Luma Pictures: Monsters Galore
The magicians at Luma Pictures are in the business of conjuring the creatures of legend, fantasy, and nightmare. Using Shake, Maya, and Power Mac G5s, the Los Angeles special effects company has animated monsters and mechanized terrors for “The Cave,” “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” and “Underworld: Evolution.” They’ve also woven subtle effects into “Crash,” “Into the Blue,” “A Lot Like Love,” and “Human Stain.” Though they traditionally work with ultra-high resolution digital film scans, they’ve recently begun shaping high-definition shots — creating full digital backgrounds, animations, and effects for “Sky Captain” and other high-definition feature films.
”Right now we’re really set up to handle film or high definition,” says Chris Sage, vice president of Luma Pictures. “For us, HD is actually a step down. It’s an 8-bit color space where film is a 10-bit color space. HD is compressed, so it runs a lot faster on our machines. In the end, we’ll be able to get a lot done with HD because it has a real advantage in speed and flexibility over film.”
“It’s really fewer than two people running the whole facility for 50 artists. And we could scale up, add another 25 to 40 people without needing any more administrative help. That’s really important to us. We’re a small company and we need to be agile.”
Creature Comforts
Founded by a group of experienced matte painters, editors, and special effects masters, Luma Pictures has been in the monster and moviemaking business for about three years. “The company was founded by artists and the people who we’ve hired since are artists,” says visual effects producer Steven Swanson. “We’re an artist-run company through and through.”
The studio now has 45 resident artists and another eight full-time employees who handle company operations. Each artist is equipped with his or her own Power Mac G5 and has access to a massive Xserve render farm. “We’re all Mac,” says system administrator Brent Hensarling. “We’ve got about 50 Xserves, 61 render nodes, and 12 terabytes of Xserve storage space.”
The artists use Shake for compositing and rotoscoping and Maya and Mental Ray for generating 3D effects and motion graphics. Typically, the team juggles huge 10-bit Cineon files and multimillion polygon graphics that require substantial computing horsepower.
“The promise of the G5’s 64-bit processors really drew us to Apple and the Power Mac,” says Sage. “When you’re looking at multimillion polygon renders, 64-bit means a lot. It means you’re able to load huge amounts of geometry and image texture into RAM.” Additionally, the team can crunch graphics on unused workstations, considerably decreasing render times.
Just two staff members wrangle the powerful Luma Pictures render farm. “We have two system administrators, but one of them spends about 20 percent of his time working on shots and animation,” says Swanson. “It’s really fewer than two people running the whole facility for 50 artists. And we could scale up, add another 25 to 40 people without needing any more administrative help. That’s really important to us. We’re a small company and we need to be agile. We can’t have an army of programmers and system administration people.”
Crafting Effects
You may not always notice them, but special effects turn up in almost every movie, even romantic comedies. Luma Pictures began by integrating seamless effects into movies and commercials — adding fire, rain, snow, and even skies to scenes in movies like “A Lot Like Love,” “Crash,” and “Human Stain.”
