Calibre Digital Pictures, the Toronto-based effects and animation house, is up and running with its new matte department. According to Mark Fordham, head of the four-member division, this expansion ‘meets the needs of the new digital environment for more and more films.’

Fordham reports Calibre is providing an increasing number of productions beyond the science fiction and fantasy genres with ‘invisible effects’, photo-realistic backgrounds audiences would not recognize as computer-generated.

Fordham would seem the right man for the job. Trained in fine arts at the Ontario College of Art (as is the whole department), he has displayed his realist paintings and sculptures in galleries in Toronto and New York. Making the transition to digital matte work primarily required he and his staff get up to speed on the Avid Matador software.

The department’s skills are particularly handy on period pieces. One of the projects it recently completed was Nuremberg, the Alliance Atlantis Communications/Productions La Fete miniseries about the trials of the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust. It also wrapped on Haven, aac’s Citadel Entertainment miniseries documenting the escape of 1,000 Jews from Europe to New York in 1944. The program is scheduled to air on cbs in February.

‘On set right here in Ontario they had some army trucks pulling down an old dirt road, with a camera move,’ Fordham explains, referring to the latter project. ‘Then the matte department took over and designed a spectacular vista showing the whole harbor of Naples, totally bombed out during the war, with Mount Vesuvius behind.’

Fordham says the department’s work is accomplished through both traditional and cutting-edge methods.

‘We might physically make a sculpture and photograph it and then digitize the photograph,’ he says. ‘We might make a sculpture in the computer or digitally paint everything within the computer. Every art technique is being used all the time.’

Fordham does not agree with the view held by some filmmakers that it’s always preferable to shoot an actual object than build it in the computer.

‘I like having total control over shots, which you can’t get when you’re out on location with limited time, at the mercy of factors including Mother Nature,’ he explains. ‘Instead of taking a photograph, we’ve gone one step further in the digital realm – we’re making a photograph. We’re making creative decisions every step of the way, leaving nothing up to chance or luck.’

Fordham admits it’s not easy for Calibre to promote its matte department when its work is supposed to pass for reality.

‘We want to highlight what we’ve done, but at the same time we don’t want people to be too aware,’ he says. ‘We’re very proud when nobody knows. All they notice is there’s a kind of poetry to the shot.’

Production boom

When Calibre opened its doors a decade ago, it was strictly a commercial house. The boom in Canadian film and tv production contributed to its shift toward long-format projects, particularly its gig on Atlantis Films’ The Adventures of Sinbad series, which ran from 1996 to 1998. In 1997, Atlantis purchased a 50% stake in Calibre, which is now owned outright by aac, which formed by merger in 1998.

According to Noel Hooper, Calibre Inferno artist and fx director, the shop now does about 70% long-form work and 30% commercial. Of its long-form work, about 40% is generated by aac productions, 60% from external sources.

For a while Calibre dropped off the spot radar, but it’s trying to turn that around.

‘We made a lot of friends in the commercial world, then kind of disappeared and made a bunch of friends in the film and tv world,’ Hooper explains. ‘We realized commercials are still interesting and you can still try a lot of new things with them, so we wanted to get back into it.’

While some houses have adopted the strategy of segregating their commercial and long-form divisions, Calibre has deliberately made no such distinctions.

‘It’s [about] giving the artists freedom to try new things,’ Hooper says. ‘If you get working on only commercials or one tv series, it can get – I wouldn’t say ‘monotonous’ – but you want to try new things now and then. It gives the producers the chance to put the artist with his or her specific skills on the project that deserves it, whether it’s a commercial, tv series or film.’

In the realm of the mow, Calibre recently completed Showtime’s Annus Horribilus, directed by actor Eric Stoltz on location in Mississauga, Ont. The cable movie concerns a teenage girl’s attempts to keep her parents together when she incorrectly believes they are getting divorced. It may sound like a down-to-earth story, but Calibre provided some out-of-this-world compositing and 3D shots.

‘In the opening we enter through the galaxy into our solar system, past the sun, into the earth and then end up hooking into a shot coming down to [the girl] on her front lawn,’ Hooper explains. ‘And then in the last shot of the movie [we] pan up from some kids throwing popcorn that turns into stars, and we pull back into the galaxy.’

