Post may 2015

MAY 2015

POST

www.postmagazine.com

AVENGERS ASSEMBLED CREATING VFX FOR THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER PLUS: NAB POST PICKS PRIMETIME: MAD MEN FOCUS ON CAMERAS NEW YORK STUDIOS

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WORKHORSE

GY-LS300

THAT’S JVC Interchangeable Lens System You’ll be ready for any situation with the ability to swap out lenses as needed.

Super 35mm Sensor

4:2:2 60p 50Mbps

Live Streaming

A brand new sensor uniquely combined with an industry standard Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lens mount.

Ideal for general HD production work. 50Mbps files are stored in the Quicktime (.MOV) format for easy editing.

Easily deliver live HD to content delivery networks such as USTREAM and YouTube.

2K / 4K

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thatsjvc.com

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Mad Men

DEPARTMENTS 2 EDITOR’S LETTER

Post Assembled

By Marc Loftus 2 POST SCRIPT

Post TV: It's A Wrap!

SERVING THE INDUSTRY SINCE 1986

VOL 30 · NO. 5

14

By Linda Romanello 4 POST PICKS

Top announcements from NAB 2015 8 BITS & PIECES

What’s new in post production

FEATURES

14 PRIMETIME

AMC’s Mad Men

18 AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

By Linda Romanello

VFX and previs for the summer’s biggest film

By Marc Loftus and Linda Romanello

16 DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

16

Spy

24 FOCUS ON CAMERAS

New models take center stage at NAB 2015

SCAD

Paul Feig — Spy

By Iain Blair 44 FIELD TESTED

Modern VideoFilm employs Autodesk’s Flame Premium

By M. J. Foley

By Dave Cole

28 MAKING THE GRADE

46 REVIEW

Experiential learning preps the next generation of post professionals

RTW’s Loudness Tools

By Keith Hodne

By Christine Bunish 34 SOUND LIBRARIES IN THE MIX

48 PEOPLE

28

When combined with custom recordings, commercial sound libraries are helping sound designers deliver unique results

Keeping tabs of the industry’s movers & shakers

Uncertain

By Jennifer Walden 40 SPOTLIGHT ON

NEW YORK STUDIOS

Post for movies and TV benefits from tax incentives; spot work remains strong through advertising transition

34

By Christine Bunish

ON OUR COVER Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. ILM, Trixter and The Third Floor talk VFX.

THIS MONTH IN

• Building the futuristic Tomorrowland • Vancouver: A VFX industry destination • Inside Out incorporates the latest CG techniques • Virtualization’s role in the graphics industry • Super effects for superheroes

WEB EXCLUSIVES • Blogs: NAB and Storage • Avengers: Age of Ultron: Prime Focus World’s Stereo 3D work • Maggie: Director Henry Hobson’s zombie flick • Somatone Interactive's mobile game audio WWW.POSTMAGAZINE.COM

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EDITOR'S NOTE

POST ASSEMBLED L

BY MARC LOFTUS SENIOR EDITOR/ DIRECTOR OF WEB CONTENT MLOFTUS@POSTMAGAZINE.COM

ike The Avengers, this issue is the result of a team effort. After returning from NAB in Las Vegas last month, we are pleased to present our “Post Picks” (page 4), showcasing some of the top new technology from gear manufacturers. Many new product introductions are cameras, which certainly can affect post workflows, so check out Mark Foley’s “Camera Focus” on page 24.

We also had a chance to connect with several studios that contributed to what might become this summer’s biggest film.

Avengers: Age of Ultron debuted in the US with a $187M opening weekend (following $200M+ a week earlier in Europe).

The film is packed with VFX, and we had a chance to speak with supervisors at ILM, Trixter and The Third Floor regarding their work (page 18). That coverage continues online, where we have additional details about those who contributed to the Joss Whedon film.

Also online is my interview with director

Henry Hobson, who recently completed work on a very different type of zombie-apocalypse film. Maggie, which opened in theaters on May 8th, stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin, and looks at the relationship between a father, daughter and town in crisis when confronted with the toughest of decisions. Hobson, who is known for his design work on The Oscars, Snow White & the Huntsmen and The Walking Dead, details the challenges of the Louisiana shoot and how he called in favors from friends throughout the post industry to ultimately get his vision onto the big screen.

And while visiting postmagazine.com, check out our new “New York” section, which continues the focused regional coverage presented on page 40. We’ve always covered New York post, but this new section brings all the local coverage together into one easy-to-navigate section that we’ll continue to add to regularly.

Enjoy!

POST TV: IT'S A WRAP! W

MANAGING EDITOR LROMANELLO@ POSTMAGAZINE.COM

2

POST

MARC LOFTUS Senior Editor/Director of Web Content 516.376.1087 mloftus@postmagazine.com LINDA ROMANELLO Managing Editor 516.931.0730 lromanello@postmagazine.com CHRISTINE BUNISH Film & Video IAIN BLAIR Film JENNIFER WALDEN Audio MICHELLE VILLAS Art Director michelle@moontidemedia.com

ADVERTISING MARI KOHN Director of Sales 818.291.1153 cell 818.472.1491 mkohn@postmagazine.com GARY RHODES Eastern & Intl Sales Manager 631.274-9530 cell 516.410.8638 grhodes@copcomm.com LISA NEELY Corporate Sales Executive, Events, Custom and Integrated Print/Publishing Services lneely@copcomm.com 818.660.5828

POST SCRIPT

BY LINDA ROMANELLO

EDITORIAL

ith more than 1,700 exhibitors and an attendance exceeding 100,000 industry pros from all parts of the world (164 countries represented), this year’s NAB was officially a success — and officially a wrap!

With new tools and solutions at every turn of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), and long-talked about technologies such as 4K still grabbing headlines with a slew of new 4K camera introductions (see "Post Picks" and "Focus on Cameras," pages 4 and 24, respectively), along with lots of buzz from drones (VFX studio xRez recently relied on drone photography for its work on Björk’s NYC MoMA exhibit, page 10), many emerging technologies came to fruition and were showcased at this year’s show. Post brought you that news electronically, with our daily NAB newsletters, and also with Post TV, featuring interviews from the trade show floor with manufacturers, organizations and studio creatives.

Closing out its 7th year, Post TV featured more than 25 interviews and three hours of footage from our booth in the lower South Hall of the LVCC. My colleague Marc Loftus and I spoke with such industry leaders as Dan May of Blackmagic Design, Matt Feury of Avid, Melanie Ball of AMD, Andy Bellamy

of AJA, Craig Yanagi of JVC, Patrick Palmer of Adobe, and studio creatives including Michael Cioni of Light Iron, Michael Sandness of Splice, Terry Curren of AlphaDogs, and Greg Ciaccio of Modern VideoFilm.

This year, we learned about how Rohde & Schwarz saw a spike in interest in IMF from its customers, addressing this need with its new R&S Clipster mastering station with added key functions to the IMF mastering workflow to make it production ready. The Foundry’s Simon Robinson told us about the company’s work in virtual reality, and offered attendees early tech previews of new tools “that will do live action VR work inside Nuke.” Both companies won Honorable Mentions in our NAB Post Picks.

Visit www.postmagzine.com to watch all our interviews.

I’d also like to give a special shout out to Athena Ashburn and her team at Morph Syndicate for their outstanding work on producing Post TV; our sponsors G-Technology, Key Code Media, Data Direct Networks, Sony Electronics, AMD, Altermedia, Avere Systems, and Killer Tracks; new Post contributor Mark Foley for his blogs and camera feature in this issue; and G-Tech for their drives. Just like NAB, Post TV is a wrap!

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Lenses and accessories shown are not included

Introducing Blackmagic URSA, the world’s first user upgradeable 4K digital film camera!

Blackmagic URSA is the world’s first high end digital film camera designed to revolutionize workflow on set. Built to handle the ergonomics of large film crews as well as single person use, URSA has everything built in, including a massive 10 inch fold out on set monitor, large user upgradeable Super 35 global shutter 4K image sensor, 12G-SDI and internal dual RAW and ProRes recorders.

Super 35 Size Sensor URSA is a true professional digital film camera with a 4K sensor, global shutter and an incredible 12 stops of dynamic range.

The wide dynamic range blows away regular video cameras or even high end broadcast cameras, so you get dramatically better images that look like true digital film. The extra large Super 35 size allows for creative shallow depth of field shooting plus RAW and ProRes means you get incredible quality!

Dual Recorders Blackmagic URSA features dual recorders so you never need to stop recording to change media. That’s critical if you are shooting an historical event, important interview or where you just cannot stop shooting! Simply load an empty CFast card into the second recorder and when the current card is full, the recording will continue onto the second card, allowing you to change out the full card and keep shooting!

User Upgradeable Sensor Blackmagic URSA features a modular camera turret that can be removed by unscrewing 4 simple bolts! The camera turret includes the sensor, lens mount and lens control connections and can be upgraded in the future when new types of sensors are developed.

This means your next camera will be a fraction of the cost of buying a whole new camera! Choose professional PL mount, popular EF mount and more!

Built in On Set Monitoring!

Say goodbye to bulky on set monitors because you get a massive fold out 10 inch screen built into Blackmagic URSA, making it the world’s biggest viewfinder! The screen is super bright and features an ultra wide viewing angle. URSA also includes two extra 5” touch screens on both sides of the camera showing settings such as format, frame rate, shutter angle plus scopes for checking levels, audio and focus!

Blackmagic URSA EF

5,995

$

Blackmagic URSA PL

6,495

$

www.blackmagicdesign.com

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BITS & PIECES

BY MARC LOFTUS AND LINDA ROMANELLO

INDUSTRY

POST PICKS LAS VEGAS — The Post team of writers, contributors and industry pros recently returned from the 2015 NAB Show in Las Vegas with much food for thought, after spending long days on the show floor in search of the most innovative and coolest new products and technologies — and even learning of some key strategic partnerships. As a result, Post is proud to announce the list of products, technologies and news that were agreed to have shown an impressive amount of innovation, as well as captured the most attention and interest at the exhibition.

Below are the “Post Picks for NAB 2015,” as well as our list of Honorable Mentions.

PROS MAKE THEIR CHOICES FROM NAB 2015

Avid (www.avid.com) introduced the Avid ISIS 1000 shared-storage system, designed for realtime collaboration.

Starting at $17,995 and powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform, ISIS 1000 integrates seamlessly with Avid Media

Composer, Pro Tools and third-party tools, including Adobe Premiere Pro CC. ISIS 1000 offers support for realtime SD, HD, 2K, and 4K media performance and offers realtime collaboration. Starting at 20TBs, ISIS 1000 can be expanded to 80TBs delivering 36 to 144 streams of 50Mbit/sec. media. It will be available for delivery in Q3 2015.

ADOBE CHARACTER ANIMATOR Adobe’s new Character Animator (www.

POST

able I/O expanders enable users to configure their rig to fit different production types, whether using the camera in a gimbal, run-and-gun, or in a studio environment. Weapon has a top handle and LCD display options that connect directly to the DSMC brain. Onboard wireless connectivity allows for remote control of Weapon using either iOS or Android mobile devices.

BLACKMAGIC DESIGN After Effects, reproduces facial expressions and synchronizes mouth movements to speech. Users have control over different aspects of a character’s movement through the mouse, keyboard, and programmable behaviors. Character Animator will rig a character’s facial features automatically. Users can then control other areas of a character’s body with their mouse. Repetitive actions or behaviors can also be performed.

RED WEAPON

AVID ISIS 1000

4

adobe.com) allows users to bring 2D artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator to life by performing into a Webcam. The application, which is accessible through

Red’s (www.red.com) new Weapon is the company’s smallest and most lightweight camera brain to feature its 6K Dragon sensor. The 19MP Dragon sensor can capture 6K motion and stills at up to 100fps. The redesigned brain infrastructure features enhancements such as auto

matic black shade calibrations, improved low-light sensor performance, and a new intelligent OLPF system. The brain is also equipped to support 1D and 3D LUTs. Weapon is backwards compatible with existing power options, Mini-Mags, DSMC lens mounts, cables, and most mounting and support components.

New LCD/EVF adaptors enable users to attach existing Red Touch and other monitoring solutions. And interchange-

Blackmagic Design (www.blackmagicde sign.com) enthusiastically rolled out 38 new products at this year’s NAB show, including the Ursa Mini, Fusion 8, and DaVinci Resolve 12.

The Blackmagic Ursa Mini is a compact and lightweight Super 35 digital film camera that’s properly balanced and comfortable for handheld and extended use. It features a 4.6K image sensor, switchable global or rolling shutter, up to 15 stops of dynamic range, a large fiveinch fold out viewfinder, and dual Raw and Apple ProRes recorders. It is available in four models, starting at $2,995.

The company’s alpha version of Fusion 8 made its debut at this year’s show.

The visual effects and motion graphics software, which until now was only available on Windows, will see Mac OS X and Linux releases later this year and will feature hundreds of tools that allow users to pull keys, track objects, rotoscope, retouch images, animate titles, and create particle effects, all in a true 3D workspace.

DaVinci Resolve 12 is a major upgrade to the software tool, with over 80 new features for professional editing and color grading that includes a new and more modern interface, multi-cam editing, new media management tools, an entirely new professional audio engine with support for VST/AU plug-ins, shot matching,

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BITS & PIECES

a 3D keyer, new 3D perspective tracker, and enhanced curve editing.

4K HANDHELD CAMERAS

JVC GY-LS300: JVC (www.pro.jvc.com) had its new line of 4K/2K camcorders at

NAB, which includes the GY-LS300. The release is now shipping and is designed for customers who want the functionality, form factor and ergonomics of a traditional camcorder, but with the imaging attributes of large imager. The camera can capture 4K (150mbps, H.264) and record two compressions simultaneously.

The LS300 costs $3,995.

Panasonic AG-DVX200: Panasonic (www. panasonic.com) announced a range of new 4K products, including the

as a compact, lightweight and versatile option, the XC10 is designed to deliver 4K and full HD video as well as 12MP still images. The camcorder also has a built-in function to extract 8MP still images from recorded 4K video. The XC10 camcorder includes a one-inch 12MP CMOS sensor, with a 10x wide-angle zoom lens with a 2x digital teleconverter and optical image stabilization. The model is intended for pros looking for cost-effective 4K video production, as well as multimedia journalists and news agencies looking to easily expand into 4K electronic news gathering (ENG) coverage.

Sony HDC-4300 4K/HD Camera System: Sony (www.pro.sony.com) introduced the HDC-4300 4K/HD camera system,

which bridges the gap between high frame rate and traditional studio cameras. It combines the HDC series workflow with three specially developed 2/3 inch 4K sensors, B4 lens support, up to 8x super slow motion and 4K/HD flexibility.

Arri Alexa Mini: Arri (www.arri.com) announced the new Alexa Mini, intended as a versatile additional tool in the Alexa

AG-DVX200 4K large-sensor, 4/3-inch handheld camcorder. It features 4K/60p recording, a 13x optical zoom and a V-Log L gamma curve (12 stops of latitude, target), and delivers a shallow depth of field and a wide field of view. The DVX200 is intended as a companion to the company’s VariCam 35 4K camera/recorder and will be available in Fall 2015, with a suggested list price under $5,000.

Canon XC10: Canon USA Inc. (www.usa. canon.com/nab2015) introduced the new XC10 4K digital camcorder. Intended

camera range that combines a compact and lightweight form factor. Like the Arri Amira, the Alexa Mini can record 4K UHD ProRes images, facilitating realtime 4K UHD output and simple pipelines for high-resolution deliverables. The Mini and all other Arri cameras with the Alev III sensor offer high overall image quality by focusing not just on spatial resolution, but also on other parameters, such as colorimetry, skin tones and high dynamic range (HDR).

The Arri Alexa Mini is scheduled to begin shipping this month.

FACILIS Facilis (www.facilis.com) announced the new TerraBlock 8D, an eight-drive, 16TB turnkey content creation system. Like Facilis’ larger servers, this 2U

rack-mountable server combines the Facilis Shared File System with virtual volume workflow and performance. The 8D includes Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and can be upgraded to support Fibre Channel and 10GigE connections, making it attractive for facilities looking for a cost-effective way to use existing Fibre Channel networking. The TerraBlock 8D retails for less than $10K and will be available in Q2.

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES The Foundry: The Foundry (www. thefoundry.co.uk) showed off some impressive work in VR. According to the company’s founder, Simon Robinson, it was offering attendees some “early tech previews of the company’s upcoming set of tools that will do live action VR work inside Nuke.” Post will have more details in next month's issue.

Rohde & Schwarz: Rohde & Schwarz’s (www.rohde-schwarz.us) Daniel Germain, segment marketing manager, broadcast & entertainment, discussed some of the

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BITS & PIECES

company’s early work in IMF, saying that it’s been getting a tremendous amount of interest in IMF from customers. “Different studios are using it in different forms, but now the time text issue has been resolved, it’s a real standard. And everybody came over to ask about it,” he says. “We’ve been working on it since 2008. We like to think we’re leading the field.” Germain says the company’s Clipster mastering station has been supporting IMF during its incubation period to present day. More details on R&S’s work in IMF will be reported in an upcoming issue.

Eizo: Eizo Inc.’s (www.eizo.com) ColorEdge CG318-4K 31-inch reference display and editing monitor with a DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) 4K (4,096x2,160)

TV Logic: TVLogic (www.tvlogicusa. com) introduced 12 new display models, including the new LUM-310A Ultra High-Definition 4K reference display

native resolution, is now shipping. A big boost here, the ColorEdge CG318-4K comes with a built-in sensor to enable self-calibration for hassle-free monitor maintenance. Eizo offers two dedicated calibration software programs, ColorNavigator NX and ColorNavigator 6, that allows users to set target values for brightness, gamma, and white point, and generate an ICC profile. ColorNavigator 6 comes bundled with the monitor; ColorNavigator NX is available as a free download from the company’s Website.

REFERENCE DISPLAYS

for the post market. The LUM-310A is a 31.1-inch monitor featuring 4096x2160 resolution with a high contrast ratio of 1,450:1, and supports 4-SDI and 4-HDMI inputs as well as an HDMI 1-channel input. It provides wide color gamut up to DCI, true 10-bit, includes 3D LUT support for precise color reproduction, 2-sample interleave division, HD 1:1 or full-screen upscaling function and TVLogic’s own color calibration utility support.

