative director what iteration means for her workflow, and she’ll tell you “it’s working up the Idea in small steps, making sure, all the while, the client is kept in the loop and making appropriate feedback, which we then apply, and advance the Idea into a final storyboard to be produced.” So far, so good.

In the post-production shop, the process is pretty much the same, only a bit more complex, naturally; we deal with lots of technical elements. So while an agency might have a single pipeline we have at last four going almost concurrently, and those pipelines intermingle with each other. We have models to be made, rigging to be applied to models, animation to be applied to the rig, models to be shaded, shaded models to be lit, whole scenes to render, renders to be comped, effects to be designed and comped, etc. And that’s a standard bread-and-butter job. Let’s not get into things like simulations, matchmoving, rotoscoping, and the like.

Now imagine the same creative director is working with a post-production shop to produce the TVC. Ask the same question, “What is iteration?” She’ll answer, non-verbatim, with this expectation: “I want to see the final product very soon, and iterate that until it becomes better.”

Because the post-production process is unknown to her, she doesn’t realise that we have many final ‘products’ to iterate over: models have their own iteration-cycle, distinct from the animation iteration-cycle; so is look development, so is effects development; and these come together as a ‘master’ development pipeline with a separate iteration-cycle as well. She doesn’t automatically think to apply her own iterative workflow principle to the post-production side because they are uninformed. But because they prefer not to know, they remain at arm’s length from the post-production group, as distanced as they themselves, as creative teams, are to their clients, who are equally indifferent of their process. The indifference is passed down from client to agency, from agency to post-production, generally speaking.

Now, all this time, I’ve been using the agency’s creative director as my example. This is not a fair emphasis, by the way, though it surely makes the point clear, and many agencies relate this way to post-production houses. But you will also find directors, be it art directors, TVC directors, or anyone calling the ‘creative shots’ are just as guilty of this indifference. But the worse of all, it should be noted, is that the indifference occurs within a post-production group, as some of the upper crust only pay lip-service to the very technical nature of their own operation. Though I began with the ignorance of an agency creative director, she is the least guilty of them all.

The post-production upper crust might have done well to learn the internal creative process of the agency. But I think they condescended to think they could be anything but the client, and thus distancing themselves from their own post-production group. Perhaps by assuming the superior client role, they thought can eke something creative out of the ‘headphone-hooded geeks’.

The agency enjoys a creative process that they themselves have built and enforce in order to serve their own purposes because doing so will yield a better product for the client and for themselves. Yet, the post-production group gets served up onto a plate of uninformed demands by uninformed folks, left undefended by the upper crust who are just as uninformed; and it would have yielded poor results if not for talent and lots unnecessary personal sacrifices. But even sacrifices have their limits.

Anyone who demands, “I want you to go hard out so you can get me the final product tomorrow, so I can iterate/nitpick/pixel-fuck that until it becomes better” does not know what iteration means and lacks the discipline of imagination necessary to mix the creative aesthetic with the highly technical processes, which is what this industry is about.

 

Commercial: Smith’s Chips (Mr. Potato Head)

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This commercial was a straightforward integration piece. Done back in May 2013, I had flown to Sydney for this job with Leoni Willis, who was the primary on-set supervisor. I came as a supervisor for the cg team, and mainly took HDRs of the scene lighting. There aren’t always that many cases in my experience that requires exacting HDRs — many lighting situations can be faked simply by observing the scene — but in this one, especially the indoor/semi-outdoor scenes, the HDR reflection maps were very effective.

We had shot throughout whole days, and one of the worries I had was changing light conditions. So I took HDRs at regular intervals (2-4 hours apart), depending on whether the direct sun was affecting the intended subject area, and whether or not the ambient had changed drastically, as it does when cloud cover comes and goes. Shooting in this way was much better for the production crews as well, as I only did them when they were well within between takes and they didn’t bothered.  I kept track of the time that scene and takes were taken on the production book. Back at the studio, I organised the HDR sets by their timestamps; I matched that with the final offline correlated to the production book notes.

