When we arrived at Imageworks, many of the tools we were used to at Digital Domain didn’t exist. We also brought Richard Kidd in as a digital effects supervisor to help as well. Rob knew he had to concentrate on What Lies Beneath he brought me along to help him, but then I could also focus on post production from part one of Cast Away. The majority of Cast Away part one was already photographed with Ken Ralston prior to Rob Legato and I coming to Imageworks, but no VFX had begun yet, and then there was pre-production happening on What Lies Beneath. What Lies Beneath went from pre-production through production and partial post during that time, then the production crew moved back onto Cast Away part two. So that was what happened: the production shifted from Cast Away to filming What Lies Beneath with Bob Zemeckis and the same crew, same DP, same everyone pretty much, while giving Tom the time to lose weight. To do that they asked, ‘How can we shoot the film and give Tom Hanks time to lose all this weight?’ So they thought, ‘What if we keep the film crew together and make another movie in between, and then we’ll transition right back onto Cast Away after Tom has slimmed down?’ Tom’s body had to dramatically change for the second part. After being stranded on an island for four years, naturally his physique was that of a different person. The interesting part of Cast Away is the transition of Tom Hanks’ physical appearance. And although Nuke mirrored much of Flame’s toolset (since it was designed to supplement Flame)–it also lacked interactivity and speed.ĭual films: Cast Away and What Lies Beneath Flame was the only tool of its kind that existed (outside of Nuke at Digital Domain) with its capabilities. Unless they were also Flame or Quantel artists, most compositors of the time did not know what they were missing–as they had very few compositing systems against which to compare its performance. Besides being extremely slow and clunky, it had a very limited toolset and did now allow a digital compositor to truly finesse a shot. Therefore, besides Cineon, most VFX facilities like Imageworks relied on Composer for feature film compositing.Īnd although Imageworks had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Composer licenses–and even more time and energy into internal plug-in and pipeline development, Composer just didn’t cut it. ![]() ![]() Flames were also very limited for film-work with only 8-bits of color fidelity (until a 12-bit option later), they didn’t allow for batch processing, and overall weren’t very ‘pipeline’ friendly. You’d be fortunate to have a few for a high-end project. And expensive Flame and Inferno systems were only available in very small quantities. In 1999, Shake’s toolset and especially its user-interface was still in its early infancy at Nothing Real, and had a long way to go to be a complete product. Therefore when I arrived at Imageworks, I had already been thinking about the next steps for a ‘node-based’ compositor for many years and how I would want to improve it and add to its overall functionality. It was clear that Nuke was long-in-the-tooth and needed a major upgrade. On Titanic, I literally broke Nuke on ‘TD35’ (the king of the world shot), having to composite it with numerous scripts and band-aid patches. We were putting the plan together for the architecture of what would be Nuke 3. While at DD just prior, I was working with Bill Spitzak and Jonathan Egstad on a major redo of Nuke–basically doing a ground-up rewrite of Nuke 2. Before BonsaiĬarey Villegas: After leaving Digital Domain in 1999 for Imageworks with Rob Legato, I put a team together to build the new compositor at Sony (Bonsai). We didn’t waste any time as we landed and then jumped on a hour-long speed boat ride to Monuriki Island!” says Villegas. “It was only a couple of hours off of our long flight from L.A. Carey Villegas (at left) and Bob Zemeckis in Fiji for part two of filming. Villegas was co-visual effects supervisor with Ken Ralston on Cast Away, and here he explains Bonsai’s history, the work of Suki Samra that kickstarted the compositor, how it was also part of What Lies Beneath, and what he says set Bonsai apart from other tools at the time. To find out more about this time in VFX compositing history, I asked Carey Villegas-who moved from Digital Domain to Imageworks to work on Cast Away and ultimately spearheaded the Bonsai project-to break down how the compositor came to be. Bonsai screenshot courtesy of Daniel Kramer.
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