The Remake of the Sequel to the Return of the Epic - Part XIV

I think it's fair to say I've been type-cast. I'm the guy who does the crowd and battle scenes in those big budget Hollywood epics that continually give you pause... to wonder why people keep making all these big budget Hollywood epics.

Well I'm here to tell you that yes, there are more on the way. I've just finished up on a moderate budget Hollywood-backed Chinese epic, The Curse of the Golden Flower (aka Autumn Remembrance or The City of Golden Armor) by Hero and House of Flying Daggers director Yimou Zhang - which looks like it might actually be a good film.

24,000 Words per Second

2005 was an eventful and productive year in which I was engaged full-time in doing whatever it took to not work on Poseidon. This involved, among its highlights, two scuba trips to Egypt, a burgeoning stand-up comedy career that saw me being punched in the head by an off-duty cop, and a rather unforseen - but by no means unfortunate - deportation to Malta. By this point I was running low on cash after the Swedish studio I'd been in talks with went belly-up, but finally Poseidon wrapped and I returned to MPC (the Moving Picture Company) in Soho, London, where I had previously been involved in creating visual effects for the Ridley Scott-directed 12th century crusade epic Kingdom of Heaven

Who Keeps Hiring Orlando Bloom?

To fulfil the requirements of that production, I was involved in both designing and coding a major re-development of the in-house crowd system which was first proven in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy - which I also worked on in the role of Crowd Simulation Technical Director. Revision 2 of the MPC crowd system, ALICE, has also been used on a number of other films, including: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman Begins, Alexander and Alien vs. Predator.

But you're here to see how I used it on KOH. Below are some examples:

[470kb Quicktime]	The Valley of Kerak For this sequence, where a small band of Christian riders take on a much larger number of Saracen cavalry, the challenge posed by director Ridley Scott was to form the Saracen riders in the shape of a Muslim crescent, yet still retain believable movement.
[590kb Quicktime]	see above
[2.3Mb Quicktime]	The Christian Army marches Here is a typical example of a bread and butter crowd shot where a small number of extras are shot in the foreground and a huge digital army streches into the distance.

And More Importantly, Why?

[2.1Mb Quicktime]	The Seige of Jerusalem There are about 30 real people in this shot surrounded by over 1,000 digital extras. This and the next shot are good examples of a crowd simulation technique whereby vignettes of pre-simulated action are interspersed with bespoke simulation to create the effect of realistic battleground chaos.
[2.6Mb Quicktime]	The Money Shot This was the biggest effects shot in the film. Or rather the biggest effects shot that wasn't in the film. Pretty much everything you see is CG. Tens of thousands of people, the siege machines, payloads, arrows, ladders, smoke, dust... To see what the shot looked like before £100,000 of VFX was added, click here [700kb Quicktime]

ESC Entertainment - The Matrix Revolutions

My previous assignment was in Alameda, California working with ESC Entertainment creating visual effects for the final film in the Matrix trilogy: Matrix Revolutions. I produced animation of huge swarms of "sentinels" in a large number of shots for one of the major effects sequences of the film using a custom MAYA-based flocking system. In order that dead sentinels would fall naturally and collide with their environment convincingly, I created a hybrid dynamic rig for the sentinel and incorporated the evaluation of this within the overall sentinel swarm pipeline.

[13Mb AVI]

The Hand of God and the Lunging Serpent This clip shows only a small number of the shots I worked on in the film, but is the largest contiguous sequence of my work, including some of the most complex shots created using the swarm toolset and the best examples of the dynamic death pipeline. In the first few shots (until the top-down) I am only responsible for the animation of the dead sentinels, but for the remainder of the sequence I produced all the sentinel animation.

Tokyo - Freelancing

I spent most of 2003 living in Tokyo, Japan, where among other things I did some freelance work for a company called EYEdentify Inc. completing a project for the national broadcaster, NHK, using non-photorealistic rendering techniques to create 3D animated versions of traditional Japanese wood block prints (hanga) as part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Tokyo becoming capital of Japan, and marking the Edo period in Japanese history. I performed a wide range of tasks including keyframe animation, dynamic simulation, MEL scripting, shader designing and rendering - all in Maya, as well as rendering in BMRT, and compositing in Shake.

[3Mb Quicktime]

NHK Special - Ukiyoe A short edit showing representative sections from three of the six approximately 30 second long shots I was primarily responsible for creating during this project.

WETA Digital - The Lord of the Rings

Prior to that I worked for three years at WETA Digital in Wellington, New Zealand as part of the team creating the award winning visual effects for the first two films in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. At WETA my role was much more specific, as a technical director in the MASSIVE department. During production this involved pre-visualising, choreographing and animating crowd, flock and battle scenes using the proprietary artificial intelligence-driven crowd animation package, MASSIVE. However I began at WETA in the early R&D stages of preproduction, and developed many techniques, core modules and hacks that remain central to the ongoing use of MASSIVE at WETA. In addition, I built custom animation/rigid-body puppets and brains for many of the MASSIVE agents that were used in all three Lord of the Rings films, and wrote programs and scripts to supplement MASSIVE functionality, and to streamline the production workflow.