Canon: Canon USA (www.usa.canon. com) expanded its portfolio of reference display products with the introduction of the new portable DP-V2410 4K reference display. Measuring 24-inches diagonally and weighing approximately 26 pounds, the DP-V2410 is designed to be easily transportable for on-set production of 4K/UHD and 2K/HD programming. The 2410 was displayed as part of an on-set dailies system at Canon’s booth during NAB. The display is housed within a sturdy metal frame that includes handles and adjustable feet that facilitate rapid setup.

It features a 24vV DC input. Canon hopes to deliver the DP-V2410 in November for a suggested list price of $18,000.

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Dolby/Vizio: Dolby Laboratories (www. dolby.com) partnered with Vizio to help bring 4K UHD content to the home viewer. The company’s Dolby Vision technology is being incorporated into Vizio’s 65-inch and 120-inch Reference Series smart TVs, providing viewers with peak brightness, local contrast, and a full range of colors that more closely mimic what the human eye can see. Warner Bros. is making some of its 4K Ultra HD titles available for distribution via VUDU, Walmart’s video on demand service.

Collectively, the partnership creates a complete content distribution and viewing solution.

Sony: Sony’s (www.pro.sony.com) BVM-X300 OLED master monitor combines 4K resolution, high dynamic range and a wide color gamut display. The 30-inch model expands Sony’s Trimaster EL series and provides an OLED option for professional video production applications, including color grading, on-set monitoring and quality control in a 4K workflow. In addition to the high-contrast performance, this new monitor offers a high dynamic range mode, giving users the ability to view the entire range of an image accurately and clearly. The monitor also has a new, integrated control panel with integrated inputs. This means there are no options required to complete the system, giving users a plugand-play solution right out of the box.

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS AMD/Avid: ​AMD’s (www.amd.com) FirePro graphics solutions have been certified for Avid Media Composer 8.4, allowing users of Microsoft Windows and the Apple Mac Pro workstations to confidently take on HD and 4K projects.

FirePro graphics cards enable Media Composer workstations to efficiently support editing of high volumes of disparate file-based media.

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Stream Smarter.

Sony’s QoS for best-in-class streaming If you can’t wait for the whole world to see what you’re seeing, stream your content with Sony’s XDCam® camcorders. Based on our unsurpassed expertise in digital transmission and encoding, we developed unique Quality of Service (QoS) technology that dramatically improves the clarity that’s possible on a single, affordable cellular channel. You can also stream de facto standard mPeG2-tS. and transfer proxy or full-res files with bit-for-bit accuracy. and control your camcorder, right from a tablet or smartphone. thanks to wireless adaptors, even XDCam® cameras that have been in use for years can take advantage of these powerful possibilities. How smart is that?

Schedule a demonstration at sony.com/wireless. © 2015 Sony electronics Inc. all rights reserved. reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. Sony, XDCam and the Sony logo are trademarks of Sony. all other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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BITS & PIECES

NEW NYC AGENCY KEEPS IT 'NIMBLE'

BLING DIGITAL OPENS IN BROOKLYN

NEW YORK — Nimble Division (www.nimble division.com) is a new agency that marks the evolution of three distinct companies: Mind Smack TV (production and post), The Smack Pack (branding, strategy and design), and Social Prompter (social media events).

According to Mike Feuer, who’s a partner and owner in the company, along with Todd Feuer, the newly-launched agency is designed to be “nimble,” allowing them to thrive in the Todd Feuer changing marketplace and work more directly with brands and corporations. Together, they are joined by a third partner, David Buivid, whose history with the duo goes back to when MindSmack first opened eight years ago.

“I was one of the first three employees,” Buivid recalls. “About three years ago I saw an opportunity to create an expertise in Web and brand marketing, so over the past three years we built a team called The Smack Pack to service clients that didn’t only have production and post needs, but more so needed help Mike Feuer understanding their brand and communicating their value across all channels. Todd and Mike allowed me to incubate this idea, essentially creating a branding agency, and now we are all bringing it back together under the umbrella of Nimble Division.”

“The idea is that we are not just a post house and production company anymore,” says Mike Feuer, “we are a full-blown agency.

We have grown from starting out that way — doing Web and design development — and have graduated to brand strategy and design, David Buivid helping companies achieve their goals. It’s a new team, and we have a new partner — David — who specializes in strategy and managing teams to bring that to fruition.”

Todd Feuer adds that the studio business has been changing. “We found that a lot of clients we are dealing with are tired of the big agency. They want more interaction with the people doing work. That seems to be a trend and we are in the position to do very well going forward.”

“Larger agencies are the antithesis of ‘nimble,’” adds Buivid.

The team will offer soup-to-nuts services, including writing, scripting, shooting and posting projects, but their strategic contributions are where they feel they can differentiate themselves from competing facilities.

“Clients come in with varying degrees of understanding of their own position and concept,” says Buivid, “so sometimes we help them figure out what is the best approach to help them connect with their audience. Other times they will know, but need expertise.”

“We’ll work with them to help hash things out,” adds Mike Feuer.

In positioning the business for the future, the trio has the ability to not only produce and post content for the Web, but also create the whole environment in which that content lives. Their team is young, and has grown up with digital DNA, with an acute understanding of how Web content is consumed, and how to position it for the target audience, which is increasingly millennial and consumes media on mobile devices, tablets and computers seamlessly. Nimble Division launches with a new Website. The studio is expanding its physical space, too, adding to its existing footprint on West 43rd St. For more on New York studios, turn to page 40.

— BY MARC LOFTUS

BROOKLYN — The Sim Group (www.simgroup.com), which supplies production and post production equipment and services to the feature and television industry, has expanded its offerings into the New York market, where it will offer dailies, offline and finishing services via a new Brooklyn facility. The Bling Digital facility creates a foothold for other Sim Group brands, including Chainsaw, Pixel Underground and Tattersall Sound and Picture.

Bling is home to a Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve color bay and Avid Media Composer and Symphony edit bays. The studio has already provided services for a number of shows, including Mr. Robot, Forever, American Odyssey and Season 3 of The Following. Leo De Wolff is a workflow producer for Bling Digital, New York, and says the studio was able to hire artists from the New York talent pool.

“New York is a vibrant production community, and Sim has the breadth of services to offer unique workflow packages to producers and content creators,” notes James Martin, chief strategy officer at Sim Group.

“With the multitude of studios and productions cropping up in Brooklyn, we saw an immediate need for Bling’s services,” adds Chris Parker, CTO of Sim Group. “The response has been overwhelming. The market is hungry for our unique way of offering workflow.”

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The Sim Group expands to Brooklyn with its Bling Digital facility, offering dailies, offline and finishing services.

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DaVinci Resolve 11 now adds professional nonlinear editing to the world’s most powerful color grading system!

DaVinci Resolve 11 combines the world’s most advanced color corrector with professional multi track editing so now you can edit, color correct, finish and deliver all from one system! With its legendary image quality, real-time GPU accelerated performance, and support for more wide dynamic range RAW formats than any other system, DaVinci Resolve has the creative tools professional editors and colorists need to work on Hollywood’s most demanding projects!

Integrated Editing and Grading

Native Camera RAW

DaVinci Resolve 11 gives you professional editing and color correction all in one system so you can move between editing and grading with a click of the mouse! No more importing, exporting, or conforming ever again! Teams can have multiple colorists and assistants working with an editor on the same sequence at the same time! You get a true nonlinear workflow that lets you edit, grade and finish faster than ever before!

DaVinci Resolve works natively with all major RAW formats! Featuring the industry’s most advanced de-bayer algorithms, Resolve preserves every detail captured by the camera’s sensor. That means you can adjust exposure, shadows, highlights and mid-tones long after the camera stops rolling! With Resolve, you can create looks that simply aren’t possible on other systems. The native RAW workflow means your final masters are literally first generation renders from camera original files!

Professional Nonlinear Editing

Scalable Power

DaVinci Resolve’s multi track timeline lets you quickly ripple, roll, slip, slide, extend and shorten edits. The context sensitive trim tool changes automatically based on the position of the mouse to make editing faster! Dynamic JKL trimming works on multiple tracks and can be done in the same direction or asymmetrically. Whether you use the mouse or keyboard, Resolve is easy to learn and has all of the tools professional editors need!

Hollywood’s leading studios choose DaVinci Resolve because it handles incredibly high resolution images and massive amounts of data easily on super tight deadlines. Resolve is scalable and works on laptop’s up to massive multi GPU systems connected to shared storage. Whether you’re working on HD, 4K or beyond, DaVinci Resolve has the power, performance and creative tools you need to get the job done!

DAVINCI RESOLVE 11 LITE

DAVINCI RESOLVE 11 SOFTWARE

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BITS & PIECES

AUTODESK HELPS IMMERSE VIEWERS IN BJÖRK’S BLACK LAKE MOMA EXHIBIT SAN FRANCISCO — Icelandic singer, songwriter and artist Björk recently debuted her Black Lake multimedia experience at New York‘s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The ethereal CG and visual effects were created with a range of Autodesk (www.autodesk.com) tools, including Maya 3D animation software, Flame creative finishing software, Mudbox digital sculpting software, reality capture solutions ReCap and Memento.

Under the direction of Andrew Thomas Huang, Björk designed the 10-minute music video film experience in collaboration with MoMA, architecture firm The Living (an Autodesk company) and Autodesk. Black Lake is the centerpiece of the retrospective exhibition charting Björk‘s career, the exhibition immerses visitors into the world of Black Lake, a song from her new album "Vulnicura." It occupies its own unique space in the exhibit and features panoramic visuals created by VFX studios Wolf & Crow and xRez Studio.

Upon entering Black Lake, MoMA visitors are engulfed in a dark, cave-like environment, sculpted from the audio track and inspired by the Icelandic ravine where the original music video was shot. It houses two screens on each side of the room that display different angles and scenes from the music video, and walls and ceiling affixed with 7,000 felt cones and 49 speakers that carry the song throughout the room. Autodesk director of emerging technologies, Brian Pene, explains that he helped “facilitate the tools required for the VFX artists at Wolf & Crow and xRez Studio to bring Björk‘s innovative vision to life.”

Footage was shot in Iceland, and post-shoot, Wolf & Crow began building digital assets, as well as a CG version of Björk to interact with various CG elements and environments.

Wolf & Crow completed post while its artists were also developing looks for the CG portion of the video, from the re-creation of environments, to stitching scenes together. Using Flame 2015, the Wolf & Crow team handled the edit; they were able to link to footage straight from camera cards at a lower resolution/debayer. After quickly making the required changes, they then upgraded the footage to full resolution, using the new Format Options feature in the

Flame timeline, before bringing it online. The software made it easier for Wolf & Crow to work with and play back large volumes of 4K and 5K footage, so that they could accommodate Huang‘s needs and meet the project's delivery schedule. The team also relied extensively on Flame‘s planar tracker to overlook lighting changes and occlusions in the timeline.

“To say we were excited to join forces when Andrew approached us to work on a project for Bjork and MoMA is an understatement,” says Kevin Shapiro, founder, Wolf & Crow. “One of our biggest challenges was integrating effects as an emotional punctuation, without having them overtake the process, which we were able to achieve using Maya as the backbone of our workflow, and adding a lovely Flame gloss on top. The team at Autodesk really helped us out. Given the massive dimensions of this film (4:1 ratio) and dealing with 4K and 5K images, Flame was essential to accommodate a fluid creative process and keep the production on track.” xRez Studio created the video‘s immersive landscape scenery using a combination of high-resolution terrestrial and aerial photogrammetry from drone photography and laser scanning, which together captured the region‘s topography. xRez‘s team of artists then turned to ReCap to bring the photogrammetry to life on-screen, Maya to build the 3D scene and tie the visuals together, and Memento and Mudbox to clean meshes.

Black Lake runs through June 7th at MoMA in New York. For more details, visit www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1501.

T2 LAUNCHES TO SUPPORT MEDIA-FOCUSED COMPANIES NEW YORK — T2 Computing, Inc. (www.t2computing.com), an IT solutions company that provides the latest in computing, storage, networking and media hardware and software for the broadcast, post production, and publishing industries, among others, announced its official company launch surrounding the 2015 NAB Show.

The company was founded with the perspective that every business is a media company, meaning that a key success factor for many corporations is the ability to use media as part of their data infrastructure and lexicon. The new company is leveraging its team’s experience and knowledge of the industry, and has been able to develop and deploy custom workflow, infrastructure and mobility solutions that correspond with its clients’ strategic and tactical goals.

“As corporations become more media-focused, and mobile devices more prevalent in day-to-day operations, we saw a need in the in-

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dustry for a solutions provider that caters to the specific needs and challenges that these types of applications pose,” says Jerry Gepner, CEO of Tekserve Corporation and its subsidiary, T2 Computing, Inc. “Class-leading experience and superior client commitment is what forms the backbone of T2 Computing. From procurement, to system design, to logistics, to managed support, T2 Computing is becoming known for our extensive technological proficiency across a wide array of industries and the personal approach we provide.”

Gepner says the company is committed to maintaining long-term customer relationships, which enable its team to deliver the right solutions and better business value. This is reflected in the personal concierge-level approach given during the planning, installation, deployment and continuing maintenance of client projects.

T2 Computing is a Premiere Cisco Partner, Silver EMC Partner, T2's Jerry Gepner Elite Avid Reseller, Gold Adobe reseller and an Apple Specialist.

MAY 2015

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BITS & PIECES

AJA RELEASES NEW MINI-CONVERTERS, KONA AND IO SOFTWARE UPDATE GRASS VALLEY, CA — AJA Video Systems (www.aja.com) announced several new releases at the 2015 NAB Show last month, including V.12.2 software for its Kona and Io products, and a host of new Mini-Converters.

The V.12.2 update includes a new capability for Io 4K that offers AJA Raw ingest to Cinema DNG files from AJA’s CION production camera, at up to 4K 60fps on Mac or Windows. Kona 4 will support AJA Raw capture from CION up to 4K 120fps on Windows. Additionally, 4K Avid DNxHR capture using Kona 4, Kona 3G, and Io 4K has been added to AJA Control Room and Avid Media Composer Version 8.4. AJA Control Room is a unified, cross platform ingest, playback and output software, available for free for use with the latest Kona and Io products.

According to Nick Rashby, president, AJA Video Systems, “AJA Raw support is huge for many of our CION customers who already own and use Kona 4 or Io 4K devices in production, providing a cost-effective and flexible approach for CION’s Raw workflows either on-set or in the edit suite. The addition of Avid’s great new DNxHR codec offers more options for high-quality 4K finishing in an efficient file size.”

For streaming clients, the V.12.2 integrated driver and plug-in package also includes expanded support for AJA Io Express products with Telestream’s Wirecast software.

The company also announced a host of new Mini-Converters, including the FiDO-4T-ST, FiDO-4R-ST, and HA54K. The FiDO-4T-ST and FiDO-4R-ST are quad-channel 3G-SDI to ST Fiber and ST Fiber to 3G-SDI mini-converters that carry up to four 3G-SDI signals on a single converter, with the ability to send signals from a 4K/UltraHD source, such as from the CION camera, up to 10 kilometers. Alternatively, the quad-signal path also allows for multiple HD signals to be carried across long distances.

The HA5-4K provides a simple and powerful path from HDMI to 4K SDI, converting the signal to four 3G-SDI outputs. It can be used to convert HDMI video from DSLR or prosumer 4K cameras to 4K SDI for use in professional workflows.

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IZOTOPE’S NEW AUDIO POST TOOLS

CAMBRIDGE, MA — iZotope, Inc. (www. izotope.com) unveiled new tools for the post market at the 2015 NAB Show in Las Vegas last month, including its RX Loudness Control plug-in, its RX 4 and a preview of its RX Final Mix. The company is positioning these new products as tools intended to help content creators deliver consistent and compliant levels, stems and surround channels.

RX Loudness Control is intended to help audio post production and broadcast professionals automatically and reliably create high-quality, industry-compliant mixes. With the widespread adoption of loudness standards worldwide, the responsibility often remains with content creators to ensure that programs are delivered within the appropriate tolerance of the required loudness standard. With RX Loudness Control, video and audio editors can choose the broadcast standard they wish to adhere to from a set of global templates. In faster than realtime, RX Loudness Control automatically analyzes the audio and renders out a compliant file and an accompanying .CSV-formatted loudness report in two clicks.

The company also spoke with attendees about its new RX Final Mix, which is being billed as the “ultimate stem/master bus processor, designed specifically for post production professionals.” RX Final Mix will go beyond audio repair and concentrate on taking the guesswork out of mundane tasks such as making multiple mix stems. RX Final Mix will use intelligent algorithms to balance dynamics and frequencies for mono, stereo or surround material.

The company's RX 4 was showcased as well, with features that help editors save otherwise unusable audio from the cutting room floor. By reducing the need to re-voice via ADR (automated dialogue replacement), or scrap an otherwise great take in today’s reality shows, RX 4 helps preserve original performances by making it possible to use production dialogue.

“The last thing an audio or video professional ever wants to say is, ‘This is the best we could do with the time we have,’” says Rob D’Amico, director of product management, iZotope.

“We’ve been working hard to develop more ways to get the best-sounding results quicker than ever before. The end result being that no matter how tight the schedule may be, the finished product is something everyone is proud of.”

MERMAIDS ON MARS EMERYVILLE, CA — Athena Studios (www.athenastudios.com) produced the 20-minute, stop-motion short, Mermaids on Mars. Directed by Jon V. Peters and created by artists who have worked on Coraline, James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas, the short is based on a book by Nancy Guettier. Mermaids on Mars tells the story of a young boy named Julian who is magically transported to Mars, where he tries to stop an evil martian from destroying the last of the planet’s mermaids.

The entire story, told in stop-motion animation (using five Canon 60D animation cameras shooting 5K plates via Dragon Frame software and a 2.5K Blackmagic Cinema camera for live-action puppeting) was shot, produced and finished on-site at Athena Studios. To help the team stay organized, Athena relied on Shotgun, a plug-and-play solution that offers production management, review and tracking tools. They also used Autodesk Maya to create all models for the 3D printer, and After Effects for post.

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BITS & PIECES

METHOD COMPLETES AVENGERSTHEMED SAMSUNG SPOT LOS ANGELES — Method Studios (www.methodstudios.com) recently completed work on a theatrical spot for Samsung that ties into the release of the new Marvel Avengers: Age of Ultron film. The :60 cinema spot shows the similarities between the new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge phones and the Avengers’ familiar weapons. Like Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and The Hulk, the new Galaxy models are shiny, metallic, sophisticated and even green!

