The hardships and tragedies of the VFX staff who won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in “The Life of Pi: 227 Days Away”

CG expressions of animals

R&H immediately began developing CG for the Bengal tiger. The film also features four real-life Bengal tigers, and they are only used in 14% of the scenes that do not involve people or other animals. Of these, R&H matched the CG texture, shape, and movement of the main character, ``King'' (named because of the ``king'' pattern on its forehead), and spent a year trying to improve the quality of both animals, even the caretakers. It has been thoroughly pushed to a level where it is impossible to tell.

Also, only 7 shots of the spotted hyena are real and the rest are CG. The orangutan and meerkat are fully CG. When the zebra was alive, it was CG, and when it died, it was a model created by Legacy Effects .

“Life of Pi: 227 Days Away” (C)2013 Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved.

R&H also works on whales, swarms of jellyfish and noctilucent insects, swimming sharks and dolphinfish, and flying fish (*3) that fly in large numbers. The standard AI software Massive was used to simulate a school of flying fish. At this time, flying fish behaved differently in the water and in the air, making control extremely complex. There was also the problem that when colliding with a boat at high speed, it would pierce through the hull. For this reason, simulation calculations are performed at 120fps, and devised steps are taken to reduce it to 24fps during rendering.

Massive is also used to represent up to 70,000 meerkats, some of which have been added with special movements using keyframe animation.

*3 The flying fish that cover the body of the main character, Pi (Suraj Sharma), are made of 150 rubber and silicone fish made by Legacy Effects, and the staff members throw them and hit them directly.

tiger vision

From the face of Richard Parker staring at the night sea, the perspective reaches the depths of the ocean where the Tzimtoum is sinking, a sperm whale fighting a giant squid splits into many other animals such as a hippopotamus, a giraffe, and a zebra, and an octopus and a monkfish unite. There is a long and beautiful scene in which a mysterious deep-sea fish attacks, and the glowing bubbles gather to form the face of the mother (Taboo), and a close-up of Pi's face is shown in one cut.

This scene was named ``Tiger Vision'' and was an important scene that implied that Richard Parker and Pi were one and the same. I was in charge of expressing abstract situations with beautiful images in films such as `` The matrix Reloaded '' (03), `` The matrix Revolutions '' (03), `` Enter the Void '' (09), and `` Avatar '' (09). It was a French company, BUF, which has a good reputation.

“Life of Pi: 227 Days Away” (C)2013 Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved.

However, the original storyboard for this scene was much longer and more complex, and the scene resembled a near-death experience that took Pi through his life all at once. It is thought that if they had made this as is, the budget would have increased significantly, so they cut it down to the limit and settled on a form that resembles a completed work.

CG representation of the sea