VFX Supervisor, Jake Morrison, is a perfectionist. He’s also developed a reputation in the industry for capturing beautiful moments in unusual locations, and creating an emotional, visceral response from his audiences.
With such blockbusters as '300', 'The Rise of the Silver Surfer' and 'Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' under his belt, every new release raises the bar and pushes his crew to set new standards for immersive, stunning visual effects. But these days, Jake is not only a perfectionist, he’s a pragmatist as well. He has to be. It’s the same story; demands on the crew are rising, but budgets are tighter than ever.
“More and more, decisions are being made in post, not prep,” says Jake. “On Speed Racer and Tooth Fairy, we made many design decisions in post that in previous years would have to have been made in prep. The industry has become much more comfortable re-editing visual effects sequences and you can't do that without very quickly visualizing these changes and generating the content as quickly as possible. It raises the questions off which shots are doable, which would be too expensive, and which ones we’d have to cut. Those are important decisions - decisions that could ultimately make or break a film.”
And the key to having enough ‘content’ to make decisions is having scenes as complete as possible, and this means compositing, tracking, monitor burn-ins - all the details that make a scene complete - needs to be done as quickly as possible.
“It used to be that, when you needed complex shots for review, you’d send them out to the big shops, compositing specialists with expensive, powerful tools. And to justify the time and money, you’d have to compile many shots to send out, not one or two. It’s expensive and time consuming, but we’d have results. Today, we don’t have the luxury of sending out all of the work, so we have to do it in-house, and quickly. Fortunately, there’s been a real democratization of VFX tools that has brought the once all powerful high-end specialty work down to the desktop. And this works really well for us.”
“During Tooth Fairy, and especially Speed Racer, we had an in-house team that was able to work efficiently and with very high quality results. We had a large number of shots to consider and didn’t have the time or the money to send them out - our in house team on Speed Racer completed over 350 shots for the movie! Doing it in-house meant we could make decisions quickly, and we saved a significant amount of money.”
mocha from Imagineer Systems was one of those tools that played a key role.
“We used mocha as a tracking engine mainly, using it for monitor burn ins right off the bat. It’s an intuitive tool, so much so that I was able to break up the larger projects into a series of tasks and tackle many of them myself. I was able to create really clean tracks, very quickly and of very high quality, then send them off to my crew. When you can give your crew such clean tracks, their jobs get much easier, and the results are stunning.”
Jake continued, “The real magic with mocha is this; the planar tracking engine is so smart, you only have to add a few key frames to create a clean track from a complex shot. And we’ve come to find that, when you generate such clean tracks from mocha and export those tracks out, you’ve saved immense amounts of time and aggravation for the rest of the crew. When it comes to Rotoscoping, you can rely on the engine to let the roto flow through the shot and you just add keyframes to guide it, which eliminates the high frequency problems that are all too common with tracking and roto. It’s all about visual harmonics and mocha works so easily within our larger workflow.”
“The most painful thing for VFX artists is; you know the hard stuff is hard, but the seemingly simple stuff is actually a whole lot harder. What’s most annoying is when someone gives you a monitor burn in and says, ‘just stick this in there,’ you know it can take days and it still might not look right. From a production point of view, if I’m an exec looking at a collection of shots, it’s hard for me to justify the actual man hours should be for what seems to be a simple monitor burn in!”
“What I love about mocha is simply this: it makes the seemingly simple stuff actually easy!”
Jake is currently wrapping up post on Iron Man 2, which is due out in theaters in May 2010, and will be back to talk with us about his experiences on this highly anticipated sequel.
