The Making Of 2012 Interview Part 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aPNcUJuiLYendofvid

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Can you tell us about working digitally and the pipeline that you developed for 2012?

Engel: Our movie 2012 came along and was fully digital and this was the first time Roland Emmerich ever worked on a fully digital movie, previously he shot on film. Dean Semler being our DP loves to work with our genesis camera. Starting from that, we embraced it from the get go, we only worked digitally for the last ten years and haven’t touched film since. On a movie of this scale the flexibility that it gave us was just amazing. There was a huge service set up at Sony so that we could produce on this project.

Weigert: We wanted to introduce an entirely digitally automated pipeline. We did this together with Sony Pictures; we built a 400-terabyte server that would store every digital frame that was ever shot. We would have automated tools that would convert the EDLs that editorial would send over, even if it was just a single shot. Or even if it was a sequence of a hundred and twelve shots it would immediately convert it into a XML format and send it over to that server and that sever would pull all those frames send them over to us and rename them based on our visual effects and conventions and pop them into the folder. It would notify us and the artists working on it that the shot is now there. That process would be literally two to three minutes. While if you did that with 35 ml you would have to pull the negative, clean it and scan it. Instead you send the drive over and rename it you put it in your folder.

Engel: All of a sudden Roland says ’I need a change eight more frames on this shot.’

Weigert: It literally would just take a minute, to get those eight frames in. The compositor would get them in front and could extend it. That was a very powerful tool and we always tried to do a lot of automated tools to take the stupid work away from the artist. To let the artist really do what they do best which is making the shots or elements within the shot. It was also good for us because at the very end when you do a backup of these things or when we need to find making of stuff then we know exactly where it is because it is in our database through the whole process and it’s all correctly named. It’s very easy to find stuff and that helped alot.

Engel: Sometimes when you work with so many companies and each company has its own way of working. It’s not so easy to get all this together and make it work together especially when we are the hub and everything goes through us. Eventually you have to make a system that makes files named the right way otherwise it’s being sent back.

Weigert: We built software tools for that too that would work on Linux, Mac and PC. That we would give to every single company out there and they would run it. They would do a first run it through the tool and the tool would first check everything. Is the naming correct and so on and then send it over to us. Our system would ingest it and immediately send it over to the playback system. There was as little human interaction as possible on this because it is stupid work and if you could to have a computer do it then why not?

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The Making Of 2012 Interview Part 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyPy-a7HrnEendofvid


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Engel: My favorite example is of the limo driving away from us in a residential neighbor hood it’s also in the trailer; it’s a very quick cut in the trailer though. There is so much stuff going on in just the logistics of that; to look for a mile into the distance and see things shaking and crumble. Just to rig that as a miniature you would have to lay so many parts and composite it together. The triggering of say five hundred events that all have to work at hundred percent would be logistically impossible.

Weigert: The same thing in practical effects not just miniatures. They have the same limitations on set if you shoot something. We had that problem we wanted to shoot some real cars and have a few shots where the freeway starts crumbling and cars are tumbling out. We have the parking garage on the right side that crumbles too and cars are tumbling out. We said hey it would be great to have some real cars falling out too. We worked with Mike Vezina on that the special effects supervisor on that and did some tests. It turned out we could only use very little and do very little because it’s so specific because when that parking garage crumble the cars have to tumble out in a very specific angle. You can drop cars from a crane and have cars swirl through the picture but just to have it at it the exact right angle is a huge set up. If you think about how much it costs to have a second unit team shoot this and get maybe two or three takes a day and you’re destroying two or three cars a day with that, after a while it just isn’t worth while anymore. We know we are going to have to build the cars anyway in CG, we say "let’s just do them all in CG."

Engel: It is a little bit of a mix, in the parking garage sequence there is a real car falling and smashing and one is tumbling over. At the same time the practical effects came in handy for everything where we had to interaction with the actors. That’s when Mike Vezina set up this big rig shaky floor that was six thousand square feet, so that the actors did not have to act like they were on a plate form that was wobbling. Wavy motion like a real earthquake was set up. When they went running from out of the house, the house was crumbling behind them, which was all CG, but they were literally running on this floor and getting into the limousine as the floor was shaking. Roland said as a mandate from the beginning "we can’t do like in the old Star Trek movies where they do the Shatner, where they hold on and act. As if the Enterprise is doing something like this". Roland said "No, the actors have to have the fear on their face and it has to be real." That is why that whole floor was built; which proved to have additional challenges for us later in post, like tracking.

Is it cheaper to make a movie of this scale today with the current developments in the software?

Engel: I recently had a discussion with somebody about that. It’s very fascinating that it is absolutely true that that is happening. The question that came up was can you do things cheaper with the software but at the same time while that is happening where the cost goes down the expectations go up. What you have to deliver with this movie it somewhere evens out. You are always on the same track with what you actually have to show and do.

Weigert: Good point because after every project we think the next one is going to be so much easier because now we know how to do it. Then there is a whole new set of challenges because now everybody knows how to do it. We say we want to do something that nobody has seen before. You now are at the same point you were at two years ago, where you have to reinvent something new. Stretch the computing power and software to its absolute limits. If you look at any sequence in this movie there were horrendous render times. Horrendous simulation time and new software development time.

Engel: There was a nice little statistic we did about computing time. It took days to render the early sequence of the earthquake. If we would render that on a single machine it would be sixteen years to actually do that.

Weigert: If you think back, doubling up every eighteen months, wasn’t that long ago but eighteen years ago according to Moore’s law this would have been double that! It would have been thirty-two years and so on. You can think about how long this would have taken just ten years ago. It wouldn’t have been possible at all. A lot of the scenes we have done here wouldn’t have been possible five years ago.

Engel: There were some new developments that were just happening when we were making the movie like Thinking Particles from Cebas, which we actually implemented. We actually worked with a company that built a plug in for 3D studio max. We said we need it earlier than you guys will have it finished. We actually made a deal with the company to hire additional programmers and whatever it takes to get it done early. Then they can use it for their official version. We have it to use on our movie, which nobody else had at that point.

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