How to Bring the Kremlin to San Francisco
Digital visual effects have really changed location shooting. Now that computers can create almost any environment or modify an existing one, being a globe-trotting producer may mean never leaving your own backyard. Matt Silverman, a well-known visual effects artist at Phoenix Edit, Effects & Design, San Francisco, helped San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners keep the travel bill down by turning daytime Chicago into a snowy apartment set in Russia.
The spot is called “Russian Family” and relates the diplomatic initiative of the Pillsbury Doughboy when he shows up on the dinner table of a Russian working class family. Initially, Goodby, Silverstein contacted a Russian production company to shoot the opening shot in a Russian city, but when that failed, they turned to Silverman and his team at Phoenix Edit. Silverman’s first step was to get reference from the agency as a starting point. This turned out to be a locked-down shot of a Chicago tenement on a cloudy day, which he digitized from Digital Betacam into his Mac G5 using DeckLink Pro with the Blackmagic 10-bit codec. Nothing says Russia like a little nighttime snow, and Silverman color corrected the shot and changed the lighting to a wintry, soft-lit atmosphere in Adobe After Effects™.
Next, interior lights were added to several apartment windows, and newly fallen snow was added to the rooftops, window sills, and any surface where snow might collect. Creating this matte painting in After Effects, as opposed to Photoshop, allowed Silverman to keep all of the modifications live so when clients came in to check on the progress, all elements could quickly be changed on the fly. Using DeckLink's NTSC preview in After Effects enabled Silverman and the clients to see precise color and composition, which was critical in this darkly lit, night time environment, and getting the lighting just right was key to the realistic depth cuing.
Since the camera looks down on the rooftops and the city of Chicago extends to the horizon behind them, it was necessary to remove all the city elements behind the apartment building. This meant blurring the elements in the distance, which gives the hint of a snowy sky that suggests the rest of the city. However, there needed to be some signature building in the middle ground that established the Russia location in a matter of seconds. A still image of the iconic, onion-shaped Basilica was added to the still matte painting in After Effects and color corrected to match the rest of the snowy night. Exterior lights were added to the Basilica, as well as random street lights in the background. A static matte painting might have sufficed, but Phoenix felt that without a camera move it would have felt like a fabricated shot. Plus, a camera move forward in the invented world would add interest and draw the audience into the story. Simply doing a 2D push in After Effects was not an option since this moves buildings in the foreground at the same rate as elements in the background. There was sufficient resolution in the uncompressed, standard-definition Chicago footage to scale it up slightly, but without a change in perspective, painted architecture would kill the illusion of depth. The answer was to use camera mapping and simple models so that the matte painting could move with proper parallax between near and far objects in the scene.
Using Electric Image, the camera's focal length was matched to the live-action plate through a process of trial and error until the perspective lines matched. Once this was set, apartments were modeled with simple cubes and set in place, and the Basilica was represented with 3D cylinders behind the apartment cubes. A simple Russian billboard model was added onto one of the buildings. The Russian typography on the billboard helped seal the location as Russia.
Once all of these simple models were in place, the 2D matte painting was projected on the geometry, and the 3D camera subtly pushes into the scene. When this happens, the geometry in the distance moves slower than the geometry in the foreground, simulating a realistic camera move. This camera mapping technique, one of Electric Image’s strong suits, allows all the complex detail usually created in polygonally complex models to be created in 2d and mapped onto the model. This is not the same technique as individually mapping each part of a model, and it only works when experienced from the camera’s POV. The advantage of the technique is that the matte painter can work on the entire scene with all the lighting and atmosphere of the subject visible in an artistically cohesive rather than technical way. It also saves many extra steps normally required to map and light multiple models. Once completed, the Russian architecture appears to be a few blocks behind the apartment where the family lives, and the remaining detail in the distance moves slower than the Basilica. The various elements comprising the scene move in matched perspective.
