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”

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2019.08.19Takayuki Oguchi

CG representation of the sea

The sea surface was photographed in a huge tank (pool) measuring 75 x 30 x 3 meters built at an old airfield in Taichung City. However, since the distant scenery had to be drawn with CG, it was necessary to blend it well with the live-action waves. In the end, most scenes were replaced with CG. Therefore, R&H created a realistic sea surface by adding in-house developed tools to the standard Houdini effects tool.

However, there are two rainstorm scenes in this movie. This would require large-scale and complex fluid simulations, which could be beyond R&H's capacity alone as they were already busy developing animals.

Therefore, Westenhofer requested support from the Vancouver branch of MPC (Moving Pictures Company) . This is because when the company worked on `` Poseidon '' (2006), it obtained a license for the extremely advanced fluid simulation software Flowline from Scanline VFX, which had just expanded from Germany to Los Angeles at the time.

MPC was in charge of 110 cuts, which took 14 minutes, but the difficulty level was extremely high. As a result, for one very long cut, it took two years and thousands of retakes to get the OK.

*4 Houdini is also a product developed by SideFX (Side Effects Software), a company founded by former Omnibus/Able staff.

Stereoscopic effect

As the film neared completion, the staff worked on ways to make the 3D expression more effective. For example, retouching a sea surface photographed by a tank. When shooting in stereo using two cameras, the highlights of the light appear differently on the right and left screens, impeding stereoscopic viewing. Since this phenomenon tends to occur at wave crests, R&H had to correct everything.

Also, in the scene where a school of flying fish appears, the aspect ratio changes from normal Vista size to Cinemasco size. Here, the bonito chasing the flying fish protrudes from the frame, creating the illusion that it is jumping out of the screen. Director Lee seems to like playing with aspect ratio, so he created a scene that looked like the cover illustration of the original book, and went out of his way to create a vertically elongated frame like the book.

I also really like the 3D effects, such as the scene where young Pi reads a comic about the mythical Bhagavata Purana and sees outer space in the mouth of Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu), and the scene where 120,000 candles were used to create a scene in India. festival. A number of impressive scenes were prepared, including noctilucent insects and luminous jellyfish spreading out on the sea surface at night, and whales suddenly appearing from the sea and jumping.

Lee's next films, ` `Billy Lynn '' (2016) and `` Gemini Man '' (2019), were also produced in 3D. Incidentally, Lee was the third recipient of the Harold Lloyd Award (*5), which honors individuals who have made significant contributions to the development of 3D movies.

*5 An award established in 2011 by the International 3D Society (I3DS), which was established in the United States in 2009. Other Harold Lloyd Award winners are 1st James Cameron, 2nd Martin Scorsese, 4th Jeffrey Katzenberg (Hidden Figures Animation), and 5th Victoria Alonso (Marvel Studios). , 6th Jon Favreau, 7th Darla K. Anderson (Pixar Animation Studios), 8th Christopher McQuarrie. The association changed its name to the Advanced Imaging Society (AIS) in 2015.

Tragedy after the movie was completed

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