was exactly the same at our end. In terms of animation and the rigs, it wasn’t that bad because we were a lot of the time using proxy objects. The last thing we do is switch over to the proper topologized objects. Some of the geometry we were modeling was so high res like the tires and the CAD data coming through was thousands and thousands of vertices. As soon as we started turning all that on, our machines started choking as well.
Merron: It was like 25 pack shots in a row! That’s a lot of high res data.
fxg: How were these shots, or what seems to be one long shot, composited?
Merron: It was all Nuke. On the face of it, it seems very simple – you’ve got one locked camera perspective and a white background and hands. And you’ve got him holding a model and you think, ‘Oh, I can see what has to be removed, paint it out, overlay a 3D model on top which should cover that completely…’. The initial ingredients were all very straightforward but what you realize very quickly is once you start painting out or removing the gray objects, what’s behind on the white table are very soft and subtle shadows – it’s very easy to see the paint strokes or clean masks or parts running through it. So blending those soft gradients and shadows together proved incredibly difficult.
The other part that was very hard was that these hands and fingers are articulating very finely and all the gray models had to be removed. So through the RED camera, we got Andy to slowly rotate his hands in different positions, clench his fists, show each finger individually to try and get as much clean plate reference through the hero camera as possible, and not just rely on photos which can be difficult to comp through. That was made a lot easier, I must say, by Nuke Assist, which means we could have a few extra people without having to buy extra licenses.
It was made of about 40 different takes and squeezed into six sequences with positions me and Dave had discussed would work for a natural cut, and which would enable us to get into each of the different sections. So for example, the TT will explode into the little yellow car is a great spot because the hands leave frame or become very static. The other one is the Clarity where he picks up and does the drink with the glass. With all those 40 takes, the morpher became absolutely critical in Nuke – mix and overlay was great and would get you almost all the way there on the shoot – but the spline warper inside of Nuke was the weapon of choice to get this to be seamless.