By Steve Fronczek What was it like to be part of creating the top Sci-fi drama? Do you get more recognition now from your involvement? It was like hell. The sexiness wore off pretty quick the more the in-house VFX component grew, and it certainly fell down to the floor once the LA office was opened. I did really enjoy working on set and the shooting crew is fantastic, but when things got into post it felt more like accounting than actual creative work because of the poor organization of the department. At times it felt late into the fall, and Christmas of 2005 (Mid Season II) that they had bitten off more than they could chew in an effort to reduce costs and increase creative control. The results however went largely the opposite of what I think the producers had intended or were told. That's when the 16+ hour days, 7 days a week for weeks (at one point months) really kicked in. I don't mind hard work. Don't get me wrong, but I don't like doing work that could have been done much better (the visual results) and with less stress and conflict if it would have simply been organized better. What's your favorite episode out of the 30 or so episodes you worked on from the perspective of a Visual Effects Consultant? I have actually worked on more episodes than those 30 listed in IMDb.com. That information is a bit out of date. I left the show the first week in February, 2007. So I don't know really where we were when I left in terms of VFX production. Probably around episode 315. Regardless, out of the 3 seasons that I did work on, I have to say "Scar", even if it was pure hell the entire time, is my favorite. However the cuts we saw originally were very different than what aired. Michael Nankin who directed that episode did an amazing job of capturing the strife of the characters. The original Directors Cut was near perfect. It needed some slight tightening up in the edits for speed purposes to keep things moving on cue, but dramatically it really pushed a lot of character development for Kat and Starbuck that actually helped tie in a lot of things that had taken place before that episode and then later on. Unfortunately because of the final aired version edit being the way it is, much of the excellent writing in that script which did get shot by Michael and appeared in his original cut which was also beautifully performed by Katee Sackoff and Luciana Carro, got totally lost and weakened the emotional impact. It's a very strong episode as it is, but I think if the Fans saw the original cut, with the final VFX put in as they were originally planned (the asteroid belt was supposed to actually be made of ice and the pre-vis done for this was wicked!), it would have won an Emmy for VFX as well maybe brought an Emmy for the actors as well, or even best writing. It could have been that much better and with less stress. What kills me is if they would have gone with the original plan, the actual VFX production of the episode would have been done on time, looked better, and been less of a trial by fire (we shipped the last shot less than 39 hours before air!). However I appreciate going through that experience because it taught me a lot of things, both technically, artistically and with respect to how the industry "works" or rather were it fails miserably to its own detriment. Which do you prefer when rendering 3D graphics, the pre-vis break-out or compositing stage, and is there one you get to be more creative with? I have to honestly say that I enjoy the entire process throughout. From on-set work to pre-vis and story boarding the shots in 3D right down to watching lines of render node logs go by as the machines crank through the rendering process. The satisfaction of course comes from shipping a shot that you know looks good, not just your superiors think looks good. That happened less and less as Season III marched on. Part of the reason why I "had" to leave. The shot break-out process can be very tedious and frustrating especially when dealing with shots coming from other artists who have never actually had to do it themselves, but have been working "professionally" for longer than you and believe they can do no wrong. You feel squeezed because it's your responsibility to get it in and out of the rendering process as quickly as possible so that the compositors can work on the shot as they are next in line in the process. You never want part of your team sitting around doing nothing, but you also don't want them to have to do things twice because something went awry, almost always in the 3D department. So you have to know how the shot was created in 3D and what the final intention was for lighting and other effects yet at the same time having the technical knowledge to pull it apart for the rendering process, then how what that raw material will be used by the compositors so they have everything the need to finish the job. You get caught in the cross fire a lot, more or less used as a human shield by both ends of the department with the VFX Producer taking bets. Communications are always the key to making it work, but communications broke down miserably because people who didn't actually know the process would take the notes on a shot and fire them off to other parties concerned and it would either go through a incorrect translation process which produced even more confusion and frustration, or sometimes get lost totally, only to be notice again later on just before shipping a shot for final lay off into the edit of the show.