The spot is fully CG (aside from some live action footage shown on the phone screens), and was delivered in 4K. 72andSunny conceived the Beauty and Might spot, which was also cut as a :30 version.

Method received weapon assets from Marvel and CAD models of the phones from Samsung. The phone models needed to be re-worked for Method’s VFX pipeline and to achieve enough detailed to withstand the spot’s extreme close ups.

The Method team — led by VFX supervisor Olivier Dumont, compositing supervisor Patrick Ferguson, and CG supervisor Erik Gamache — animated several iterations of both weapons and phones in order to find the right angles and movements for smooth transitions.

Method spent four weeks on the project, focusing heavily on lighting and textures. The studio used Maya for modeling, Mari for textures, Nuke for compositing, V-Ray for rendering, and Flame for finishing. Method also added some atmospheric elements to give the weapons and phones more depth against the black background.

In addition to the 4K master, Method delivered the final spot in a wide variety of codecs and formats for audiences worldwide. Alain Gourrier served as editor on the project.

CORONA'S CAN MORPH

LOS ANGELES — Brand New School (www.brandnewschool.com), in association with agency La Communidad, directed and produced a new spot that introduces Corona Extra cans. The result is a piece of 3D animation that celebrates summer in all its glory. As the star of the spot, the can transforms fluidly from palm trees to flip flops to a beach ball and then to the blue waters of the ocean.

The spot was inspired by aluminum can art, a style popular throughout parts of Mexico, and a natural fit for the Corona brand. Creative director Robert Bisi and the Brand New School CG team created CG models in a manner that mirrored how the material would be manipulated in the real world. Maya and V-Ray were used for animation and rendering, while Nuke and After Effects were used for compositing.

PROJECT DREAMSPACE SHARES ‘VIRTUAL PRODUCTION’ RESEARCH

STUTTGART, GERMANY — Project Dreamspace (www.dreamspaceproject.eu), a three-year European Commission-funded project tasked with researching and developing tools for creative professionals in visual effects, presented its first year’s findings at FMX 2015 (www.fmx.de) earlier this month. The research focused on the technical components necessary to enable virtual production and was put together by a consortium of leading VFX thinkers from the education, research and commercial sectors. Together, they looked at the critical issues around collaborative workflows and combining live performances, video and computer-generated imagery in realtime. Members from the group include The Foundry, Ncam, Stargate Germany, CreW, Saarland University, iMinds and Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Key findings include: Markerless camera tracking with depth keying; omnidirectional video for virtual sets; interchangeable realtime and high-quality rendering; realtime compositing connected to post; and on-set tools for intuitive and collaborative set-up and visualization.

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PRIMETIME

BY LINDA ROMANELLO

AMC’S MAD MEN F

HOW POST HELPS KEEP THE 1960’S REAL

or the past eight seasons, AMC’s Mad Men has been bringing viewers back to the 1960’s, maintaining the period’s authentic look with, according to Blake McCormick, producer in charge of post production, an almost “obsessive-compulsive” approach.

“I think that whatever you put in front of the camera, whether it’s production design, wardrobe, hair, makeup, props, anything that you see, just gets beaten up to a degree that’s unimaginable,” he explains. “The overarching goal is, if we don’t do everything we can to make it as accurate as possible, there’s going to be that time when a viewer is going to see something and know that that’s not right. And I think the minute that starts to happen, it’s like Jenga — it’ll fall apart in the viewer’s mind. From the ground up, everything is just so carefully vetted.”

It’s this type of dedication to accuracy that has earned the series a regular spot at the Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe tables (among others) for “Outstanding Drama Series,” “Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Drama Series,” “Sound Mixing,” “Writing,” “Acting” and more. With a mix of wins and nominations behind it, Mad Men, along with its cast and crew, led by main character Donald Draper (Jon Hamm), is now in its final season and ready to move on from 1960’s New York. Here, McCormick talks to Post about some of the elements that went into making Mad Men such a huge success.

These are the last few episodes of the series; is it going to be hard to say goodbye?

“It’s funny, I don’t know if it’s because I work in post production and I must be an eternal optimist, but I rarely look at something and go, ‘I can’t believe this is going away.’ I look at it and go, ‘Isn’t it amazing that we got to do this for so long?’ I always say you’re lucky if you have one of three things: if you like the show you work on, if you like the people you work with, and if the viewers like the show you work on. But to get all three of those things, in one process, and have it go on for so long is very unique. It was an incredible experience and [I'm] happy to have lucked into it. It’s pretty amazing

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McCormick: The series is edited with Media Composer.

to get to work in this arena.”

How much goes into creating an accurate representation of the 1960’s and getting the show’s look and feel?

“I think that one of the most enjoyable moments in one of our [episode planning] meetings, is when people are arguing about their recollections or about what their grandparents said. Someone will speak up and say, ‘I have an idea, why don’t we actually check and see

what it really was?’ (laughs).

"So there’s a woman here, head of research, Allison Mann, you would just hear her name shouted out and ask her to check something. But before a word is even written, that goes into it.

"And then, that translates into the post production process, that obsessiveness I spoke about earlier never ends. In the premier episode [of this final season], we had a scene that takes place where Don Drapper walks out and he’s in front

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PRIMETIME

of the Algonquin Hotel, yet we weren’t shooting in New York in front of the hotel.

Everyone had done an amazing job of making an Algonquin Hotel, but the street address, the big bronze letters on the building downtown, they were not accurate. And so, obviously, as a visual effect, we changed it to the street number of the hotel. Again, why give the audience something to say, ‘Oh, that’s not right?’

"There was also one shot where there was a tire that was visible in the scene, and we had seen this shot 500 times, and the 501st time we noticed that the tire manufacturer is this Korean manufacturer called Hankook Tires, which, in 1968, was not selling tires in the United States, so we had to black out those letters.

“So, it goes right from the very beginning, before it’s even written, focusing on what needs to be right, and then at the very opposite end of the spectrum, in post, when we’re removing things like smoke detectors, fire alarms, video cameras, alarm panels, and more. The number of things that get removed from scenes from when we’re working on a practical location, the lengths we go to are pretty extreme.”

For post — editing, VFX, color, finishing, audio — how much is internal and how much goes to outside vendors?

“Up until the middle of Season 7, we were working with the venerable Todd-AO for our sound. That was a very sad thing; so many people lost their jobs and we all lost a cherished institution. So, for the last few episodes [of that season], we used all the same people, but we had to do it under different auspices.

“In terms of VFX, for larger things, set extensions, compositing of a trickier nature, that was done by FuseFX in LA. Then, our in-house folks at Technicolor handle — and quite wonderfully — all the cleanup work, the corrections, the almighty fluid morph split screen, and all those fun little tricks that make editing as seamless as possible. It’s funny, I just don’t think there’s a show anymore that isn’t a visual effects show.”

very strong emotional connection with the show. Usually, they’ll pick a character, you’ll hear from someone and they’ll always want to talk about such and such a character and on some level, I think that’s the editing style where you’re always seeing the person whose talking. It mirrors your own experience at life. If I sit down with someone to have a conversation, I would be watching them speak.

And then I would talk.

"I think it provides an intimate, first-person experience. And It’s amazing, the discipline that that calls for and the skill that is required of the editors. It makes their job much more challenging.”

What is the acquisition format; are you shooting on film?

“No, we actually switched in the middle of the show to the Arri Alexa. And, what’s kind of remarkable about that is that that was something our DP Chris Manley was interested in and everyone else was very skeptical about. All of the people involved in [the production], I think, [felt that] there was something very nostalgic [about film] and wanted to continue that tradition. But we finally broke down and did some extensive testing on our sets, where we shot things, simultaneously, and it was a huge turnabout. We shoot ProRes 4:4:4:4.

We weren’t shooting in Arri Raw. The majority of our shooting takes place in a controlled environment. So, some of the possible shortcomings of the Alexa, which are only few, though there are

some, weren’t as much of a problem.

But when we were looking at the test footage, all these people who were very skeptical, came to embrace it. And that was just very interesting because there couldn’t have been a bigger group of skeptics on that issue.”

What are some of the key tools you’re using on the show?

“We edit on Avid Media Composer, moved to Avid ISIS in Season 7, use Lustre for color correction and on the visual effects side, the usual — Smoke and Flame.”

Anything you want to add about the post process of the show?

“Yes, another thing our editors do, in terms of wanting to hold on people and not doing cut aways, are tricks we would use and one of them is the legendary fluid morph, which allows you to edit within the frame. And another fantastic tool is the split screen. You have two actors in a scene and if you want to change the timing a little bit, the split screen is your friend. Another thing on Mad Men I think is important, is that the camera doesn’t move very much, so these tools, the split screen and fluid morph, are very usable as long as the cameras isn’t moving around. One of our editors coined the term, ‘splorphs,’ which is a split screen and a fluid morph.

“I think it’s kind of ironic that to have such an old fashioned style of editing, we have to use the latest technology (laughs).”

Mad Men began shooting on film but later switched to Arri's Alexa.

Is there anything about the post process here that you think is unique?

“Certainly the editing style of the show.

It’s something that I don’t think you necessarily notice, but about 90 percent of the time, the person who’s talking is the person who you see on-camera. And over the years, people have built up a MAY 2015

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DIRECTOR'S CHAIR

PAUL FEIG: SPY A

BY IAIN BLAIR

THE CHALLENGES OF COMEDY AND KEEPING A CONSISTENT TONE

fter laboring for over a decade in the TV trenches, where the Emmy-nominated Paul Feig created the cult hit Freaks and Geeks and directed everything from The Office to Arrested Development and 30 Rock, the director/ writer (and sometime actor) joined the major leagues in 2011 with the breakout hit Bridesmaids, which grossed (pun intended) over $288 million. “People think it’s my first movie — it’s not, but the other two did so poorly I wish it was my first,” he notes dryly.

Feig followed that smash with yet another hit, The Heat, starring Melissa McCarthy (also in Bridesmaids) and Sandra Bullock, and reunites once again with McCarthy for Spy, an action comedy James Bond homage that he also wrote and co-produced. The actress plays a deskbound CIA agent who ends up being assigned a dangerous undercover mission in Europe after her hunky field agent partner (played by Jude Law) goes missing.

Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Feig talks about the challenges of making comedy, his love of post and visual effects, and taking on Ghostbusters.

Successful comedies are tricky to pull off. How did you approach this project?

“The reason most comedies don’t work is that they don’t keep a consistent tone.

Usually people will abandon and jettison tone for the joke, and this film was particularly hard to do as we were always on a razor’s edge regarding the tone. If it’s a spy spoof and the villains are silly, then you’re not invested in it — and you can do that, but it has to be like Austin Powers, which has a very consistent tone — it’s silly the whole way through and works brilliantly. But I wanted to do a comedy that had real danger, and then you have to be realistic and let the comedy flow from that. Same with the score, and I told the composer ‘Do not treat it like a comedy at all.’ And then it’s funnier, as you’re treating it all very seriously.”

Where did you shoot?

“It was all done in Budapest, Hungary, partly because of tax breaks, but I also wanted these glamorous European locations, as I’d originally written it as taking

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Director Paul Feig advises not falling in love with any one cut.

place in Paris, Venice and Capri. And once we started scouting, we realized that Budapest could double for a lot of places, so I just rewrote the script so that most of it happened in Budapest. I did the same thing with The Heat, where Boston originally doubled for New York, and then I thought, ‘Why not just set it all in Boston instead?’”

What were the technical challenges?

“Shooting any big action movie has its own challenges, but we were really on top of it. I had a great stunt coordinator who’d previs’d nearly all the fight scenes and a lot of the chase stuff with his stunt guys, and then he gave me a videotaped version of it already cut together, so I could go, ‘Let’s try this, let’s add something here,’ so by the time we hit the set we were pretty lean and mean.

Regarding the car chase, I’m not a big storyboarder as they limit you sometimes. And with comedy, we improvise a lot and add new lines all the time, and when I get to the editing room and we’re cutting comedy, we’re not going to stick to the order of some storyboard. We had a great 2nd unit director who shot all the car-chase scenes, and it’s more about getting the cool angles and the most dynamic shots and not me having to police it and go, ‘Where’s the joke?’ I don’t just want random fighting and mayhem. For me, it needs to be in the service of the story and characters, but also have some

funny pay-off along the way. And being in Budapest made that easier, as we had more access to things and these fantastic local crews.”

Your DP was Robert D. Yeoman — Oscar nominee for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

How tough was the shoot?

“Not bad. All the scheduling and all the logistics were the tough part, and getting the actors in and out on time. It was a 55-day shoot and the great thing in Europe is that we could work French hours. That’s the greatest thing ever and it’s ludicrous that we don’t have it here. It’d save so much money, and safety and so on, because everyone’s hyper-focused for 10 hours, and then they get to have a normal rest of the day. So that makes it far more pleasant dealing with all the stress of the action stuff, and we stayed right on schedule.

The big challenge for me is, no matter what I’m shooting, I want to have room for extra jokes and improvising, so that when you edit and start test screenings, if something doesn’t work, you have back up.”

Where did you do the post? How long was the process?

“We started off at Catalyst Post in Burbank, where we did The Heat. I love it as it’s this very modern building and every edit suite has windows — it’s very important for me that post isn’t this usual dun-

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DIRECTOR'S CHAIR

geon-type environment where you never see the light of day. We spent about six months there, and now we’re doing the final mix on the Fox lot with Andy Nelson, the re-recording mixer, and the other mixers. Post was quite long as I shoot so much extra material, so we do a lot of versions of the movie. I’ll start test screening three or four weeks into my director’s cut to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. My goal is always to not fall in love with any one cut, which is what happens the longer you work on one cut. So we’ll do test screenings every few weeks, and pull stuff out and change stuff. The difference with this film is that as it’s such a big action film, Fox post rigged it up so we could have full temp mixes on a stage, as it really needed that scope.”

Do you like post?

“I love it. It’s my favorite part of the process, as you have everything, and I go into post with all these choices, and it’s where the magic happens. Post is where we’re experimenting and building jokes — that we didn’t even know existed — in the editing room, just through juxtaposition and cross-cutting scenes. I sort of suffer through production a little bit, as every shoot day’s a chance to screw it up or miss something."

You re-teamed with Heat editors Brent White and Melissa Bretherton?

“Brent and I’ve been together since Freaks and Geeks, and we always use multiple editors and assistants as there’s so much material, and they deal with putting effects together in the Avid and building green screens. Brent would visit the set for the big sequences, to make sure we had coverage, but I don’t like having editors on location as once I’ve finished shooting, I’m done. I don’t want to then go off to the editing room. So they’d be cutting back here while I shot, and I had my first screenable cut ready in just three weeks.”

each other through the Alps, but I shot it so the action was all inside the plane, and then when we began cutting it together, we were able to add some exterior VFX plane shots. And I fell in love with the Dolby Atmos system on post, so we designed a lot of things flying around and overhead just to showcase it.”

How important are sound and music?

“For me, they’re the most important aspect of post, and I’ve always said that if I wasn’t a director, I’d probably have gone into sound as I love sound design and effects so much. And it all starts with the music. Often I’ll write scripts around specific songs, but this is the first time I’ve done a full score. I usually like to find source music, but on this we began scoring as we cut.”

Where did you do the DI? “At Technicolor. I love the DI, having suffered through the old way of color timing. Now you can manipulate anything you want so easily.”

You also produced this under your Feigco Entertainment banner. Do you like producing?

“I do, because I know what I want and then bring on people I trust. The problem with most producers is that they just become the middlemen between the director and the studio, and my first loyalty is always to the audience — which is why we have all the test screenings.”

Bridesmaids was hailed as pioneering a new genre — the raunchy, gross-out comedy for women. Do you agree?

“No, I don’t really. There’s the one scene, but it’s mostly implied. I don’t see it as a gross-out comedy.”

There have been rumblings about a sequel. What’s the latest?

"That all falls on Kristen Wiig really, and if she wants to do a sequel.”

What’s next?

“The big Ghostbusters movie, ironically enough with Kristen, along with Melissa McCarthy and Dan Aykroyd, and a great cast. We’ll start shooting in June, so it’s been really tough finishing post on this and prepping that at the same time, but I’m very excited about it. And I’m also doing this TV sci-fi series for Yahoo! that I created and wrote the pilot for. They wanted to air one episode a week, but I said I’d only do it if we put out all episodes at once. That’s what’s so great about TV. So my plan isn’t to do all movies all the time now. I love TV and I want to go back and forth, although I plan to do very limited amounts of episodic directing now. I’m more interested in creating my own shows again. When you think about it, TV’s kind of like long movies that just get chopped up into 30-minute sections. The kind of storytelling you can do on TV now has changed so radically from what it used to be.”

Spy star Melissa McCarthy has appeared in a number of Feig's films.

How many visual effects shots are there?

“A lot, maybe 1,200, all done by Flash Film Works and Furious FX. I’m a big fan of in-camera stuff that then just needs paint out, as it feels real.”

What was the most difficult VFX shot?

“The whole weightless plane sequence, as we never really had the budget for it.

It was originally meant to be a much bigger sequence with two Lear jets chasing MAY 2015

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AVENGERS

BY MARC LOFTUS AND LINDA ROMANELLO

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I

t wasn’t that long ago that Marvel decided to launch to its own movie studio and turbo-boost the Avengers comic book heroes by first releasing the hugely-successful Iron Man film (starring Robert Downey Jr.) in 2008. Grossing more than $318M, it was the birth of a franchise that then lead to the release of The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and several sequels, before all culminating in Marvel’s The Avengers in 2012, which grossed

ASSEMBLED

ILM, Trixter and The Third Floor help Marvel take audiences on its latest VFXdriven superhero adventure

more than $623M. With numbers like that, and groundbreaking special effects work from some of the industry’s leading studios, why wouldn’t Marvel give the Avengers another go ‘round?

In its latest offering, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel and director Joss Whedon captivate audiences once again, leaning heavily on visual effects by studios that include ILM and Trixter, among others, as well as previs and postvis work from The

Third Floor. Here, Post speaks with the visual effects and previs/postvis supervisors who lead the teams that created Ultron, The Hulk, Iron Man, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. And then there are the digital environments that play an equally-important role in the story.