The last step was to add moving snow using Particular, a new and very powerful particle system plug-in for After Effects. With motion blur added to the camera move and snow, the illusion was complete. The final shot was rendered out of After Effects to the 10-bit Blackmagic codec and laid off to Digital Betacam through Final Cut Pro™. The tape was sent to Los Angeles, where it was cut into the rest of the spot. When the client first watched the matte shot, they were not aware that it was entirely invented by Silverman in San Francisco—they assumed the original plan to have a Russian crew shoot halfway around the world had worked. Not a bad endorsement for a visual effects company.
“Russian Family” is just the latest visual effects project Silverman has created on a desktop system, an approach that he has championed since the days when desktop was more promise than fact. Having graduated from the cinema department at San Francisco State University in the mid-nineties, he was in the right place to get in on the revolution early. He was squarely in Silicon Valley, the software epicenter of computer graphics where Mac, Adobe, Macromedia, and other pioneering companies invented the notion of multimedia. It’s not surprising that Silverman did some work for Apple in Cupertino, Calif., or that the studio where he works today is primarily Mac-based and a smart mixture of Discreet Flame and mixed-software desktop systems.
While the majority of work at Phoenix Edit is commercial production, corporate clients are increasingly turning to HD for in-store video. “All of the Macs that we use for design and effects have DeckLink cards attached to Sony NTSC monitors,” explains Silverman. “That allows us to accurately preview our work and participate in client-supervised sessions.” While the pipeline is SD, Silverman insists that all source material be captured as 10-bit uncompressed files. Most of the software used in the visual effects department can process and render 16-bit files, for instance, Maya, Electric Image, After Effects, Curious gFx, Photoshop, Combustion, and Shake, so it makes sense to maintain the highest quality throughout the system.
Phoenix Edit uses a digital router to connect Avid NLEs, Flame, and Smoke systems with the Mac-based visual effects department. “This gives us the ability to move footage around our studio in realtime via SDI. If I need to send an animated end-tag from my Mac to our Smoke, I can patch the DeckLink’s output into the Smoke with the router remote on my desk and play the live footage while the Smoke captures it in,” he says. “Final Cut Pro™ with a DeckLink is an excellent, high quality, frame-accurate system that gives us the same I/O quality and precision as our Flame and Smoke.” According to Silverman, system agnosticism leverages the strengths of various platforms and software so that clients get the right solution at the right time.
But it’s not just the tools that are important when working across platforms, it’s also the consistency and confidence that what you see in one software and monitor is identical throughout the studio. “The beauty of the DeckLink card is that it always mirrors [if the app supports QTVOUT] or extends the Mac desktop, so I am always accurately previewing my work,” he says. “I am always seeing my work in the correct color space and pixel aspect ratio. If I’m in Photoshop, I can simply drag my canvas onto my NTSC monitor, hit the F key, and the NTSC is filled with my image.”
Silverman has refined his current SD workflow in a balanced environment of Flame, Smoke, and desktop solutions. He feels that processing HD for visual effects puts a strain on his current system, but he knows that HD is the future. And while he likes the quality of the HD image, he has some misgivings about the added rendering overhead. “In general, I want my HD workflow to feel just like my SD workflow. That means faster/smarter processors, better grid computing integration, faster networking, and more hardware acceleration [ie OpenGL].” He knows that by the time he’s finished another half dozen commercials, enough time may have passed that processing power will be cutting HD down to size.
Even now he’s ready for HD projects, with DeckLink HD cards priced below the cost of a 20-inch LCD monitor. “At this point, the price/performance of the DeckLink make it a no-brainer in every system. It has become a non-issue. Every Mac can have broadcast support for a few hundred bucks and HD for under a grand.”
The new hardware is letting companies like Phoenix Edit, Effects & Design easily move video around their studio in SD and HD. This is one of the reasons why artists with a vision and lots of know-how are able to change the weather in Chicago and bring Russia to the heartland.
