Recently, in the November 2009 issue of Post Magazine, Molecule’s visual effects supervisor and lead compositer, Luke DiTommaso was interviewed for the article “Early Intervention.” Luke discussed some tips and tricks, stemming from his experiences with on-set vfx supervision. In this blog you can read what Luke had to say for the article.

Tips for VFX Supervision:

Be prepared:

There was a time when I would show up on set to VFX supervise with just my hands in my pocket. If I needed tape to make a tracking marker—I’d ask Scenic for a roll, if I needed a tape measure—I’d ask an AC, for a pen I’d ask the Scripty. For the most part people are friendly and happy to help, but there was one incident that made a light bulb go off in my head.

The scene called for a fire at the end of a dark hallway and my borrowed tape tracking markers were disappearing into the shadows. So I had the brilliant idea of taping some mini Mag-Lites to the walls as tracking points. I was going to go around to all the gaffers and start collecting their mini flashlights. When I asked the first guy, he stopped coiling a massive cable around his forearm and looked at me for an uncomfortable period of time. He calmly explained that he would in fact lend me his mini mag-lite if I really needed it, but he said it in a way that led me to understand he would in fact give me CPR if I really needed it. Unless this were a dire situation, you just don’t ask another man for his mini Mag.

After that shoot I went back to the office and we bought a pelican case, stocking it with rolls of tape of every color, Sharpies, little LED tracking points, tape measure, laser level, still camera, etc. Everything we could think of we threw in there like it was Batman’s utility belt. When I saw that gaffer at the next shoot, I made sure to flash him a smile—and my new min-Mag.

Wardrobe & Hair/Make-up can save you more Roto than you can imagine:

Especially on a greenscreen shoot, the Wardrobe person and Hair stylist can save you so much time in post that it behooves any VFX supe to be super friendly. There are the obvious situations where you show up to a music video shoot and the dancers are wearing reflective outfits and big fuzzy hair-dos, in which case you stop production or plan for a roto slumber party at the office. But often times it will be a more subtle detail that can cost weeks in post.

On one shoot, the production opted for ReflecMedia greenscreen which is notoriously difficult for very fine details like hair because of the ghosting/shadow issues with the technology. I happened to know the hair person from another production (NYC is a small town in this industry), and we chatted amiably during the long stretches of downtime between shots. When it came time for my greenscreen sequence, one of the actresses had a few single strands of hair sticking out that I knew would not key well. So in the frantic moments of “last looks” I asked the Hair person if she didn’t mind smoothing it out. No big deal, right? Well, they ended up doing many takes from several angles and those stubborn hairs kept coming undone. I’m convinced had I not made friends with her earlier, she would not have been as eager to run out onto the stage in between takes to flatten out of those few strands of hair time after time. That small extra effort on her part must have saved us hours and hours of frustration in post.

Similarly, there was a scene shot against a black screen that involved firefighters covered in soot and ash. The firefighter outfits are dark and I knew that unless they were covered in white ash it was going to be a tough roto. The wardrobe person had given the actors a nice delicate sprinkle on the shoulders. Had we not been friendly I’m not sure she would have made the effort to take fistfuls of soot and mash it all over their uniforms—for several takes. It was messy for everyone involved but it saved us gobs of roto down the road.

Production designers need you, speak their language, make their life easy:

Visual effects are often determined by a simple subtraction equation—the script calls for something, the production designer can only provide some portion of it, and the difference is made up with VFX. An easy example would be a cemetery scene we worked on where one of the characters is visiting the grave of a deceased character and his name needs to be on the tombstone. It’s cheaper, faster and better to carve a name into the marble digitally than practically. Often times we’ll do a set extension and there will be a greenscreen flag set up where the set ends, or where a location needs to be modified. Those are obvious examples, but other times being a little creative can make a big difference. In one scene, the script called for a long hand-held shot around the corner of an L-shaped corridor in the basement of the WTC. During the pre-production meeting, the Production designer expressed concern about the scope of building such a set with all the destruction and detail involved. We suggested building just one straight corridor and dressing it twice. A hidden cut between the two could be buried as the actor turned the corner. It was a simple suggestion but it made a world of difference to the Production designer. Alleviating that burden allowed him to think of the production design in a different way. He was able to focus his resources and still have his set look amazing and we benefitted because he became our staunchest ally for opting to use VFX in scenes.

This morning in Metro New York, a principle and senior editor of The Molecule, Luis de Leon was featured in an entertainment story about one of the documentaries he edited. “Every F—ing Day of my Life” is a documentary that follows the story of Wendy Maldonado- a woman from Oregon convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail for murdering her abusive husband. Film director Tommy Davis was so captivated by Maldonado’s story that he decided to center his documentary solely on her, as opposed to a group of people, as he originally intended. In 4 months, de Leon and Davis edited 80 hours worth of footage down to 80 minutes. This powerful story played at many film festivals including SXSW and the prestigious Locarno Film Festival. In addition to a theatrical release in L.A. and New York, the documentary will premiere this Monday night, December 14, 2009, at 10p.m. on HBO.

This isn’t the first documentary to come from Luis de Leon and Tommy Davis. The pair worked together on Davis’ documentary “Mojados: Through the Night” which won the audience award at SXSW in 2004. Currently, de Leon, with The Molecule, is working on a documentary surrounding Bill Laswell’s new band Method of Defiance. To find out more about “Every F—ing Day of my Life,” and to see a trailer of the documentary, you can visit its IMDB page here.

