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Just as JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL<\/em> raises its own game with story, action, and adventure, so do the CGI needs in order to execute and deliver on that story.\u00a0 And this is where Weta Visual Effects Supervisor K EN McGAUGH and his team come into play.\u00a0 A two-time Academy Award winner, Ken has spent his career in visual effects, first at Weta working on the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers<\/em> and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King<\/em>, then jumping over to Double Negative for a decade working on films like Batman Begins, Avengers: The Age of Ultron<\/em>, and Godzilla<\/em>, before returning to Weta Digital as Visual Effects Supervisor on Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, and The BFG.\u00a0 And now he tackles some of the most intricate visual effects of his career with JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL.<\/p>\n While there are several effects houses involved in the film, it fell to Weta to handle the mind-blowing rope bridge sequence complete with bridges, mandrills, digi-doubles, live action, rapid-paced three-dimensional action, and then dazzle us with some terrifying hyenas.\u00a0 For my money, the award-worthy work of KEN McGAUGH and Weta Digital with the rope bridge sequence is a big reason to not only see the film, but see it more than once.<\/p>\n Chatting with Ken during global pandemic lockdown, we not only spoke in-depth about the effects process for JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL, <\/em>but the current production situation around the globe.\u00a0 While the whole of Weta is “working at home right now and all efforts are in maintaining business continuity for the current projects, the big fear is because you can’t shoot. Without the ability to shoot, you don’t have to edit and without the ability to edit, you don’t have ability to do visual effects.”\u00a0 As Ken notes, as long as the world remains on lockdown, even productions shot in New Zealand where Weta is located and where so many productions now shoot, are crippled because “we won’t able to import cast or crew like we often have to.”<\/p>\n While Weta Digital and Ken and the world await normalcy and more movies in the production pipeline, it does give us time to view the films that we have available now for screening and appreciate the work of the artisans who brought those films to life; and one of those is KEN McGAUGH and JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL<\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0From 200 to 300 mandrills, 100 to 200 suspension bridges, an exquisite topographical backdrop, and beautifully composed and balanced foreground and background, Ken and his team left no stone unturned, no mandrill left hanging. . .<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ken, something that I’m very happy about is that you were with Weta, you left Weta, you came back to Weta and now you just worked on one of the coolest cinematic sequences in JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL<\/em>.\u00a0 I’m watching the film and the bridge sequence comes up and I’m immediately thinking of is MC Escher and that famous drawing of his with all the staircases, and Hogwarts with the moving staircases.\u00a0 \u00a0Floating in air, going back and forth; it’s not one-directional.\u00a0 Everything is very volumetric in three dimensions as things are moving.\u00a0 You bring in rope bridges that are breaking with weight and you’ve got the weight of somebody like Dwayne Johnson that’s going to have a different balance and then counterbalances with somebody small like Kevin Hart.\u00a0 This sequence is masterful.<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, thank you. I like your MC Escher reference because that’s the one thing that we actually had not really thought about, but the Hogwarts staircase shots were something that was on our mind when we’re looking at some of the shots with the counter-rotating bridges, just as a sense of vertigo and chaos. But, it’s meant to be confusing. In some ways that actually helped us. That meant that we didn’t have to maintain strict continuity and it was trying to maintain strict continuity in some situations because we didn’t want the audience sitting on what happens in what order and we just wanted them to be as confused as it was meant to be.<\/p>\n That’s what the whole idea of Jumanji<\/em> is.\u00a0 The game is confusing and it breaks the rules so there are no rules.<\/strong><\/p>\n Exactly. Definitely.\u00a0 We’re very, very proud of the work. They obviously came to us because we have a little bit of experience doing monkeys.\u00a0 So by the end, we had wanted a big shot, and it was really coming together and Mark Breakspear [VFX Supervisor] had commented how great the bridges look. He’s very, very witty and he made a joke about, “Well, that’s why they came to Weta because they’d come for our bridges.”