Soho VFX: Far Reaching Effects
Toronto-based Soho VFX had lobbied hard for the right to create Mr. Fantastic’s elastic effects for the movie “Fantastic 4.” But after a year of wringing squishy limbs through complex frames, the effects shop still worried that the character’s infinite reach might exceed its considerable grasp.
“These shots on ‘Fantastic 4’ were the most challenging we ever ran into,” says Soho VFX supervisor Allan Magled, in the same breath letting on that he would happily re-up for a sequel. And why not? In one of the summer’s most successful releases, a film that launched a thousand special effects shots, Soho’s iterations of Mr. Fantastic’s antics — composited exclusively on Power Mac G5s running Shake — stand out and stand apart.
“You’re always looking for something different and new, something that hasn’t been done, because almost everything’s been done,” says Magled. “Mr. Fantastic, with all that stretching — we’d never seen it before. So we went after it hard.”
Booming Boutique
In a work-share scenario typical of big effects movies, Soho was one of four main VFX shops from as many as a dozen pulled in at various times to create the sum total of scripted effects. And while its invitation to work on “Fantastic 4” came through a contact on a previous film (“Relationships are still everything in the film business,” says Magled), it was its unique creative and technological disposition that allowed Soho to deliver the goods.
“We’ve always wanted to be the facility where you could take a sequence of shots and know that it’s going to be perfect and delivered on time,” says Magled. “But we don’t ever want to be too big. We’d prefer to take on 150 shots, not 450.”
But even 150 shots could sink a small shop lacking sufficient technological bounce to amplify its resources. “We’re all about being able to make our way through whatever is thrown at us,” says Berj Bannayan, who manages Soho’s technical operations. “From my angle, that has always been about giving our artists and compositors the kind of custom tools they need to be creative.”
Beyond Compositing
One of Soho’s most flexible tools is Shake, which the company uses not only for compositing but to integrate its workflow. “Shake has a deeper pipeline here than you might think, because of scripting,” says Bannayan. “For F4 we built custom tools on top of Shake’s scripting language to prepare and deliver shots. They made a huge difference for us in being able to quickly get out 15 or 20 shots at a time.”
“You’re always looking for something different and new, something that hasn’t been done, because almost everything’s been done.”
Besides greasing the production skids, simple macros helped ensure conformity across an enormous number of layers and shots. By saving simple scripts under a “Soho” tab in Shake, various animators and compositors could share custom macros for properly cropping and color correcting images.
“We have quite a few shots of human skin with anywhere from 15 to even 30 layers when you count all the different factors — hair, skin, fingernails,” Bannayan says. “If you sat two compositors down in front of this list of elements, each would handle it differently. That obviously isn’t acceptable on a project like this, but with Shake we were able to pipeline things.”
Bannayan points out that Mac OS X running under Shake cinches the integrated workflow: “All of our file servers are Linux-based, so being able to mount those seamlessly on the Macs made a huge difference for us. With Mac OS X, everything integrates and plays very nicely in the same sandbox.
