Glancing through the FRAMES schedule one session that held the most promise was the one on Making of an SFX movie. A line up that included the likes of Colin Brown, George Merkert, Tim Mc Govern, Sai Prasad and Devendra Mishra sent one’s expectations sky rocketing. Did the session match expectations? It did, but for the shortage of time.
The session began with an especially created showreel that introduced the speakers to the audience. Taking to the dias first was VES Co Chair Tim Mc Govern who came prepared with a wonderful presentation on the 103 yr old history of SFX. Taking the audiences 100 years into the past Tim displayed footage from early Hollywood films that used IN CAMERA FX, coming gradually to optical printers which came about in the 1930s to VFX in the mid 80’s.
Said Tim,” In the beginning all of Hollywood FX used to resemble video games. It took a long time to get breakthrough in software and come up with things like Anti Aliasing, Texturing and Chrome. And the VFX industry owes a lot to the US defense department and the cold war due to which the Government put in a lot of funds to help develop faster processors and computing power. Another breakthrough was the ability to compute on more than one processor simultaneously”
Next to take the dias was Cinesite Chairman Colin Brown who was knighted by Devendra Mishra as ‘Sir’ Colin Brown. Colin who’s company Cinesite has worked on the FX for all the Harry Potter movies presented a splendid case study on the FX in King Arthur. Explaining the processes such as Pre Planning, Pre Visual and Pre Production, Colin presented the famous Ice Lake Battle scene from the film. The amazing 5 minute sequence which has a battle waged on a frozen lake, has underwater camera shots showing the footsteps of the warriors and took Cinesite 6 months to complete. At the end of the session ‘Sir’ Colin Brown played a clip from Harry Potter and urged the overwhelmed audience that,”You should be doing the same stuff in India”
George Merkert stressed on the importance of managing FX production pipelines, which according to most of the international experts was the difference between Hollywood and Bollywood. Of course the budgets are quite disparate too.
Prasad group Director Sai Prasad then elaborated on Digital Intermediate and how DI was changing the way FX were executed. “The future” said Sai,”belongs to DI and soon every producer will include DI in his budgeting”
Prasad Labs chief colorist Ken Metzker then did a short case study on Kisna and the way color was managed in the DI shot by shot.
An extremely interesting session, the masterclass on making of an SFX movie had the audience wishing for more.