\u00a0 Well, the bridges were secondary.\u00a0 But to be fair, the bridges actually ended up being less as much of a character in the sequence as the monkeys and technically a lot more difficult because we were used to doing monkeys and hoards of monkeys.\u00a0 We don’t have a lot of experience doing something like rope bridges, especially given they have to work with a hoard of monkeys. It’s animation on top of animation on top of animation and that broke all the assumptions our pipeline makes and we had to invent new ways of working to do it. It was a bit of a gamble but it really paid off at the end.<\/p>\n Something that I found particularly striking is the layering that you have here.\u00a0 You’ve got the gorge itself, you have thousands and thousands of green plants, you’ve got fog, you’ve got mist, you’ve got volumetric clouds coming in, you’ve got monkeys;\u00a0 Mandrills, which are very different than gorillas in many respects, and you’re making them mean and nasty and mandrills are not mean and nasty primates.\u00a0 So, you’re just building and building.\u00a0 And then you’ve got stunts happening so you’re doing digi-stunt doubles, I’m sure, and digi-principal actor doubles.\u00a0 So, this is just layer upon layer, upon layer and then all of that’s thrown on top of bridges. Where do you start with something like this?<\/strong><\/p>\n There’s two places to start. The first place is when it comes to the monkeys themselves, we just look for reference. As you mentioned, mandrills are not very aggressive and we could not find any reference of a mandrill being aggressive. A lot of the aggressive behavior and looks we had to model up from the baboons or other monkeys.\u00a0 So, there’s an extrapolation there.\u00a0 To those people that know primates, the first thing they’ll probably notice, I’m sure there’s some forum somewhere where someone’s had a winch about this, but our mandrills had tails and real mandrills don’t have tails. In our video, mandrills, they’re meant to be scary and they’re meant to be different so they’re actually not anatomically correct to real mandrills.\u00a0 But the main place we like to start, and we prefer to do this whenever possible is, we like to start with principal photography. Even if we ended up replacing pretty much everything in the frame or CG, it still really grounds the work, having something to base it off and if incorrect, they can remove little bits of the set or environments they didn’t match to.\u00a0 Unfortunately, there’s lots of photography in there.\u00a0 It’s all blue screens so we have tried to replace quite a bit of it with the environment.\u00a0 But that really grounds everything so all CG shots are quite a bit more work because you have to define what the shot is.\u00a0 Then you have to get the camera move to look real.\u00a0 And there were a handful of those CG shots in this.\u00a0 Our animation team did a fantastic job led by Simeon Duncombe, not only all the mandrill work, but just the camera and some basic photography needed to achieve this.\u00a0 Then we have to lay out a plan and do it one step at a time.\u00a0 I struggle every single project where I’m presented with, “here’s what the end goal needs to be, it needs to be higher to the mandrills on hundreds and hundreds of bridges, all moving, all reacting to each other and BCG environment chasing people on these bridge plates that are really messy and hard to deal with because they’re all stretches of ropes against the screen.”\u00a0 My first reaction is, how do I handle that. I remind myself that after so many years of doing this that, that’s good that you don’t know how you’re going to do it when you start; you just start laying out a plan and you just take it one step at a time and you just trust that every step is going to build on the previous step.\u00a0 And if you do it in the order that you planned it, then it will work and by the time you’re done, you won’t know how you got there.\u00a0 That’s what I love about the job, every project presents a new challenge that way.<\/p>\n Something I found interesting with the mandrills, versus the Apes<\/em> films where they are really focused on developing the eye contact and light reflection within the eyes and the scleroderma around the eyes, here, you’re not paying as much attention to the eyes of the mandrills as the color of the face, because their color is beautiful and you have that captured beautifully.\u00a0 But then, the violence and the anger of fangs and teeth, actually look quite similar to some of the snarling with those hyenas that we briefly see within the film.\u00a0 So, I’m curious, how long the mandrill process took to develop their specific look before you start integrating and creating everybody else.