Prolost

The Orphanage

Spirit Press: VFX World

Over a year ago I wrote The Film Industry is Broken, about how the increasing importance of both visual effects and digital color grading means that some of a film's most important visual decisions are being made blindly. I proposed that tools were needed to communicate complex color corrections between DI (Digital Intermediate) houses and visual effects facilities, and that the best-case scenario would be to integrate visual effects and DI so that the two processes could collaborate and evolve apace, throughout not only a film's post-production but also its production and pre-production.

I wrote that about a week before embarking on the adventure of The Spirit, a film on which I would get to put every one of those ideas to the test. We created, within The Orphanage's San Francisco offices, a secure mission-control for all the visual effects work on The Spirit. Based around a Nucoda Film Master grading station, “The Bunker,” as it came to be called, was where we performed the DI over the course of six months of visual effects shot production divided among ten facilities spanning the globe, integrating visual effects shot review and color correction into one seamless process. At all times, all participants had accurate and up-to-date color information about every one of their shots.

You can read a detailed article about this at VFX World. Here's an excerpt:

"As we were reviewing the shots, we were viewing them in the context of the ever-evolving cut of the movie. We'd get EDLs passed up from creative editorial in L.A. and we would stay in sync with the current cut. Every submission from every vendor would get dropped into a full 2K timeline that was being color-graded on the fly. In that sense, we merged the DI process and the visual effects shot review process into one, as opposed to the traditional, and painful way of doing it, which is that you final all your visual effects shots and then you go into the DI. This was the ultimate win/win of post. We not only achieved a huge amount of efficiently, which enabled us to do 1,900 shots on a budget in six months but it was the right thing to do creatively for the film. The look of the film is so significant, and we weren't making decisions blind. The Bunker's technology backbone is such that we can pre-color correct a shot and compact that correction into a look-up table (LUT) which we can share with the vendor. The vendor can bake that color correction into their QuickTime dailies that we review using cineSync software, but then they can deliver the shot to us uncorrected and we can reapply that correction in the DI so we have the ultimate flexibility to change it if we want to. But we also have a trust relationship with the vendor and they know that the way we have been looking at the shot the whole time is a faithful representation of what it's going to be."

Read the whole article here. It's mighty good—and yet there's more to it that I hope to blog on soon. See, the process of tying visual effects review and DI together turned out so much better than I'd dreamed it could, and it taught me some very important things about what matters in effects work. Stay tuned!

The Orphanage Brings VFX And DI Processes Together With Film Master

Straight-up press release for now, more thoughts and analysis of how this relates to prior musings later.

Top visual effects studio The Orphanage has purchased its Film Master finishing system to extend its creative and workflow management services to include DI and colour grading.

With Film Master, The Orphanage is able to harness artistic talent more efficiently and eliminate re-work across the VFX and DI processes for both film and commercial work.

The upcoming Frank Miller film The Spirit, shot with the Panavision Genesis camera, is the studio’s first project that leverages the Film Master. The Orphanage is the lead VFX studio on the film, managing the creation of effects by a number of facilities, and will also perform the final DI/colour grade. On the VFX side, the Film Master is the central repository where all of the VFX work comes together. The system is located in The Orphanage’s San Francisco studio, where it is implemented on the studio’s SAN and has access to all VFX assets for real-time playback and manipulation.

Stu Maschwitz, Co-founder, VFX Supervisor and Director at The Orphanage, said, “If a vendor gives me a shot that’s 99% there, rather than send it back and ask them to perfect the color, I can do that work immediately and potentially have a final shot instead of needing another iteration. Because that shot can then be used in the DI as is, because we’re using Film Master for both processes, it also solves that huge frustration of having VFX artists slave over the look of a shot only to have it re-created again in DI.”

With its comprehensive grading and conforming toolset and modular control panels, Film Master fit The Orphanage’s need for a full, high-end system. Maschwitz said, “We evaluated a number of systems looking for the best combination of a software system with a hardware interface, and an approach that was familiar and comfortable for high-end colorists. Every time I looked under the hood of Film Master I liked what I saw. The way the tools work, the order they’re presented in, how they interact with the panels – it’s all incredibly well thought out.”

Simon Cuff, Digital Vision President and COO, said, “The Orphanage’s implementation of Film Master pulls together two highly creative processes—VFX creation and DI—which are typically serial, and combines them to enhance the creative elements and increase final quality. Film Master offers the most complete set of conform, grading, finishing and image enhancement tools that make it an ideal platform for the converging VFX/DI workflow.”