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The whimsical home of Flash Film Works began life as a 1920's taxi stand. Today, inspired by founder William (Bill) Mesa's trips to Disneyland, it's an arts and crafts house created by LightWave artists, carefully crafted on breaks from their carefully crafted virtual arts. During the renovation, artists alternated from pixels to pliers, hard drives to hard hats, to raise the roof of their very visual effects studio. "Bill actually tracked down the Operations Manager at Disneyland and found out where they got the composite materials that look like the slate roof on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride," explained Dan Novy, Flash Film Works' Technical Supervisor and occasional construction handyman. "We hand nipped all the corners to make them look cracked and broken. This is in the middle of working on Red Planet. I'm in here painting and then running back to the render farm." The creative tenacity demonstrated in building their brick and mortar studio is the same that they attach to their digital endeavors. Flash was formed back in 1993 for film work by two-time Emmy winner, director Bill Mesa. "When he was directing the film, DNA, Bill needed some 3D creature animation," said Novy, "and he knew Ken (venerable LightWave guru) Stranahan. He asked Ken, 'Do you think LightWave is capable of doing high level film creature animation?' Ken said, 'Yeah, people underestimate it all the time. Its render engine has always been really one of the best, comparable to RenderMan or Mental Ray." "We've been using LightWave as our #1 animation and rendering program ever since." "Every possible piece of propaganda - like 'you can't use LightWave for real animation In the ensuing years, Flash Film Works' credit list comprises numerous film projects including Deep Blue Sea, Red Planet, Collateral Damage, Holes, The Last Samurai, Into the Blue and the upcoming The Guardian with Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher. "We're known as a specialty house which can do really hard shots," Novy said. "We can figure out how to do shots that they say you're never going to get done. Somebody once called us the Navy Seals of effects. And it's because we have a small team and each individual member is really talented and experienced." "We have some of the original LightWave artists. Mark Kochinski is back there. Most of the core group here - Ken Stranahan, Tim Everitt - have been LightWave users doing effects for over ten years." In addition to their installed base of LightWave talent, Novy also sees a bottom line reason to use the program. "It's more cost effective," Novy said. "Price per seat per artist, you can put together a fairly powerful machine for about two grand. Throw a $795 piece of software on it and do feature film quality work." "We also run Maya, but every time we start thinking, 'Well, maybe we should do this shot in Maya,' I look around and think to be able to render it in a reasonable amount of time, and to be able to use my farm, I'm going to have to spend minimally $1200 a proc for Mental Ray or some ridiculous amount for RenderMan. I could use the internal Maya renderer, sure, but that's not anywhere near the LightWave renderer." If a project demands extra rendering horsepower, "With LightWave, I have the ability to deploy twenty more render procs and get them here in two days," Novy said. "And I can start rendering on them right away - I don't need more licenses; I don't need to spend more money. And it's quality." Kochinski added his personal perspective. "I still find LightWave to be the most efficient software out there," he said. "I've worked at all of the big houses at one point or another, both within and outside of their LightWave departments, and I was frustrated by the lack of efficiency of the big companies." "I'll still take a LightWave team above any other group," continued Kochinski, "because the best LightWave artists are interested in the whole picture rather than just being a small piece of the puzzle. Since LightWave is used so much in television production, we learned certain disciplines, particularly in the early days where we were making it up as we went. We attained a certain efficiency level." "No one has ever thrown the kind of money and resources at a LightWave project as they do at other big features. If you were to throw a tenth of the resources that they put into Final Fantasy into a good LightWave team, you would have had a fabulous product," he exclaimed. "I've never understood the propaganda that LightWave is only good for TV and you can't use it for feature films. That is patently absurd because we have been using it for feature films. Every possible piece of propaganda - like 'you can't use it for real animation or character animation' - none of that is true because we've been doing all of that for years and years and years." "We're actually doing larger fluid simulations than they had in Poseidon. "To this day," Kochinski