<\/strong><\/p>\n I think that the mandrills actually were one of the smoothest part of the process for us, in part due to just our vast experience in doing monkeys. Also, because they’re always moving and they’re always aggressive, it’s easier to do big action and aggression and animation than do anything in a bubble, like a drama. That’s where things like the eye contact, the eye darts, the very subtle facial expressions, they are really important. All the developments from the Apes<\/em> films, we inherited.\u00a0 The way that I look at the techniques used to do on stuff, our animators are very experienced with.\u00a0 I will say that even given how action focused the sequence is, which means you can get away with a lot on the animation side when it comes to nuance, eyes still were repeatedly something that we had to go back and refine, refine and refine.\u00a0 There’s a handful of shots which are really focused on the faces for the mandrills and the comments usually coming were, “it looks great, eyes are bad.”\u00a0 The curse of doing CG animals or people or characters always will be, getting the eyes.\u00a0 That takes a lot of work and you still have to put nuance in there even at action sequences, if you really focus on the eyes.\u00a0 In many shots, we had lots of mandrills jumping over each other so you don’t focus on the eyes and you don’t have to do nuances quite so much.<\/p>\n But there are a couple of shots where the mandrills are coming right at the camera and it’s very effective.\u00a0 Tieing into that effectiveness is the fur on all of these creatures. Gorgeous job with the fur, Ken.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you. The fur is probably the one area where our past experience on films during various types of primates really paid off. Obviously, we go from concept art and we start implementing it.\u00a0 It will end up being a bit of a back and forth with the client refining it.\u00a0 That was a very smooth process and it’s because we have so much experience with those types of furry creatures. We did the hyenas as well.\u00a0 The hyenas were a whole other story. Getting the fur right; that was a lot harder than it was on the mandrills.<\/p>\n They are scary. Those hyenas are ugly and scary.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n It’s amazing you say that because a lot of the back and forth we had to try to get the fur right was, they look too fluffy and too dog-like so we had to keep on making them scarier, scarier, scarier and scarier.\u00a0 It was very lighting dependent.\u00a0 We had help with that too as we had just finished doing the new Lady and the Tramp<\/em> with the CG dog.\u00a0 We have a lot of experience doing CG dogs.\u00a0 Dogs and hyenas, now you think they’re very similar but when it comes down to it, they’re actually very, very different in the way they move and the way they look. So, separating ourselves from jumping dogs was hard but it was the thing we had to do in order to get the hyena look working.<\/p>\n Immediately, because they were hyenas, I was thinking about what Favreau and his people did in the live-action Lion King<\/em> with their virtual experience of what they created.\u00a0 I have to say, I think that your hyenas look much more realistic in their stance, in the bone structure of the stance, especially of the front legs. With the curvature of the spine and the head going down, it looked much more authentic and scary as hell.<\/strong><\/p>\n That was the whole point.\u00a0 They had to be scary.\u00a0 But, I think with the anatomical proportions, early on we based our hyena off of a lot of data that was available for hyena from the, I think, from Los Angeles Zoo. I don’t think it’s San Diego zoo.\u00a0 And then we got the proportions right but as we learnt, it’s not just about the proportions, it’s about the posture.\u00a0 \u00a0It’s very, very easy to make the hyena look like a dog if you set the posture in certain ways or incorrectly.\u00a0 One of the things we discovered, the curvature of the neck, keeping the head low, keeping their rear hunched and rounded over almost like with a dog – you think a dog was weight-bearing or was being scolded with the tails tucked under –\u00a0 but the hyena, that’s actually a point of progression.\u00a0 Going against your intuition and how you work with dogs was necessary.\u00a0 We had these anatomical features that have to be graduated through the animation to sell it and that was a learning curve for us.\u00a0 We got there in the end. I’m very proud of the hyena work but it wasn’t an easy as we thought it would be.<\/p>\n Well, I love the hyena work!<\/strong>\u00a0 As I said, that’s really what stood out for me, that spinal curvature with the head down and that nice, smooth downward curve.\u00a0 I didn’t see that with Lion King<\/em>. So, I was really happy to see the accuracy and the authenticity that you brought to the animation of these hyenas.