ILM ILM’s facilities in San Francisco, Vancouver, London and Singapore contributed to more than 800 shots featured in

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Avengers: Age of Ultron, making them one of the film’s largest VFX vendors.

The film challenged them with further developing The Hulk and Iron Man characters they had worked on in past releases, as well as imposed brand new challenges, including the creation of Ultron and helping to carry out the villain’s grand plan to destroy a European city by ripping it from the ground.

THE HULK: According to ILM VFX supervisor Ben Snow, The Hulk appears 50 percent more than in the prior Avengers film, and is much more amped up. “[He’s] not really himself,” says Snow. “He’s an amped-up version, so one of our first tasks was to make him a more extreme and crazed-looking version. Joss likened him to someone strung out on drugs.”

ILM, says Snow, set the bar high, working to improve upon an already well-received character. “It was like, ‘How do be push this even further to make it more believable and a more realistic performance?’ We thought a lot about doing that and worked with Mark Ruffalo so he could help us on-set, performing the character for some of these quieter moments. Also, we went in and rebuilt his technology. The design of Hulk was largely the same, albeit angrier and more strung out. We essentially doubled the resolution and rebuilt him from the inside out. We made a full skeleton and skull, which he hadn’t had in the past. We rebuilt the muscle system to more correctly drive his surface, rather than be a simulation tool. We took the sculpting we did in the past and rebuilt his muscles, so that once we layered the flesh and skin simulation on top, he would look the same, but you see his muscles move under his skin much more convincingly.”

While Snow isn’t sure of the poly count, Hulk represents the studio’s largest human asset to date. ILM employs a mixture of off-the-shelf and proprietary tools in its feature workflow. Most of the studio’s animation and base rigging is performed using Autodesk Maya. Simulations are created in Maya and with the studio’s proprietary tools, which provide good soft body dynamics and solid body dynamics, says Snow.

“For a lot of our simulation and for flesh and muscle systems, we were using our proprietary solvers. The skin-sliding simulation or muscle-driving simulations, that was implemented mostly with internal stuff.”

Pixar’s RenderMan is used for render-

ing creatures, but Chaos Group’s V-Ray is used for rendering environments.

IRON MAN: The studio was able to use some of the assets from Iron Man’s Mark 43 suit, which was introduced at the end of Iron Man 3 but not created by the studio. Still, they were faced with building the Hulk Buster suit and the new Mark 45 — Iron Man’s latest creation.

“It’s a little bit of a different direction,” says Snow of the Mark 45 suit.

“It’s a much more streamlined suit, with rounded forms. It still feels like Iron Man, but it presented some particular challenges because of the rounded streamline-ness. As soon as he started moving, he got these weird gaps that would open up — more than we’d experienced with the more-traditional design — so it took another layer of work.”

But even Iron Man’s impressive suit pales in comparison to the work ILM put into creating Ultron Prime.

ULTRON PRIME: Ultron, says Snow, “was probably the most elaborate hero

character that we’ve created. He was a full robot and had to feel like he was made of rigid material, but we really wanted the essence of the James Spader performance to come through and have a nuance you would get from having an actor like James Spader.”

ILM received an initial Ultron design from Marvel. The studio then built on top of that, making his body and face even more complicated.

“We used a proprietary tool for rigging,” recalls Snow. “Basically, it was 10 times as complicated as the rigs we did for The Transformers. It had around 2,000 individual nodes in the rig and 600 in the face alone. This is because we couldn’t really get the face to squash and stretch. You didn’t want it to deform like a creature would, you wanted to see the plates sliding below one another.

It was an extremely-elaborate rig and was a collaboration between the rigger, animator and modeler, adding more cuts and breaking it up. The ultimate goal was

According to ILM's VFX supervisor Ben Snow (inset), the studio's 800-plus shots included the Hulk Buster (top) and the more amped-up Hulk (above).

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AVENGERS

to give the animators the sort of control they’d have on a normal face. We gave them the tools they would have on a normal face and we gave them a version of James Spader they could animate as a digital double. It was driving this elaborate, robotic face that rode on top of that.”

ILM employed its proprietary Muse motion capture system on-set to allow the actors to see how the Hulk’s and Ultron’s expressions would appear, and to serve as a reference for the artists creating the final animation.

ILM also contributed to a big, timed sequence in the trailer, where all of the Avengers are shown coming together and in action. The Hulk and Hulk Buster sequences were among the first scenes shot, in order for them to appear in multiple trailers and in time for last summer’s Comic Con convention in San Diego.

“It was the first sequence that was shot,” says Snow of the Hulk Buster sequence. “We shot it in South Africa and planned it very well. There was previs and it was a second-unit shoot, though Joss was there with us for part of the shoot. It was of course featuring the Hulk and the Hulk Buster exo suit that Tony [Stark] creates around his Iron Man suit, so it was a lot of fun to do. So we shot that and it was a pretty elaborate sequence.”

DESTRUCTION: Beyond their contributions to the film’s superheroes, ILM also handled a major VFX sequence in the third act.

“Ultron engineers this crazy scheme to basically lift a small European city from the ground it’s sitting on and raise it up into the sky with the idea of dropping and crashing it into the earth and causing a huge cataclysmic event,” Snow explains. “We did a lot of the work on the creation of this European city, and the lift off and the ground effects/earthquake effects, ripping itself out of the earth, and the flying city."

The sequence, says Snow, represents ILM’s most elaborate digital environment asset. “We had to create this city, which you have to see from all sorts of different distances. It had to break apart.”

The studio took digital matte assets — generated in 3DS Max and rendered in V-Ray — and ran them through ILM’s proprietary rigid body destruction tools, finally going back into V-Ray for rendering.

“In the wider shots of the city lifting up, you have whole avenues of build-

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VFX supervisor Alessandro Cioffi (inset) says Trixter's Munich facility created Quicksilver's highspeed motion (here) and Ultron's Mark I suit (below).

ings breaking apart, the ground ripping apart,” Snow explains. “In the past, when we’ve wrecked buildings, it was a single skyscraper or a few skyscrapers falling into one another. We had to really step outside of this — it’s a whole city this time — and change our approach a little bit. We wanted the detail and realism, and hand-drawn artwork that you get from the digital matte artists, and combine that with our rigid body destruction so that we could put interiors into these buildings so it didn’t seem like they were eggshell buildings cracking.”

The studio employed its Plume proprietary effects simulation software to add smoke and dust in the debris.

VFX work on Avengers: Age of Ultron spanned ILM facilities throughout the world. The studio’s Singapore facility has been contributing to films since the first Iron Man release, but this film marked the debut of ILM’s UK office and also took advantage of the studio’s resources in Vancouver, which were able to receive dailies at the same time as the San Francisco location.

“It was a terrific experience because

we were able to hire very talented artists in those locations,” says Snow. “The team in Singapore has become a really advanced team, and does work the levels of anywhere else in the world. And because we share a pipeline, we are able to split sequences amongst companies.”

TRIXTER Trixter (www.trixter.de), which has German offices in Munich and Berlin, as well as Los Angeles, was responsible for more than 300 VFX shots that appear in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The studio’s work included effects for Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and the first time audiences see Ultron (Mark I). According to VFX supervisor Alessandro Cioffi, the studio got involved in early 2014, collaborating during preproduction with the film’s visual effects supervisor, Christopher Townsend.

“We were requested to investigate a look for Quicksilver and his colleague,” says Cioffi of the studio’s initial work.

“This started during the time of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. There’s a sequence at the end of the show where

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AVENGERS

Avengers Hawkeye (left) and Black Widow (right) fight off an attack in the film's opening forest sequence.

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these characters were introduced. It was a great privilege for us to do the concept for the visual effects for these two characters and then apply [it].”

Quicksilver has the ability to run or move extremely fast. “He has a very peculiar and specific look in the movie,” Cioffi explains. “Scarlet Witch has telekinetic powers and mind control powers, and also needed some enhancements and CG effects to be explanatory in the live-action performance.”

All of the work was performed at Trixter’s Munich facility, which has a core team of 40-plus artists, but scaled up to approximately 100 during crunch time.

This included delivering 80 final shots in time for the film’s trailer debut at Comic Con in San Diego last summer.

“We worked massively on the project.

In proportion to our scale, we are a fairly small facility. Working on over 300 shots was quite a challenge,” he notes.

QUICKSILVER: The visual effects that support Quicksilver’s motion went through several stages of development.

“We did some preproduction work with Chris, trying to define the look and where the possibilities were, and what has been seen before and what we wanted to avoid,” says Cioffi. “The first phase was trying to figure out what we could have done in-camera.”

Cioffi says the team looked at a number of ways to visualize Quicksilver’s high-speed motion. One option was to use realtime, where the character is shown moving extremely fast in-frame.

Another would be to show him moving at normal speed, but with the world around him appearing to slow down. And the third would be Quicksilver moving at normal speed, but with the world around almost frozen in time.

“All of these approaches have a differ-

ent look and require different shooting techniques,” Cioffi explains.

Ultimately, Townsend and director Joss Whedon opted for a look that resembled shooting things “at 6fps, with a pretty open shutter angle,” recalls Cioffi. “You get a photographic, smeary effect — not just the direction of blur, but a very dynamic and curvy effect behind things that are moving fast. In order to achieve that with our compositing tool, the solution was to shoot pretty much everything in high-speed — at least the foreground, namely Quicksilver — with an Alexa. We were oscillating between 120fps and 72fps, depending on the shots, and always trying to shoot a clean plate or backgrounds.”

Trixter uses a combination of offthe-shelf software within its proprietary pipeline. For modeling, animation and rigging, the studio employs Autodesk Maya. Lighting is achieved using Katana and rendering is performed using a combination of RenderMan and Arnold. Side Effects Houdini is used for effects and The Foundry’s Nuke handles compositing.

“They are all standards, but are joined together in our pipeline, which is a living creature and has to adapt in specific cases,” he notes. “All of these assets play very well together. Efficiency is a key, so we need to stay agile and light in our workflow so that we don’t suffer too much.”

In the comic, Quicksilver emits silver particles that sometimes freeze in position. Subliminal images also appear along his motion path. This was achieved by freezing random frames here and there, and compositing them in a subtle way.

“Then there was the whole part of creating the CG trail, which makes the effect look interesting,” Cioffe adds. The CG trail has a blue-ish, cold tonality, with silvery, shiny reflections. This was created

entirely in Houdini. "The process was not that straightforward, as we had to create rotomation of the character. We had to rotomate a dummy on him to recreate his motion. This dummy was the base for releasing the particles behind him.”

The studio had as many as 100 licenses of RenderMan. Some of the rendering resources were allocated to characters and effects, while others were reserved for Houdini and compositing operations.

“We have split renderfarms for the three main assets,” he explains. “I’d say we try to combine render power with process optimization. We try to find a good solution in the shading and the lighting not to overload the farm. I’ll say this, the bottleneck was elsewhere and not the rendering.”

ULTRON MARK I: Trixter also produced the assets for the Ultron Mark I — the first appearance in the film. “It’s the first time Ultron appears in the movie and it appears in a temporary shape, as a self-assembled robot,” says Cioffe. “He has an extraordinary look — very creepy and mysterious. This CG character has been enriched greatly by mister James Spader’s performance.”

Cioffe is also quite proud of the work the studio performed for the fight sequence at the Avengers’ headquarters.

“This sequence, which we worked on entirely from A-Z, was for me, the most interesting thing we worked on. In terms of visuals, animation, rendering, integration and compositing especially, what happens at Avengers Tower during this fight is something that made me really excited and willing to work on this show…

It was the sequence I love the most.”

THE THIRD FLOOR As previs/postvis supervisor at The Third Floor (www.thethirdfloorinc.com), work-

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AVENGERS

Director Joss Whedon used The Third Floor's visualization tools to help plan key scenes.

ing on such Hollywood blockbusters as The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, and Thor, Gerardo Ramirez has plenty to say about the important role that previs and postvis played in Marvel’s newest Avengers offering, directed by Joss Whedon.

PREVIS: “We knew early on, this was going to be a big film with lots of visual effects and a need to figure out how the story would develop or how to shoot certain scenes. Joss wanted to utilize all the visualization tools we had — previs, mocap, virtual production, techvis — so we knew we were going to touch multiple aspects of this film and help multiple departments.”

According to Ramirez, the previs was a tool used to help the director and other departments — stunts, second unit production, visual effects, etc. — realize Whedon’s vision.

“When they can actually see something in motion, see this idea and see the way Joss actually is envisioning the concept, it’s a lot easier for them to figure out what they’re going to need to build, what kind of props they’re going to need, what lenses, what angles, it’s a very informative tool.”

Beginning in September 2013 at its LA studio and then moving to its UK offices for the majority of the work, Ramirez says The Third Floor wrapped up its Avengers contributions earlier this year. Shot predominantly on Arri Alexa cameras, with the Phantom camera for the high-speed Pietro shots, The Third Floor relied on its Xsens MVN system for motion capture and on Maya, a familiar tool for the VFX studios, such as ILM. “We visualized a lot of the major CG scenes; the action scenes” he says, “such as the Hulk Buster sequence, the freighter scene, the South Korean [Seoul] chase scene, the final battle, the party fight, and the early tie-in shot.”

Ramirez explains that the studio was involved in so many areas of the film, “we had part of our team designing one of the action sequences, like the Hulk Buster sequence, with a few artists animating that and we also had a virtual production team, lead by Casey Schatz, that helped scout and rapidly prototype scenes using previs, motion capture and techvis viewed within a virtual camera system.

Once the filmmakers found a location or had a design they wanted to construct, the previs team created that location in CG. Then, at their convenience, the director, cinematographer, or any department, was able to come in and hold the virtual camera and basically do a virtual scout and walk around the sets and explore camera angles. That was a very important tool as well.”

Ramirez says that second unit director John Mahaffie used the virtual set heavily, spending hours with the virtual camera to explore different parts of the set, rehearse scenes and stunts, and view them from different camera angles. “Once he was on-location, he knew that set like the back of his hand,” says Ramirez.

POSTVIS: Explaining that the postvis process begins as soon as the footage is shot and the editors cut some footage together, Ramirez again refers to the Hulk Buster sequence, saying that as soon as they got the plates, and the editors started cutting those together, they would send those plates over to his team, which would put previs CG character versions on the plates.

“It was very important for that sequence because it's all CG action,” he explains. “After they shot empty background plates based off the previs, we would track the plates and then try to use the animation they liked from the previs and place it onto those plates. And that’s kind of the postvis process we did

throughout the entire film.”

Ramirez says for a scene such as the “party fight” in the Avengers Tower, where the characters are running away from iron guard legionnaires that were firing at them, “we comped in our CG iron legionnaires in the background and this process helped Joss take a look at the sequence, edit it, tighten it up, and the end result was that anyone in production could see the sequence and understand where it was going. It was helpful for the editor and helpful for the VFX vendors where we would send them our files to help expedite the process on their end.”

CHALLENGES: Ramirez says their biggest challenge was the film’s early tie-in shot, where “in one continuous camera move, we go from each character. We spent extensive time on this shot. We worked on the previs and then we broke down the shot and took it into techvis and calculated the camera moves. We worked really closely with the second unit director to help plan the actual shoot and figured out things like, ‘this part of the shot is going to be a wire cam,’ and ‘this part of the shot is going to be mounted on a truck’ and ‘this part of the shot is going to be on a motorcycle.’ Once they shot the plates, the next step for us was the postvis, which was also challenging because CONTINUED ON PG 45

AVENGERS IN STEREO 3D

With credits that include Guardians of the Galaxy, Edge of Tomorrow, Maleficent and Gravity, Prime Focus World senior stereo supervisor Richard Baker speaks with Post about his latest stereo 3D work on Avengers: Age of Ultron, with emphasis on the opening "Forest Attack" sequence, the South Korea truck chase sequence and the climactic battle in the abandoned church, which sees all the Avengers fighting off Ultron and his minions.

Visit www.postmagazine.com for complete details!

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Blackmagic Design's URSA Mini features a 4.6K image sensor.

Focus On Cameras New Models Take Center Stage At The 2015 NAB Show

BY M.J. FOLEY

O

ne of the biggest highlights for any shooter/director at an NAB show is the introduction of new cameras.

We (ok, it’s me) turn into big kids at the candy store, anxiously waiting our turn at the counter. NAB 2015 was no exception.

The new camera models I had a chance to get close to were designed with an unprecedented attention to detail in both imaging and engineering. Here’s a look at what impressed this tech geek at this year’s show in Las Vegas.

CANON'S C300 MARK II & XC10 Canon (www.usa.canon.com) unleashed two beautiful new cameras that take the classic Canon look to a new level — the C300 Mark II and the XC10. The C300 Mark II (list price $20,000) is loaded to

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the gills with its reworked sensors and incredible sensitivity to low light. The C300 Mark II brings such exquisite detail and color to the screen. I looked at a lot of footage shot both for interiors (Trick Shot, a short film running on Vimeo) and exteriors, including a great demo from John Dorn and Dorn Productions. Dorn trekked all around the globe shooting in what looked like pretty darn tough environments. The C300 Mark II took advantage of its new Super 35 CMOS sensor to produce some drop dead gorgeous images. Also, when I looked at the interior shots from the C300 Mark II used in the short film Trick Shot, what really caught my attention was how well the camera handled shots with a ton of contrast, including one scene with a darkly-lit pool

table and a huge window behind it. Most shooters would know getting any detail from the exterior would be hard, but the C300 Mark II clutched out.

Also shooting 4K in a very compact and svelte 2.3 pounds is the company’s second NAB camera offering, the versatile and mobile XC10 (list $2,500).

The XC10 was showcased in a short film called Battle of the Ages (also currently on Vimeo). I can’t give away the whole story, but I can say that the XC10 performed really well in quite a few fastpaced, moving shots in what I consider challenging locations, including a sketchy alleyway. If the requirement for your production is 4K with mobility, such as being handheld or a run-and-gun documentary, the XC10 should be on your must-see list.

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■ QUICK LOOK Canon XC10 — Compact, lightweight and versatile; delivers 4K, full HD video and 12-megapixel still images; built-in function to extract eight megapixel still images from recorded 4K video; includes one-inch 12-megapixel CMOS sensor, with a 10x wide-angle zoom lens with a 2x digital teleconverter and optical image stabilization; incorporates Canon’s proprietary DIGIC DV5 signal processor.

