Ex Machina – VFX Movie

Today we  will discuss about a Science fiction psychological thriller VFX Movie “Ex Machina” which is written and directed by Alex Garland, released on 21 January 2015.

Made on a budget of $15 million, grossed worldwide $36.9 million. VFX Producers: Carrie Rishel and Fay McConkey.

The film follows a programmer who is invited by his CEO to administer the Turing Test to an Intelligent Humanold Robot.

The movie received critical acclaim for its visual effects, score, acting and the director’s writing and direction.

On website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 93%, based on 235 reviews, with a rating average of 8.1/10.

The site’s critical consensus reads: “Ex Machina leans heavier on ideas than effects, but it’s still a visually polished piece of work — and an uncommonly engaging sci-fi feature.”

When Alex Garland’s Ex Machina was released earlier last year,’fxguide’  spoke to visual effects in the film by Alicia Vikander.

The live action performance was augmented to add in, via VFX, robotic elements to various body parts of the actress.

Now, Ex Machina is in the Visual Effects Bake-off for the Academy Awards, and we have a special breakdown from Dneg of the work, plus some more insight from Whitehurst.

Designing Ava

Alicia Vikander as Ava.

Ava’s final look came from art department concepts and DNeg art, including depicting where real skin would end and where the CG would begin.

“I was conscious that I didn’t want to push for super realistic concept paintings,” says Whitehurst.

“We had to stop and then go and build it – it’s a sculpting and engineering problem – and then we did turntables.

At the start of the shoot we had concepts that featured just clean metal and no textures, and then during the shoot our team would be painting up textures.”

“We made the decision to try and keep the shoulders and armpits in plate for the simple reason that rigging shoulder blades is not that much fun,” notes Whitehurst.

“Similarly, we wanted to keep the hands and feet and face because that was the main method of interacting with the environment and the main method of expression.

The arms and legs are full CG because we see through them, and the same with the back of the head and neck.”

Much of Ex Machina takes place inside Nathan’s house – an isolated building in the mountains filled with glass-lined walls.

“The set was really like an enclosed glass box,” describes Whitehurst.

“That meant the camera was either inside or outside, and there’s nowhere to hide really, because it meant later on we had to body track things three or four times because the reflections are all different from lens and mirror distortion.”

That location challenge was exacerbated by the style of the film – Ex Machina is not intended to be an action adventure, but a more cerebral and intimate piece.

“Because the whole film is about human consciousness and what it means to be human and what it means to be conscious,” outlines Whitehurst, “it’s very conversation-driven, almost exclusively. In order to get that relationship, you have to have an actor talking to another actor – they have to feed off each other.”

The result was that, although significant digital work would be carried out by the visual effects team, motion capture was not an option.

The actors were always in the plates. For each take, then, a clean plate was acquired, and later extensive body tracking – including for shots up to 1600 frames – would be necessary.

Production filmed on the Sony F-65 with anamorphic lenses, which would ultimately make for challenging plate tracking.

“We did have one or two witness cams,” notes Whitehurst. “The sets were all closed and not that massive, so the opportunities for placing witness cameras were limited.

We always tried to have one and if we could get a second one in there we did. We had to paint out witness cams for some shots since it was sometimes just easier to do that and use it for body tracking.”

On set, Vikander wore a gray wetsuit material costume covering most of her body.

When visual effects replaced a section of the actor, the remaining parts were still the wetsuit material.

Each setup involved an IBL take. “The way the sets were built actually really let lent themselves for IBLs,” notes Whitehurst.

“Plus at DNeg we have physically based shading pipeline and it really meant down the pipe that our lighting just worked.”

 Building Ava

Alicia Vikander wore a wetsuit-like costume on set, with certain key robotic parts replaced by DNeg.

To ensure the CG elements would perfectly match to the live action photography, Vikander was initially photo booth scanned in pre-production so her equivalent CG model could be built.

Once the final costume was ready on set, the actress was scanned again and the model refined.

A key aspect of Ava’s appearance was the mix of hard metal and then softer outer skin.