\u00a0 It makes up for giving the mandrills tails!\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you.\u00a0 At first when we saw the mandrills had tails in the concept we thought, “Oh no.\u00a0 They’re just going to be swinging from those tails”, which makes animation a lot harder.\u00a0 Then someone pointed out that baboon monkeys actually swing from tails and even the tails are most definitely not new with monkeys.\u00a0 So, we were able to get away with not having swinger tails.<\/p>\n Going back to the bridge sequence and the mandrills.\u00a0 With all of these bridges, you’ve got weight factors involved.\u00a0 As we always see with rope bridges, you’ve got planks breaking depending on weight, so you’ve got weight differentials to capture and create.\u00a0 As I said earlier, between Dwayne [Johnson], Kevin [Hart], and the mandrills, some of them actually look like they weigh more than Kevin, but you have such great balance happening. When I look at the bridges, you’ve got perfect sway and you’ve got the weight dropping some of those bridges down and it’s all continually shifting and changing.\u00a0 I’m curious how you went about executing that and specifically designing these bridges, which I know were built practically to an extent.\u00a0 But, I’m curious how you went about designing them and capturing those weight differentials and weighting the bridges themselves because they have to have some kind of substance to them as well to hold the weight that’s being put on them.<\/strong><\/p>\n Actually, a real mandrill probably weighs as much as Dwayne does.\u00a0 That was actually probably the biggest challenge we had.\u00a0 We thought that with the chaos and within the action sequence, we’ll be able to just have the bridges just randomly undulate around and then we put the monkeys on them but we realized that work flow wouldn’t actually be really conducive to the way we want to work.\u00a0 Also, it didn’t work as well as having the bridges actually respond to the monkey animation.\u00a0 We had developed a pipeline where we’d have a bridge; our CG bridges were based purely off of the practical bridges on set.\u00a0 What we did is, we had the bridges to be rigid and we had the monkey animation going across the bridge, across the ropes, doing all that.\u00a0 And then, we would feed it to another group of people that use this quite specialized implementation of some commercial software called Euphoria that does physical simulations from animation.\u00a0 They take the monkey animation and would run it across the bridges and it makes the bridges move and makes the monkeys fall over the bridge as well. The monkeys would stick to the bridges and fall off the bridges, too, and that gets the dynamics.\u00a0 But then the result that comes out of that still has lots of clean up to do because you’d have monkey paws going through planks or crashing through ropes.\u00a0 So, then it has to go back to the other team that cleans it all up.\u00a0 Going through all those processes, it’s very time consuming, so our biggest fear was coming at the other end and having animations that they would have us to go back to the beginning and then go back to all departments.\u00a0 But the clients are very, very accommodating.<\/p>\n We laid out our plan early on how we were going to tackle the vast majority of animations, what we call vignettes because we realized from the trailer early on that with having a vignette and just changing the timings of the vignettes and multiplying it out through the frame and through the scenes, you can get away with a lot of repetition and not know that it’s repetitive.\u00a0 With the trailer, we had exactly one vignette.\u00a0 The vignette was mandrills on a bridge, running across and jumping up the other end.\u00a0 With that one vignette, we were able to do all the trailer shots with.\u00a0\u00a0 So that was a proof of concept.\u00a0 We ended up having longer vignettes and more of them.\u00a0 We did just a handful of them.\u00a0 I think some of them were actually driven by actions that were needed in a specific shot, but they were still generic enough that if you saw the background of another shot, you wouldn’t think twice about it.\u00a0 We had to build a whole pipeline where these vignettes are treated as shots, where they go through this whole animation process I just described and on the other end comes the end result, including all the effects of debris falling off and dust being kicked up.\u00a0 All the dynamics on the fur or the secondary dynamics on the ropes that were added after all the dynamics of the interactions as all packaged up as the vignette, our animation team was then able to go back and place vignettes as animated elements.\u00a0 That meant that, in a lot of those shots, by the time we had the pipeline finally working, it was easier to add a whole group of bridges full of dozens of monkeys running across it than it was to change the animation on a single monkey.