Canon C300 Mark II — Second generation Cinema EOS 4K camera system; 4K/2K/full HD internal and external recording (including 4K Raw output); new 10-bit Canon Log 2 gamma; expanded dynamic range of 15 stops; improved dual pixel CMOS autofocus; focus assist engineering; CFast recording technology.

ARRI'S ALEXA MINI The next camera up is Arri's (www.arri. com) Alexa Mini (list price $36,000 to $45,000), the company’s different but very good take on what I would consider a very cinematic lineage. With features like a carbon housing, the Mini weighs in at a scant five pounds, making it a really strong choice for heli or long gimbal shoots where weight can really start to make a difference as the day wears on. The Mini records in-camera ProRes, Arri Raw to CFast 2.O cards or an external Codex recorder. The Codex can handle up to four Minis, giving a director some interesting shot choices. Again, images generated from the Arri Alexa Mini lived up to the legendary Arri name. If you haven’t shot on an Arri camera before, here’s the perfect place to start. Check out some impressive footage from The Balloonist at www.arri.com/ goto/0415/balloonist.

■ QUICK LOOK Arri Alexa Mini — Equipped with a 4:3 sensor; automatic de-squeeze mode for anamorphic productions; frame rates of 0.75-200fps; records ProRes or uncompressed Arri Raw either in-camera to CFast 2.0 cards or to specially-designed external Codex recorder; can record 4K UHD ProRes images, facilitating realtime 4K UHD output and simple pipelines for high-resolution deliverables.

BLACKMAGIC DESIGN'S URSA MINI Call me crazy, but this next entry really caught my attention. Even though Blackmagic Design (www.blackmagic

design.com) is calling this camera the Ursa Mini, it is anything but mini in design, functionality or performance, for a price that won’t set you back.

List for the Ursa Mini 4.6K EF comes in at $4,995 and the PL version at $5,995. To be honest, that kind of pricing would make almost any indie shooter or director just flat out sing.

Add in the Super 35 sensor and away you go. Shooters can also go from tripod to handheld with the shoulder mount, something this long-time shooter found to be a really great add.

The viewfinder was really easy to look at and the on-screen controls menu was easy to navigate. Dual XLRs for audio, built-in stereo microphones, and the ability to record ProRes or RAW. Seriously, dollar for dollar, this camera has some get up and go. Think of the Ursa Mini as a solid choice for the indie producer/director/shooter who needs a terrific camera with a lot of flexibility that won’t kill the budget. Oh, and one last note: It makes beautiful pictures!

Canon's compact XC10

■ QUICK LOOK Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini — Compact and lightweight Super 35 digital film camera; balanced for handheld use; features 4.6K image sensor; captures 4608x2592 pixels; switchable global or rolling shutter; up to 15 stops of dynamic range; a large five-inch fold out viewfinder; dual RAW and Apple ProRes recorders; available in four models — can choose either EF or PL lens mounts and 4K or 4.6K image sensors.

JVC'S GY-L300 The JVC (www.pro.jvc.com) GYLS300 Super 35 (list $3,995) is one of the most compact, yet feature laden 4K camcorders I saw at the show. True to form, JVC loads up with everything an indie director would want. With several different lens adapters, this workhorse can become a formidable tool for documentarians and directors lensing indie projects using almost any lens in the bag. A really sweet feature from JVC that makes it possible for a shooter to get a real sense of what they are shooting is called Variable Scan Mapping technology. This adapts the active area of the Super 35 sensor to provide native support of PL and EF mount lenses.

Additionally, the camera has one of my favorite features, dual XLR inputs.

And, not to leave anyone or anything

The lightweight Arri Alexa Mini

AJA’s (www.aja.com) CION, which is shipping, received a Version 1.2 firmware update at NAB. The camera is designed for 4K, Ultra HD 2K and HD production, and can capture in the 12-bit, ProRes 444 codec. CION ($8,995) now supports external recorders from Convergent Design and Atomos, and can be outfitted with both vintage and modern lenses, including those from Panavision.

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CAMERAS

Sony's HDC-4300

The JVC GY-LS300

else out, the GY-L300 has the ability to also do live streaming in HD. Overall, this camera has a really solid feel and makes for a great choice for people who want to use or own a bunch of lenses and marry them to a feature-laden camera — one without a big footprint or big budget to match.

■ QUICK LOOK JVC GY-LS300 — Flagship camera for the 4KCAM product line; designed for cinematographers, documentarians and broadcast production departments; features JVC’s 4K Super 35 CMOS sensor; Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lens mount; built-in HD streaming engine with Wi-Fi and 4G LTE connectivity that allows live HD transmission; dual XLR audio inputs that are mic/line switchable.

SONY'S HDC-4300 Right out of the gate I can say I think Sony (www.sony.com/professional) got it “right” with the introduction of the HDC-4300, the first 4K System Camera with three (yes, three) 4K image sensors.

Looking at the set up, there are some real advantages to the Sony way of thinking.

First, the look and the feel of the camera will be very familiar to those guys and gals who make their living in either the live-sports or events-production space. Just as with other Sony cameras, the folks at Sony really thought out the ergonomics and the HDC-4300 “feels” like a production camera ready to go a full day without making the operator keel over from exhaustion. The camera controls and functions were all in familiar places, and lens mounting is the same, making the learning curve not so steep

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at all. But don’t kid yourselves. We are just warming up. With the three 2/3rd 4K image sensors, the HDC-4300 is ready to go 4K and make some beautiful images.

The camera can be configured for handheld or tripod use. And in a nod to the engineers at Sony, the HDC-4300, when teamed up with other Sony products, can be conformed into a complete production system in 4K, out to the switcher along with slo-mo, without having to start over from scratch. The look, feel and beautiful imaging of 4K without having to start all over again is a pretty sweet deal.

■ QUICK LOOK Sony HDC-4300 — Provides ability to use high magnification wide zoom range lenses currently employed by HD 2/3inch systems while maintaining adequate depth of field; uses three 2/3-inch 4K image sensors; supports the same B4mount lenses as well as the same control surfaces as Sony’s HDC-2000 series cameras; capable of 4K/HD operation, with 2x, 3x Super Slow Motion as standard, and higher speeds up to 8x available.

RED'S WEAPON If you know anything about Red (www.red.com), then you know that the company marches to the beat of its own drummer. With the release of Red Weapon to big crowds at the 2015 NAB Show, Red continues to innovate and turn heads.

While I was in the booth, I had an all too brief turn at the wheel. It felt as though I was driving a Ferrari at about 145mph.

Slick and sophisticated yet rugged, the Weapon, loaded with a 6K sensor (said to be available this summer), makes heads turn. And, if you upgrade to the 8K that would be available in late 2015, you would be future-proofing yourself. Plus, as with other Red products, there is always a lot of support and trade-in options. I like the fact that you can record ProRes internally along with R3D Raw files at the same time. I also like that there will be multiple versions of the Weapon camera, with carbon fiber having slightly higher ProRes specs over the magnesium body. But that is the beauty of Red. Pretty much build the camera you want without compromise.

Red’s new Weapon

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CAMERAS

VARICAM 35: IN-CAMERA DAILIES

The Panasonic DVX200

■ QUICK LOOK Red Weapon — Company’s smallest and most lightweight camera brain; boasts a number of improvements and features that include workflow enhancements, cable-free and intuitive peripherals, and integrated mounting points; interchangeable I/O expanders enable users to configure their rig to fit different production types; built–in stereo microphones and speakers allow for easier audio capture and playback; Weapon also supports the Apple ProRes codec, giving users the choice to record in both the R3D and Apple ProRes file formats at the same time; 9-megapixel Dragon sensor can capture 6K motion and stills at up to 100fps; redesigned brain is also equipped to support 1D and 3D LUTs.

PANASONIC'S DVX200 Last year, Panasonic (www.pana sonic.com/broadcast) introduced its VariCam 35 4K to the pleasure of shooters. At this year’s show, the manufacturer offered an extension unit for it, as well as for its VariCam HS camera/recorders that permits operational separation of the camera head from the recorder and will increase the versatility of both models in situations requiring mobility, agility and reduced weight.

This time around, I was able to see up close the company’s new DVX200, and all I can say is, I would really like to shoot with this camera. Unfortunately, it won’t ship until the fall. The large-sensor 4/3-inch handheld AG-DVX200,

which in my opinion can be thought of as the little brother to the 4K VariCam 35, is a good addition to the 4K playing field. Images are lensed through a fixed Leica Dicomar 4K zoom lens with F2.8 aperture. The DVX200 is another camera I saw at the show that can be thought of as a versatile addition to the 4K workspace.

■ QUICK LOOK Panasonic DVX200 — 4K large-sensor, 4/3-inch handheld camcorder; 4K/60p recording, 13x optical zoom; V-Log L gamma curve (12 stops of latitude, target); newly-designed Leica Dicomar 4K F2.8~F4.5 zoom lens (4K/24p: 29.5mm-384.9mm, HD: 28 mm-365.3mm, 35mm equivalent); time-code in/out; 3G HD-SDI and HDMI 2.0 (4K) video outs; easy focus and zooming, and programmable user buttons; will record 4K (4096×2160) 24p, UHD (3840×2160), HD (1920×1080) 60p/50p/30p/25p/24p in either MP4/MOV file formats; two SD card slots.

When digital cameras come to market, they are generally evaluated first on image quality, then ergonomics, and then sometimes price. Ironically, the more digital cameras available, the more similar they have become. They say, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” and I believe tangible similarities between cameras are largely due to manufacturers imitating each other.

But as cinema technology evolves, it’s important to create new processes that differentiate from what is expected (or even requested). We don’t want every camera to eventually become identical. That would not be in the best interest of creative users.

One of the most important perspectives that Steve Jobs left us is a roadmap that could help camera differentiation, and also start a new evolutionary tract of digital development. Jobs said, “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” Digging deep into the meaning behind that statement taught me not to fear change, rather to be willing to abandon successful ideas or business practices in order to reveal new paths of exploration. A recent example of this was evident during NAB 2015 with the latest firmware release of the Panasonic VariCam 35.

The act of transcoding is a necessary process used on nearly every professional production, whether commercial, episodic or theatrical. We need multiple flavors of formats to serve different departments that don’t want or can’t work with the original files. So if we use an outside computer to generate those flavors and to add elements such as letterboxing, window burn and watermark, what was stopping us from using the camera’s internal computer to generate the same results?

VariCam is the first camera in the world to offer five different ways to capture an image (4K Raw, 4K compressed RGB, 2K compressed YUV, HD ProResHQ, and 1K H.264). VariCam enables users to press record once and setup an internal CPU-based encoding process that literally creates the same dailies in-camera as are typically created after footage is downloaded. With a growing UHD market and reduced budgets, the ability to output to editorial, Web and iPad review faster could essentially eliminate the need for external processing of dailies. We can now shoot content and simultaneously capture an online, offline, and Web file — all with unique gamma and overlay settings. The result is a drag-and-drop offline, Web review, and a simple relink to UHD at the end of the process — effectively creating an automated “self-onlining NLE” that reduces time in the post process more than any other camera in the world.

Harnessing the digital horsepower within VariCam gives content creators more variations of customized workflow without having to wait until the camera has stopped rolling. Because Panasonic resisted copying other popular digital cinema cameras, users will find new ways to improve their workflows with fewer hurdles. But I predict we’ll continue to see camera imitation — only it will be other manufacturers that flatter Panasonic by imitating VariCam with their own versions of its revolutionary in-camera dailies solution.

—BY MICHAEL CIONI, FOUNDER & CEO, LIGHT IRON, LA/NY

The 2015 NAB show was a great place to be if you wanted to see new cameras. Versatility was a common theme, giving decision makers a great deal of latitude when selecting their next camera.

Yet camera and lens selection is a personal choice, based on the needs (and budget) for each production. There were certainly plenty of options to choose from, but ultimtely, it’s all about making beautiful pictures.

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MAKING THE GRADE Experiential Learning Preps Next Generation of Post Pros

BY CHRISTINE BUNISH

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s the academic year draws to a close at many educational institutions, it’s a good time to reflect on how schools are preparing students for careers in post production. It’s not just a matter of classroom learning and acquiring tech skills: Experiential learning, sometimes alongside top industry names, makes them job-ready for the real world.

SCAD The Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) confers Fine Arts degrees upon students enrolled in film and television production, animation, VFX, game design, interactive media, sound design, branded entertainment and more. SCAD (www.scad.edu) boasts almost 12,000 students at its unique locations. The majority attend the flagship Savannah, GA, campus, which includes 67 restored historic buildings in town. The Atlanta location, whose facilities include a former

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TV studio and the Ivy Hall antebellum mansion, opened in 2005; the Hong Kong location is housed in the historic North Kowloon Magistracy Building, and the Lacoste, France study-abroad location is in local medieval structures.

These fields of study have grown continuously, reports Tina O’Hailey, dean of digital media at SCAD. “We’ve seen more growth than we predicted, and we’re looking at expanding to meet exciting changes in the industry. There’s a lot of cross-collaboration between our departments, like sound design working with animation, advertising with motion media. Students are getting a wide skill set: You can’t be a one-trick pony anymore.”

SCAD strives to “futureproof” students by ensuring that they are “creators, first and foremost, then specialists in the areas they’re most passionate about,” O’Hailey says. “We give them business and collaborative skills, and put them in touch with other passionate people:

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In addition to SCAD's greenscreen stage (pictured), students (below, left) have access to many pro apps.

We’re a Petri dish of creativity. We don’t look at anything traditionally here; we turn everything on its ear. It’s all about how creative people come together and synthesize ideas. We want our students to be visual media ninjas!”

Students get exposed to professional working environments right on campus.

SCAD opened Savannah Film Studio last fall; the fully-equipped soundstage features greenscreen production, a Techno crane, Foley stage and screening room, and includes rentable space. The TV Producing Studio in SCAD Atlanta once housed the city’s Fox News channel. “We occupy one floor now and are constructing two more with another stage, greenscreen, motion capture and sound recording area,” says O’Hailey. It offers rentable space that’s production-ready.

All edit bays are outfitted with Avid, Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere systems, as well as Autodesk Smoke.

Audio post is performed with Avid Pro-

Tools. An extensive equipment inventory enables students to check out cameras — from prosumer to professional models — wireless mics and lighting kits.

But learning isn’t confined to the classroom. O’Hailey, an industry professional like other instructors, brings real-world experience from her time with Disney and DreamWorks to SCAD. What she calls “extra learning opportunities” include festivals, screenings and workshops with top names in the business. SCAD’s Savannah Film Festival, now in its 26th year, has hosted Jeremy Irons, Alexander Payne, Stan Lee, Oliver Stone and Lily Tomlin. The most recent Atlanta-based aTVfest hosted a preview of the ABC TV series, American Crime, with star Timothy Hutton; Lee Daniels, Terrence Howard and Mindy Kaling were also festival guests.

Internships are elective for undergrads except for those in the TV production program where four internships are re-

quired for the degree. SCAD interns have worked on The Vampire Diaries, The Following and The Walking Dead — a group of students built the wall protecting Alexandria for the most recent season of The Walking Dead.

While illustrious alumni such as Neil Helm, now a character animator with Pixar, and Zach Parrish and Nathan Engelhardt, who worked on the Oscar-winning animated feature, Big Hero 6, are pursuing careers on the West Coast, and others are working around the world, O’Hailey is glad to see that Georgia’s production tax incentives and thriving film and television scene enable many SCAD graduates to remain in the state. “We’re very engaged in bringing legislative committees to the school to show them how the talent base is growing to meet Georgia’s needs,” she says.

VANCOUVER FILM SCHOOL Across the continent, the Vancouver Film School (www.vfs.edu) runs an array of MAY 2015

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EDUCATION

VFS's animation and VFX campus has production studios, as well as a greenscreen stage.

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concentrated one-year entertainment arts programs consisting of six twomonth terms. With eight campuses and more than 1,000 students, VFS has 13 departments, including 3D animation and VFX, classical animation, animation and concept art, digital design, film production, game design, sound design for visual media, plus makeup design, acting and writing for film and television.

“A large percentage of our students have some type of previous education or professional experience but don’t necessarily have the practical experience, portfolio or tangible skills to get into the industry,” explains managing director Marty Hasselbach. “Most people understand that the industry is changing so rapidly that unless they focus on core skills, it’s a challenge when it comes to the job market. They’re spending time, money and energy when what they need to do is develop the right level of skills then continue their learning in the industry.”

Generally, the first half of the program has students developing their required skills in classes and labs as they work on projects. The second half focuses on the student’s portfolio piece; they partner with industry mentors to create high-quality projects which “really show what they are capable of and what they excel at,” Hasselbach says. “The last half of the year, students are working in environments that emulate the real industry, so a lot of experiential peer learning happens,” he adds. Students typically work cross-collaboratively, so students in the film program find themselves working with writing and sound design students

— just as they would in the real world.

VFS alumni, local luminaries and visiting artists are frequent guests on campus, too. Industry leaders guide graduates toward “employment opportunities, not internships,” says Hasselbach.

VFS boasts a new animation and VFX campus featuring 10 production studios and a 280-degree greenscreen studio; the school also has a full mix stage and Avid editing suites, and its own fiber ring throughout the downtown core that connects all the campuses. Since Vancouver is a film and video production hub, the city is full of other facilities, which students can utilize when appropriate. “Acting students may use a local studio for voice work; game design students can use a game company’s motion capture studio,” says Hasselbach.

When VFS opened in 1987, “the film industry was new here,” Hasselbach recalls. “The school was developed primarily to supply talent in a short amount of time, and since then we have paralleled the industry in our success and growth.

Our new programs are aligned with growth in the industry: We introduced digital media/new media programs in the ’90s and our new animation concept art program launches in June.”

He notes that the VFS animation programs “have been staples for the industry; students go into the classical or digital animation pipeline production-ready, but the time they spend developing characters and environments has been minimal. We saw a big need in animation, VFX and games for more concept and storyboard artists so we

developed the new program.”

VFS’s “holistic” approach to delivering the best-of classroom and practical learning during an intensive 12-month period is constantly evaluated, says Hasselbach. “We continually fine tune and enhance the programs so students get the most out of their year. Every two months, as students start and finish a module, we look at how to make subtle changes and add value to their education.”

