Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[ADOBE Creativity: Insights from Rhythm & Hues Studio on Motion Design]
[Karl Soule, Adobe Evangelist - Adobe Systems] Welcome back.
We're going to switch gears a little bit and start talking about
some motion graphics compositing and Visual Effects work for feature films in Hollywood.
And joining me here today is Hussin Khan from Rhythm & Hues.
Welcome, Hussin.
[Hussin] Thank you very much, Karl.
Thanks for having me over.
[Karl] Tell us a little bit about Rhythm & Hues as a company.
I'm familiar with some of their work from Hollywood,
but how does that fit into the whole picture with this Visual Effects work in Asia?
[Hussin Khan - Educator, Rhythm & Hues Studio]
We have 5 different offices around the world,
and recently, about 2 years ago, we started up in Malaysia,
so we have about 1200 employees at the moment.
[Karl] Wow.
[Hussin] And we have delivered over 120 Hollywood feature films
and these are some of the films that we have featured,
and I hope that I'm here today to share some ideas about how Visual Effects
is done in Hollywood movies, so I have brought with me some clips
from some of our films we did,
so just to share with the people out there about how Visual Effects are made in movies.
[Karl] Wow. So in addition to Malaysia and Los Angeles, where else is Rhythm & Hues based?
[Hussin] So we have one in Kuala Lumpur, which is started in 2009.
Besides that, we have 2 in India--that's Mumbai and Hyderabad.
And recently, we opened up in Vancouver; our main office being in Los Angeles.
[Karl] So you've seen this just really exploding, really grow in the region
as far as just expanding Visual Effects work worldwide.
It's really become a worldwide industry now.
[Hussin] Exactly, it is.
We also are proud to say that the achievements we have had
with Rhythm & Hues is we have got 2 Oscars for 2 of our movies,
which is The Golden Compass and Babe.
[Karl] Wow.
[Hussin] And we are pretty proud about that.
And not only that, not only have we received what is creatively,
but also technical ways because we have developed our own application,
our own software, to be able to use that to make our movies.
[Karl] As you guys have run into challenges of mixing the real and the computer-generated,
you had to kind of meet those challenges in some cases
with special advanced techniques.
[Hussin] Exactly.
[Karl] Do you have any clips you can show us of some of the work?
[Hussin] Sure, this is our show reel, which will give a great overview of what we do.
Let's have a look.
[♪music♪]
[Karl] That's X-Men First Class, one of my favorite recent films [inaudible, film audio].
[♪music♪] [film sounds]
[Hussin] In Malaysia, although we've just been around for the past 2 years,
we have finished about 10 movies so far
using our local artist, Malaysian artists who have worked on these films
and these are some of the films that you can see on the screen, yeah?
[Karl] Yeah, Alvin & The Chipmunks--one of my daughters' favorite films.
She loves that whole series.
[Hussin] Yeah.
All right, so I brought here a couple of VFX shots that get done in the studio.
I'd like to share it with the audience today and how this was developed
and it was done in Rhythm & Hues, and one of them is my favorite movie
called X-Men First Class.
But let's look at the movie called Hop first.
It's a story about a character--in this particular story it's an Easter Bunny
and instead of becoming an Easter Bunny by coming on and helping his father
by following his father's footsteps, so instead he wants to become a rock and roll artist.
[Karl] So it's the son of the Easter Bunny, and he does not want to
take over the father's business.
He actually wants to go and do his own thing.
My daughter saw this and really loved it; it's really geared towards young kids.
And it was a really interesting mix because it starts all as a computer-generated film
and then it moves into a lot of live action as the movie progresses.
[Hussin] Yes. So in this case, we have this shot
where Rhythm & Hues was to be responsible for the look and character development of E.B.,
E.B. being the main character.
So we worked on almost 600 shots of this movie
which consists of modeling, loop development, background preparation,
match moving, layout, character animation, technical animation,
lighting and the final composite.
[Karl] So a lot of different terms there, a lot of different specific jobs that you see.
When you go into a movie today and you stay for the end credits,
you see that just list of tons and tons of different people that have very specific jobs.
Like one person just does rotoscoping.
You might have a whole team of rotoscope artists, a whole team of match-move artists
that just focus on these different elements.
[Hussin] That's exactly right, yes. [Karl] Wow.
[Hussin] This was a pretty exciting job--project for us.
[Karl] Wow, yeah, and a lot of different elements here now.
As you guys are going through and composing different scenes like this,
are you focused on doing like a final render scene,
or do you really go through and have different passes and different pieces
that you work with?
