For Canadian effects companies, competition to get the big jobs is a constant. In order to stay on top, these effects houses must be forever investing in newer and better equipment. Many say the new innovations in effects technology could make a number of older technologies obsolete sooner than later.

In Montreal, Big Bang FX/Animation president Mario Rachiele says with some recent acquisitions such as an Inferno and a Renderfarm, his shop is well equipped to handle most any job thrown its way.

Big Bang bought the Inferno, by Discreet Logic, last summer. It contains an R12000 processor, which allows Big Bang’s animators to create images more quickly and offers a better range of effects than previous models. Rachiele says his shop was one of the first in North America to pick up the new and improved version of Inferno.

The Renderfarm is a more recent acquisition and Rachiele is enthusiastic about the new addition. ‘It allows us to render our 3D animation more quickly and on separate machines, which allows our animators to work while we render elsewhere, which is great,’ he says.

Rachiele says there has been a shift of late in the kind of work his shop is called on to handle.

‘More and more we are getting the chance to do effects that are invisible instead of doing aliens all the time, which is nice,’ he says. ‘It is really challenging to insert buildings or to remodel a full, live scene with new buildings and set extensions. Star Wars [episode 1, for example] had 90 minutes worth of set extensions. The digital world is really close to realism and it saves a lot of time in the shooting stage.’

Christopher Mossman, a principal in Vancouver’s Image Engine, is excited by one of its latest toys, the Interactive Photorealistic Renderer. The ipr, says Mossman, allows renderers to make adjustments to the textures and lighting in a scene, previously a time-consuming process.

‘Before you had to sit there and literally render out an entire frame, checking lighting, checking textures,’ says Mossman. ‘It can take up to three-quarters of your time, especially when you are doing film-based series work, like we do. With the ipr you can pick a very small area [to work on] and it really speeds up our entire work flow.’

At Toronto’s C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, president Bob Munroe believes the key focus for many effects shops in the coming years is going to be the creation of cg ‘characters.’

‘I think the main focus will be coming up with computer-generated talent as opposed to computer-generated effects…like Stuart Little and Jar Jar Binks,’ he says. ‘We’re not talking about monsters or just creatures that make a quick appearance, but central characters that exist and are as important as any human actor in the show.’

He adds the kinds of cg characters seen in 1999 will be dramatically different and vastly improved in the next couple of years.

‘If you were starting right now, you are talking about a research and development and technological cycle that would be two years before anything would get to screen,’ he says. ‘The amount of evolution that can happen in this business is quite extraordinary. So if one starts today on a film with a computer-generated character that will end up on-screen two years from now, I think it will be remarkably better than what we have seen in the last few months.’

Endangered list

Sadly, as new ways of creating top-line special effects are created, there will be some casualties. Mossman speculates the days of doing practical modeling, and even explosions, may be severely numbered.

‘There is just so much flexibility in the post process as opposed to doing it on set and then being locked into it,’ says Mossman. He reports that Image Engine does a lot of work for film-based series, like Stargate SG-1, and although practical explosions are often shot, they are almost as often aborted from the final cut in favor of animating the image with a computer.

‘In a lot of cases we end up negating the use of those elements for our composites,’ he says.

‘We find the cg particles we can use now, especially in software packages like Maya, are now able to tweak these things to make them look photorealistic, and then we have full control over where we want them and (their) color.’

Another special effects staple that may be on its way out is motion control. Motion-tracking packages such as Maya Live Software offer advantages over traditional motion-control methods by being able to track marker points during a shoot.

‘We are able to track those marker points and our camera locks onto their camera. It makes for a far more believable scene when the camera is actually moving through a cg shot,’ says Mossman.

c.o.r.e.’s Munroe is convinced new products like motion tracking will gradually, but inevitably, eliminate the need for motion control and green screen, saying the former is ‘a visual effects technique that will be going the way of the dinosaur.

‘The only reason we would have to do a motion-control shot anymore is to match the camera move between two live-action plates as if we were shooting on green screen or between a model and a live-action background,’ he says. ‘It’s very problematic to shoot motion control because you can’t have any of the actors speaking, you can’t have sync sound because the noise of the camera is just too great, and you need five people to run the thing.

‘It slows down a set remarkably.’

Rachiele’s take on motion tracking is: ‘I don’t think it will render motion control obsolete, but it is surely taking the whole process to another level.’

Rachiele and Munroe both see a bright future for the new Z-Cam.

Munroe says in addition to being able to capture the same images as an ordinary camera, the Z-Cam can also be output to a different camera to capture depth information, eliminating the need for a green screen.

‘You can be shooting live action and getting the depth info at the exact same time, stored on either film or video,’ says Munroe. ‘With that information, you can composite anything into the scene without having to worry about what’s behind or what’s out front.’

He adds that with the Z-Cam, gone are the days of having to shoot a foreground plate or eliminate a background plate. It can all be shot and captured on the new camera.

‘Let’s say you have someone two feet from the camera and the background is 50 feet from the camera,’ explains Rachiele. ‘With the Z-Cam, the computer will know the depth of each so it can extract whatever is at two feet.’

Rachiele says all of these innovations will help to keep his shop and others on top, producing realistic effects and keeping audiences guessing.

‘Everyone in this business obviously prefers to do effects that are extremely realistic’, says Rachiele, ‘and if nobody knows there is an effect there, it is successful.’

Crew key

As important as the software is to an effects shop, these companies still need people to operate it (for now, anyway). Rachiele says no matter how outrageous effects packages become, Big Bang still relies first and foremost on the strength of it employees.

‘The main thing is always talent and finding the right people who will take any software and push it to its limits,’ he says. ‘Software and hardware keep coming out, and it is a matter of finding them and learning them as quickly as we can [and] having the right creative people to take them to the next level.’

c.o.r.e.’s Munroe concurs, but takes a slightly different tack.

‘Our strategy is to be much more expert in [traditional] filmmaking, and to be sensitive to what making film is all about,’ he says.

‘Anyone can get access to tools and anybody can put together a research and development department and develop tools. It is very important that our people here are very sensitive and sympathetic towards directing, editing, cinematography, and they know how to tell stories. They do a lot more than just push a button and add an effect to a movie.’