\u00a0 We tweeted that with Mark Gee [Visual Effects Sequence Supervisor] and they got on board.\u00a0 They wasted no time in saying, “Okay, get rid of this bridge over here.\u00a0 I want to bridge over here to two bridges with monkeys fumbling onto a third bridge.”\u00a0 \u00a0They realized that they could actually pick the frame with a lot of monkeys on bridges rather than trying to hand animate individual monkeys.\u00a0 And that is the only way we’re able to get that done because if we had to hand animate every single monkey and every single shot, we never would’ve been able to finish it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wow!\u00a0 Just, wow!\u00a0 I love the suspension aspect of the bridges because they’re all essentially pulleys.\u00a0 They’re like V-pulley suspensions and I love seeing that detail even come into play with the bridge work.<\/strong><\/p>\n Fortunately, the ropes of the bridges just disappear into the clouds and then you can’t see where they come from.\u00a0 The bridges they had on set were held by these steel things.\u00a0 A real rope bridge like would just collapse on itself. In our bridges, there’s still those invisible frames that hold the ends away from each other, but then it looks too rigid.\u00a0 It didn’t look right so we had to allow a little bit of wobble in it but still fitting constraints so that the bridges can’t just collapse and just fold up on itself. Everything that we added, the details are complicated quite a bit. But, we were happy.\u00a0 Unfortunately, anytime we’d show a bridge with dynamics of monkeys running across it, the first comment we almost always got was, you can’t make the bridges move enough.\u00a0 We build them frequently early on and just go bigger and stronger.\u00a0 Eventually, we finally did hit that point where we could make it big enough.\u00a0 We finally had one shot where we’ve done another thing – you’ve made the bridge look too much stuff on it.<\/p>\n How many bridges and monkeys did you ultimately end up with?\u00a0 Total in shots.<\/strong><\/p>\n I think some of the shots we had 200 or 300 monkeys and on about maybe 100 to 200 bridges.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s been a while so I’m guessing right now, but it’s definitely in the hundreds.\u00a0 And the bridges were more expensive to render than the monkeys.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And then you have to add people.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah.\u00a0 The people.\u00a0 We had quite a few digi-double shots and some of them were digi-double takeovers where we actually have a live-action play of one of the cast members or a stunt double and you have to take them over within the shot into a CG version of himself and those are always the hardest ones to do.\u00a0 For instance, when Karen Gillan’s character, Ruby, is on houses picked up by the monkey and thrown, that top down shot of her being thrown from her halter top, it’s all from the photography and her waist downwards is all CG throughout the entire shot.\u00a0 That was lovely because she had a stunt harness that would’ve been very difficult to paint out and we\u00a0 found it easier just to replace her whole mid-section with CG.\u00a0 \u00a0Also, it really improved the contact with the monkey that’s holding her by the waist.<\/p>\n You have all of these components but then you set them against this beautiful, beautiful gorge and the backdrop with the mist, the clouds, snow-covered mountains in the distance.\u00a0 If it weren’t for your nasty monkeys, it would look beautiful, almost utopic.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you. There was perpetually a sunset there as well.<\/p>\n I have to commend you on the lighting because we’re getting 360\u00b0 of light.\u00a0 We’re feeling where the sun is in the sky so that when everything is spinning, when the bridges are spinning and people are dropping and monkeys are dropping and then we’re going back up on a rope,\u00a0 we at least have a temporal context within the course of a day almost. How challenging is that lighting aspect of this?<\/strong><\/p>\n When it came to the lighting and when it came to the layouts, one thing I should point out is, we had to guess early on how big the gorge should be before we had the whole sequence turned over to us. A bit of a handful of shots in the preview, we made a guess how big the gorge was and we laid out all the spires.\u00a0 I don’t know if you noticed that some of the spires have animals’ faces in them.\u00a0 Actually, there is a monkey spire, there’s a crocodile spire and in the background on a cliff face, is an elephant’s head.\u00a0 But, we had the whole thing laid out because as the sequence developed we realized that the gorge was not a big one and we were a little bit too far into the work we had done to go back and start over so we had to break the whole sequence stuff into bits.