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world with Profile studio (now Method studios). “I had a hard time articulating, saying for instance that I needed a hard light over here and a really diffused fill light over here. It took a bit of translating to get on the same page, so what they very graciously did was to talk with our electrical department and get photometric data from most of our lighting package, which they then input into their system. Ryan, the lighting designer (at Method) then created an iPad app for me so I could sit in the video game room with them and turned dials in the app to move the position of the sun, raise and lower it, change the intensity and quality of it, including the colour. “So everything was at my fingertips in terms of designing the lighting in each of sets – it was supremely helpful in communicating how we wanted it to look. In effect, they matched their library of lighting tools to our physical sources. As in most things that Bob does, the whole process is kind of groundbreaking while being quite expensive at the same time.” Kim talks about how symbiotic the relationship was between the physical set and the VFX department during the production of the film, which in his experience isn’t usual. “The disconnect between the two departments is entirely unnecessary as everyone is marching towards the same goal. But on this movie, Kevin Baillie, the VFX supervisor who is now a really good friend of mine, was such a great motivator and has such a great understanding of the physical filmmaking side of things that our conversations were much easier than they usually are between myself and VFX supervisors.” INFRARED BLOCK Kim had never experienced motion capture, but this was no normal capture: “In a way
it was like we invaded the sanctity of the motion capture space – they had a space that was roughly a 60 by 40 by 30 feet cuboid space, which was rigged with 30 or 40 motion capture cameras. We then surrounded that volume with bluescreen and blacks so we could use blue when we needed to and black when we needed to. The first thing we discovered we had to adapt to was that the motion capture cameras were infrared sensitive, which is how they get their information from the tracking marks. But anytime we turned on too much lighting trying to physically light the actors, our lights would emit so much infrared information that it would overcome the motion captions cameras. “So, in many ways we had to adapt our lighting methodology to reduce the amount of infrared and still achieve the design we were hoping for. It took a little doing, but with a little bit of give and take we got it done. The other big difference was that we wanted to shoot the faces with our cameras how we normally would with a Technocrane, for instance, so the art department gave us some rudimentary wireframe set decoration shapes for doorframes and stuff like that for our
ABOVE Steve Carell and his miniature co-stars spend time in a world where fantasy and reality collide...
46 The number of minutes of doll VFX in the movie 60 Number of days the doll alter egos were in the mocap studios
26 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 20 1 9
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