2012: interview de Goran Pavles

Le nouveau film catastrophe de Roland Emmerich, 2012, sort dans les salles aujourd'hui.
C'est un nouveau festival d'effets visuels avec près d'une dizaine de studios impliqués afin de pouvoir livrer plus de 1300 plans !!

On trouve notamment dans les studios, Double Negative qui s'est occupé des séquences du Vatican et de Yellowstone et Uncharted Territory (fondé par Volker Engel, collaborateur de longue date de Roland Emmerich) qui a pris en charge la destruction de Los Angeles et et le survol de Las Vegas (près de 400 plans !). Scanline VFX a fait la gigantesque vague qui envahit l'Himalaya.

Voici une interview de Goran Pavles qui a travaillé sur le film chez Uncharted Territory en tant qu'artiste TD:

- Can you introduce yourself ??
So my name is Goran Pavles. I'm 25 years old, born in Croatia and living in Basel for 18 years or so. Started CG five years ago as a hobbyist. Working as accountant at that time.

- What was your job position on 2012 ??
I was one of the many VFX Artist at Uncharted Territory. You can call it TD Artist. We all did get pretty tricky tasks and enough time to get them look how the supervisors want. So everybody was developing his own little tools and setups.

- On which sequence have you worked on ??
Uncharted Territory did the L.A.-Limousine sequence. From the point where the earthquake starts, up to the point where they arrive at the Santa Monica airport.
Second Sequence was the Vegas one. There I had just a little part to do.

- 2012 is a big massive destruction movie, what was the biggest challenge on it ??
I think the biggest challenge was to fill so much different things into those full CG images, that they do look believable. For us Artists it was kinda "easy", we got a task and had to solve it. I think to manage all those shots, to keep continuity, and match all the elements of each frame to work together is the hardest thing. There are unbelievably many elements in each shot. There were 3 people dedicated just to keep overview of who is doing what, what has he to do next and keep everything updated.

For me personally the challenge was to find a more or less procedural way of working, so I could adapt the simulations to the supervisors wishes. I had this huge ground element that was breaking, and it was not possible to simulate it in one go. At least not in reasonable time. Splitting it up into many smaller simulations, but still keep it work together was kind of a tricky thing.

- Did you have encounter some difficulies and how did you achieved them ??
Hell Yea, Every day!
There are always unexpected things that slowdown your work flow and ask for crazy workarounds. I was lucky that I knew a little scripting. So I could write something that helped me out. We were also a lot of artists coming from different softwares with different experiences. So there was always somebody to ask and who knew how to solve a problem or just had an idea how to workaround it.

- Which softwares did you used ??
We used 3ds Max 2008, Thinking Particles, FumeFx, Final Render and Nuke.

- How long did you work on this show ??
I've been 6 months over there

- What was your best memory ??
I think the whole thing is a great memory. The working climate was really nice. Uncharted is a great company that does not try to save each cent and creates a very nice working atmosphere. Also to see this other world on the other side of this big blue is very interesting. It's one thing to go there for a week and see the interesting tourist parts. But a whole other thing to stay there for a longer time and live there the way Americans do and see the good and bad parts of their system.

- What's your next project ??
No further plans at the moment.

- Thanks a lot for your time !

Vous pouvez voir un long extrait de la séquence de destruction de Los Angeles en HD, ici !!!