Digital Video - September 2008 - (Page 20)

INSIDE OUTSOURCE was going on. In any shot of the HPUs in the cells, the finished frame includes not only the person in their suit, with pulsating veins, but also a virtual set of the room around them and its video screens, all showing the POV of what their linked probe is seeing on Earth. But what people were looking at in the cut was generally an actor in an inert suit, hanging against a black background. Moreover, the sound design for the movie is also very elaborate, so even when the visual effects were done and added to the cut, there was still no breathing or electric zapping or any other auditory clues about what was going on. “Aaron Sullivan and I took an Eisenstein-like constructionist approach when we designed Outsource. We wanted every frame of the film to speak to the next,” says Trezise. “As a testament to that style, there is no dialogue — there are just cuts and reactions to tell the story.” Once he committed to a cut, Trezise could begin the visual effects — having done as much as he could ahead of time to make the process easier for himself. One of Trezise’s biggest directorial choices was to make every outdoor shot a lock-off, so he could quickly shoot a clean plate immediately after the final take. He would later use these clean plates in post to hide elements of the A puppeteer operates the probe while the character attempts to “reset” the device. Below, Trezise demonstrates the action for a probe POV shot. Trezise. “Other systems have a sharp falloff to black and to white, but I needed a soft falloff in both the blacks and whites in order to get the keying results I wanted in post.” The Viper’s completely digital, tapeless pipeline also offered him a smooth transition from production into post. Once production had wrapped, Trezise created QuickTime movies with frame numbers, rather than time code, because he knew that would be a better way to lay the groundwork for the compositing in Apple Shake. He began by creating a picture edit in Final Cut Pro, working with half-res proxies in the Pixlet codec, an Apple codec designed by Pixar. “This was a hard film to cut,” says Trezise, who turned to editor Natalie Ebnet for help. “You would think the effects would have been the most challenging thing, but, really, the edit was.” He explains that because the movie contains so many effects, it was almost impossible for people to watch the cut and understand what http://www.edirol.com/f1 http://www.edirol.com/f1

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - September 2008

Digital Video - September 2008 Contents Discproducer PP-100 Frameforge 3D Studio 2 First Cuts Expodisc Bird's-Eye View Instant Expert Inside Outsource Red in Combat Tools & Technology My Studio DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - September 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.