PRE VISUALISATION
POST
and about 70% of postvis (where assets are integrated with shot footage for final decisions). According to Creative Director and Senior
Supervisor Vincent Aupetit, almost 80 people at FPS worked for more than a year and a half on the series’ 1400 VFX shots. “We use information that’s as accurate as possible
from LIDAR scans, location scout photos, video references and so on. When we get to techvis we take this even further; we use real dimensions for the sets, and for the equipment like cranes or motion-control,” he continues. “As it’s real-time, you can have a back and forth between the previs version of the shot and the techvis, with all changes auto-updating.” Everything that FPS does in Unreal sessions is
Top:Previs frame created in
Unreal Engine of Stormtroopers in Season 1 of Obi- Wan Kenobi. Image copyright Lucasfilm and courtesy of The Third Floor
tracked and recorded; the company is working on integration between Shotgun and Unreal to hone this. “You want to be able to refer to and act upon all the decisions the director takes during the sessions,” says Aupetit. As they are on a shared network, FPS and the
VFX supervisors at Framestore can keep up with each other’s progress. On Moon Knight, VFX supervisors could see previs environments evolve while VFX animation tests on creatures could be integrated into previs. Later, changes to the final model from VFX could be updated directly in the postvis to keep everything consistent. Neville Kidd ASC, cinematographer on many VFX-
heavy TV shows, uses previs for anything involving a virtual build and describes it as “a game-changer” for all departments in the way the shot is being thought
“If you know how everything is going to be structured, you don’t have to show up with an entire truck’s worth of redundant equipment”
of, and for budgets. “You don’t want to find out on the day that the shot physically won’t work because you can’t get the camera through a passageway. It’s also a great indicator of when a shot is too long, your angles are wrong, or when the story is not being told. Fixing that becomes very expensive and very time- consuming afterwards.” Kidd has lensed 16 episodes of Netflix’s The
Umbrella Academy, and “prevised it to within an inch of its life”. “Working with Spin FX for season two, we had ten shots to join together into one big seamless sequence,” he explains. “Previs was absolutely essential. We constantly fine-tuned it, so that it was an accurate representation of what was on the screen at the end of the day.” For season three, DigitalFilm Tree used previs tools
from Unity to build virtual sets, dropping in virtual camera models and rigs for the shots to be planned out in finer detail. “Even if you haven’t decided what your cameras are [before previs], it just takes the click of a few buttons in software to change from ‘shooting’ on an Alexa 65 to shooting on an Arri LF,” Kidd says.
VIRTUAL VOLUMES Previs can be “incredibly useful” in helping decide how you’re going to shoot things in advance, especially when virtual production could be in the mix, says Kidd: “You realise very quickly what needs to be shot for real in camera, what needs to be shot on green screen or blue screen, and then what needs to be shot within a LED volume. That’s all super helpful at the very early stage of production.” Using virtual production during previs, sees “the
process of post-production and content finalisation accelerated, saving time and ultimately money”, according to Sebastian Leske, Product Manager, Cinema, XDCAM, Virtual Production, Sony Europe. “Colour matching and accuracy can be done between the scene elements, the LED Walls and the cameras, especially when using the Sony Venice with Sony CLEDs. This reduces the heavy lifting in colour matching and compensation normally done in post.”
Spring 2023
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