Svengali embraces the future with Nuke on Star Trek

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1 CASE STUDY Svengali embraces the future with Nuke on Star Trek When asked where the Star Trek franchise might go next, its creator Gene Roddenberry boldly replied that sooner or later someone would come along and do it again but much bigger and better. Star Trek 2009, the eleventh film based on the Star Trek franchise, has done exactly that. Directed by JJ Abrams, the Paramount Pictures production is faithful to the Star Trek canon with Vulcan death grips, mind-melding and intergalactic adventures galore but with a modernised production design. Well-received by critics and audiences alike, the new movie is expected to take more than $360million at the box office this year. Svengali, a small but enterprising VFX boutique, based close by the Pacific Ocean in Venice, California, worked closely with the filmmakers, using Nuke to deliver around 80 VFX shots on the film, including a host of enhanced environments which give it that modernised look. And, they are delighted with the role played by Nuke.

2 Having artists using software that is on the cutting-edge, such as Nuke, helps us stay ahead of the curve, says Svengali owner Jamie Venable. It results in great movie making with costeffective values, and we like to think that our work on Star Trek is a shining example of that. We have a specialised and talented group of artists VFX compositors and matte painters who really benefit from extraordinary tools like Nuke. As the software is so good, fast and modern, our guys were able to pump out a ton of work on that show. Since opening in 2002, the entirely Mac-based Svengali has delivered VFX shots on a range of productions including the independent Garden State, Mel Gibson s Apocalypto, Disney s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe, and most recently Star Trek, which was the project that prompted the debut of Nuke at the company. VFX supervisor Stefano Trivelli, whose considerable experience includes stints at Weta Digital working on King Kong, and ILM on Terminator Salvation, was pivotal in Svengali s adoption of Nuke. Compositing is rapidly becoming a more three-dimensional process, says Trivelli. Nuke delivers a better approach to working and compositing in 3D space than any other software I ve used. It has a range of tools that fundamentally support the type of environment-enhancing and VFX work we do, and it is more than capable of handling really ambitious shots Paramount Pictures, Images courtesy of Svengali FX Svengali s Nuke work on Star Trek included the sequence in which the young Spock informs the Vulcan Council of his ambitions. Director Abrams preferred camera movement throughout the

3 film and Nuke was able to 3D composite the Vulcan planet exterior with the 3D tracked plates. One of the shots from that sequence also included a mouth replacement of a councilman, as the camera corkscrews towards the council members before rotating around to settle on Spock. Nuke was also employed on a range of more mundane, but essential, compositing and VFX tasks that included rig removal, plus the addition of lens flares and camera shake effects. But it is perhaps the enhancement of environments the Starfleet Academy auditorium, and the establishing shot of Trail Bar which reveal Svengali s skills and Nuke s capabilities to their greatest advantage. The Starfleet Academy auditorium appears in two sequences in the movie, first when Spock and Kirk discuss the Academy test, and later when Kirk is awarded his Captain s wings. Svengali s brief was to augment the live action plates, to make the auditorium appear bigger, more densely populated, and more futuristic. The process began by importing Maya-created geometry into Nuke, along with the original live action plates. The team assembled the extended audience members one to five people at a time, with matte paintings projected in Nuke to complete the effects. There were as many as 100 layers in some of the composites but Nuke coped really easily with whatever we threw at it, says Trivelli Paramount Pictures, Images courtesy of Svengali FX

4 2009 Paramount Pictures, Images courtesy of Svengali FX Svengali also applied its magic touch on the establishing shot of the Trail Bar, where Kirk later provokes a riotous punch-up. On screen, the audience sees the Iowa landscape showing a futuristic city, the local bar in the foreground and the vast Enterprise dockyards in the distance, with Kirk approaching fast on a motorcycle-like vehicle Paramount Pictures, Images courtesy of Svengali FX We started with an aerial plate of farmland that second unit director Roger Guyett shot from a helicopter, explains Trivelli. It was a daytime element, although the final element needed to be sunset. We used the plate as a basic texture, as well as match-moving it and importing the camera data into Nuke. Our matte artist, Michele Moen, created the actual environment, putting together the original plate texture with different photographic and painted elements.

5 We also included some CG elements like the Enterprise dockyard and the building skyline in the distance, both provided by ILM for continuity. We modelled the Trail Bar and the moving vehicle in Maya using simple geometry, and then loaded everything into Nuke. In Nuke, we were able to construct the perfect 3D setup, animate and project our matte painting elements over the geometry, and even test the best way to simulate the fake headlight effects on the motorbike vehicle. Nuke made the assembly, compositing and initial balance grading of the many disparate elements pretty straightforward. The shot, like all of Svengali s work on Star Trek, was final rendered at 1828 x 1556 cinemascope resolution, with the Mac-based Nukes proving stable throughout. Nuke at Svengali is integrated into a pipeline that includes CG packages like Maya and Cinema4D, with rendered images and the associated data being imported into Nuke as OBJ or EXR files. Nuke s ability to work in 3D space, its floating-point pipeline, scanline renderer, improved GUI and ability to balance grade shots, are greatly prized by Svengali. But it s the overall speed, flexibility and forward-looking perspective that really thrill. From my personal experience Nuke is so much faster than anything else, Trivelli remarks. Apart from the software being intrinsically quick, I can pipeline effects work in Nuke in fast, if not faster, ways than we have typically worked. Since The Foundry took over development, we have seen big steps forward in Nuke s capabilities, and the rapid pace of R&D is making other desktop software, that has not been developed, look very slow and quite old-fashioned. From a learning point of view, if you know how to composite, it s really not hard to jump on to Nuke at all. Of course, you have to get your head around 3D compositing, but that s not a Nuke issue, that s the way the wider world of compositing is going. To create compelling or sympathetic visual effects, today you need to think and work in 3D space, and there s nothing else out there that comes close to Nuke.

6 Looking forwards, Venable says, As bigger companies have adopted Nuke for their pipelines, the talent pool has expanded so bringing talent on board is not an issue. I see a big key point being the ability to handle stereoscopic projects. By offering workspaces for 3D stereo, plus 3D stereo plug-ins like Ocula, Nuke's impact will be similar to the jump we have made from 2D to 3D compositing using Nuke. Outstanding!