District 9: The CG Society Interview with Image Engine
In this first of two features covering the efforts of Vancouver's Image Engine VFX studio, we meet some crew and find out how they worked. CGSociety :: Production Focus Part 1/2
20 October 2009, by Paul HellardHistoryFor many years, the founding partners of Image Engine, namely Robin Hackl, Christopher Mossman and Greg Holmes wanted to nurture the company into new areas, to start taking on more film work. They'd grown a primarily television-focused business over the previous ten years, just like other boutique shops in Vancouver. When Neill Blomkamp arrived with the feature film pitch for 'District 9', this was exactly what they were waiting for.
They needed folks with feature film experience to drive the growth. Shawn Walsh began as a Digital Effects Supervisor on the existing episodic television work, but given his background, he quickly turned his attention to the task of creating a feature film division at the company. Now, Image Engine has grown roughly four or five fold in four or five years.
"The first person I called begging for help was Peter Muyzers who was my CG Supervisor when I worked as a lighter at The Moving Picture Company on 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'," explains Walsh. "Both Peter and I were looking for an opportunity to create something in Vancouver and the film division at Image Engine fitted the bill for us. Pete and I hashed out a plan to grow the company into a film focused entity and set that plan in motion." Now, film work accounts for about 90% of Image Engine's revenue. Shawn Walsh says that Muyzers has been the key catalyst in their increased technical capabilities, the drive towards establishing a strong R&D department under John Haddon, and creatively reaching for the highest level possible. "It has been a really challenging three years, but we are really jazzed about our crew's potential," Walsh says.
FilmWhen Peter Muyzers and Shawn Walsh went to New Zealand to flesh out the film plan, Neill was very responsive to their suggestions regarding the visual effects process and to some degree handed the torch to them. "He'd been carrying the ideas for visual effects on 'District 9' for some time, and I think he really wanted someone to take up the charge. Neill's ideas and our plan to facilitate them held up throughout the entire production at Image Engine, from the initial scrums at WingNut Films back in New Zealand."
"Neill Blomkamp is an incredibly savvy filmmaker. His knowledge of the process from start to finish is well beyond his years," Walsh adds. However, Shawn points to one aspect you wouldn't necessarily know until you have some working familiarity with Blomkamp is that he is a focused designer. "I was working with Neill in pre-production," explains Walsh. "It was only after I watched Blomkamp laying out the visual effects of 'District 9' at Image Engine that I was truly convinced that this work was possible within our budget."
The crew completed somewhere around 80 shots in the final five weeks of the schedule. "That simply would not have been possible without the combination of Image Engine's R&D driven film pipeline, Neill's incredible clarity of vision and our amazingly talented crew," says Shawn. "Also, let's not forget that Neill had a great mentor and support system in Peter Jackson and all the folks at WingNut who were all very passionate about this project. They are a great bunch to work with!"
StaffingThere were a lot of other people involved in the hiring process, but ultimately Peter Muyzers (Digital Production Manager), Stefanie Boose (Visual Effects Producer) and I really put a lot of effort into reaching out into the visual effects community and qualifying people to work at Image Engine on this project. We were fortunate in that the previous three years had seen a slow and steady accumulation of talent at Image Engine. At the start of the project we had assembled a great core crew of about 50 at Image Engine. But for 'District 9' I flew to London, Toronto and Montreal to conduct interviews with folks who were interested in joining our crew. In addition, key people also came from direct working experience or referral. James Stewart (Creature Supervisor) is someone I have known for just about as long as anyone I can remember in the industry, Rob Bourgeault (Lighting Lead) and I went to film school together and Dan Kaufman (Visual Effects Supervisor) was new to Image Engine but was referred through friends in the industry and did a great job leading the charge during post production. It is amazing sometimes how people can come together on a project like this one that has 'something special about it' that people can just feel. Our crew is a tremendously talented group and range from juniors I have personally mentored at The Vancouver Film School all the way through to very senior people who have been attracted to our agenda.
Artist, modelerMarco Menco began his dream job working at Image-Engine (IE) after searching Vancouver VFX houses for a few months. After traveling from Italy with his partner and fellow CGTalker Vivien Hulbert, Marco started in the TV department of IE working on 'Stargate: Atlantis'. The aliens he created for that show gave proof to his managers he was able to handle the alien for 'District 9'.