The Molecule was recently featured in the September/October 2009 issue of Creative Cow’s Magazine. The article, edited by Tim Wilson, discusses a brief history of the studio through the narration of one of its owners, Chris Healer. The article continues with a discussion on a few of the projects The Molecule worked on. Most of which, I should mention, have been broken-down on this blog. One interesting segment was about the problem solving our artists had to do when working with a green screen technology called Reflec Media.

“Some effort went into hiding the LED ring from bouncing off the glass, and rotoscoping was always an option, but there was very little garbage area because we wanted to keep all of the reflections except for the ring. We found a clever way to do the composites: by selectively spill-suppressing the source footage (using loose rotos), the spill and the green-screen were removed. Then, by subtracting the suppressed and unsuppressed material we could get a kind of difference matte between the two. The suppressed material doesn’t approach black in the once-green areas, so the difference matte is used to expand those areas down to near black, where they would be if the material was premultiplied.”

Finally, one of the last segments of the article is an interesting commentary on The Molecule’s use of social media- one of the reasons all of this came together.

“There’s a lot of noise out there so if you really want to make yourself stand out, it’s important to figure out a way to steer relevant traffic towards you. Social media is a part of that, but it’s still in its infancy. Social media is a great resource for interacting with our community and a way to discover what you may have otherwise missed.”

The Molecule was recently contracted to develop custom software for an event in the lobby of the IAC building. The basic premise of the installation was that party-goers would see their text messages projected and displayed on one of the lobby walls. Processing, a programming framework for interactive and real-time visualizations, was used for the piece.

Processing is known for its ability to deliver real-time high quality output based on some source of data. Processing acts as the glue between an input data source (such as audio information) and some output style (such as geometric shapes and colors, as in a music visualizer). In this instance, the data input was the contents of the text messages, and the output was the display of the messages on the screen, in the form of continually moving bubbles modeled after instant messenger software, like AIM or Jabber.

The text messages had to bounce around between a few places before they were displayed on the video wall. Messages would be sent to a particular phone, set up with special software that forwarded the message to an e-mail account. From there, a machine would check the account and save the in-box message contents into a database. Once approved by an operator, the program would grab and display the message. Every step except the operator’s approval was fully automated, and the time between the cellphone and the operator was usually between 15 and 20 seconds. The operator was provided with a custom web approval interface, also created here at The Molecule.

There were several considerations that had to go into the way the text messages were to be displayed. We wanted everyone to be able to read the messages as they were projected, but we also wanted to animate the messages so that their presentation was not static and boring. To that end, all of the message bubbles were bonded to a particle in a 2d particle system with inter-particle attractions and other forces. That way, the messages would push away from one another, and never overlap. We also created restrictions to make sure the program always ran at full speed, including limiting the number of on-screen messages to some constant value. One concept that didn’t make it to the final version involved coloring the bubbles based on some property of the message, for example the area code of the sender. So, all messages from, say, 212, would be the same color, visually grouping senders from the same area.

One of the main issues we had to address early on was the stability of the system. It was very important to make sure that the system ran in real-time and would not crash. A caching system was developed where the creation of the bubbles was offloaded to another thread. There, the oval bubble was formed, based on the length of the message. Time consuming post-Processing blurs and drop-shadows were added. Then, the resulting bubble was cached to a 2d image buffer, and shunted back to the main program. That way, the main program only had to draw a series of 2d cards, as opposed to redrawing each bubble in its entirety 30 times a second.

This system allowed the (near) real-time display of text messages, in a totally different visual form, on a large screen. One of Processing’s strengths, compared to other similar frameworks is the amount of third party libraries that extend it’s functionality. By using the sql database library and the particle system library, we were able to create a more engrossing experience without needing to spend tons of development time.

The visual effects industry is a conundrum of sorts. It’s a combination of the science world meets artistry meets traditional business. Never have I seen so much inter-firm collaboration in any other industry. With technology continually expanding and IP becoming an increasingly competitive game, trends would suggest that there is no room for multi-firm collaboration; yet it exists- and for good reasons. Like scientists, VFX artists around the world are discovering new methods and elements that make their jobs not only easier but allow for a better final product. A common discussion piece on festival panels across the globe is this idea of open sourcing- what happens to the discoveries and should they be made readily accessible to the community. Like any other artist, individuals and firms in this business have their core competencies- abilities that set them apart. One firm may have an excellent command of 3D modeling while another produces excellent matte paintings and composites. Yet, everyone seems to find the time to come together, share, and collaborate.

When we talk about the big players, ILM, Framestore, Digital Domain, etc., it’s without a doubt they dominate many of the large-scale projects, however it is not uncommon for them to collaborate with smaller firms to achieve the best end-result. Whether that collaboration is inspired by skill-set, geography, budget or schedule, this collaboration isn’t anything new to the industry. In 1997, James Cameron’s Titanic called for a collaborative union between 16 visual effects firms. According to Autodesk’s August 24th Press Release (found via VizWorld), last month’s G.I. Joe movie called for the collaboration of “hundreds of artists worldwide who collectively created close to 1,500 visual effects shots.” Stig Grumen, the Vice President of Autodesk Media and Entertainment was quoted as saying, “Enabling creative collaboration is central to our software development strategy… The movie showcases the work of six extremely talented visual effects studios which used a range of Autodesk tools to bring this massive project together and deliver an astounding visual result.”

These “coming-togethers” is something The Molecule has seen regularly. This studio has partnered in various collaborations- whether it be by sending one of our VFX supes out on-set, outsourcing smaller projects to freelancers, or shooting custom plates that are needed for a comp, or even working on a scene that we are able to execute well.