THE V I SUAL I SERS | FEATURE
IMAGES Previs for The Bells episode of GoT Season 8 (left); TTF mapped out selected shots for It Chapter Two, mostly in the third act (above)
Within our systems we have every piece of kit you can imagine, from Technocranes and wire cameras to dollys and lens packages th
effective and it not only saved us a lot of time but was also extremely inspiring.” NEW SKILL SETS Webster from TTF likes to describe the skills of these new visualisers generally as a mixture of creativity and technology. “Most of our guys come from an animation background, rarely do they come specifically from a VFX background as you might assume. They are people who have experience in narrative storytelling, they probably understand more about the filmmaking process coming from editorial backgrounds, and they also understand cinematography. So it’s more about working with directors and understanding
impressed. “This new way of working was introduced by our brilliant production designer Deborah Riley,” says Freeman. “She had seen this type of work before and was very inspired by it, so suggested that we tried it for Season 8. I had a couple of critical scenes that required set extensions and set recreations, and with this technique myself and Dan and David (DB Weiss and David Benioff, the directors of the finale) were able to step in to a virtual set before it was even built. “Working virtually in this way allowed the directors and cinematographers to literally walk in to existing space in virtual reality. So we could walk around in this virtual space and then take screenshots as storyboards that we’d eventually use to implement our previs. But it also allowed us to suggest changes in the design of the set, such as to extend a wall or push a wall back or structurally change things to make the shot better; that works for practical set building and VFX set design extension. The system allowed us to be very specific
in the design of the sets and also provided us a great opportunity to imagine what a sequence would look like. “Normally what you get are blueprints and elevations, maybe some concept art, which are there to inspire you to figure out what your shots are. Then you use a storyboard artist and get it ‘kind of’ right. But in the end it would never be exactly the same. Now, with the VR, you can essentially create a photo-board which can eliminate the need for a storyboard. Storyboarding can take anywhere from three to six weeks and in some cases we were able to skip this process using VR. Also the VR had a direct link to the previs tools so it made it much quicker for the previs to be put together. They had references or markers in the model that had camera information, so that every single shot that we photo-boarded, for example, would have been recorded in the previs. You could then recreate the shot within half the time and then continue with the animation. It was really, really
their vision, then translating that cinematically and editorially into a basic layout for the film.”
The visualisers can also be brought on to the production in the early discovery phase when plans for the movie or TV series are scarce or not entirely fleshed out. “When they come to us early on
JANUARY 2020 | DEF I N I T ION 57
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