Bryan Rowland, Doug Stewart & Kelly Peterson: Shake Performs a Miracle
They had 90 visual effects shots to finish in 4K resolution in 65 days — and no facilities to do it in. Nevertheless, thanks to their ingenuity and talent, effects team leads Bryan Rowland, Doug Stewart, and Kelly Peterson — with the help of Power Mac G5s running Shake — managed to do it.
The effects were for “Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration,” a new feature film on the life of Joseph Smith. One of the most charismatic and influential religious figures in American history, Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons.
“The LDS church has a motion picture studio here in Utah, but an official visual effects group didn’t really exist until the Joseph Smith film,” Rowland says. “Initially, when the studio found out it would cost a quarter of a million dollars just for someone else to look at them, we were asked to create just nine effects shots. But the whole thing fell in our laps when the directors saw our work.”
“The miracle is that we had to bring in people who had never touched Shake in their lives, teach them how to use it, and work them into our pipeline.”
No Room at the Lot
With no room for a visual effects suite at the movie lot, Rowland and Stewart decided to create makeshift headquarters in a ’60s-style house at the edge of the studio lot. It had no phones, no internet, no heat, and limited electrical service.
Rowland says that, right away, he, Stewart, and Peterson “set up these little ragtag desks and started getting the phone lines hooked up. We hooked up 10 G5s to a gigabit router and set up an Xserve RAID on a G4.”
“We didn’t have Xsan,” adds Stewart, who suddenly found himself in the role of network administrator as well as that of senior compositor. “It would have been a lot easier if we had it, because we were doing everything at 4K resolution when most films are done at 2K.
“You need a big pipeline to make 4K work smoothly,” he explains. “We ended up pushing more than 30 terabytes of data. We were hoping to have Xsan’s fiber connection to increase our speeds when we worked with such high resolution, but we’re in the process of getting it now.”
Up and Running
For some of the effects, the team integrated shots of a miniature jail and temple into live action plates. In other cases, they created CG smoke in LightWave and incorporated it into the film.
“The film opens with a paddleboat traveling up the Mississippi,” Stewart explains. “But there wasn’t any smoke, because the steamboat used in the film is diesel powered. We integrated CG smoke, and we removed buoys from the river and antennas from shorelines to make the scene authentic to Joseph Smith’s era.”
The miracle, says Rowland, isn’t that he, Stewart, and Peterson were able to create 90 effects shots in 65 days. “The miracle is that we had to bring in people who had never touched Shake in their lives, teach them how to use it, and work them into our pipeline,” he says.
Lead Artist, New Tools
Even lead artist Peterson had to learn Shake. A veteran with 16 years working in visual effects, Peterson trained as a traditional physical effects artist. And he had spent most of his time on a film set.
Bryan Rowland and the VFX shot list for “Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration.”
Since he was working on more complicated shots for the Joseph Smith film, Peterson had to learn the new interface on a shot-by-shot basis.
