In the spirit of the new year, we’re taking a look back at some of the wonderful projects we’ve had the pleasure of working on while we gear up for an exciting 2012.

Click here to check out our Rescue Me VFX gallery showcasing some of our best VFX shots from one of our first TV serials.

Coming Soon:
Keep an eye out for our upcoming blog entry about the Molecule‘s work on Discovery Channel’s new hit Moonshiners.  Happy New Year!

Episode 301 - Living Room (Footage)

Due to a sadistic groundhog and six more weeks of winter, Royal Pains was forced to pull off rarely accomplished “Winter for Spring” shots this past March. While shooting several episodes that kicked off their third season, the tree-lined streets of Montauk, Long Island were unfortunately a landscape of barren branches.  Luckily the VFX artists at The Molecule, expert in ”invisible” effects, were there to the rescue adding the thousands of necessary leaves to complete the shot.

“When they asked us, ‘Can you put leaves on the whole environment?’ we were hesitant because of the potentially impossible amount of work,” said Luis de Leon, Visual Effects Supervisor - The Molecule.  “We decided that as long as we were able to block and frame the photography we could minimize a massive job.”

Episode 301 - Living Room (Final)

On set, Luis worked closely with the camera department and the director making sure actors didn’t step into the path of any soon to be digitally budding leaves and hair didn’t intermingle with branches.  Luis oversaw the framing and actor’s blocking and made alterations when needed.

Back at the studio, VFX artists used Nuke to complete the more demanding tracking shots. Nuke’s 3D tracker system creates a 3D point cloud in which each point is connected to an object (or part of one) in the scene.  In this case the leaf footage was connected to the points that correlated to the branches and trees. This allowed the leaves to stay in proportion as the camera moves on a 3D plane.  Additionally, Nuke’s advanced technology allowed VFX artists to alter the leaves while keeping them proportionally sized in relation to their distance from the camera.

Episode 301 - Living Room (Footage)

First, leaves consistent with the region are sourced, laid in and connected with points in point clouds.  Then, after all the leaves are added the footage is reviewed, and shots where foreground action blocks the trees are rotoscoped.  Finally the leaves are color corrected to make them look as if they are on the same tree and shot at the same time of day.

“The 3D tracks were tricky because of the layers of branches.  When you have branches behind branches the 3D tracking system can’t always tell which branch is in the foreground and Nuke can incorrectly resize the leaves,” Luis added. “However, without Nuke’s 3D tracking ability, certain shots, like one that consisted of a 200 degree camera turn, would be difficult to pull off.”

Episode 301 - Living Room (Final)

We challenge interested viewers to keep on the lookout for these “invisible effects” as they are a large part of The Molecule‘s daily VFX work but be warned: At The Molecule, the hand is quicker than the eye.

Click Here to see more Royal Pains VFX Shots.

Film industry members leap at the chance to use newer, more sophisticated technology. In the VFX world, 3D/Stereoscopic projects with the biggest resolutions achievable and the highest frame rates possible are showing up on the doorsteps of The Molecule and other VFX studios in increasing numbers. Chris Healer, Founder/CEO/CTO of The Molecule, bucks the trend, questioning tech that advances past necessity, in a recent Post Magazine article.  Check it out…

Compositing Trends by Randi Altman

The work is becoming more sophisticated, and increasingly that sophistication is being required for 3D stereoscopic projects. Sometimes artists start a job not knowing that they will be asked to go stereo halfway through. Other times they know it’s coming but still have to prepare intricate stereo workflows so there are no surprises during the process. All of this keeps a visual effects team on its toes and ready for anything.

And these days, being prepared for anything often means more than just knowing the latest compositing tools and techniques, it involves learning other aspects of filmmaking that aren’t typically in a compositor’s job description… and most importantly, looking at things in an entirely new way.

THE MOLECULE

The Molecule is a six-year-old New York City-based VFX and motion graphics production company whose primary work has been visual effects for TV series such as Rescue Me, Royal Pains, Damages and Blue Bloods — all deceptively loaded with lots of invisible effects, as well as some traditional big effects — but they have recently been fielding requests for feature film work thanks to their newly minted Hollywood office.

At this year’s NAB he saw 8K recorders and 120fps playback in stereo. “It’s like, come on guys, do we really need stereo, do we need multi-view, do we need more pixels, more frames per second?” It remains to be seen what of this is going to stick.  Chris Healer, president/CEO of The Molecule (www.themolecule.net), sees that resolutions keep getting bigger and bigger, and that frame rates keep getting higher and higher, and he’s not certain it’s all very necessary. “Personally, I think we exceeded all practical limitations a long time ago. Maybe you want to see 4K in a theatrical screening, but from then on out HD is fine for all practical purposes — Blu-ray discs, downloading on the Internet, even viewing HD in a theater is fine.”

A 3D camera on the set of "The Frying Pan"

The Molecule is currently providing VFX on the indie film Hellbenders. “It’s 5K in stereo, which is like 120MB per frame,” he explains. “It’s cool that we can do it, but it begs the question: why do we always have to be at the absolute maximum limit of what our machines can do? At this point, when an HD job comes in, I am thrilled. Everything is so fast and so fluid. When a standard def job comes in it’s hilarious; it’s virtually realtime compositing.”