RINGLING COLLEGE Founded in 1931, Ringling College of Art & Design (www.ringling.edu) has more than 1,200 students on its 35-acre campus in Sarasota, FL. It confers BFA degrees in 11 majors, including computer animation, film, motion design, photography and imaging, plus a BA degree in the business of art and design. A creative writing program, across all media, will launch next year, and a minor in content development will run alongside the film program — both meeting an industry need for “storytelling in all disciplines,” says Jeff Bellantoni, vice president for academic affairs.

Bellantoni says that Ringling’s focus on experiential learning “is the key to educating students for the next 10 years.

It’s difficult to pull off; tying it to curriculum is a real challenge. We have a very rigorous curriculum; we work our students very hard. But with their real-world working experience, graduates are ready to hit the ground running.”

One way Ringling students learn by doing is through the school’s relationships with leading names in the industry.

Students are currently working with

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Cogswell Polytechnical College: Project X

(Top) Actor Dylan McDermott with graphic design student Alexa Schara.

(Above) Ringling students shooting a summer film project.

Dylan McDermott on Sugar, a live-action and animated coming-of-age Web series based on an idea by the actor. “Students will be involved every step of the way: script development and writing, casting, shooting, post production,” says Bellantoni.

Game design students are working with American Zoetrope to develop a trailer for a new game, which will feature character development and environments. Film majors are involved on a Matt Dillon project, cinematography students are shooting a Web series about legal issues for producers, and a motion design student created the new 3D logo design and animation for MLB’s Baltimore Orioles.

To further enhance the real-world emphasis of Ringling’s studies, this fall the school will launch The Collaboratory Commitment to “guarantee every student the opportunity for a client-based work experience before they graduate,” says Bellantoni.

The school has also announced a public-private initiative to build a 30,000 square-foot soundstage and commercial post production complex in the Newtown neighborhood of Sarasota. “We’ve cleared the land and expect a late 2016 or early 2017 opening,” Bellantoni reports. The complex will feature an approximately 25,000 square-foot soundstage plus CONTINUED ON PG 45

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Cogswell Polytechnical College, designed as a “fiercely collaborative, living laboratory,” is located in the heart of the legendary Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, CA, where it is a WASC accredited, four-year institution of higher education with a specialized curriculum that fuses digital arts, audio technology, game design, engineering and entrepreneurship. The school’s “Project X” is one of a number of project-based learning classes it offers, a cross-disciplinary course where students collaborate over multiple semesters to create an animated short film.

The course is taught by industry-experienced faculty, including Timothy Heath (director) and Dave Perry (animation director), with instruction supplemented by an array of adjunct faculty. The course is designed to give students the experience of working in a real-world studio environment and requires all work to be conducted in the project studio. Not only are the students exposed to every aspect of a production pipeline for an animated film, but they also learn the importance of working together as a team in a professional manner.

Project X kicks off with an initial story idea, properly scoped for the class size and duration. From there, the students break into smaller teams tackling story development, art concept and design, and technical research and development.

The current short film, Trouble Brewing, stars a protective nanny goat, her rambunctious kid, and a mysterious troll.

For this film, the students research fur and muscle systems for the characters and rely on V-Ray as a rendering solution. Concept designers dive into the look development of the film, producing character and environment designs.

Animators collect reference and study quadruped motion, while the story team focuses on story structure and ultimately produce the storyboards for the film.

As production heads into full-swing, students focus their efforts on individual disciplines while communicating with one another to ensure efficiency across departments. The modeling and surfacing team sculpt and texture the characters and environments using industry standard software such as Maya, zBrush, Mari, and Photoshop. Technical directors and animators work primarily in Maya. Custom scripts and tools are developed for caching large files and cloth simulations.

In Trouble Brewing, the students tackle complicated visual effects such as a flowing river, physically accurate destruction, dust and debris. These effects are created in Houdini and often times passed back to Maya for lighting and rendering with V-Ray. The students in the lighting department are also responsible for compositing their shots in Nuke. Original music and sound design for Project X films are created by the students enrolled in the Digital Audio Technology program at Cogswell.

Project X emulates a studio environment, teaching the technical skills and artistic subtleties of creating a short film. Students are able to focus on a core discipline of their choice, as they work hand-in-hand with other integral parts of production. Departmental teams participate in project scheduling and are headed by a student team and advised by a faculty member. Communication, time management, and personal accountability are skills that are developed as a result of participating in Project X. The project also presents an array of challenges that require the students to push their learning and solve complex problems. These skills are incredibly important to graduates entering into the creative and collaborative animation industry, and enable them to hit the ground running when entering their first job.

— BY TIMOTHY HEATH, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DIGITAL ART & ANIMATION

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Comingle with the diverse fabric of the computer graphics and interactive techniques community and discover an exhilarating patchwork of innovation that inspires powerful creation.

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9-13 August 2015 Los Angeles Convention Center

The 42nd International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

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R E G I S T E R T O D AY !

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Boom Box pitches down gong and cymbal sounds to highlight the camera moves featured in TMNT.

SOUND LIBRARIES

IN THE MIX!

When combined with custom recordings, commercial sound libraries are helping sound designers deliver some unique and powerful results

BY JENNIFER WALDEN

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ove them or hate them, one thing is certain — commercial sound libraries provide easy and inexpensive access to useful and hard-to-get sound effects. When sound designers use them in combination with custom recordings and creative layering and processing, those raw commercial effects, available to anyone, are transformed into unique sounds that not just anyone can make. Jeff Shiffman at Boom Box Post says, “The libraries we’re purchasing are recorded by some of the best sound recordists and engineers around. I trust them for their recording expertise and I trust myself to take those

sounds and make something different and interesting happen with them.”

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES Jeff Shiffman has been the supervising sound editor/sound designer on Nickelodeon’s animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles since Season 1. Recently, he and supervising sound editor Kate Finan opened Boom Box Post (www.boomboxpost.com) in Burbank, CA, conveniently located just blocks away from Nickelodeon and other animation studios. With a focus on design, they provide creative sound services for animated series,

films, and interactive media. Boom Box Post has four Pro Tools 11 audio suites networked together via an Apple AirPort Time Capsule. In addition to sharing videos, and sessions, Shiffman notes, “The editors we work with are expected to create original material for our series.

We have our library of original sounds networked to foster an environment of shared creativity.”

For an upcoming episode of TMNT, Season 3, Shiffman describes a scene in which a main character is injured and another character has to heal the injury using supernatural powers. Shiffman chose

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ROYALTY

FREE WORLD

Shiffman (left) and Finan (below) recently opened Boom Box Post in Burbank, CA.

a musical approach, pulling big Taiko drum hits and cymbal rolls from the Pro Sound Effects Hybrid library that he pitched down and warped to create an otherworldly sound. “When I use sound libraries, I very specifically use them for more musical builds, rather than for nuts and bolts sound design,” he explains.

Shiffman additionally selected several drones from the Hybrid library, layering them to create chord-like structures. “To be perfectly honest, there is a decent amount of fluff in the Hybrid library, but the musical elements and drones are top-notch.”

Shiffman also pulled big drum-like hits from the Cinematic Metal — Construction Kit by Boom Library. He says generally Boom Box Post tends to get more use out of the low-frequency impacts from construction kits versus already built sounds. And if an object is small enough to hold, it’s typically recorded in-house. “If we’re using something from a library it’s because it’s too large or cumbersome for us to record without a whole lot of planning and execution,” he says. “The Cinematic Metal — Construction Kit gives us all of the pieces, pristinely recorded. It’s basically a blank slate for us to build from.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles uses very dynamic and fluid camera movements, says Shiffman. Instead of pulling a library whoosh, Shiffman pitches down gong and cymbal rolls to create low, chesty rumbles that highlight the camera moves. He uses Soundminer for effects management, often utilizing its built-in pitch shifter before sending the effects to Pro Tools.

To pitch the drone effects in this scene of TMNT, Shiffman chose the Waves SoundShifter plug-in because it allows him to effect both pitch and time compression/expansion, as well as adjust the pitch intensity over time. Shiffman also used the Waves Doubler plug-in to add a chorusing effect, and Avid’s ReVibe to add a big, roomy ring-out on the drones. “For this scene, I did a lot of pitching and layering to create something new, instead of running the elements through any intense plug-in chains,” he says. “Overall, the sound was supernatural, but it had to sound naturalistic too, almost like monks chanting.” Shiffman says the scene provided a great opportunity to be creative with the tools at his disposal. “I could create drones or I could record instruments, but in our work flow we have to keep things moving along. The library sounds were malleable enough for me to create something really different and interesting.”

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SOUND DESIGN

Sound designer Gregory Hainer (far right) relied on fluttering sounds from Sound Ideas and Hollywood Edge libraries to create the bee's wing flaps in Plants vs. Zombies 2 (above).

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PLANTS VS. ZOMBIES 2 When sound designer Gregory Hainer, owner of Scorpio Sound (www.scorpiosound.com) in Los Angeles, was contracted to help create sound effects for Plants vs. Zombies 2 (iOS/iPad), he was told, “You have to have a quirky, sarcastic sense of humor to be able to design for this game.” Developed by PopCap Games, Plants vs. Zombies 2 features a soundtrack that is part realistic and part cartoony, with an added dash of unexpected. Hainer was asked to create effects for a few very different sounding levels. His sound design for the Zen Garden level, which takes place inside a green house, is very organic-based, with a bit of an odd twist. “There is a bee that flies back and forth until he’s either prompted to pollinate the plants below or he goes into a boredom-induced bee hibernation state,” explains Hainer. Additionally, the potted plants below need to be watered to make them grow and produce jewels to be collected. “I had to design sounds that would give the appropriate reward or emotional response while also making sure they did not become annoying if played repeatedly.”

In contrast, Hainer’s work on a Far Future level, where alien zombies are attacking using super-slow space tractors with shields, is more sci-fi based. He describes the tractors as having retractable arms with metallic clippers that are used to cut and nibble through obstacles like giant pies. “This level is more sci-fi based but still incorporates a good deal of mechanical elements that contribute a lot of the functional character and personality

required,” says Hainer.

To create the main bee-buzzing sounds for the Zen Garden level, Hainer ended up recording his own voice. “I couldn’t find anything in a commercial sound library that was the right fit for the bee,” he says.

“I went into my VO booth, took a deep breath, and made long buzzing sounds with lots of variations.” He also voiced other bee sounds, such as the bee-snoring and a questioning "huh" sound for when a player clicks on the bee. In Pro Tools, he layered the vocalizations with organic effects, cartoon effects, and musical elements.

For the bee’s wing flaps, Hainer experimented with layering realistic elements, like the shuffling of cards and various fluttering sounds from Sound Ideas and Hollywood Edge libraries, with cartoon sounds, quirky sounds, and custom sounds. “The bee also does a little excited loop-the-loop when he pollinates and little magic honeycomb-pollen things come off him. I had to create sound for that movement as well,” says Hainer.

After the bee pollinates the plants, they begin to grow. Hainer combined the Foley of rustling plants with stretchy, rubbery cartoony effects to create a plant growing sound that was not too real and not too silly. He chose classic cartoon sound effects from the Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera, and Hollywood Edge libraries. All of his effects, from custom recordings created for previous projects to commercial libraries, are managed using Soundminer.

With only a few weeks to work on Plants vs. Zombies 2, Hainer had to quickly find the right tone for his sound

design. Whether organic or sci-fi, the sound effects still had to fit in seamlessly with the overall quirky Tim Burton-like aesthetic of the game. “One of the things that was so challenging about designing for this game title was that it really doesn’t sound like anything else,” concludes Hainer. “I basically had to pull everything out of my hat for this one.”

UNCERTAIN New York-based freelance sound designer/re-recording mixer Jacob Ribicoff (www.linkedin.com/pub/jacob-ribicoff/16/1a9/448) designs and mixes both narrative features, such as the 2015 Sundance Film Festival favorite Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, and documentary films — most recently the Anna Sandilands and Ewan McNicol-directed documentary Uncertain, which premiered at New York’s 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. Ribicoff observes that New York filmmakers generally prefer natural, realistic sound design that adds an element of emotion to the soundtrack. “Whether it’s an urban story, on the ocean, or up in the mountains, it’s not enough to just take the actual recordings from those places.

They want to have an emotional impact underneath the sound,” he explains. As was the case with Uncertain. The film tells several interwoven character stories set against the backdrop of the local lake in Uncertain, TX, being taken over by a floating fern called salvinia. Ribicoff’s challenge was to give that plant a sinister bearing. “You see the surface of the lake with these floating plants about half the size of your fist. As the film progresses,

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SOUND DESIGN

Ribicoff (pictured) used the Blastwave FX Bugs! Library on the documentary Uncertain.

the salvinia is choking out the life, the fish, in the lake.”

Back in 2010, Ribicoff helped judge a sound design competition sponsored by Blastwave FX and Avid. As a perk, Ribicoff received the Blastwave FX Bugs! Library, full of close-up recordings of insects. “It has pretty amazing, creepy insect sounds, like you have something crawling on your skin,” he says.

From the Bugs! Library, Ribicoff found the sounds of maggots, worms, and slimy insects, but when played straight, they were much too fast and frenetic and high-pitched. “I started thinking if I slowed it down, it might work.” Using a combination of Soundminer’s pitch shifter, the ‘vintage’ Pitch Shift in Pro Tools 10, and EQ via the Digi Channel Strip insert, Ribicoff created a much slower, watery, low-end effect that was the perfect compliment to the natural environments captured on-location by sound mixer Steven Bechtold.

“Steven did an amazing job of recording the actual ambience on this lake at different times of the day,” explains Ribicoff. “I was able to really draw from those recordings and then bury these sound library

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recordings within them.”

Ribicoff feels that one of his most invaluable tools for sound design is Soundminer. Everything he’s collected and created over the years is consolidated into one library.

“I’m accessing sounds through one huge Soundminer database so I’m not paying attention to where these effects are coming from,” notes Ribicoff. He auditions and flags sounds in Soundminer, then layers, processes, bends, twists, and stretches them in Pro Tools. Ribicoff, who’s been working in Pro Tools since the early '90s, says, “I have every bit of confidence that if I can just get it in Pro Tools, then I can make anything happen.”

JEEP WRANGLER POLAR VORTEX Ad agency Doner, Detroit worked with the Santa Monica division of bi-coastal sound and music composition company Elias Arts on the :30 Jeep Wrangler Polar Vortex TV spot.

Elias Arts tapped award-winning freelance sound designer Jay Nierenberg, owner of Sublime Sound (www.sublimesound.tv) in Los Angeles, to craft the sound design, including a chaotic cyclone of snow and ice caused by Jeep Wrangler

X Edition joyriders doing donuts in the snow.

After more than 25 years in the biz, Nierenberg has amassed nearly five terabytes of custom recordings and commercial library effects, which he manages using Soundminer. Nierenberg says he prefers custom recordings, only turning to commercial libraries when absolutely necessary. “Like a lot of other oldschool sound designers in the industry, who pride themselves in trying to create things that are unique, I’m not just using sounds from sources that lots of other people go to — at least not without having done something special with those sounds in some way,” he states. For example, the swirling winds in Polar Vortex combine recordings Nierenberg captured himself from multiple locations in upstate New York and California, with recordings his colleagues captured in Alaska.

He layered those winds with previously-recorded Foley of debris, ice, and snow sounds in Pro Tools 11 and used the Waves PS22 plug-in to manipulate the stereo image, creating a swirling sensation for scenes inside the storm. “I tried to make drastic changes to the stereo imaging so that you really felt the movement using just the stereo environment,” Nierenberg says. In addition, he used the Waves Doppler plug-in to create a sense of snow and ice flying through the air.

When the Jeep stops, the storm suddenly dissipates. Nierenberg’s challenge was to take a raging storm and have it end believably in a span of three seconds. Editorially, he created the de-escalation by cross-fading powerful, heavy winds into light winds layered in near the end of the storm. He also extended the light debris effects over the scene to cover the last remnants of snow falling. For processing, he used Avid’s Vari-Fi plug-in to quickly slow down the heavy wind sounds. “Vari-Fi was the most effective way to sell the storm stopping. It allowed me to bend the wind sound down to give the illusion that the storm was dying in a threeto four-second span,” he says.

The spot opens with news announcers whose broadcast signal is affected by the storm. Nierenberg

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Freelance sound designer Jay Nierenberg created "chilling" sound design for Jeep Wrangler's Polar Vortex spot, managing various sound effects via Soundminer.

experimented with Avid’s D-Fi plug-in suite, including Lo-Fi and Sci-Fi, as well as utilized Avid’s EQ III, to create the effect of interference while still maintaining intelligibility. “We were trying to get the right effect of a voice that was cracking up, coming in and out, but we had to do it in a way where you understood every word,” says Nierenberg. In addition to processing the dialogue, Nierenberg admits he used a commercial library effect of radio tuning. “The client was really in love with the radio tuning idea so I had little bits and pieces of radio interference and tuning to make sure that we were getting the sensation that the channel was changing.”

THE SEA OF TREES Independent re-recording mixer Beau Borders started his sound editorial career at Skywalker Sound. He feels an editorial background is a vital asset for re-recording mixers in today’s crossover workflow of audio post for feature film. “In the past, sound editors would design and assemble, and then pass their material on to the mixer and be done with it. The mixer would then take Borders, who co-mixed The Sea of Trees, used Pro Sound Effects.

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over and carry everything through the print-master. But now there is just so much back and forth between sound mixing and sound editing that it’s hugely beneficial when the sound editors know how to mix and the sound mixers know how to edit,” he says.

Borders, who recently co-mixed director Gus Van Sant’s film The Sea of Trees (premiering at Cannes this May), says he’s often involved on a film from an early stage, cleaning and temp mixing Avid tracks and working with the sound editors as they’re building tracks for the picture editor and director to preview against a cut. “It’s great because I’m able to be in the cutting room with the sound editors, laying out the path for the rest of the mix. All the material is very familiar to me by the time we get to the pre-dubbing and the final mix.”

During his sound editorial days at Skywalker Sound, Borders says he had access to one of their most powerful tools — the Skywalker Sound Library. “Their library is phenomenal. It just gets better and better with every project they work on,” Borders says. When Borders switched from sound editing to mixing independently, he no

longer had access to that resource. “It was super scary to just not have that safety net of amazing ingredients at your fingertips at all times. But as a sound mixer, I’m relying on the sound editors to come to the table with all the goods.” Though he was able to survive without a library, he recently got involved with Pro Sound Effects, which he says solved all his sound editing worries. “Pro Sound Effects can basically customize a library for you and it shows up on a hard drive with all the invaluable metadata, and it’s organized, and it’s everything that you need. My fear of living without the Skywalker Sound Library has ceased now that I found Pro Sound Effects.”

