SANM 560 - Week 8

While we finally had all our assets in the project and it got uploaded in time, preload day was a bit rocky to start. Our fps started at a whopping 14 and so we had to get to work deleting things. We deleted geometry in the back that couldn't be seen, deleted about half of our lights. Got rid of meshes that had overlapping transparencies, which was pretty much all the ivy. We significantly reduced the resolution of a lot of textures and various other little things here and there. This was mainly headed by Danci and I, with assistance from Imaz, Luis, and Birdie. We had our last final push getting rid of the shadows from some of the lights that were purely fill. From then on it ran pretty smoothly, only dipping with quick movements towards the door. Seeing the actual scene all completed for the first time as well as the physical set from production design was truly amazing. While we were both setting up it was easy to go in and move around pieces of rubble, delete foliage that stood in the way of the camera. And generally little fixes here to really refine the look of the piece. With the physically set we were also able to match some of the materials more accurately. Saving the materials crashed the file every time (which shouldn't have happened according to the Stage Technicians) so we ended up disconnecting the project file from the XR stage and made changes locally instead of uploading it every time to the multi-server that projected it on the wall. As physical lighting was starting to be put on the set, we realized we needed the scene to be a lot warmer and we need to include the warm tungsten lights that were on the physical set to spill into the virtual scene. This really really helped the two scenes merge and at some points I would be looking through the camera and couldn't tell what was a real and what was CGI. While we were setting everything up the CEO of Ferarri came through as well as our mentor Eve Roth, who was gracious enough to do portfolio reviews, give a talk about her journey and job which very much spoke to me and take a look at our project and see where we can improve. For shoot day I was Script Supervisor alongside Carlos. I printed off a chart for me to keep track of scene and take number, shot duration, file name, time stamps, and anything that changed take to take. While I had an idea what I had to do for the job I also discussed with Joao and Pranav on what information would be useful for them in editing and added that in too. We had a lot of last-minute lighting changes and we had to make sure any changes we made didn't stand out too much as missing from other scenes. I was able to talk with the brain bar and communicate to the live action team what was happening and point out discrepancies from an outside viewer. Eve Roth was extremely helpful in all of this as well, teaching us how to use color grading volumes and various techniques to help everything run smoothly. While I would have liked to be part of the brain bar more, there was already a lot of people up there and felt adding another person would be unhelpful to the team, and since I had another job it would have been hard to do both. Whenever I found inconsistencies between takes I would mention it to Carlos for clarification and then bring it to Nate, Weston, Todd, or Amber's attention to see if it was cause for concern. The only major inconsistency we found was our main wide master shot which by the weekend we decided to reshoot on Monay. Surprisingly everything went smoothly as it can for a production like this. The Vice President of Disney Imagineering stopped by and said that they were very impressed. The Dean of Film and Television, D.W. Moffat as well as the Chair of Visual Effects, Grey Marshall, stopped by. We also got approved to have the set up there for SCAD Day and we later found out that both Atlanta and Savannah campuses requested to have a miniature model of the set made by production design. It has truly been an honor to work on this project, and I am so excited to see where it goes!