[Hussin] Yes, obviously in the visual effects industry,
we don't only render 1 output all over.
We always work in different layers, and finally, the compositor will put them together
and that comes up with the actual final composite of the movie.
[Karl] I see.
[Hussin] So I will show you a little later how these layers are being made.
In fact, in this clip, if you just give it a couple of seconds,
you can see the layer that was done in one of the shots that we have here.
So this is a shot where--
[Karl] You can see the wireframe model of the character and you can see
the different passes with the fur and lighting and--wow.
[Hussin] This shot, here you can see it just defines the layers.
[Karl] Magic dust. [Hussin] Yeah.
[Karl] So yeah, a lot of different elements.
Probably a lot of different tools kind of all come together to make these things happen.
[Hussin] Exactly.
[Karl] I see a lot of realistic, actual elements from photographs.
In a lot of cases, some of the background plates in that opening scene
with the window with Easter Island in the background
when you saw all the different layers of graphs and things like that.
[Hussin] Yeah.
[Karl] A lot of the textures you see on the drums here
are probably taken from actual drums.
[Hussin] The actual drumset was on the stage
and we camera-tracked the whole thing
and we put E.B. in the scene
so he looks as if he's part of the scene.
[Karl] Wow.
[Hussin] So there was rotoscoping done as well.
[Karl] A lot of different elements--you can see the reference point
there added with the hand, holding that in.
[Hussin] Exactly, yes, and the shadows from the lights.
[Karl] And getting that depth of field even added to the characters,
like an extra layer that gets added in--wow.
[Hussin] Yes, you're rIght.
[Karl] Wow, pretty impressive. Wow.
[Hussin] All right, that was Hop, and now I want to share with you how we did
a certain scene in X-Men: First Class.
It's one of my favorite movies this year, and this is a shot of a particular scene
where we have worked on about 160 shots for this movie.
So we were involved in designing and construction of character Emma Frost,
and in diamond form, she can repel bullets and stuff like that, all right?
And we also worked on another character called Angel,
where she can sprout wings from her back.
And the other one is Mystique; of course, everyone knows about Mystique,
because she was in the previous other X-Men movies.
[Karl] So less into furry animals and cute animals, but still kind of focusing
on the idea of characters and taking a little bit of the computer
and adding it to the real to make something otherworldly.
[Hussin] Yes, right. [Karl] Wow.
[Hussin] So I have a shot here that was part of the movie
and this is the shot where Emma Frost was in one of the submarines.
[Karl] She goes to get ice for the drink of the main bad guy.
[Hussin] Exactly, that was Sebastian Shaw,
so he wanted a drink and Emma Frost has to go up topside
and cut out an ice chunk for him for his drink.
[Karl] This is a challenging shot because a majority of the scene
is obviously all done in white, but you've got a lot of different layers.
You've got translucency coming from the ice, and obviously, you're not doing
a camera pull-back on a dolly that's going to move that distance.
What do the actual elements look like?
[Hussin] So this is the actual background plate
where we see from the client.
Sometimes we have minimal on-location presence.
We don't really get a lot of references from where they were shot,
so we get this background plate, and here you can see
it's sitting in a stage with some props that look like ice and some blue screen at the back.
[Karl] Also, all the ice elements are actually not realistic-looking at this point.
They obviously look like some sort of styrofoam or something like that,
but they're actually adding to the lighting of the scene by helping to get
some of the reflections on the actor.
Even though they're not the translucent ice crystals, that white reflection
really can help to add some of the--how do you turn something like that
into a virtual geometry in the computer?
[Hussin] Sure.
Fortunately enough, in this particular scene of X-Men: First Class,
we got a scanning that we call a LIDAR and that's what's called Light-Detection Ranging,
so it's an expensive kind of process to get LIDAR out,
but fortunately now we got this out from them,
so what we did is we did a LIDAR scan on this particular set
so we got some geometric information from that.
[Karl] So this is kind of like radar, how it takes an image like radio waves.
This is actually using lasers to go through and actually scan the entire scene
in the same position from the camera.
[Hussin] That's exactly right, so out of LIDAR, when you've got the scan
this geometrical that we receive, so this was done in 3-D,
the part that we received from LIDAR.
Okay, and obviously, we have to do camera tracking.
So the [inaudible] was tracked to place a map painting in the background,
so now you can see the background has map painting now.
[Karl] And that might be real elements, may be touched up in PhotoShop
or a composite of real elements, or it could be generated completely on the computer.
