20 Questions Film » CGI

WATCH: What Software Was Used To Create The World Of ‘Sebastian?’

Mads Black — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 23:27:25 +0000

We recently posted an article about Fede Ponce’s latest passion project, Sebastian: The Slumberland Odyssey. In the video below, Fede explains how he created the elaborate dream world in which the story takes place.

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Fede Ponce has been in the entertainment industry for more than 15 years and he is humbled by having had the lucky opportunity to work on some of the biggest blockbusters to date. Whether leading global campaigns of MAIN TITLES for MARVEL movies as Creative Director (Iron Man, Thor, Avengers) or creating a metal suit for Iron Man as a VFX supervisor, he has found himself working with some of the most creative people in entertainment. He has directed commercials and video game cinematics. However, he always dreamed of developing his own project. He received the help of Bertha Navarro, producer for Guillermo Del Toro, and has worked closely with Academy Award winning writer Zachary Sklar to ensure his project, Sebastian: The Slumberland Odyssey, is founded on an incredibly solid story.

Read Transcript “What Software Was Used to Create the World of Sebastian?”

Federico: So, that’s like the live action part of it which was very complex. But it is nowhere close as complex as to the CG part of it. The CG part of it is a beast. I was working with people in Vancouver, I was working with people in New York. I was working with people in India, da da da, and eventually, you know, some of them were my friends, so they would jump in an help for a little bit and then they would have to go back to work and then I would have to do it myself. So it was a process.

Federico: So project management is extremely important when you’re doing a project like this. One of the programs that I used called Maya, it’s Autodesk Maya. Autodesk is the maker. And Maya is very powerful. It’s a sculpting, 3D, modeling, well, sculpting, I meant modeling. Sculpting they have MobBox for that which is great. You know, if you want to do a creature, high resolution creature, then you’d go in MobBox.

Federico: So then you have Maya, and Maya’s like this giant program. You can do animation you can do particles, you can do dynamics, but what’s really great about it is it uses Python and MEL which are programming languages. If you learn them, which are not, they’re not had at all. You know, it’s tedious, but it’s not hard. If you learn them you can write your own tools within Maya, which is fantastic.

Federico: So part of the project management was writing a program, very small, nothing complex, that would create the right folder structure for all the shots and that would output the necessary plates for the artist to work with so that at any given time I could be like, okay, I know, you know, Jeremy’s working on this shot, Ricky gives it backup. Coming into this folder and you just keep track of everything that way, so Maya was really, really good for that.

Federico: When, I used Buju and PFTrack to track the live action plates and create the 3D world. So what we did with that is you know, when you’re shooting grid space stuff and you’re going to make, you’re going to build a digital set afterwards, you need to make sure you’re visual effects supervisor is taking all sorts of notes, all sorts of measurements, what are the distances, what kind of lens are you using? Do you have markers on your screens? All that stuff, because when all that stuff is translated into Maya, you can input all that stuff into your camera in Maya so you can mimic a real world camera and the camera in Maya. Which is phenomenal.

Federico: Then you can take a tracking program like Buju or PFTrack and then what these programs do, is they look at the data, they look at the flat image, right, and as a flat image moves it calculates the parallax based on the speed of the movement of those pixels. So it creates that, so then you import that point, it creates points, you import that point data into Maya and now you have your digital set. And that’s what we did for Sebastian.

Federico: We tracked and we measured and we had all the camera specs and all that, and so there’s a beautiful scene where Sebastian is confronting one of the Loldegy, that’s one of the monsters, with his pillow, because his pillow is where his magical powers are, and he takes this giant jump. And what we did is, when we created that shot, I knew that that’s what I wanted, so I had separate markers and I had some distances marked out and I knew sort of where this monster was going to be, the height and all of that and we shot that a very, very, very high speed rate, frame rate, so that we could have a lot of frames to play with and speed the animation up or slow it down as needed. So we shot that took it into PFTrack, brought into Maya and then created one of the shots that you’ll see in the trailer.

