An Army of One

Mark Van Slyke has the only clone trooper costume in the entire Chicagoland area so we have to clone the clone for our shots that involve the clone army. Thanks Mark for agreeing to do this. This is scene 41 shot 3. Yari'el and Jared are escorted to the office of Jedi Knight Web Mallick.

There are 3 layers to this After Effects composition. The first layer is the one where the clone commander is escorting the rebels. The second layer is the guard at the door. The third layer is the painstaking rotoscoped layer of the commander walking in front of the guard. This is a first pass of the cloning technique and there are some noticeable areas to tweak before making it a final approved shot.

There is no sound for this shot.

First attempt at bluescreen keying

Here is our first attempt at keying out the bluescreen behind the actors.

First completed CGI shot

We have finished our first fully rendered and composited effects shot. The shot is of the Sarco, which carries Yari'el and Jared, being chased into the clouds of an uncharted planet. The blaster bolts were added with After Effects. The explosion comes from Detonationfilms.com. The foreground clouds were animated in After Effects. The Sarco and TIE fighters were rendered in Lightwave 9.2 and output to an EXR image sequence. There are 2 layers to each render, key and fill which are composited together in After Effects.

Screamernet, which is a network rendering program in Lightwave, was set up on our quad core machine. It treats each processor independently when rendering frames. Next, we will extend Screamernet to other computers on our intranet.

Lightsabers

191 frames of rotoscoped footage taken down in NuMI.




This is Scene 70 Shot 16. The footage was deinterlaced and then rotoscoped with Adobe After Effects. All that is left to do is add a contact flashes where the sabers clash. Once Scene 70 is fully rotoscoped it will be passed to the audio team for ADR.

Compositing

Currently we are working on a segment of the movie where the Sarco, Jared's ship, is chased by the Empire and eventually crashes on the planet below. We have about 50 GB of video to composite into this 22 second scene. There are several layers to be imported and adjusted prior to compositing. The planet is a layer. The ships are two layers each, keylight and fill light renders from Lightwave. The picture shows a composite of the planet, TIE fighter, and the Sarco. The exposure, brightness, and contrast are adjusted on each layer and then blended. The nebula background and blaster bolts are left to be added to the shot.

Rotoscoping

We have over 6300 frames of lightsaber rotoscoping to complete. The process is arduous but rewarding. We are following the tutorial by Ryan Wieber. It creates the most realistic movie quality saber effects. After Effects is used in this process. After the footage is imported (each frame is a targa file), a mask must be placed over each saber in each frame. A seven second sequence is 210 frames. This takes a long time to complete. The background saber must be roto'd first followed by the foreground saber. The image shows you how the sabers will appear in the film release. This scene was filmed 360 feet underground in the MINOS detector hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

On a side note, our latest padawan Alexandra Crawford was born on December 4th.

Rendering

We are using Lightwave 3D v9.2 for CGI animation. Files are saved in the ILM EXR format. The tutorial from the Battlestar Galactica Visual Effects Consultant Kelly "Kat" Myers is used when setting up scenes and rendering. A Key light specular pass and a Fill light diffuse pass, utilizing the 28 spinning lights cluster, are rendered and saved to several EXR buffers. Adobe After Effects CS3 is used to composite the various layers together. One 7 second shot right now is taking 1 hour and 2 minuted per frame for the specular pass.