[Hussin] Correct, exactly.
So the most critical process in VFX Pipeline is the camera tracking.
So if there's any error at all, the eyes can pick up some errors in it,
and you can see the bit of shaking in the scene,
so you have to be done correctly.
[Karl] All right.
[Hussein] So other camera tracking, we do our light source, the standard gray
and chrome balls we use to gather the light source as a reference.
[Karl] So keep an eye on the different balls in the upper left corner there
because to generate those and to get those types of diffusion masks,
you actually use a device that looks like it has balls on either side of it
and the pole in the middle, and it's used to actually capture and give you an idea
of what the actual contrast--the specularity, the reflections are all kind of mapped using those
and that helps with the computer.
[Hussin] Yes, the light situation that was on the scene on that day,
so we are picking up that as a reference to be used in the animation process.
So this is actually, again, the final composite that we see,
after putting everything together.
[Karl] The translucency in the ice--
[Hussin] Yes.
[Karl] Really making it look real, and then that gives you a reference to track this whole thing
into that wide, expansive shot, really showing the desolation of the Arctic desert.
[Hussin] All right, the other thing I want to share with you today
for the folks out there about Stereoscopic 3-D.
Rhythm & Hues worked on the first ever Stereoscopic 3D,
a movie called Yogi Bear.
[Karl] So this is your very first production in Stereoscopic 3-D?
[Hussin] Exactly.
[Karl] So what do you find--there's a lot of debate about Stereoscopic.
Obviously, it came to prominence this round with Avatar.
It was very well-received, and then we saw some kind of
inexpensively-done 2-D to 3-D conversions, and that kind of gave it--
people were saying, "Oh, it's back on its way out again," or something.
[Hussin] Yeah.
[Karl] Do you feel it's going to be here to stay,
and is there a right way or a wrong way to shoot Stereoscopic?
[Hussin] Yeah, we strongly feel that the 3-D Stereoscopic--it's going to stay,
but it has to be done correctly, so you have to decide up front
whether you're going to do this movie in 3-D or not.
So if it has to be in 3-D, then you will have to have a 3-D camera rigged perhaps.
[Karl] You have to commit up front.
[Hussin] Exactly, you have to commit up front.
So if it's shot in 3-D, then it will be easy to convert to 2-D if you wanted,
but if it's shot in 2-D, it's going to be--
[Karl] A lot of extra work, yeah, I can just imagine.
[Hussin] Yeah, extra work to convert back into 3-D.
[Karl] I see this camera rig here is kind of a top-mounted camera
so that you get kind of a narrow rig.
I've seen various different types of stereo rigs out there where you have 2 cameras
as a true left-right eye, and a lot of people nowadays, I see them playing around with
some of the smaller rigs where you actually can get the interocular distance
of the human eyes, but that's always not best for the scene.
You really want to have something that you have a lot of fine-tuned control to adjust
how far the images are.
[Hussin] Exactly, right.
[Karl] So this type of rig makes a lot of sense. [Hussin] Yeah.
[Karl] You put a 1-way mirror, basically, so 1 image is shooting through the mirror
and the other one is getting the balance and the reflection off of that.
[Hussin] Right, so you can do adjustments if you want, accordingly,
and it also fits in tight places.
[Karl] Very good.
[Hussin] Because these camera rigs are usually quite large in size.
[Karl] Now, Yogi Bear had a lot of--again, fuzzy characters mixed with real actors,
so this is a breakdown where you have some--
[Hussin] Yes, this is a breakdown of how we'd interact the CG character and the live action.
So this is a scene where the actor--this was actually a final composite
so you can see how it was done.
[Karl] Very short and very simple scenes.
[Hussin] Very short, yes.
[Karl] But I imagine there's a lot of work that goes into putting something like this together.
[Hussin] That's what we do in Visual Effects: we don't work on longer scenes.
We only work on short scenes and we put them together later on,
so that's the final composite and let's look at what we received from our client.
So as a background plate, we received this from them.
Just let me go back a step.
So this is what we received from the client.
[Karl] Just a really simple, easy shot.
The one thing I noticed was that the bench actually physically drops down
to kind of seem like the weight of Yogi--
[Hussin] Exactly, Yogi when he sits down later on.
Okay, so the plate comes from the client, the actor acting out the scene by himself.
So that's not easy, actually, working by yourself without knowing the reference.
So they put in--again, when you mentioned earlier the chrome ball and the diffuse ball--
so we are taking references from the particular scene to be used later on.