When he needs a certain sound, or set of sounds, Borders prefers to have a member of the film sound crew capture custom field recordings, but with shrinking budgets and schedules, field recordings are the first thing to go. “It’s a rarity that we can actually put somebody out in the field to record custom sound,” says Borders. “That’s sad. I prefer the organic quality of using the real, natural, raw sounds. If you just had the perfect recording to begin with, you wouldn’t have to rely on all the processing and manipulation.” In a pinch, Borders says, Pro Sound Effects comes through. “If I need a kit of World War II airplanes, for example, they’re going to have it. It’s kind of like having a sound designer on call at all times.”

Borders observes that film schedules that allowed for months of audio post can get condensed to merely weeks, and crews are constantly shifting from studio to studio. That’s just the nature of the business changing. “Now we have to look at prerecorded libraries and places we can pull sounds from. Pro Sound Effects is great because they have well-organized, searchable databases and it’s all right there ready to cut. I feel like my safety net is back,” states Borders.

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Napoleon Group has been a factor in New York's advertising scene since '85, when it was known for previs.

New York Post MarketOn The Upswing Post for Movies and TV Benefits from Tax Incentives; Spot Post Remains Strong Through Advertising Transition

BY CHRISTINE BUNISH

N

ew York has played a key role in the film industry since the dawn of motion pictures. With moving image pioneer Thomas Edison across the river in New Jersey and early studios and distributors setting up shop in New York City, business thrived.

Until a little town across the country with year-round sunny skies and endless open space launched an exodus to Hollywood.

In subsequent years, the film industry ebbed and flowed in New York. But the fledgling TV business took hold in postwar New York and remained strong for decades. Madison Avenue has long ruled advertising, making the city the country’s unrivaled commercial production center.

The last decade has witnessed a resurgence in film and TV production in the city thanks to generous tax incentives.

Films and television series have returned to the unique locations, robust industry infrastructure and deep talent pool. Post is on the upswing, too. Here, Post speaks with some of the city’s top studios.

(www.postnewyork.org) was formed by 13 post houses and Local 700, IATSE Editors in December 2009 for the purpose of lobbying the statehouse to pass a post-only tax incentive for film and television. “We’d all seen the benefits from the production tax incentive of 2004,” says Yana Collins Lehman, co-chair of PNYA. Local 700 eastern executive director “Paul Moore had lobbied alone for a post credit years before we formed.

Then PNYA came together to encourage the legislature to introduce the first of

its kind post-only tax credit: no matter where a project was shot, there would be an incentive to finish it here.”

PNYA was successful, and a 10 percent Empire State Post Production Credit debuted in 2010. “We quickly realized that wasn’t going to cut it, so we lobbied for an increase to 30 percent, with an additional five percent credit for upstate New York. And that passed in 2013,” Lehman says.

The fully-refundable tax credit applies to projects that spend 75 percent of their

The Post New York Alliance's (L-R) Clark Henderson (Technicolor-PostWorks NY), Jennifer Lane, Yana Collins Lehman and Zak Tucker (Harbor Picture Company).

THE POST NEW YORK ALLIANCE LOBBIES FOR POST TAX INCENTIVES The Post New York Alliance, Inc. (PNYA)

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post production costs in New York. Almost all costs qualify for the credit: editing, post audio, music recording, VFX, titles and lab finishing.

PNYA now counts 50 companies, 300 post professionals and one more union (AFM Local 802) among its members. The collegial group hosts bi-monthly "Post Intelligence Gatherings" to share info on work coming to New York. “We all rise and fall together,” says Lehman about the collaborative nature of the organization.

A significant amount of time also is dedicated to educating the workforce of tomorrow via helping to develop school curricula, offering professional internships, making financial donations to educational programs and creating informational podcasts. “People tend to know about jobs in production, but not know about all the jobs in post production,” notes Lehman.

And the post marketplace is “growing massively,” she reports. “We didn’t anticipate how much TV would take advantage of the post tax credit. Eighty-seven pilots shot here last year and many remained to post.”

Post houses are opening in New York or expanding their existing facilities. “Post Factory is now leasing an entire building in TriBeCa,” Lehman says. “Harbor Picture Company is about to open a big mix stage that New York has long needed. The music scoring company Fall On Your Sword has opened in Brooklyn.” Other powerhouses include Phosphene; Mr. X Inc., which has offices in Toronto and New York; and Buffalo-based Empire Visual Effects, which has ties to the academic program at Daemen College.

“It’s a very vibrant, diverse, artistic community,” says Lehman. “We haven’t created an industry here, we’ve expanded it. Film commissions from other states call us and ask how we did it.”

FILM AND TV POST GET INCENTIVIZED Film and television in New York “isn’t going to slow down any time soon,” observes Rob Morlano, senior vice president of post production at Prime Focus Technologies (www.primefocustechnologies.com) in New York. Headquartered in Mumbai, India, PFT has offices in LA, London, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Toronto

and, of course, New York.

“With the tax incentives, we’ve seen a big increase in scripted shows, but a ton of reality content doesn’t qualify for incentives,” he notes. “That’s a shame — it could really help them because their budgets aren’t growing with the demand for new technology.”

Still, Morlano cites the large number of scripted pilots in town and the new deal between Disney-Marvel and Netflix for four live-action series based in New York. “Shows used to shoot here then go back to LA, but now they’re staying for post and keeping everyone busy.”

Brooklyn-based post and finishing house WorleyWorks (www.worleyworks.com) believes the post tax incentives have “created a lot of energy” in town. Minah Worley, who co-owns the facility with husband Greg, says, “Boutique companies like ours have really seen a difference in the quality of work coming through.

Filmmakers from LA, London and even Korea are interested in the incentives — places that have strong post markets of their own. It’s a really good time to be in business here.”

WorleyWorks caters to indie features and feature-length documentaries. It grew into the post business in 2014 after offering motion capture and stereoscopic 3D services. “Director Ang Lee wanted to do a project requiring 60fps 4K stereo and nobody was placed to do that in LA or New York,” says WorleyWorks’ director of post production, Jack Reynolds.

“Greg had some solutions, so Ang Lee became our first post client.”

The company recently performed the DI for the new feature doc, Song of Lahore, codirected by Academy Award-winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. WorleyWorks also donated its motion-capture system to the filmmaker for her next project, Pakistan’s first animated feature.

To meet the demand for 4K finishing, WorleyWorks has invested in the city’s first Mistika color correction system, Barco 4K projector and Canon 4K monitor for its DI theater. “Everyone is interested in finishing in 4K or higher for longevity, if nothing else,” Reynolds notes. “Amazon is talking about requiring 6K finishing.”

Rob Morlano (left) says Prime Focus could benefit from tax incentives for reality TV, such as Too Cute (shown).

FUSEFX COMPLETES WORK ON THE BLACKLIST & POWERS NEW YORK — FuseFX New York (www.fusefx.com) recently wrapped up work on The Blacklist and Powers, both for Sony Pictures Television. The studio is a satellite of FuseFX, Burbank, and launched last fall, initially with a staff of six, but has since grown to a team of 27.

FuseFX produced a wide range of VFX for the two shows, which included 22 episodes for The Blacklist and 10 for Powers. Creative demands for the two series were markedly different. For The Blacklist, in which James Spader plays a former fugitive now assisting the FBI, the work was primarily supporting VFX and included a lot of pyrotechnics — enhancing gun battles, explosions and the like. The effects team also produced numerous matte paintings and set extensions to support the exotFuseFX enhanced explosions for NBC's The Blacklist.

Powers required digital characters and super power VFX.

ic, international locations where the show takes place.

Powers, in contrast, features a cast with super hero abilities. The effects work here had a more fantastical bent, with FuseFX called on to create everything from super power simulations to full CG characters. Each episode featured hundreds of effects shots.

“The work was interesting because the shows were so very different,” recalls VFX supervisor Greg Anderson. “The Blacklist had a tight schedule and we had to get into a rhythm very quickly. With Powers, there were only 10 episodes, but they involved highly-complex CG effects.”

FuseFX employs a proprietary pipeline capable of servicing 30 or more productions simultaneously.

Anderson says the New York facility is optimistic about landing more television projects, thanks to the state’s generous state tax incentives. They are also looking at the area’s burgeoning independent film community, as well as at commercials requiring major VFX components.

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Greg and Minah Worley say they've seen a difference in the quality of work coming through their Brooklyn-based studio, Worleyworks, thanks to tax incentives.

“We believe in futureproofing,” says Worley. “We can do high frame rates and even 8K.” Morlano likens the transition to 4K to the industry’s migration from SD to HD and says PFT is “already ahead of the curve with expanded 4K post and finishing.” The company recently finished its first 4K reality series: four parts of Animal Planet’s Too Cute franchise. The company worked closely with the client and equipment vendors to create a 4K workflow that best suited the project.

“True Entertainment cut the shows on Avid and brought them to us for the 4K conform and color correction in Resolve,” says Morlano. “We went to Blackmagic Design for some proprietary patches for Resolve; we also worked with Adobe Premiere — it was the only system capable of handling Discovery Networks’ specific 4K codec. It was exciting to figure out.”

WorleyWorks has had inquiries about virtual reality, “from a narrative storytelling standpoint,” says Reynolds, but there’s been no direct VR work yet.

Stereo 3D projects, though, have come to a standstill. “We had two projects last year that cancelled, but there’s not even a sniff this year,” he reports.

Morlano believes that PFT is well positioned to become “one of the big players” on the New York post scene. It’s his job to ensure that PFT has “a bigger

presence in New York,” and to support its growth, the company had made additional executive hires: Tris Baer as vice president of business solutions and Rick Crosta as vice president of sales.

“After we get post humming we want to integrate CLEAR, our Hybrid Cloud-enabled Media ERP Suite and cloud media services, including Dax, our production workflow application and digital dailies service, into the facility,” says Morlano. “Eighty percent of scripted content in the US is delivered by Dax to networks; we could [increase] that if reality programming also took advantage.”

WorleyWorks defines itself “as very niche” market and plans “to remain small,” says Reynolds. The company also offers creative production packages to filmmakers and has an inventory of Sony F55 cameras, Steadicams, Cooke and Fujinon lenses, and lights.

“We’re buying a pair of Arri Alexas,” says Worley. "We also have Briese and Arri flicker-free lights for high frame rates.

We want to outfit filmmakers with the best technology for the highest quality production and post. New York’s production and post tax incentives both apply to us, so it’s a real win-win situation.”

COMMERCIAL POST EVOLVES ON MADISON AVENUE Commercial advertising does not qualify

for New York post tax incentives so studios specializing in the spot market haven’t experienced the boom that facilities catering to film and television have seen.

The 21st century ad business is healthy but changing. Traditional :30 broadcast spots still play a central role in many ad campaigns, but marketers are also creating online spots, messages for social media and longer-form online content.

There’s a shift of budgets, too, as ad platforms broaden. This isn’t exclusive to New York: It’s happening nationwide.

In the transition from broadcast to digital, commercial post houses are seeing a wider scope of clients than just ad agencies: PR and branding companies, small marketers direct and even production companies tasked with doing turnkey projects.

To facilitate efficiency and possibly cut costs across all platforms some of these clients seek post houses with underone-roof services, either from a single company or a collective of specialist partners. They’re looking for more bang for the buck: Campaigns may start with a :30 broadcast spot then add social media pieces, a behind-the-scenes film, and maybe longer-form content that resides on a Website. From this “360” perspective, one shoot yields a host of deliverables.

Napoleon Group (www.napo leongroup.com) has been a factor on New York’s advertising scene since 1985, when it was known for its previs work.

“We were a formidable force in previs for high-end test commercials,” says director of business development, Paul Johnson.

“Then clients began coming to us with other problems to solve. We grew our services and pipeline, and now we have a turnkey facility with all the bells and whistles. But we’re the only post house in New York with an in-house art studio; character development and storyboarding are in our DNA.”

Brooklyn-based audio post studio Fall On Your Sword (www. fallonyoursword.com) recently opened a new 700-square-foot mix room it calls “The Foundry.” The Dolby-certified studio can handle 5.1 and 7.1 projects, and is based around Avid’s Pro Tools 11 HD and an S6 M40 control surface. Since opening, the room has been used to mix Queen of Earth; It's Me, Hilary; Contra; Muckland; and Bodies at War.

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Napoleon Group's Paul Johnson (right), and the studio's 2D/3D animation for PSE&G (below).

Napoleon’s business acumen has allowed the company to grow and thrive for 30 years “despite the economy,” Johnson notes. “Starting with the recession in 2008 there’s been a disconnect between what client procurement is willing to pay and the value of the creative process.

They want high-quality, global advertising on a short turnaround at drastically-slashed prices.”

Still, Johnson is optimistic that the next few years will see “the costfor-services equation balance out in a more appropriate way. More spending in the digital space will offset less spending for broadcast and meet somewhere in the middle. People are starting to understand the importance of high-quality, creative storytelling no matter what the distribution method.”

Napoleon moved to a custom-built facility in the Flatiron District in 2013. The 14,500 square-foot space includes Vicon motion capture, a greenscreen stage, and full editorial finishing and audio suites.

The company did “a monster eight-spot Web project” for Procter & Gamble’s Dreft recently, which tapped Napoleon’s “concept-to-air” capabilities. “We worked start to finish, lining up the director, doing the storyboards, casting, live-action production, the greenscreen product shoot for print, and all the editorial and post audio,” says Johnson.

Napoleon also did 2D and 3D animation for a short online film for Con Edison about the importance of restoring power after a storm. The “Pixar-esque” short generated such a positive response that Napoleon was asked to adapt the animation for the utility’s affiliate in Orange and Rockland counties in New York, plus PSE&G in NJ, PSEG Long Island, Entergy, and NB Power and Toronto Hydro in Canada. “Since then we’ve developed other short films for them on energy efficiency, billing and safety,” says Johnson.

Most recently, Napoleon produced two shorts that combine live action and 3D animation for One World Explorer Productions in New York, one of which is featured on the One World Observatory Website and the other in a point-of-purchase kiosk at the top of the new One World Trade Center, which opens on Memorial Day. “The quality of work coming out of New York will always be superior,” says Johnson. “The cachet of New York attracts creative people from around the world; talent flocks here. I’d just like to see the legislature write a post tax incentive for advertising, too!”

TECHNICOLOR-POSTWORKS NY COMPLETES SINATRA & JOBS DOCS NEW YORK — Technicolor-PostWorks NY (www.postworks.com) has continued its eight-year collaboration with Alex Gibney and Jigsaw New York by contributing to two documentaries for HBO and CNN. The studio recently provided final mastering services for Sinatra: All or Nothing at All and Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which will debut on HBO and CNN, respectively.

Editorial conforming and final color grading for both projects was performed by a small team of artists and technicians working under the direction of Technicolor-PostWorks VP/creative services Ben Murray, who worked in close collaboration with Gibney’s production team and editors from Jigsaw, New York. The same line-up has worked together on a more than a half dozen previous documentaries, including Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.

“We have an all-Avid workflow that we have honed with Jigsaw and the Gibney team, and it works very well,” says Murray, whose team included colorist Jack Lewars and finishing editor Allie Ames for Sinatra, and Lewars and finishing editor Jeff Cornell for Jobs.

HBO’s Sinatra: All or Nothing at All is a four-hour mini-series about the late singer, produced with the authorization of his estate. It tells the story of Sinatra’s life and career leading up to his famous 1971 “retirement concert” in Los Angeles. The documentary is composed almost entirely from archival material, with recordings of Sinatra himself providing the narrative thread.

Jigsaw prepared a conformed version of the documentary in-house before passing it on to Technicolor-PostWorks for final editorial adjustment and color grading. Murray’s team handled clean-up, formatting, titling, opticals and effects, including camera moves on still images.

“We also received a significant amount of PAL and NTSC footage that we needed to make look as good as possible,” adds finishing editor Allie Ames.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is a two-hour documentary that looks at the life and work of Steve Jobs. It screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival in advance of its TV premiere on CNN. Jobs was edited for Jigsaw by Michael J. Palmer and produced for Jigsaw by Viva Van Loock. As Jobs was born 40 years later than Sinatra, archival material documenting his life is of more recent vintage and derives from more modern types of sources, so fewer items needed significant post processing. Additionally, the Jobs documentary includes new interviews with people who knew and worked with him.

All that made for a different finishing process. One notable difference involved color grading. Whereas Sinatra, with its mix of black & white and color material, was given a naturalistic grade, Jobs has a more stylized look, particularly in its archival segments. “We colored it in a very electronic way,” recalls colorist Jack Lewars. “The colors are almost hyper-saturated, especially the blues. On computer screens, the blues are almost bleeding out of their boundaries.”

Lewars says the unusual color treatment has a narrative purpose and is meant to subtly underscore Jobs’ personality and the digital revolution that he helped bring about. “It feels like a throwback,” Lewars says. “While we are describing someone who modernized the world, he’s presented in a very low-fi setting. The contrast works really well.”

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FIELD TESTED

FLAME PREMIUM CATCHES FIRE AT MODERN VIDEOFILM M

BY DAVE COLE SUPERVISING SENIOR DIGITAL COLORIST MODERN VIDEOFILM BURBANK/SANTA MONICA WWW.MVF.COM

THIS SUITE OF TOOLS INCLUDES FLAME, LUSTRE, FLAME ASSIST AND FLARE

odern VideoFilm is a Burbank and Santa Monica, CA-based post production and content services facility that designs end-to-end workflows for clients in film, television and beyond. With a staff of more than 400, we work with a large client base, including film studios, TV production companies, corporations and more. At the onset of each project, our team conducts extensive R&D to build a robust workflow that ensures a seamless post process with high-quality results. To do this, we have to be creative and adaptable, which is where state-ofthe-art technology is crucial. We rely on a combination of hardware and software, including Autodesk Flame Premium 2015 (www.autodesk.com) — a technology suite that includes Flame, Lustre, Flame Assist and Flare — and five standalone seats of Flame.