The shop is currently at work on the feature Interstate 60, a Fireworks Entertainment/Redeemable Features comedy starring James Marsden as a young man in search of enlightenment along a fictitious highway. The film was shot in and around Toronto and wrapped in early November.

Calibre was called upon to achieve an effect for a magical character played by Gary Oldman. The magic man alters people’s lives by puffing on a pipe whose base is a fake monkey’s head. The monkey’s eyes glow and mystical green smoke emanates from them.

‘In one shot, the smoke rises up the side of a building past someone in the window affecting them,’ Hooper elaborates. ‘Basically our job is to create everything in these shots, and most of them are with a moving camera.’

Hooper describes another effect involving a ‘talking eight ball’ which characters carry. Calibre is creating the insides of the fantastical object using Discreet 3D Studio Max. The smoke is being done with Alias|Wavefront’s Maya.

All geared up

Hooper believes the emphasis in the industry has moved from the systems to the artists.

‘Three or four years ago, a lot in compositing was based on software,’ he says. ‘As soon as you said Inferno, there would be ‘Ooh, ah, they’ve got one,’ but anybody can press the buttons and it doesn’t mean they’re going to make great things. People are realizing it’s the artist that makes the magic.’

Nevertheless, Calibre has covered its bases technologically, housing its facility with a wide variety of gear. ‘When you’re trying to get things through as fast and good as possible, you have to rely on different softwares for their strengths, and try to avoid the pitfalls,’ Hooper says.

The shop’s main compositing packages are Discreet’s Inferno, Flame and Flint. On the nt platform, it runs Adobe’s After Effects for fx on episodic work, Photoshop for textures and matte painting, Director for onscreen playback and NewTek LightWave 3D for 3D animation. On the sgi side, it has Maya and Avid Softimage for 3D animation and a|w’s StudioPaint3D for all texturing on 3D models.

Sometimes Calibre even creates its own code to accomplish what the software can’t.

‘We have two guys who can write small programs so we can design specific effects,’ Hooper explains. ‘A lot of it works in conjunction with other pieces of software, whether it’s plug-ins for Inferno or code for doing something specific with a part of the system in Maya.’

Hooper acknowledges the trend away from big expensive machines towards desktop hardware.

‘The nt boxes are faster and cheaper,’ he says. ‘The only [programs] we have to stick with on sgi are Inferno, Flame and Flint, because that’s all they run on. sgi’s been really good, but realistically, when something’s faster and cheaper, you have to go that way.’

Calibre has been a beta site for various systems, and although Hooper says the manufacturers are good at listening to input and correcting problems, it’s easy for fx houses to fall into a trap.

‘That warning they tell you – ‘It’s not supposed to be used in production’ – kind of flies out of your head and suddenly you’ve got an entire show built on a piece of software that’s not entirely stable,’ he says. ‘We’ve gotten caught a couple of times where we’ve had to go back to a previous version of the software just to get the job done.’

Dipping a toe in the HD pool

Calibre continues to provide 3D shuttles and spaceships for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict for aac/Tribune Entertainment. It reports that nothing has changed on its end even though the show switched from 35mm film origination to Sony 24P high definition in this, its fourth season. Although shot in hd, the show is downconverted to digital 601 ntsc and delivered to Calibre in non-hd anamorphic digital Betacam.

Hooper cannot confirm earlier reports that the shop will finish one episode in hd.

‘To get us all the plates, it’s more expensive for [the production] to transfer everything for us,’ he says. ‘The size of the files makes everything move a little bit slower. It would have to come to us on a different format, like D5 hd or dlt. But provided they want to put the time and money into transferring it to the larger file size, we would love to jump into that.’

The shop had an earlier foray into hd with the aptly titled fantasy The Test, which has screened at various film festivals. The 40-minute, $250,000 short, produced and directed by Clute brothers Jason, Warren and Roy, tells the story of convicts taken to a deserted bar and served alcohol that makes them dry up, crumble and fall apart. Calibre had to achieve the morbid disintegration.

‘That was a good run-through and it was pretty much flawless,’ Hooper reports.

When the hd rush is on, Hooper feels Calibre will be ready.

‘Any of the animation programs can render at hd,’ he says. ‘Inferno is probably the most comfortable just because of the size and speed you need. Technically we’re ready for [hd], but maybe the medium still has a bit of work to go as far as getting a nice look out of it. I think we’ll see that in the next couple of years.’ *

-www.calibredigital.com