\u00a0 For each bit, when looking in this direction, we would shift that cliff face away and rearrange the spires and when looking in the other direction, we would do the same thing.\u00a0 We did that for everything.\u00a0 We had our base global layout which had to become stretched and treated.\u00a0 One of the things, and just for composition as well, when looking at a certain direction, it was boring so we’d say, “Well, we’re going to look a little bit more this way or we’re going to drop an extra spire right here just to give us a good composition and some depth layering in the background.”\u00a0 And lighting followed suit with all these bits.\u00a0 We had to make sure that the lighting was consistent with the storytelling aspect.\u00a0 The sunset is traveling South to North and the light of sunset in the West and the place topography was very, very good at maintaining light direction.\u00a0 There were a handful of places where our creative choices and with the edit method they used, shots were originally intended for different parts of the sequence, so we had to get very creative with the lighting so that we maintain that kind of storytelling continuity as well as matching what we did in the photography.\u00a0 But surprisingly, it only ended up being a handful of times we had to do that. I thought that Jumanji’s lighting was fantastic.<\/p>\n Did you have any specific reference that you looked to for developing the topography, the snow-covered mountains, and the foliage?\u00a0 Because, as you know, foliage can be so specific to a region so I’m curious if you had visual reference for that.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes. The whole gorge environment is based very much also, I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce the name, but it’s this Zhangjiajie National Forest in China.\u00a0 It’s the exact same location that was the reference for the Floating Mountains in Avatar<\/em>. Since we were working with that film, the unique thing is that we just stole everything they’re doing but they haven’t gotten to that stage yet on the Avatar<\/em> so we had to do it ourselves.<\/p>\n So now that they can steal from you?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, they can!\u00a0 \u00a0They probably are already.\u00a0 But the look of it based heavily off of that. T here was some beautiful concept art done by IOS concept division of what the gorge looks like, not only for the geography and the foliage, but also the mood of the sky, the clouds, and the lighting, so that drove most of what we did of trying to match that artwork.\u00a0 The balance between was good.\u00a0 We expected it to be this beautiful sunset but we didn’t know if it really was there.\u00a0 But there’s a beautiful sunset, there’s lighting on the gorge.\u00a0 It was just what we expected.\u00a0 So, it’s a balance between beauty lighting to make the foreground pieces look good and sunset lighting on the background.\u00a0 And that’s the perpetual struggle that we have with visual effects, you always want the foreground stuff to look good but you want the background stuff to look real. So it’s funny the trade-off, the transition and the balance between them.<\/p>\n It’s very funny that you mentioned that because in my notes as I was watching the film, I have little stars next to it, “foreground and background”, because I was very impressed with how good the foreground looks but also how beautiful the background looks as well and how realistic.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you. That was, I’d say, a large portion of the assembly work that went into finishing the shot was the ability to balance the foreground and the background.\u00a0 It felt like an endless struggle trying to get those balances just right and I’m glad that you appreciate that.<\/p>\n Especially with this sequence that you guys did in the film, because this is the one that has the biggest delineation between your foreground and your background.\u00a0 Everything else is pretty much in a very contained space whereas, this sequence is not, it covers a much wider breath of air.<\/strong><\/p>\n I think there’s a lot of those shots, especially the shots where the camera is right there with the characters in the foreground but there actually was a gorge exactly like this and this is all real.\u00a0 If they had a camera out there and they shot them for real, it wouldn’t look good because you’d have such a distinction between the foreground and the background, nothing connecting them. So, a lot of our work was actually not trying to make it look real, it was just trying to make it look interesting.\u00a0 Sometimes, real photography looks fake so we have to try to not make the audience jump out of the sequence because the whole purpose of the sequence is to get the eyes engaged in the action and the drama.