Marco's specialty was poly-modeling and texturing of the aliens and the clothes. Starting from a 3D scan of the clay model provided by WETA Workshop, the IE crew re-topologized the model and then cleaned the geometry in Maya to prepare it for rigging. Playing with lots of different aspects of character creation, they used ZBrush mostly for texturing, for gross displacement for background clothes. "I was pretty excited to work with the 'maquette' of Christopher Johnson (the main alien) on my desk, especially thinking that was done by the great artists at WETA," explains Menco.
"I worked with my creature supervisor James Stewart shoulder to shoulder to build the creatures and get them ready for rigging, then animation. Jelmer Boskma, Gus Yamin and Alexander Lehman were working with me during this process," Menco adds. "After this, I had the chance to work on a human digital double. It was the digi-double for Koobus, the bad guy. That was a pretty different experience for me since I did the character in almost his totality. I started from the scan of the actor, built the geometry, then I did the texturing and the look-development, guided by Nigel Denton-Howes and Joe Eveleigh."
"It was a great experience," Marco chirps. "Neill Blomkamp, the director, was sending comments and excitement through Shawn Walsh, our Visual Effects Executive Producer and Dan Kaufman, our Visual Effects Supervisor and that was always really encouraging to keep the spirit and the quality of the work high. The team was full of amazing artists such as James Stewart, Jelmer Boskma, Julianna Kolakis, Anna Ivanova and many others, so it was quite easy to talk about art, ideas and to learn from each other. It was what I was looking for when I choose to study at the Academy of Fine Art! I learned a lot about how to deal with modeling with creatures and characters in a professional production environment at the studio Image Engine and being part of its team of artists makes me feel quite proud."
JabukaImage Engine's Digital Asset Management system was written in-house by the Digital Asset Lead on the project, Nigel Denton-Howes. IE looked at various asset management systems that are marketed solutions, but none of them seemed to be able to match their necessity for a flexible, robust solution that would tie into the existing pipeline which had facilities for animation caching, version control, etc. The house needed the ability to modify the look of the aliens almost on a shot by shot basis and to maintain visibility and ease of management. The variation would take shape via texture map changes, shader changes, additional rigged CG assets on the aliens. Many small details that had to be tracked on a per set-up basis. "Nigel is one of the most naturally talented folks I have ever worked with and he was the ideal combination of an artist with programming capabilities to take on the asset management system," says Walsh. "We needed that process to be open and easily manageable by artists and coordinators alike. Jabuka allowed us to do all that and more."
"Jabuka is an asset management and shot setup system written in python using a postgreSQL database backend," adds Nigel Denton-Howes, Modeling and Texturing Supervisor. "Many of its shot-end lighting tools are built upon the cortex libraries open sourced by Image Engine. Jabuka was designed to handle version control of assets, shot setup and interdepartmental dependencies once in shots." Although Jabuka was used and useful on every shot in 'District 9', it really shines in shots with large numbers of creatures. The shot setup tools included many used for randomization including color, paint, sticker, geometry and clothing variations. "These tools made it simple for animators to select 40 or 50 creatures, hit one button, and get a crowd of entirely unique characters," adds Denton-Howes. "These same tools also made it a simple process for a sequence supervisor to modify those initial random characters and have those changes propagate to the TDs."
Neill Blomkamp's brief was that "Jason Cope's performance as Christopher Johnson must live on in the shot through the CG." This was a huge challenge for the animators, but one that was aided by the process that Animation Supervisor Steve Nichols set in motion. The animators first faithfully recreated Jason's performance (either from motion capture or rotomation) and once that was nailed, Steve would begin to push for a more alien look and feel exaggerating various movements to become more twitchy, sharper, more insect-like. "The unsung heroes of the project were the camera tracking and match move crew," says Nichols, "because without them the animators would have had a much more difficult job and ultimately the shots may not have held up. The liberal blend of motion capture, rotomation and key framing that we employed allowed our animators the flexibility to chose the best approach at the right moment in all of the shots. My personal favorites are the shots that were derived via rotomation. It was an incredibly successful method for what we needed in this film."
Next week, CGSociety wraps up the coverage of 'District 9' with an interview with Peter Muyzers and Julianna Kolakis.
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