I enjoy compositing a lot, especially when working with pure computer generated images or integrating those images into a live action plate and make it believable. I did a lot of research and development on the rendering and compositing process with the new Centurions, which resulted in some amazing results that also look less time (from 20 hours down to 2.5) to render per frame but never made it into the show. Because of my duties in other areas, once season III progressed more, I did less and less artwork which was very disappointing. I have always felt the centurions are characters, not props. They have to look kick as ever time they are on screen, like the human characters. A lot of the hard work put into animating the Centurions by Timothy Albee got shot to hell in the compositing process, even though all the elements were produced to make them look absolutely photo-real Hang on, let's backup a sec... Not all of our readers will know some of the terminology. What is break-out and compositing? The break out process is the stage where a shot done in 3D gets split out into different "layers" or passes. For example the ships on the show are lit in 3D, and for maximum control we render out passes of each lighting element separately (layman's terms here), which can then be recombined in the compositing process but with various changes made to color, brightness, gamma, adding additional effects in 2D such as glow which helps bring out the specularity (glossy) look to the painted or scratched areas of a ship. That the basic explanation but it also deals with other elements such as engines, volumetric effects like fire, particles (shrapnel), explosions, tracer fire. You name it, we probably render it out separately for maximum control. However the compositing process can only go so far. So you have to ensure that a shot right out of the basic rendering of Lightwave looks really good in the first place. If it's a crummy shot in terms of how it was designed, don't expect to fix it in the compositing stage. There is no "make it look amazing" button in any VFX package. You have to know what you are doing first and foremost. Do you have a style you adhere to when compositing shots for the show? Well, we were supposed to. All of the compositing was intended to look consistent with what had been done previously in earlier episodes. However when the LA department opened up things started to change, which affected the compositing process, so certain looks that were established by Zoic Studios and continued on with Atmosphere VFX, got lost most of the time. The tools used in all three studios are the same. Each house uses Lightwave 3D for the modeling, surfacing (texturing), lighting and rendering. Atmosphere and the in-house VFX facility use Fusion, while Zoic uses Combustion and fusion or Flame. The process is the same really and should have produced really consistent looks. In the end however it went all over the map. How much more time and effort does it take to get that "documentary" camera wiggle effect to the VFX shots compared to just a stationary space shot? None really. Because Lightwave is so fast and easy to use, you can basically go for whatever look you want to without much hassle if any. But abusing that style now seems to be the norm in the VFX process because it's being used to hide problems that are unrelated to the software. What methods do you use to get ideas to help flesh out the story boards? The story boarding process is largely done before hand and cut into the edit where a VFX shot will go. That or they will cut in previous shots that are similar from previous episodes just to get the feel and the timing for the duration of shot. However, we do take those story boards direct from the story board artist with director and producers input and work out the shots in the pre-visualization stage as much as possible. This helps the director and producers as well as people in post-production sound to visualize exactly what is happening on screen. If we do our jobs right, we can take the Lightwave 3D scenes from the pre-vis and translate them directly into a final shot which then goes through the break out and compositing process, then cut back into the show as final and they get exactly what they expected. One of my favorite VFX shots was when Gina blew up the Cloud 9 from "Lay Down Your Burdens 2". As we see Cloud 9 explode a chunk of the hull hits the camera and it gets knocked out. Did you work on that shot and was that part of the action story boarded? That shot was done by Zoic Studios and I think it was one of the very last shots they did on the series. But I can tell you that a lot of the story boarding elements such as the camera lens break was there as I did see those boards. At one point I think it was scrapped (the lens crack) but made it back in at the last minute. You would have to talk to the good cats at Zoic and find out. What was the hardest and most challenging VFX shot you had to do for Galactica? One of the most challenging shots was in Season II for "Flight of the Phoenix". The script called for a massive Cylon and Colonial armada to meet in space head-to-head. This literally meant over 80 Viper Mk II and Mk VII's on screen at the same time as hundreds of Cylon Raiders and dozens on Heavy Raiders. We did these shots in-house and the biggest challenge was dealing with that many ships. In order to make our master shots that get broken down into render, we grouped the ships into 3 parts for each "side" of the battle line. Background, mid-ground and foreground. There is a part where the camera pulls back over the wings of a few vipers then across the nose of another revealing dozens of them. Because of this, we had to balance the level of detail in the ships vs. what we could physically render because of ram limitations on the basic render farm we had at the time. That was a very challenging shot but it is also one of the best looking shots, not just in terms of quality but also in terms of dramatic impact. It gave the audience an idea of the scope of what the colonials were up against, and also re-enforced the concept of born flesh vs. manufactured flesh and the waste of the lives of those pilots had the story had a different outcome. Do you have any "easter eggs" you have been able to incorporate into your VFX composites? Yes. But I can't say. No, they are not obvious things like the "Serenity" in the mini-series being shown through the glass of [Roslyn's doctor's office] when she is told she has cancer or anything like that. Still I have worked in some small stuff here and there which you would never see unless you went back to the original 3D scene files. I did at one point have to prove to the VFX producer that one of our ships (Flat-top, a repair freighter) looks a lot like the original series "Star Trek Enterprise" at certain angles at a distance after it came to the attention that someone at another studio may or may not have dropped it in as a joke into one of the fleet ship shots. Although I can tell you that I became very concerned about models from other sci-fi shows being used for fleet shots as stand-ins that may have actually gone to air like that. I was told to keep it hush-hush. Another one of the reasons why I "had" to leave.--------------------------- |