As a subscription customer, we’ve been thrilled with the steady pace of new features being rolled out by Autodesk throughout the year. For example, we recently upgraded to Extension 3, which includes new features that have been fantastic for working in 4K and UltraHD. The Extension 2 release of Lustre at the end of 2014 also gave us client-friendly workflow enhancements, such as a new labeling and flagging system, as well as a second screen server. This allows clients to sit in the room with the current shot information displayed on a PC while I’m grading the shot, which makes for a more collaborative experience. It’s invaluable during VFX reviews, and clients love it.

Extension 2’s added support for Apple

ProRes encoding and decoding has also been great. Our senior editor Barry Goch can take his timeline out of Flame Premium and make a ProRes file with extremely high color fidelity; it’s been a game changer. He can quickly create deliverables and continue on with other tasks, because the export happens in the background.

TESTING THE WATERS: 4K AND HDR We already had several 4K projects underway in 2014, and you can expect to see more from us this year. For Down Dog, a Brad Silberling-directed pilot for Amazon, I used Flame Premium with an AJA Kona 4 card to output 4K to a UHD/4K monitor. We also re-mastered The Black Stallion for Criterion using scans of the original negative — working in 4K and then delivering in HD for Blu-ray. As this was the final target resolution, Flame Premium allowed the image to be scaled in realtime to the HD monitor during interactive color grading with the cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel. For a truly-cinematic experience, we performed final reviews at full 4K resolution in the theatre using a Christie digital cinema projector.

Our team is also actively creating workflows to help clients establish High Dynamic Range (HDR) pipelines. From a creative standpoint, HDR has a ton of potential, but to maximize it, you need to play with the range to achieve the right balance, which we’re pioneering here at Modern.

KEEPING PACE WITH A DEMANDING PROJECT LOAD We’re juggling multiple projects simulta-

neously, and Flame Premium helps us stay on track. For the upcoming film No Escape, I used the software to help emphasize story points by subtly highlighting characters and locations, and to create an assortment of moods in color grading. No other color corrector has a shape system like Lustre. It’s powerful, efficient and fast for manipulating images — allowing me to do what I need to and do it well.

For The Book of Life, digital frames were delivered in OpenEXR. Using Lustre on this project, I was able to fine tune shapes, densities and VFX to bring a unique tonality to the film’s scene progression and achieve maximum color fidelity in 2D and 3D. ATTRACTING NEW BUSINESS AND RETURN CLIENTS For us, Flame Premium has also become a business development tool. We’re able to quickly throw images up on screen, and conjure exactly what potential clients envision in a 15- to 20-minute session, and before we know it, we’ve won the job.

Having the ability to immediately compare shots, restore and copy prior grades and draw shapes has also been useful for client review sessions. We can also write custom plug-ins to achieve looks and effects that can’t be seen elsewhere. Flame Premium gives us the tools and speed we need to be extremely creative, but fast and efficient at the same time. If we’re thrown a curveball, we never have to worry, because it gives us the confidence that we’ll be able to solve problems every time.

Modern VideoFilm employed Lustre on the animated feature The Book of Life.

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EDUCATION CONTINUED FROM PG 32

editing suites, Foley stage, dubbing bays, offices, classrooms and a screening room. Students will use the space for their academic programs and will have an opportunity to work with clients who hire the soundstage and post facilities for commercial projects. “That makes for a very robust economic model,” says Bellantoni. Currently, students use a smaller stage and post facilities on campus.

Ringling, which has already been called the most wired campus in the world, according to Bellantoni, has just implemented 1.6 petabytes of database and storage from DataDirect Networks. The massive system “will allow students and faculty to render up to 2.8 million frames a week,” he says.

Bellantoni reports that Ringling alumni are among the best recruiters of new students. “They recognize the value of the education they got here,” he says.

“A Ringling degree presents clear opportunities for graduates.” Indeed, three of the five animated features nominated for 2015 Academy Awards had Ringling graduates working on them; 30 alumni had credits on the winning Big Hero 6. Plus, Ringling grad Patrick Osborne (with Kristina Reed) netted the Oscar for best-animated short film for Feast.

UL AND LSU When noted Los Angeles-based VFX studio Pixel Magic opened an office in Lafayette, LA, the company formed a relationship with two of the state’s leading universities. Pixel Magic VFX supervisor/stereoscopic supervisor Raymond McIntyre Jr. has his office on the campus of the University of Louisiana in Lafayette where he liaises with the school for internships and curriculum; he’s also on the advisory board at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, which just launched a digital media program.

Both schools have been proactive in educating talent to fuel the state’s busy production scene or take on jobs anywhere in the world.

UL (www.louisiana.edu) introduced its Moving Image Arts program a little over five years ago (http://liberalarts.louisiana.edu/academics/majors/ movimgarts.shtml). “We could see that in order to sustain the rapid growth in the Louisiana film industry, we’d have to grow the creative workforce here,” says Charles E. Richard, director of the program.

“We’re not a traditional film school. Our program is designed to teach motion picture media as a lan-

guage for creative communications of all kinds. So instead of preparing students to work in a particular industry, they’ll be literate and fluent in the language of moving images across various workplaces: entertainment, video games, advertising, educational media, museum exhibits.”

Professor Richard has seen the program quickly grow from about a dozen majors to more than 120.

The program offers production and post production labs featuring Adobe Premiere, Maya and Pro Tools. All students complete a one-year “capstone” project at the end of their studies, which highlights the collaborative nature of the industry.

“We stress how to be good collaborative artists and the social skills you need to succeed in the workplace,” he says. “Internships are also precious to us for showing students how to be team players.”

Students have interned with Pixel Magic and other studios in Louisiana doing VFX, animation, rotoscoping, graphics and post sound. Pixel Magic has hired UL/Lafayette alumni, too.

Professor Richard believes the program’s biggest challenge is making sure students are not distracted by an all-encompassing focus on technology.

When technology takes center stage, students can “lack grounding in the bigger picture that makes them real artists: the aesthetics, the work ethic, the professionalism, the good taste,” he explains.

“The VFX artists and editors I’ve worked with value craftsmanship: They’re not terribly impressed by a particular brand of tools.”

At LSU (www.lsu.edu) the Center for Computation & Technology, a research center for all fields of computational science, just launched a graduate program conferring an MSc degree in Digital Media Arts & Engineering (https://dmae.lsu.edu). It includes such fields as VFX, animation and video game design; the school does not offer undergraduate degrees in these disciplines.

The founding director of the program, Marc Aubanel, comes to LSU from EA and Stage 3 Media, and an academic post at the Arts Institute of Vancouver. So far, the biggest challenge has been “convincing students that [digital media] is a well-paying, well-respected career to enter into. That’s not a hard sell in Vancouver or LA, where students have seen the industry all around them for years. But in Louisiana, where industries like oil and gas have

LSU students learn collaboration.

dominated, we’ve had to be evangelists.”

The Center occupies two stories of a new $29.3 million building on campus; EA fills the top floor.

The Center features post labs, super-computers and render farms, as well as a 200-seat 4K theater.

Students are required to take nine credits in courses outside the department, such as business or art. A two-month internship is scheduled halfway through the program. “There’s nothing like learning in an actual work environment,” says Aubanel. “It’s critical to experience day-to-day life in the production world.”

The advisory board, on which Raymond McIntyre Jr. sits, will be looking at students’ portfolios and “making sure they’re going in the right direction,” Aubanel says. “We need to train students for two years from now when they graduate. What skills will they need? Where are the trends leading? The advisory board will play a crucial role in helping with that.”

Aubanel is certain of one thing, however.

“Computation is impacting every discipline throughout the country. It’s where the jobs are heading.

We’ll see more technical and creative positions everywhere.”

AVENGERS CONTINUED FROM PG 23

we had to take many plates and try to combine them into one continuous shot. The filmmakers really finessed the shot until they got it to exactly where they wanted it so when we passed this off to ILM, they knew almost exactly what Joss was looking for.”

Ramirez sums up that with a film like Avengers,

“visualization becomes so powerful because it helps make a lot of the decisions. And I mean, Joss, the editors Jeff Ford and Lisa Lassek, and the VFX supervisor Chris Townsend really used this process for showing all the departments, including the visual effects studios, this is a vision we like. On a film like this, with such a tight schedule and of this

magnitude, there’s not a lot of time for the visual effects studios to get these shots done. So it’s really important that we had a strong team to be able to work closely with all the departments so there were really good creative and technical roadmaps that were close to what everyone was looking for and expecting.”

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REVIEW

VITAL STATS

RTW LOUDNESS TOOLS I

BY KEITH HODNE POSTFACTORYNY MADHOUSE36@AOL.COM NEW YORK CITY

RTW'S NEW SOFTWAREBASED TOOLS ALLOW MIXERS TO CUSTOMIZE THEIR SET-UPS

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first learned to cook out of necessity to feed myself. I got the job done with whatever tools I had handed down from my parents, and as I got more experience, the food tasted better. Years later, I grew out of that old cookware and sought to purchase better tools to get the job done. I had actually learned to enjoy cooking and the art of it. My tools became my baby, because they were such an important part of the process I used to achieve the outcome I wanted. I chose those tools carefully, just like I choose the equipment I use for my work in audio post.

I was recently switching between a few different loudness plug-ins when I was considering a review for Post of the RTW Touch Monitor TM7 hardware meter. That meter was luxurious, and I would have loved to keep it long term.

But with accelerated schedules, moving between mix rooms and constant bouncing from one project to the next, it didn’t quite fit my workflow for the long haul. When the good people at RTW told me they were developing a software equivalent, their Loudness Tools, I quickly nominated myself to give the toolset a test run, and haven’t turned back since.

There are a bunch of software loudness metering plug-ins out there, so what makes RTW Loudness Tools different is its ability to customize the layout. And, the tools you do have on-screen are amazing. Why have the same meter and same layout when day-to-day jobs differ and require different types of measurements? Loudness Tools gives users “instruments” to be able to pick and choose from to customize plug-ins. And these instruments can be as small or large as you prefer.

The Mastering Tools plug-in supports standard sampling rates up to 96kHz, that includes RTW’s Peak Program Meter, TruePeak and Spot Correlator instruments, and also offers all common loudness formats, including ITU BS.17703/1771-1, ATSC A/85, EBU R128, ARIB, OP-59, AGICOM and CALM Act. Other key features include numerical or bar graph-type readout, MagicLRA and correlator display, audio vectorscope, RTA (Real Time Analyzer), SSA (Surround Sound Analyzer) and multi-correlator.

What does this all mean for a very busy mixer jumping from independent film to commercial and long-format TV mixing to Web projects? Confidence that even with varying average levels for different mediums, your mix will pass quality control and (in my case) I can sleep well at night knowing whatever I sent out will not get rejected. It gives me the ability to know not only the long-term level readouts, but certain section readouts so I can accurately get the creative emotion needed, by raising or lowering audio while still keeping in “passing range” for whatever provider I’m mixing for.

The ability to pick and choose instruments to add to my main meter view, and to be able to customize the sizes of these meters is indispensable. No two engineer’s layouts have to be equal. Use what instruments you like and leave out what you don’t. Make long-term or short-term readouts larger or smaller depending on the content you are mixing, and how much you need to baby the meters with your eyes. For me, this translates into being able to make my mixes stand out punchier and louder than the rest, especially when my police drama needs to sound rougher and tougher than the tissue commercials surrounding it. Also, quite honestly, when mixing for super-long hours, it’s not unheard of for ear fatigue to set in and you sometimes just need to trust those meters in addition to your ears. RTW has saved me quite a few times since I’ve had the

MANUFACTURER: RTW PRODUCT: Loudness Tools PRICE: $299 WEBSITE: www.rtw.com • Metering and loudness display for mono, stereo, multichannel and surround applications.

• Pick and choose instruments to add to main meter view • Option to customize meters sizes

plug-in in my possession.

For years I’ve used that bundled loudness meter that everyone has, and for years it has served me well. But as I progress and get more skilled at my craft, the normal tools just don’t cut it as much. Just as I became more skilled at cooking, my appreciation for finer hardware and software products grew.

Let's be honest, the way we mix hasn’t really changed over the years, but the need to micro manage your mix due to loudness restraints imposed on networks has. For most engineers, it was a steep learning curve to have to eye the meters more to ensure meeting short-term dialog averages. But I do feel that average levels on all mediums have been more, well, average because of the loudness regulations put in place. Luckily as those loudness measurement rules have evolved, so have the products we use to meet matching these requirements. For me, the dead-on accuracy of the RTW Loudness bundle, the fully-customizable instrument features, and the look and feel of RTW’s Loudness Tools make it a stand out plug-in and a smart choice.

Users can choose the size and look of their preferred meter.

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2015 Exhibits Seminars Demonstrations Film Series Competition New Product Introductions Technical Awards Networking Special Events

Cine Gear Expo 2015 Los Angeles

June 4 - 7, 2015 The Studios at Paramount Hollywood, CA

Cine Gear Expo 2015 New York City

September 24-25, 2015 The Metropolitan Pavilion New York, NY www.cinegearexpo.com info@cinegearexpo.com

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PEOPLE

RICHARD KIDD, SCOTT MCCULLOUGH Culver City, CA-based VFX and design studio Artemple-Hollywood has expanded its inhouse team with the addition of CD/senior VFX supervisor Richard KIDD MCCULLOUGH Kidd and director/DP Scott McCullough. Kidd was on-set VFX supervisor/VFX producer for The Longest Ride and will work on features, TV, commercials and theme park content. McCullough, who has worked with Pepsi and Ford, will specialize in live action production.

JOHN BOLEN LA’s Formosa Group recently launched Formosa Villa, its commercial/branded entertainment division, which is housed at the newly-renovated Formosa Santa Monica facility. The company has also added mixer John Bolen, who comes from Play with over two decades of experience.

He began his career at Roland House in Virgina and spent eight years there, mixing long-form projects for PBS, TLC and National Geographic.

In 1999, he moved to LA to work at Eleven Sound, and in 2003, he opened Play, where he spent the next 12 years.

CHRISTINE CATTANO VFX and creative content studio Framestore has promoted producer Christine Cattano to executive producer of its virtual reality studio in New York. Cattano will continue to serve as a primary client liaison and will oversee a growing team beneath her that's a response to rapid project expansion within the department. In her previous role at Framestore, Cattano served as a production lead for all digital and integrated projects.

Before joining Framestore, she was senior producer at marketing agency Campfire.

ADAM BECHT Senior producer Adam Becht has joined the Santa Monica office of editorial company Cut+Run. A New York native, Becht worked in translation and interpretation in the US, Spain and Argentina before transitioning to advertising. He started as a post producer in New York City and then joined R/GA, where he produced digital branded content and post for global brands as well as oversaw the agency’s production of internal content.

Becht has extensive credits producing broadcast and digital live action as well as post. He recently relocated to Los Angeles.

POST MAGAZINE (ISSN 0891-5628) is published monthly by Post,LLC, a COP Communications company, 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, California 91204. Subscription rates: $63 for one year in the United States & Possessions; $94 for one year in Canada and Mexico; all other countries $133 for one year. For air-expedited service, include an additional $75 per order annually. Single copies (prepaid only): $16 in the United States; $32 in Canada and Mexico; $47 all other countries. Back issues, if available, are $32 for the U.S. & Possessions; $63 for Canada and Mexico; $94 for all other countries. Include $8.00 per order plus $3 per additional copy for U.S. postage and handling. If shipping outside the U.S., include an additional $14 per order plus $5 per additional copy. Periodicals postage paid at Glendale CA 91205 and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to POST, P.O. Box 3551, Northbrook, IL 60065-3551. Canadian G.S.T.

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CRAIG ALAN SCHOENBAUM Agency veteran Craig Alan Schoenbaum has joined previz and digital content studio Napoleon as a sales representative. He will work to generate leads and sales, and qualify new business prospects, with a focus on art for storyboards and animatics. With the addition of Schoenbaum, Napoleon’s business development team expands to four, a reflection of the studio’s overall expansion into new products and services.

BEN ELLIS Creative editorial company Beast in Austin, TX, has promoted Ben Ellis to editor. Ellis has been with the Austin office for seven years, starting as a freelance assistant editor and later transitioning to lead assistant editor. In his time there he’s contributed to national commercials for Walgreen’s, Zales and Pacifico Beer.

DAVID SALLAK Sunnyvale, CA’s Panasas, a provider of hybrid scale-out NAS solutions, has appointed David Sallak its new VP of industry marketing. He will be responsible for driving market penetration of Panasas ActiveStor storage solutions in all of the company’s vertical target markets, with an initial focus on the media and entertainment industry. Sallak brings more than 15 years of experience developing vertical industry markets in the storage business to his new role. He most recently served as CTO for M&E at EMC Isilon.

VICTORIA GUENIER Spot Welders, which has offices in Venice, CA, and Manhattan, has hired Victoria Guenier as executive producer and director of development. She brings almost 20 years of experience on the agency side, working with clients such as IBM, Target, Microsoft and PlayStation. Most recently, Guenier worked as head of production at agency Omelet. Prior to that, she was director of broadcast and content production at Deutsch LA. Spot Welders specializes in editing commercials, music videos and feature films.

DANE MACBETH, BRANDON STEVENSON LA-based mixed-media production studio Roger has added Dane Macbeth as creative director. He started his career as an animator/ designer at Framework LA and later went on to MACBETH STEVENSON freelance for creative agencies Big Star, Laundry, King and Country, Metaphrenie, Troika, Big Block Design Group, Digital Domain, Buck and Roger.

Roger has also promoted Brandon Stevenson to head of production. He began his career at Roger, starting as an entry-level coordinator and then moving up to produce small jobs. He's since worked on numerous projects. number: R-124213133RT001. Publications Mail Agreement Number 40017597. Printed in the U.S.A. ©Copyright 2014 POST, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including by photocopy, recording or information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by is granted

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4-14-1

* Images shown are taken directly from CION footage

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The sweeTesT spoT. Maximum quality at minimal storage costs with XAVC™ recording exquisite recording typically requires extreme bitrates, quickly filling up your media, overwhelming your storage and bogging down your network. The answer is XAVC encoding, which embodies sony’s decades of expertise in both codecs and cameras. here’s the supple texture of 4K, beautiful high Frame Rate capture, extraordinary 10-bit encoding and precise 4:2:2 color—all at modest bitrates. Incorporated in a full range of sony® cameras and storage devices,* the XAVC codec is supported by all major non-linear editing and grading platforms, including sony’s Catalyst family.

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