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CAMERA MOVEMENT FEATURE
MAKING ECHO Creating Victor Perez’s dreamlike vision of a young woman caught in a time warp required the latest tech
Echo is a short film written and directed by Victor Perez, a renowned Spanish film director. When he decided he wanted to embark on this project, the only problem was the special film effects that would be required to achieve ‘a mirror reflection that is ahead in time’ to the audience. The film follows a girl who wakes up in the middle of nowhere to see in a mirror her reflection ten seconds ahead of her time. When she wakes up again the nightmare has just started over. different countries) as well as working on the effects himself. The short was filmed using motion control at Stockholm-based Stiller Studios, where the team did extensive research and development to come up with a groundbreaking approach for the film. Echo features a pioneering motion control technology developed at Stiller Studios by Tomas Tjernberg and Tomas Wall – synchronising for the first time two motion control rigs: the massive and pixel-accurate Cyclops and the fast Bolt, both manufactured by Mark Roberts Motion. The synchronisation algorithm allowed the filmmakers to tell this story in a very specific way: just five long takes. All takes Victor Perez supervised the visual effects team (located in more than 12
from both motion control rigs were shot contemporaneously to create the effect of a virtual mirror. Once the sync was pitch perfect Stiller Studios worked closely with Victor Perez to accomplish the highest challenge: a reflection in the mirror out of sync in relation with the hero camera, and vari-speed to alter the time within the reflected image but always maintaining the angle of reflection in relation to the main camera. Stiller Studios bought a state-of-the-art motion control technology featuring a 3D virtual representation of their real sound stage. This allowed the filmmakers to design a choreography with the actress to match the virtual world to the real one and vice versa, with visual feedback in real time. The shot was achieved by mounting one RED EPIC DRAGON camera on the in-house Bolt Motion Control rig and one RED EPIC DRAGON camera on the in-house Cyclops motion control rig. The Cyclops was driving the main spectator camera that the audience experiences the film through, and the Bolt was serving as a slave, projecting what the spectators see in the mirror reflection, shooting the exact same move as the Cyclops but flipping around the face of the virtual mirror and shooting on a
dynamic frame rate to be able to look back in time or ahead of time. A special plug-in was developed for Autodesk Maya to be able to pre-visualise the time differences that were needed with absolute precision and export the results to Flair. This allowed for a pre-visualised controlled dynamic frame rate for both the camera movement and the camera, with each frame captured in-camera triggered from Flair. The Bolt footage in the mirror could then be speeded up and moved ahead in time, then played in real time – giving the effect that the mirror shot was taking place in the future but still having the matching camera movement compared to the footage from the Cyclops. Tomas Wall of Stiller Studios: “This meant we could give the director the opportunity to capture the scene in one single take, and at the same time give post-production camera moves aligned to start working on without the need to do camera tracking, plate stitching or time-warping. Fully understanding the workflow and pipeline was essential for this project, as it was the first time it would be used in production. The guys at Stiller approached Victor Perez to try the technology out as he has a very solid and strong experience in VFX, but also is a great director and script writer.”
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MARCH 2018 DEFINITION
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