The visual effects team also added ‘ribbons’ of plastic visible on the inside of Ava’s translucent shell areas, which came from experiments made during the concept art phase.

“There was this lovely air of mystery you got from playing with the brushstrokes which meant that as soon as you build something for real, you can lose.

So we thought, ‘How could we add that sense of slightly confusing mystery back to her?’

What we did was add these translucent ribbons that run up and down the torso that just have that little bit of refraction on them so it just breaks things up.”

Ava’s inner mechanical parts, representing muscles to some degree, were constantly moving as she did, as Whitehurst explains: “They were all built into a rig where all of the muscles would fire correctly, and then we had various organs and gyroscopes that would just spin throughout.

We ended up with a gold mesh based on air-actuated robot modules we found and then we wrapped a spiral of metal around each muscle because that helped read the contraction of the muscle as it’s moving. It’s almost subconscious in the end.”

Milk VFX worked with Double Negative to create a CG brain for Ava who referenced a jellyfish and technical feel, as well as delivering Ava POV shots. Utopia also contributed VFX to the film.

The mechanical parts and ribbons were rendered via DNeg’s physically plausible rendering pipeline (which uses RenderMan).

“Physically plausible gives you that photographic quality that you can’t get any other way,” says Whitehurst.

“You can get beautiful renderings not using this approach, but they have a painted quality – they don’t feel as photographic – especially when you’re dealing with very known materials.”

Those known materials were replicated with shaders for things such as aluminum, chrome, silver and steel.

“Fundamentally,” notes Whitehurst, “if the material’s correct and it doesn’t look right, then you’ve got the lighting wrong.

We tested it in all the lighting environments we knew she was going to be in, and we tweaked some level of displacement on Ava’s body mesh on wider shots because you didn’t read it there.”

Having anticipated early the challenges of incorporating Ava’s CG elements into the shots, Whitehurst says that compositing was still a tough and brute-force challenge. Lens distortion from the anamorphic proved most difficult, as did adding in refraction through the see-through aspects of Ava.

“You get all that anamorphic goodness happening around the edges,” says Whitehurst of the lens choices. “Which also meant it was one of the hardest body tracking jobs we’ve ever done.

The shots are long, it’s performance-based and so we have to absolutely capture what she’s doing.”

Such VFX films inspire us, and MAAC Chowringhee is the best institute which has multiple courses such as VFX, Gaming, Animation and multimedia.

USE Of MINDBLOWING AFTER EFFECTS IN STAR WARS

In our blog today we will be discussing the mind blowing After Effects done in star wars.

Star Wars is a renowned film franchise begun by the American director George Lucas with his 1977 film of the same name.

At the time, the film became the highest-grossing in the world (and remains among the highest grosser today as well) and proved to be a landmark in terms of the stunning imagery and effects put to use.

Following the critical and commercial success of the 1977 film, there have been seven more releases (marketed as a prequel trilogy, the original trilogy, and a continuation sequel trilogy), with the eighth and ninth film in the series slated for release in the coming years.

In addition, there are several spin-off films, books, video games, comics and other media and merchandise that have established the series as an icon of popular culture.

Coming to the heart of the matter, the series is an epic space opera involving intergalactic struggles between forces of good and evil.

There are alien planets and creatures abound, as well as futuristic technology and weaponry.

Naturally, visual effects and computer generated imagery have been invaluable additions to the production process over the years, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) has handled the visual augmentation for all the films since the beginning.

Motion graphics and rotoscopy in particular have been made simpler with digital support through software such as Adobe After Effects.

After Effects is a powerful layer-based visual effects, compositing and motion graphics tool, which is commonly used in film and television in the post-production pipeline.

It can be used for chroma keying, motion tracking, compositing as well as animation, and serves as a basic non-linear audio-visual editor and media transcoder (or in layman’s terms, converter).

It has played a role in the post-production of films like Sin City, Iron Man, and Stranger Than Fiction, and is far more widely used to create introduction title and closing credit sequences due to its very capable motion graphics creation tools.

It is also used in animation films, advertising industry and television industry.

