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why we make films. Beyond that we are risk takers and are enamoured with new technology and love to experiment with it, to see if there are new ways to apply it in our storytelling. And after all that, if it can inspire others, open them up to new ways to tell their stories, even better! Yes, the technology continues to evolve; it is constantly being pushed by its developers and users to get better, more efficient, easier to use. And as it matures, and competition and demand for the technology grow, the prices and availability come down. The catch is that regardless, we are always dreaming up new problems to solve, so it’s not like we will ever fully arrive. Def Could you please explain the real-time aspect to this production? Where does the real-time processing appear and what is the significance of it? CH: A lot of this has already been covered in earlier answers, at least in how real time is significant. In short, it’s faster, allowing for fewer people to complete the work in less time while at the same time allowing for greater creative exploration. That might sound like magic but don’t forget that at the core it’s still dependent on the hands of highly skilled artists! In terms of where it’s used in the production process: it’s used as much as possible and throughout the entirety of production. We make a conscious effort to get things into the engine as soon as we can.
difference is that we could replay our favourite performance over and over again, perfecting and trying different cameras until we found the one we liked! Finally, these recorded cameras and performances were run out as video clips and sent to our editorial department to edit the film with Neill. Once he had a cut he was happy with we recreated this edit in Unity’s Timeline feature… and from that point on we were pretty much solely in engine and any subsequent changes to it were handled in it directly. Def: Are we looking at the first live-action digital movie? As Toy Story was one of the first digital animation movies. What is the end goal here and will the technology become easier and cheaper to use? CH: Haha, not even sure what a ‘live action digital movie’ is. I wouldn’t say so. If we are classifying it as a largely performance captured digital movie rendered in CG then possibly something like Polar Express might be a better candidate for being called the first. But of course, that was something entirely different than what we are doing here. Polar Express is at the end of the day a flattened video. This project lives in a real-time engine; at any time a viewer could open it up, pause it, move the camera around, make a change and then hit play again. Our end goal? Simply put we wanted to tell a story. I mean that’s
Def: Could you also explain some of your co-development with Unity for the project and how that is evolving? Like Alembic streams, for example. CH: Internally we didn’t actually do a tremendous amount of development, but we surely did push Unity to advance and focus theirs. Alembic is one obvious example. It was a crucial tool in allowing our artists to work in familiar ways and enable us to get that data into the engine. Throughout the project we pushed to get new features into the Alembic streaming tool and provided a lot of feedback for future development. We also spent a lot of time using their new SSS shaders (sub-surface scattering) and again through the testing and file exchange back and forth I think they learned a lot about where they could/should take it. We honestly didn’t get much ‘custom’ code for our ADAM projects, it’s mostly just off the shelf. However, even without a lot of custom dev, I think this sort of collaboration is essential for any kind of software development. It’s one thing to code away on the tools and quite another to get a close look at them in production. Just the other day I was told by someone at Unity how much the ADAM project had affected future development on various film related features within the software. Def: How did you go about digitally recreating human beings for the production? CH: With a lot of hard work. Seriously, digital humans are hard. But
ABOVE Director and writer Neill Blomkamp is creating a new way of filmmaking.
BELOW Creating digital humans and their faces is notoriously difficult.
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