|
|
|
In a bit of artistic symmetry, John-Mark Austin and his LightWave team recently completed a game trailer for Ubisoft, featuring a digital Sam Fisher, hero of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series of video games. Indeed, the boX, the production unit that Austin co-leads with producer Deborah Gates, could be considered a splinter cell of its parent studio, Rhythm & Hues. "In 1998," said Austin, "when the facility was created as part of Rhythm's Commercial Department, it was actually called the Black Box. The idea behind it was that it operated like a black ops stealth unit, i.e., get it done by any means necessary as quickly as possible. Eventually that name shortened itself to the boX." Rhythm & Hues Studios ranks as one of Hollywood's visual effects powerhouses. Once best known for that adorable (and Academy Award winning) talking pig in Babe, R+H now numbers over 100 feature films credits including last year's blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia, and more recently, Superman Returns. Austin started at R+H in 1996 and spent a year as a technical director in the studio. "Roughly a year after, the Commercial Department discovered I had a CG boutique background," accounted Austin. "I was used to being a generalist and doing everything myself. The studio was in full production at the time and resources were limited. Commercials were finding it difficult to get some of their pet projects through the bigger pipeline. It was just the 'tyranny of the urgent' thing." "I started picking up some of these projects on the side and doing them in LightWave. When they realized that one person with the right tool was able to do that for them, they invited me and another studio artist to come over to the Commercial Department to develop a sort of creative sandbox." "Much of the work that the Commercial Department had been interested in our doing was R & D'ing new looks, new techniques and creating style frames and animatics - things that they could use to get other jobs. And as those jobs started to award, it became apparent, since we had developed the look and figured out the techniques, that we would just go ahead and do the production. So within six or seven months, the boX became more of a full-fledged production unit, albeit operating with a very generalist team oriented pipeline." "Our goal was never to be redundant or competitive with what the studio was doing. We wanted to augment the specialist pipeline with a generalist approach and capture a larger piece of the production pie. In the beginning, those projects were mostly commercials." "In the last year, we've been primarily doing game stuff," Gates said. We did two fully CG HD spots for Call of Duty 2 at the end of 2005. Then we did two substantial sized projects for E3. We did a Fable teaser trailer for Microsoft. They were coming out with Fable 2, but it was quite early in the development so we had the opportunity to get in and do a lot of stuff from scratch." Austin distinguishes the creative process of the boX from that of the main studio in terms of different workflow pipelines. "Rhythm and Hues is a major studio - I think we were around 650 during Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe - with a specialist pipeline. The upside to the specialist pipeline is that once it is fully up to speed, it is very fast and efficient. But it works like an assembly line in a factory, the people in the middle of the pipeline have nothing to work on until the models have been done, the rigs have been created, and animation setup files are in place. That works great on a feature film where you have six, ten, twelve months to get that pipeline up to full efficiency." "The real super power of LightWave is that it provides "In a short turnaround project like a short film, an Internet piece, or television commercial, you typically have from two to ten weeks. And a specialist pipeline doesn't reach its full efficiency until after that point. A generalist pipeline, on the other hand, allows everyone to work right off the bat. So I can bring everybody in and literally have them start the project on Day 1 and know that they have the skills to bring the job along wherever we are on the job," Austin said. "There's something about LightWave that makes it particularly well suited for that. The whole application was sort of designed with this idea of one person being able to carry a project from its beginning to the end." "LightWave does everything pretty well - or at the very least adequately - it does some things exceptionally well. But the real super power of LightWave is that it provides an artist with a robust toolset across the board. It's not one of those packages where you say 'the animation's great, but the render engine is useless.' There's some great plug-ins for it, of course, but even without them the fundamental tools are there - and they're solid." "Maya," he said, contrasting it with LightWave, "used to be a $30,000 package, and so there's this perception that it must be better because it used to cost so much more. But for us the bottom line has always been that, in comparison to the other applications we have looked at, LightWave is the most generalist-oriented tool that's out there. Maya's a terrific tool and there's some great work being done with it, but there are very few Maya artists that I've encountered that have the same breadth of skill across all the CG disciplines that your typical LightWave artist does." Starting with his core staff of Keith Matz, Jeff Apczynski and Dennis Greenlaw, Austin hires freelance LightWave artists to build his high performance teams that are not only delivering stunning visual effects, but also are becoming more deeply involved in the design aspects of the projects. "One of the things that was really nice for us about Fable 2 is that we are more and more finding ourselves creatively in the driver's seat with these projects," Austin said. "Microsoft Games was really amazingly great to work with. Basically they left almost all of the creative development to us. So even though the schedule was very tight, we were able to shape the creative to hit all of the points that we needed to hit. And shape it in such a way that it was actually achievable in that time frame." "We prefer doing the gaming stuff because there's usually a bit more of a storytelling aspect to them. It's not so much about promoting a product, it's about creating a really spectacular visual that makes somebody want to go out and actually play that game." "A few years ago, we were still trying to figure out where we fit in the studio. I think they were trying to figure us out too! But now there's a strong mutual respect. Generalists aren"t the saviors of our industry. Neither are specialists. But a studio that can deliver both approaches can take a wider variety of projects without sacrificing quality along the way." As for the future, projected Austin, "The next immediate thing that we are aggressively pursuing is in-game cinematics, opening sequences to games, one of our biggest thrills was doing a couple of shots for Return of the King (Lord of the Rings), which was a dream for a lot of us," said Austin. "We did a sequence that was in the extended edition of the movie. We actually got to shoot and kill Peter Jackson in a cameo role. Peter Jackson is a corsair on the ship. We put an arrow through him and watch him die dramatically. It was great fun. It's on the DVD. Rhythm + Hues Official Website
M.R. Dinkins & Dick De Jong have covered the computer arts for over ten years. They reside in Austin, Texas. |