<\/p>\n Ken, because I know that ILM did some VFX on Jumanji 2<\/em>, as did MPC Rodeo FX, so I’m curious, do you work in tandem with any of those or is everybody independent and somehow it all looks cohesive at the end of the day?<\/strong><\/p>\n There’s definitely some sharing of work.\u00a0 I heard that MPC did work on the film, as far as I know, and ILM did the concept arts so they were involved as art resource but they didn’t do any shot’s work.\u00a0 The vendors were primarily Sony, Weta, Rodeo, and the Method out of Melbourne. Rodeo and Method, we had to share some work still on the hyenas.\u00a0 We were the hyena vendor but sometimes behind the shop in a CG environment, we had to put our hyenas into another vendor’s CG environment.\u00a0 With the case of the mountain top fortress, Jurgen’s fortress, that was Method doing the fortress and in those shots, we did the hyena and we also did the CG crowds as well.\u00a0 Then the oasis environment was all done by Rodeo.\u00a0 There was a couple of shots where there was CG crowds and CG hyenas that we had to put into their environment.\u00a0 So, we did have to collaborate with them in the ground workflows for extension data.<\/p>\n For you, Ken, because you’ve been doing VFX for so long, you’ve been with Weta, you’ve been with ILM, you’ve been with Double Negative, which by the way, I have to say, I am one of the huge fans of John Carter<\/em>, let’s just get that out there, I love that film and I so wanted to see sequels because there are so many books in the John Carter series. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh, you’re one of the five!\u00a0 \u00a0Thank you! I want to see sequels largely because that was one of those wonderful experiences working on a project.\u00a0 Andrew Stanton was just a dream to work with.\u00a0 We were so proud of the work we did and it was such a good experience.\u00a0 It popped on TV here and I hadn’t seen it in years.\u00a0 I was really pleasantly surprised at how well the visual effects held up all this time.<\/p>\n But, I’m curious, now that you’ve gone through this process tackling new things with the rotoscoping for the rope bridges and the building, rebuilding, cut and paste so to speak for the layperson, what did you take away from this particular project or what new technology that you came about that you’re going to be able to use in your next project?.<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, I don’t know our next project but the workflow and technology that I’m most excited about to solve problems on other projects that we may be working on and potential future ones that I don’t know that yet I may work on was the vignette workflow for getting the large amounts of coupled animation between environment pieces and characters up to a really large scale.\u00a0 The workloads that were created for that, I think, works phenomenally well.\u00a0 I look forward to having an opportunity to do something like that again.\u00a0 There are small bits of technology that we’re quite proud of.\u00a0 One of them is rotoscoping of the ropes on the optical bridges.\u00a0 The ropes are so thin and when they’re moving, the motion below it, there’s no way you could rotoscope down.\u00a0 First off, you would spend a fortune rotoscoping them and then the rotoscope wouldn’t be useful for extracting the actual works of the place because through the motion blur they were so mixed with the stuff in the background and it’s really difficult, the way things are moving, for us to get really good blue screen coverage back there.\u00a0 So, you would end up using the rotoscope just to reconstruct something that looks like the rope but you wouldn’t have the ways to add texture or shaving or anything like that to it.\u00a0 Our component’s supervisor, Robin Hollander, came up with this technique for using open lines so our rotoscoping artists can have the option, usually they close those lines and they make a whole loop around something, but to keep it open, it’s not a common workflow, but you did indeed get the way of actually adding texture to it and you can also keep it a lot simpler.\u00a0 There’s this whole workflow technique where our rotoscope artists could very intuitively do a really rough blocked out outline of the ropes and then add detail just where they need to and then those lines they would draw would actually get textured to make quick ropes.\u00a0 We would just also replace the ropes on the bridges where they became problematic or they’re going over the actors.\u00a0 That was a system called a Ropo.\u00a0 It wasn’t used a tremendous amount, but where it was used, it was essential.\u00a0 It’s just really clever and we’re quite proud of it.<\/p>\n by debbie elias, exclusive interview 03\/26\/2020<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/ken-mcgaugh.png\")
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