The team of The Devil's Playground Trailer left to right is Nitin Shetty, Jitesh Shinde, Anup Kulkarni, Amit Mozar, Shreeraj Nair, and Aniket Ujjainkar.

We worked on the attire of both characters. Lucifer, the devil, walks around in a trench coat with a menacing staff for a weapon.

We decided Michael, the angel, would be a kick-ass dude sporting a shotgun to hunt down Lucifer who has come to earth to be the harbinger of the end-of-days. Accordingly, his costume was Levis jeans, a tight black tee, and a leather wrist band.

Q. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced on this project?  How did you overcome them? How did Fusion fit into the solution?

Well, every step of the post production process was a challenge in itself.

The biggest challenge was the tight deadline but we achieved it very easily with our Fusion work flow. The first phase of the pipeline was to create character mattes through green screens and rotoscoping. We effectively used the Ultra Keyer and the rotoscoping tools to get perfect mattes.

After generating all the mattes in Stage one of the post production, we categorized all the shots as per the complexity and other elements needed, such as matte paintings, stock footages, CG elements, and 3D tracking. This made our pipeline very smooth as shots were divided among artists in alloted man-days.

One more challenge was to make the devil disappear into particles. Fusion's adept particle system helped us get the result that we were looking for.

Q. Tight deadlines in your students' classes put a lot of pressure on the team.  How does Fusion help you achieve your deadlines?

For us, deadlines were pretty easy to manage due to our production pipeline. In distributed machines, we made extensive use of macros for color consistency. Also, the built-in scripts Change Paths and Archive Compostions were great time savers.  Faster renders with the built-in network rendering manager helped us to meet deadlines easily.

Q. What was the most rewarding shot using Fusion?

For us, every shot that we composited in this trailer was rewarding. 

The one shot that really stands out is the devil's entry shot. It is the one where the devil is standing on the road and the camera pans up from the ground slowly to reveal his face. This shot consisted of green screen removal, 3D tracking, stock footages, 3D environment within Fusion, and matte paintings. All of these were blended seamlessly into a single shot.

We used a 3D tracking software to extract a track for the shot and imported the track into Fusion. Character matte and stock footages were used as projection plates along with the 3D track to blend all of the elements seamlessly. The flow that we ended up with was monumental, to say the least. Thanks to Fusion, we managed the flow and the rendering quite effortlessly.

Q. Was there a particular shot that was more complex than usual or turned out better than you could have hoped?

The opening car blast shot was pretty complex for us to handle. There were a lot of passes from the CG guys. To top it all off, there were some lighting issues on the car which had to be ironed out and made perfect by the compositors. The shot has gone through several versions.

The color scheme of cloud transformations with lightning, merging 2D projection plates into 3D environment, various fire and debris passes, motion blur, and camera shake, all came along perfectly to finalize the shot.

When we saw the final renders, we were dazzled by the visual spectacle that played for us.

Q. What are some of your favourite tools in Fusion and how do they help in production?

The rotoscoping tools, ultra keyer, channel boolean, matte control, bitmap mask, and the particle toolset are great.

With the Channel Boolean it is quite easy for us to control the channel information in the images. The Ultra Keyer is quite an effective keyer and quite easy to handle.

The Particle toolsets are quite fast to render and preview. Moreover, there are a lot of controls present that assist us in getting the kind of simulation we want.

Thanks to the integrated workflow of Fusion, we easily managed heavy deformations and color correction issues. It blends the 2D toolset and the 3D environments very neatly.

Q. How important is 3D compositing to your course instruction?

Very essential. This is the key to generating seamless output if the live action plate is changing its perspective and depth or if you have to stitch two separate live action shots into one with CG elements. This is an enormous challenge if you are using 3D space, matchmoved camera, and 2D live action projection plates, all-in-one to give the final output. Two of our main shots, the devil opening and the climax bullet shot, are passed through all of these processes.