Besides the set work, I contributed the lighting of many of the scenes, though the shading was mainly developed by the Terry Nghe. I’m usually responsible for both the start and end parts of the job, which means scene setup/layout, and then rendering/managing outputs, fixing odd, tail-end issues, and this job was no exception. Will Brand worked on the mouth rig with me as well as worked up some scenes himself. I worked on the rig fro the rest of the, while Alfredo Luzardo, did most of the animation, though we also got a few others to fill gaps. Leoni did the job of compositing all of our renders.

For all its simplicity and straightforwardness, I really like this commercial because its simplicity looks good, it’s believable, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. To add, I liked the team I was working with.

Commercial: Toyotown Corolla (Sporty Drive)

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I normally don’t post the commercial work I do, and my reason for doing starting to do this now correlates to slowing down and appreciating just what the heck I’m doing.

I taught at a vfx/animation school once, and in that setting, I found it hard to quantify the things I did. I get through one year of multifarious subjects, a year of events, grading, failing, meeting, etc. It’s one big blur, and my memory being less-than-stellar, I’d forget all the details. Then one night, my wife and I started talking about the feeling of under-achieving despite feeling so busy. So we sat down to write our achievements, reminding each other what we had done.

I go through many projects, and I start one before stopping another, and so I’m not in the habit of sitting down and appreciating the end of projects. At the end of the year, it’s sometimes quite amazing to the see just how many I go through.

This commercial linked above, dubbed internally as Sporty Drive, was a 3-part campaign, and I was only involved in the first commercial. Three vfx houses contributed to the first commercial; two from NZ, and the main vfx vendor from Japan called VisualMan. It was shot in Queenstown, NZ with a Japanese crew and a local NZ crew. I was there along with two other vfx supervisors from the vendors to vfx-supervise the shoot  It was a great time; I hadn’t been to Queenstown before and the only thing that marred my work was the fact that I hadn’t been sleeping well (one night I didn’t sleep at all).

At the set of the airplane-forest shot; DOP at the top of the truck.

I would characterise the shoot as hectic as there were multiple locations that were hours apart, and we had only 3 days to shoot them all. Thankfully, I didn’t need to be in all of those locations and planned accordingly. vfx meetings were held late at night to discuss the storyboard; the director of the ad was not present, and only the DOP was the one heading the shoot.

The post-production side took 3 weeks, we 4 cg ops (that’s including me), and 2 flame ops. We ended up with 19 shots: a full CG sequence of cars racing around a fictional race track set in some dusky environment (originally based around the Speed Racer motif, but morphed into something else as time went by); a CG airplane sequence with a CG tunnel; a collapsing bridge sequence; and finally, some background replacements. Because the CG cars in the whole ad were going to be partly VisualMan’s work and partly ours, we shared the same CAD data and the same HDR. The bridge sequence was rendered in V-Ray, and the rest were rendered with Mental Ray on account of speed, as we predicted we were going to be up the wall in last-minute changes; we weren’t wrong.

Though this isn’t the first commercial I’ve led, it is the first that my current company asked me to ‘drive’, which meant to call (some of) the shots, and ‘direct’ as much as it was in my purview to do so. I enjoyed the experience very much. At the end of it, I felt very pleased at the results we got for so many shots, with so little time. Things, of course, could always be better, but I’ve been at this for so long — sounding like an broken record — that I know situations like these are never ideal. It is, however, much better to appreciate the intrinsic value of the nature of these sorts of projects and use that to learn and re-affirm my experiences.  Of course, I was even more pleased when I was told that on the weight of our work on Toyotown, that the director specifically wanted to work with us again on another of his commercials (ie Kirin Mets Gachapin) few months later on.

One of the main things that I enjoyed about the project was working with a Japanese team. Their culture has always been interestingly foreign to me, and I’ve always been eagerly curious to know how it would be like to work with them. Now I know, and I’m not disappointed; though there were many difficulties with the job, as most jobs do, I appreciated their sincerity, open-mindedness, and collaborative spirit; and the fact that when it’s work time, they don’t shut off.