Healer and crew have done a good amount of stereo, including work for The History Channel, a short film and bits for the feature The Mortician. Hellbenders is the studio’s first full-length stereo feature. “It’s the first real stress test of our pipeline. It’s one thing for one person to do a shot in stereo or a couple of people to do four shots, but it’s an entirely different thing when you have 15 people trying to push hundreds of shots through a pipeline. And some of them are thinking in stereo, some are thinking purely operationally and some are figuring out how to make the software work better. Everybody is at a different place and that’s an entirely different strain to put on a pipeline.”

A 3D comera on the set of "The Frying Pan"

Thinking about stereo in a different way creatively is a must, reports Healer. “When I first started doing stereo I thought that even a static frame — a non-moving camera — would need some kind of a 3D track on it in order to extrapolate 3D information. That was difficult to do. I spent a lot of time trying to work out the process of extracting 3D information from a stereo pair to flow it into our software so the 3D guys could add things in true depth and make that mathematically accurate. In an ideal world you would be doing one thing to one eye and parameterizing the space in such a way that having done one eye, the other eye would kind of come for free. Lately our approach has changed dramatically. I don’t believe that anything is exact. From a purely didactic sense you can do it that way, and yes it’s valuable and sometimes you have to go there, but more often I find if it looks right, it’s right.”

For Full Article Click Here

The Molecule and OffHollywood have teamed up to create the Stereoscopic 3D feature “Hellbenders”.  The film, OffHollywood and The Molecule are featured in newest issue of Post Magazine.

Offhollywood shoots 3D stereo movie with Red Epic:

By Randi Altman

“Mark L. Pederson’s Offhollywood has developed a strategic partnership with fellow New York house The Molecule, a visual effects studio that does TV work for many New York-based shows. The two are now working together on the first independent Red Epic-shot 3D stereo film, called Hellbenders.

He met Chris Healer, one of the founders of The Molecule, and immediately hit it off in terms of technology and new ways to develop pipelines. “What got me excited was they were working on developing stuff specific for stereoscopic and resolution independence, meaning being able to do 4K finishing in visual effects. We don’t do VFX in-house so we started doing tests together — streamlining high resolution (4K, Red) — and 3D workflows where we are acquiring, managing the media and handling the dailies, and they are doing visual effects. Final finishing and DI is at Offhollywood.”

Pederson says Healer is more progressive than a typical VFX shop. “A dirty little secret is many visual effects companies don’t have a real infrastructure; just individual workstations with local storage, so it’s not easy for them to do 4K renders. But Chris has custom shared storage and a renderfarm built to work with The Foundry’s Nuke and Ocular. He can work in 4K with less overhead than some can work in HD,” he explains.

“I got the itch to shoot a high-end, high production value 3D feature film with lots of CG visual effects. Something that had only really been done with a 100-million-dollar budget at the studio level, and I wanted to kill it with technology and the right people. I found a project but it didn’t have the money. Still, I liked it so much I was able to, with my business partner Aldey Sanchez, connect with other producers and got financing.”Hellbenders is now in production, shooting on two Epics in stereo 3D.

They are using the new Adam rig from Element Techniqua, specifically tailored to connect two Epic cameras. On-set dailies are being done on an iPad with Teradek Cube. It captures HD-SDI off one of the cameras and compresses it to H.264 and streams it to an iPad live.

“We are capturing stereo dailies in realtime with the Qtake, a product I helped develop and market,” says Pederson. “It’s a high-end video assist playback system that is software-based and runs on a Mac. On the editing side, we are using a version of Media Composer.”

Color grading is via Assimilate Scratch directly from Epic raw files in Offhollywood’s Dolby DI theater.”

MORE HELLBENDERS BUZZ:

Movie Carpet.com

http://moviecarpet.com/2011/03/16/first-images-from-jt-petty-s-hellbenders/

GEEK TRYANT.com

http://geektyrant.com/news/2011/3/15/exclusive-first-look-at-hellbenders.html

In southern Louisiana lurks the largest swamp in the coastal United States. It’s a place where nature reigns supreme and men must fight to survive. This battle is at the center of “Swamp People,” a new show premiering on The History Channel, Sunday, August 22 at 10/9c.

Original Media (Miami Ink, Storm Chasers) brought in The Molecule to create a branding and graphics package for the new series. Brian Catalina was tapped as showrunner on the heels of his success with hits like “Ice Road Truckers,” “Deadliest Catch” and “Axe Man.”

The series follows the locals, often referred to as the Coonass, who live off the land and feed themselves the traditional way of making their own hooks and hunting alligators. On account of their rare abilities, the federal government even gives them tags so they can help regulate the alligator population. The Molecule was tasked with creating a graphics package which recognized this unique ability and portrayed it with a sense of admiration.

In order to appeal to a wide audience, the show’s focus is on character-centric non-fictional situations, said Ted Markovic, Producer at The Molecule. “From what I’ve seen so far, there is the older generation that do everything by the book and the younger crowd that likes to push things a little bit.” he said. “Superficially, they are people running around the swamp with guns — but with personalities and stories to tell.”

For the show’s title sequence, the creators tried to capture the essence of the dangers of the swamp. “We cut together alligator eyes peering above the water, snakes swimming, and the creepy night  environment.” Markovic said.

He actually didn’t think one of the heaviest shots was going to pass through the network censors: A dying alligator claw clinging for his last breathe of life. It really captured what the show runner wanted, noted Ted. “None of us thought the network would like this shot, but they did. It’s nice to see that History is willing to take some risks and not sugar coat the brutal side of the story.”