In our discussion today, we will focus on two aspects of the Star Wars films: the introductory title sequence, and weapon effects.

Star Wars Title Crawl:

The introduction sequence of the Star Wars films is one of the most recognisable elements of the franchise.

It features three parts: a static slide with the text ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…’ in blue, followed by the stylised words ‘STAR WARS’ shrinking into the frame against a star field background, which is followed by the episode number and subtitle and a (typically three paragraph) passage that delves into the back-story for the film in a prologue format.

This text crawls through the screen in a perspective view rather than the more common frontal view.

After this text crawls out of the frame, the camera tilts downwards and the film begins.

The initial release of the first film did not include the episode number, but subsequent films and the re-release did.

For the original trilogy (1977-1983), this title sequence was filmed using huge 2ft x 6ft models with the camera painstakingly manoeuvred to capture the scrolling effect smoothly.

The prequel trilogy (1999-2005) made use of computer generated text and imagery to achieve the same effect, making the process faster and much easier to control and modify if needed.

The original format of the title crawl was preserved, however. In subsequent years, the original films, too, were re-released with a digital version of the introductory title crawl.

The ongoing sequel trilogy, which began with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015, has the title crawl designed digitally like the prequel trilogy.

Weapon effects:

There are two weapons that we see throughout the series: lightsabers, and blasters.

The lightsaber, as the name suggests, is a sword-like weapon that consists of a plasma blade powered by a kyber crystal, which was emitted as a beam of light from the hilt (usually constructed out of metal or a specific type of wood).

It is used primarily by Jedis and Siths, who are users of the Force (a mystical energy form in the films) and requires a great deal of training and skill to be handled properly.

They are of different kinds, most commonly single-bladed, but also double bladed like a staff, and these blades have different colours depending on the affiliation of the user.

Blasters are more common; they are gun-like devices that fire bullets of plasma, and are typically used by the Stormtroopers, mercenaries and rebels who do not have access to the Force.

During shooting, for the original trilogy, white blades were used.

These were subsequently rotoscoped by hand and a glow and colour was added to make them distinctive: blue and green for the Jedi, and red for the Sith.

In the prequel trilogy in the later 1990s, this design process was done digitally.

With the addition of a new character in Mace Windu (played by Samuel L. Jackson), we even find a new colour of lightsaber, purple.

Software like After Effects made the rotoscopy process faster and less cumbersome than the older manual technique, allowing for creative expansion of the mythos of the series.

Lightsabers have also been seen in white and (rarer) black across other media in the franchise.

Blasters are considered more generic weapons, and they fire bullets that resemble white streaks of laser light.

These bullet fires, too, are now created digitally and added to the live action during the compositing process.

This serves not only for faster and cost-effective production, but also reduces any potential risk of actors getting injured by malfunctioning props.

These are just a few examples of the creative power of After Effects.

If you want to learn for yourself how it can be used to create these wonderful and cool effects, do stop by your nearest Maac Kolkata centre and enrol yourself for free class and amazing career options.

For all you know, you could end up working for upcoming films in the Star Wars franchise!

Use Of VFX In War Scenes In Movies

A war film is concerned with warfare of all kinds, from naval to air to land battles, with combat scenes central to the drama. How was that possible to shoot in real life without some techniques, so their came the role of VFX.

Themes explored include combat, survival and escape, sacrifice, the futility and inhumanity of battle, the effects of war on society, and the moral and human issues raised by war.

The stories told may be fiction, historical drama, or biographical with plots exploring action and even wartime romance.

The Battleship Potemkin (1925) is among the most well-known of the early war films.

The genre is not tightly defined and its definition varies widely depending upon people’s personal perception of it.

A study of the most celebrated war films, however, reveals one important common trait: realism.

Films like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, Lakshya, Madras Café are among the most loved war films from India and the world, and they all give us an unflinching portrait of the violence and bloodshed, hard decisions, and tension that characterize any war.

The popularity of war films progressively increased in the 20th century and the World Wars became the most popular subject.

After the World Wars and Nazi themes, it was the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

In India, there were films made about gaining independence from the British or ongoing the tussles with our neighboring countries like Pakistan or Sri Lanka.