revealed, "there are a lot of big houses that call me personally to solve problems for them that they, with all of their resources, can't accomplish." Since the beginning, creating realistic water has been a challenging specialty at Flash Film Works. Mesa and his brother, John, who also works at Flash, are both surfers. "So they know what oceans are supposed to look like and what a cresting wave is supposed to do," said Novy. "We're kind of known as a water house and I think that's because they have that deeply ingrained sense of fluid motion from years of surfing." "On Deep Blue Sea," Novy said, "we helped develop NatureFX, (the LightWave plug-in), and we're still using it today. All the shading in the ocean that we're doing right now is being handled by NatureFX." "Presently, we are working on The Guardian, a film directed by Andrew Davis who did The Fugitive, Collateral Damage, and Holes. It's is a Coast Guard epic, in the same style as Top Gun. And Coast Guard means a lot of ocean and water simulation." To create the water in The Guardian, Flash Film Works is not employing the standard technique of relying on procedural animations for the actual wave deformation. "Andy (Davis) didn't like Perfect Storm," Novy explained. "He didn't like any sort of fractal based noise generated wave patterns. He thought they looked too regular, too fake." "So we are basically bringing in reference material onto the background and hand sculpting and modeling with deformation maps to real footage. Although it may seem tedious, at the end of the day, you look at it and say, 'Well, yeah, that looks real,' because it is based on a piece of ocean footage. We're using a large amount of stock footage that was shot for Master and Commander, which they never used. And then we are putting an Arete shader on top of it and Real Flow to get foam crests." "Our simulation supervisor, Dr. Mark Stasiuk, was with CIS Hollywood for Poseidon. As soon as he was available, he came over. We're actually doing larger fluid simulations than they had in Poseidon. Without LightWave 64, we would be dead in the water. A lot of my workstations right now are 64 bit Windows with 8 to 16 gigs." "We've written custom software to convert Real Flow binary particles directly to LightWave objects. Jen Hachigian has been writing tons of custom code to facilitate movement between LightWave and Real Flow, as well as automating the pipeline." "LightWave's render engine has always been really one of the best, comparable to RenderMan or Mental Ray." Novy continued, "Mark does all the high end scripting. He does the math, he has the Ph.D. and he hands it off to me and I deploy the tools. We have five people on our simulation flow team. ILM on Poseidon had over 100 and Stanford. And we're doing things that I think frankly look a little better." "I think that has a lot to do with Bill as a Supervisor not accepting first or second generations. Even though simulations take an incredible amount of time to calculate and render, he's willing to say, 'Let's push it through a couple of more revisions.'" And with Mesa's surfing experience, he has an innate sense of waves. "Even if we can say that it is mathematically accurate down to the molecular level," Novy declared, "Bill says, 'I don't care. It doesn't look right.' So we go back and do it again." "LightWave's render engine has always been really one of the best, Tim Everitt then added his coup de grâce to the conversation. "When we first were going to bid the job," he said, "we were given two months to come up with a test to show them what our water would look like. And Dan and I said, 'Oh, Maya is probably the way to go.' They got their dynamics and their motion shader; they have great particles. We worked separately and together for two solid months trying every trick in the book to come up with a wave that matched the Master and Commander reference footage. And we noodled it and noodled it. And I could tell you stories why it doesn't work." Novy interjected, "We would get 85% there and then never make it." Continued Everitt, "And then the guys that tweak insisted their modules were crippled - all sorts of problems. We just couldn't quite get it and finally, on a Tuesday, Bill walked in and said, 'The studio is coming by on Friday. You have to show what you have.' And we had nothing. Trust me, we talked with experts. We dug and dug and dug. None of the dynamic products could do it." "So on Tuesday, I pulled up the Master and Commander footage into (LightWave) Modeler and I modeled the waves. I put on traditional textures, slammed it off and showed it to them on Friday. They all thought it was the best thing and we got the job. That's the story that shows the difference between Maya and LightWave. LightWave can do it, (he snaps his fingers), like that. That's a true story. You should advertise that." Amen, Brother. Flash Film Works Official Website
M.R. Dinkins & Dick De Jong have covered the computer arts for over ten years. They reside in Austin, Texas. |