REVIEW: Six Reasons You Should See ‘Jurassic World’ Immediately

Katie Crump — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 22:58:45 +0000

If you had told me a week ago that I would be writing an article with this headline, I definitely would not have believed you. Jurassic World looked like a movie whose trailer would be better than the actual film, and I never would have guessed how much I actually loved it. I do not even care that the storyline may have been a bit predictable, because Jurassic World was just simply enjoyable to watch. From the amazing world building of the park itself to fun characters and dialogue, this new installation into the Jurassic universe did its predecessors justice. Here are some of the reasons why.

#1. Dinosaurs

Obviously one of the most important factors of any Jurassic movie is going to be the dinosaurs. I personally think that the CGI on this film’s star-studded cast of genetically modified zoo animals was entirely believable and definitely well done. Although the Indominus Rex was a little bit ridiculous, it gave a slew of really interesting ideas to explore, including what exactly was it that they threw together to make this killing machine? From frog to raptor genes and even those of humans, the writers and animators worked well together to create a monster with just enough mystery and fear factor to make even dinosaur whisperer Owen (Chris Pratt) run for his life.

#2. Chris Pratt

Honestly, what more is there to say? We’ve seen him as hilariously oblivious puppy-dog Andy in Parks and Recreation and sarcastic space cowboy Peter Quill, sorry Star Lord, in Guardians of the Galaxy. Up until this point, Pratt has had snark and wit to hide behind if he needed to, but we can see in Jurassic World that he can take on a more serious role without a comedic crutch.

#3. Claire

Jurassic World almost doesn’t deserve the masterpiece of a leading lady that is Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), operations manager of the park and resident badass. Despite what seems to be constant verbal humiliations by her male coworkers and bosses, she remains strong and in charge of her own decisions. Even her own sister makes a comment early in the film about how Claire should and will eventually become a mother, which is obviously not her decision to make. This film tries to turn Claire into a stuck-up, bossy, stick in the mud that needs to loosen up, but I refused to buy that “character flaw” for even a minute, and I like to think that I was right. The moment that tough-guy Owen mocked her choice in footwear, I began praying that she kept the shoes – and boy she kept those shoes alright, and single-handedly ended the fight against the Indominus Rex in the meantime. Claire is tough and feminine at the same time – a mixture of character traits that we don’t often see in Hollywood – and Jurassic World would definitely not have been as good without her.

#4. Jurassic Park Throwbacks

Let’s face it, this movie did so well in its opening weekend simply because everyone wanted to see where they were going to take this universally loved franchise (and maybe also Chris Pratt, but that’s not the point). Jurassic Park has a level of name recognition that most films can only dream of achieving, and certain aspects of the original movie stick with people for life. Jurassic World definitely took advantage of this nostalgia but did so in a way that made you proud for recognizing each throw-back. From the original Jurassic Park gates and music to Rexy reclaiming her territory at the end of the film, each little nod only added to this film.

#5. Humor

People just keep dying in the Jurassic movies; this isn’t a surprise. What is a surprise is how well the writers are able to maintain a sense of humor even in a movie with such a high fatality count. Without any of the small moments of wit and humor, this movie would have been much darker, and far less enjoyable overall. However, because the characters maintained interesting personalities that managed to still be funny in the face of disaster, Jurassic World could be a lot more well rounded.

#6. Seriously, guys. Dinosaurs!

Just in case you didn’t catch it when I said it the first time: this movie has dinosaurs just roaming around. Now I know that people die anytime genetically modified dinosaurs are brought into the mix, but I for one would be at Jurassic World in a heartbeat if it actually existed. I mean, there were people canoeing with dinosaurs, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to do that. So although we make jokes about how they should have figured out that dinosaurs maybe aren’t the best idea by now, we can’t really blame them for trying, right?