With changing times, cinema evolved and so did the cinematic techniques.

Technical excellence became a necessity in film production with the advent of modern technology, and this trend hasn’t changed to this day.

VFX is extensively used in films, and the war film provides an ideal platform through its need for realism of action.

In addition to creating environments or adding effects such as explosions, many war films also need crowd simulations as it’s simply not feasible to recruit thousands upon thousands of actors to play extra roles.

As far as foreign films are concerned, 2006 saw the release of an iconic war film, 300. Based on a 1998 comic series by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, it depicts a fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae within the Persian Wars.

Two months of pre-production were required to create animatronics animals, and the hundreds of shields, spears, and swords, some of which were recycled from movies like Troy.

The actors trained alongside the stuntmen, and even Snyder joined in.

Over 600 costumes were created for the film, along with extensive prosthetics for various characters and the corpses of Persian soldiers.

Only one scene, in which horses travel across the countryside, was shot outdoors.

It was filmed mostly against a blue screen, to help replicate the imagery of the original comic book: environments were digitally created, and the actors painstakingly composited into the scenes to reproduce the stylised picturisation of Ancient Greece.

The film has gained a solid place in international film as a unique war movie.

A discussion on technically accomplished war scenes in movies is incomplete without mention of James Cameron’s Avatar.

Released in 2009, the film portrays an epic struggle of the Na’vi to reclaim their home planet Pandora from the citizens of Earth, who are seeking to mine the precious element Unobtanium.

Cameron waited over a decade to see the film realised, and not without reason.

Most of the movie is shot after gorgeous shot of Pandora and the Na’vi.

The planet, its blue-skinned natives, and its black-skinned beasts were digitally created and animated with the aid of motion capture from actors.

The climactic battle scene is worth mention: as human machines mow down glowing trees to get closer to the Unobtanium mine, our hero Jake Sully, in Avatar form, takes control of the King of the Skies – Toruk – to turn the tide of the battle.

The scenes of the Na’vi praying as one at the mother tree while the battle is afoot are equally breathtaking.

Other notable Hollywood films featuring memorable war scenes are The Last Samurai by Edward Zwick, Hacksaw Ridge by Mel Gibson, Fury by David Ayer, and Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola.

Indian film, too, has its fair share of war films and use of VFX in it. Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar (2008) and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani (2015) are recent notable examples of films with a fair share of visual effects augmentation to portray battles and wars onscreen.

Both (especially Bajirao Mastani) featured extensive use of crowd simulation techniques to reproduce the huge armies that were taken to battle in those days where VFX plays an quite important role..

This is typically done for the long shots that establish the battle, as relatively lower poly models can be used along with image based rendering to get a good and realistic output without the need for thousands upon thousands of actors.

Chroma and staged sets were also employed to recreate the environments of the Mughal and Maratha empires in the respective films.

For Jodhaa Akbar, Gowariker tried to use traditional film techniques as far as possible; he hired around five thousand extras, and several hundred animals to reduce the pressure on the post production team. Bajirao, however, was a different story and VFX involved.

It relied heavily on VFX for the environments, and NY Vfxwalla  did a large part of the effects work for the film – including the war scenes, as well as the final climactic hallucination sequence of Peshwa Bajirao.

More recently, the Baahubali duology of films (2015-2017) by S. S. Rajamouli has some notable war scenes that boast of technical accomplishment.

From crowd simulation to environments and weaponry, it has it all. You can read more about Baahubali in earlier posts on our blog. Rangoon (2017) and The Ghazi Attack (2017) are more examples of Indian war films.

The former is set amidst the Indo-Burmese tensions during World War II, while the latter depicts the attack on the Pakistani submarine PNS Ghazi off the coast of Vishakhapatnam during the war of 1971. On a global level, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a highly anticipated war film releasing this month.

The film features extensive use of practical effects, augmented with VFX by Double Negative.

If you are more the doing kind, walk in to your nearest MAAC Kolkata centre and start your journey to explore firsthand the techniques used to make these war films come to life.

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