As well as being heavily involved in pre-production, I worked on a total of over 50 shots in the two films. Below are a selection of quicktime movies from some of those shots, with brief descriptions of my involvement. Unless otherwise stated, it can be assumed that I was responsible for the crowd animation and secondary dynamics on all agents (cloth, hair, etc).

Fellowship of the Ring

The Last Alliance

The movie opens with a recounting of key historical events that pertain to the story, especially focussing on a battle between the alliance of elves and men, and the orcs of Mordor. Realising this battle on the big screen was the main focus of the MASSIVE department for the first film.

[1.8Mb Quicktime]	Foreground Orcs This is an entirely digital shot in which I was responsible for the animation of the orcs. Those standing on the hilltop in the foreground were motion-captured, and required motion editing and rigid-body dynamic simulation. There are around 10,000 MASSIVE-animated orcs below, charging to clash with around 40,000 elves and men which were animated by another TD.
[650kb Quicktime]	Background Combat In this and the following shot there is blue-screen studio footage of combatants in the very foreground, while I generated around 1000 MASSIVE elves, men and orcs fighting into the distance.
[680kb Quicktime]	see above

Spying Crows

As the Fellowship is paused on their journey, Legolas sees a large flock of crow spys approaching, so the Fellowship hide behind rocks as the crows cirlce. Then the crows return to their master, Saruman, to report what they saw. A small number of crow flap cycles and other actions were provided in the form of keyframe animation. Then I built a brain to make the crows behave realistically - both individually as birds, and collectively as a flock, using the keyframe clips in conjunction with procedural animation.

[4.1Mb Quicktime]	The Flock Approaches Around 500 birds fly into frame from behind camera. Their entrance is both sudden and chaotic to accentuate the surprise. They can be seen navigating to avoid colliding with each other.
[3Mb Quicktime]	The Flock Circles I built a feature into the brain of the crows to make them cirlce a virtual sound emitter, but still maintain overall realistic behaviour.
[6.5Mb Quicktime]	Reporting Back The first half of this shot was handled by another TD using a different approach. My crows fill the chamber at the tail of the shot.

The Two Towers

Battle of Helms Deep

The biggest battle of the second film is the defence of Helms Deep, an ancient fortress carved in stone. A large part of this sequence was created by the MASSIVE department, and I began work early in the process developing techniques for integrating custom motion captured vignettes with MASSIVE crowd simulations. For instance in the shots of ladders being raised against the castle wall, the characters directly interacting with the ladders were custom motion captured and edited, while every other character is an autonomous MASSIVE agent. Another advancement over the first film is in the rendering of MASSIVE agents which meant that especially in the low visibility conditions of Helms Deep we were able to use MASSIVE agents in the very foreground.

[3.1Mb Quicktime]	Marching Uruk-Hai This is a fully digital shot for which I was responsible for all animation. The general on the rock in the mid-ground was animated based on a motion capture clip of Sean Bean, who played Boromir in the first film. The marching Uruk-Hai are all MASSIVE agents, and the secondary dynamics (the banners, hair and skirts) were animated by rigid-body simulation, also in MASSIVE.
[2Mb Quicktime]	Raising Ladders In this and the following shot, as mentioned above, custom motion captured characters interact directly with the ladders, with an army of MASSIVE agents surrounding them, detecting them, and avoiding colliding with them, while performing according to direction. The castle is a studio filmed miniature.
[2.1Mb Quicktime]	see above
[1.2Mb Quicktime]	Bringing Down the Wall The physical effects department shot a miniature wall exploding. The army of MASSIVE agents is thrown back from the blast with a combination of procedural animation and dynamic simulation, and crushed by falling chunks of wall using the same combination of techniques.
[2.1Mb Quicktime]	Fighting on the Causeway At the top of the causeway, custom motion captured characters, motion edited by others, engage in a carefully choreographed fight, while MASSIVE characters attempt to join the fight, and fill out the background.
[4.4Mb Quicktime]	The King Rides The men on horses where shot on a full-sized partial set, while the army of Uruk-Hai is all created in MASSIVE, including those being mown down by the horsemen, which were the responsibilty of another TD.

Battle of Isengard

The other major battle sequence in the film was a very ambitious one, where an army of trees attacks the city of the wizard Saruman, fighting hordes of orcs and destroying and flooding the city. This sequence involved an elaborate combination of keyframed animation, motion capture, MASSIVE agents, and filmed characters.

[3.2Mb Quicktime]	Rampaging Trees The wizard over-looking the battle is the only live action element in this shot. The foreground trees are keyframed, while the orcs and the background trees are all animated by me in MASSIVE.
[3Mb Quicktime]	The Flooding of Isengard The fleeing orcs in this shot were animated with a combination of custom motion capture, and MASSIVE.