[Karl] The guy on the right--he just looks thrilled to be there.
He's got this great look like, "I'm the guy who holds the Yogi head."
[Hussin] So we will try to get as much reference shots from the shoot as possible
which will help us impose later on, so that's a good thing.
All right.
And everything we will have to do what we call a camera match-moving,
so this scene, the camera track so the CG corrector will stick into the scene
so it doesn't move--the camera moves.
So when the object match-moves on the bench, so we can then accurately
place CG characters when they sit on the bench itself.
[Karl] So no fancy LIDAR in this particular scene.
You actually have to take a 2-dimensional plate and figure out the 3-D geometry
in the computer.
[Hussin] Exactly, yeah. [Karl] Wow.
[Hussin] The plate is just 2-D and we have to figure out the depth of the 3-D
so we can put CG characters where they're supposed to be in the scene, all right?
[Karl] Wow.
[Hussin] So this was done with camera tracking.
And this is with animation test run where we see the animation part of it
and you can see that one spot over Yogi's head is in front of him,
so we did some rotoscoping and just put it in front of him.
Now you can see Yogi's head is behind him--can you see that?
[Karl] The lighting is starting to come into the scene a bit.
[Hussin] Yes, so this would be the light setup then
and it's--as you mentioned earlier, Karl, that we have different passes
,when we do animation, so it's not just 1 render and it finishes the whole movie,
so we do it in different render.
So these are different passes of the lightning comb, and the idea is to save time
instead of rerendering stuff; you can make him a stick.
So we can go in and tweak each individual pass if we want to, right?
If you feel that a diffused lighting is too much, you can always bring it down.
[Karl] You need to have that final control and editorial to really sell the scene.
[Hussin] Exactly.
[Karl] Wow, okay.
[Hussin] Again, this is a final composite of how it's done, and notice Yogi is going to--
Yogi's going to sit on the bench and the bench goes down.
[Karl] Very good.
I know you guys probably have a lot of different projects in.
Can you briefly just mention some of the things that you might have coming up
in the near future?
[Hussin] Sure. Well, a couple of movies we're working on at the moment,
and your favorite, Alvin & The Chipmunks, is going to be out again.
[Karl] My daughter will drag me to see that, definitely.
[Hussin] See, this time around, it's called Chip Wrecked.
[Karl] Oh, wonderful. [Hussin] So you can imagine where they're going to be.
So we have also Snow White, which is coming in April of 2012,
and we are also wroking on another movie with Ang Lee, called The Life of Pi,
and the other one is called R.I.P.D., which will be probably the end of next year.
So you can see that we're already working on movies
which are going to be released the end of next year, so there are a lot of things
to be done in between.
[Karl] A lot of leeway, yeah.
[Karl] Now, when you talked about a bunch of different terms
like match-moving and rotoscoping, and obviously, these are very specialty skills.
Now, I imagine, especially if you guys work with and create your own toolset
in most cases, how does somebody become trained in using these types of--
how do they become trained to be able to do something like a match-move or rotoscoping?
[Hussin] Right, that's a good question.
Thank you very much for that.
In Rhythm & Hues, I have 2 roles, basically.
The first role, obviously, I'm teaching the artists that we have currently, in-house artists,
of how to use our own proprietary tools that we have developed over the years,
and the other role that I have is actually going out there and reaching out to people,
teaching them Visual Effects concepts.
And this is where Adobe comes in.
We use Adobe After Effects, teach them the concepts of visual effects:
rotoscoping, match-moving, 2-D tracking kind of stuff.
So we go around to the faculty members and I teach them,
giving them the idea of how visual effects is done and stuff like that.
[Karl] And I understand you run the After Effects group--the user group--for Malaysia?
[Hussin] Yes, I do.
This user group I started about a year ago
and my passion for After Effects--it shows there, that I want to go around
and tell people about After Effects.
And funnily, I started this about a year ago and I still remember my first ever meeting
that I did with Adobe After Effects Malaysia,
there was only 4 people who turned up for the meeting.
[Karl] 4? Wow.
[Hussin] Only 4. Yeah, that was sad.
But our last meeting, which was held about 2 weeks ago,
we had 450 people turned up for the meeting.
[Karl] Wow, that's awesome!
So it is a big, growing field for you.
[Hussin] Yes.
[Karl] Thank you so much for coming, Hussin. I appreciate it.
[Hussin] Thank you very much, thanks for having me. [Karl] Thank you.
