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| What inspired you to take on a project like Gentlemen’s Duel? |
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"Every year Blur organize a scenario contest within the studio. Everyone is authorized to submit one or several scenarios that could be done as a short movie. The scenario that receives the most number of votes by the supervisor team is chosen to be produced in the studio.
That's exactly what happened for Gentlemen's Duel."
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| What particular features in Fusion were essential for this project? |
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"Basically, we started all of our shots in low resolution for a better and faster workflow. Once we were happy with the effects, we finalized the shots in HD. The transition to the HD format with all our tools, such as transforms, rotoscoping and tracking done in the lower res format, was smooth and without any changes. This certainly accelerates the speed of our work."
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| What was the outline of Gentlemen’s Duel? (Who was the client? What were the requirements?) |
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"The project was produced by Blur. We make short movies to have fun without the constraints that come from the needs and directions of clients. It's really enjoyable creatively and it helps facilitate new techniques, new looks, and new pipeline configurations for future projects. On top of that it's a great way to show the quality of work being done by Blur through festivals."
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| What were some of the biggest challenges you faced on this project and how did you overcome them? How did Fusion help in this regard? |
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"We had to face a ton of challenges due to the complexity of the project. We decided to inaugurate a crossing pipeline between 3dsMax and XSI by developing our own tools for both software applications. Gentlemen’s Duel was the first short we did with dialogs. Beside the amount of characters in the short, and the size of the environment, we also had to find a way to keep altering them during the duel. Another difficulty was the number of shots: 135. In order to be more efficient, we did this Shot Change tool for Fusion. Fusion script gave us the ability to create that tool, which turned out to be essential to the project. It was essential and helped a lot in setting up Fusion flows for that many shots."
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| The Shot Change tool: More Information |
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"Fusion is used as the core compositing software at Blur. We basically separated every shot by pass (lights, layers and FX being the general variation). Some of the shots used more than 50 different passes. The short shows different looks (introduction, beginning of the fight, ending of the fight, final sequence, and also the inside cockpit shots) so Blur did several master shots using different techniques and settings.
Concerning XSI, we used it for animation and animatic only, we point cached the vet data and brought that into 3dsMax.
We did several scripts on Fusion to help our workflow:
-A size converter for the size of all BG tools.
-A tool to automatically change the depth of all loaders at once. Several of our comps were done using the format depth and it showed a lot of banding on the final comps.
-A shot change tool as we call it allowed us to create a flow from another. If I had a shot 01, which was a master for a whole sequence, I could convert it to another shot in a minute. This one is quite more complex and was really done to work with Blur's pipeline. When we are doing our passes in Max, we use a layer tool we did called Render Elements (it has nothing to do with Max’s built in Render Elements). It basically stores settings from Max in an .ini file for every pass we want to do and it lets us manage all of the passes in a single Max file. Each .ini file managed by render elements gets information on frame ranges, output paths, layer settings, lights, materials, etc. (basically all the settings Max allows us to save). We used this information to create the shot change tool."
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| “THE” Shot change script. |
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"Just go to the script roll out in the main tool bar and it is named Shot change."
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"It is reading render elements folders to find all the passes rendered to create or update a comp with the info embedded in the .ini files.
Let's see how it works when you start from a master shot and you want to create a new comp for an identical shot:
I'm starting with shot 18 and I want to switch the comp to shot 15. When I run the script it's asking for render element paths (if you have different files for the same shots, such as foreground/ background/characters, you can fill more than one path).
Once you do that, you can change some preferences for the whole script.
The unchanged loader option lets you decide what to do with leftover loaders that it couldn't find new elements for. I prefer "disable" so you can see what the old loaders were doing and decide from there whether to delete them or not. For example, you have a loader for "robot_mask" but your new shot doesn't have that render element. The script will simply disable that loader.
Then the script is going to analyze differences between the original comp and the target render elements files. It will give you a report for any loader that doesn't exist in the new render elements or it will tell you if there are any new loaders and offer you the option to merge them in the comp.
Last step: It's creating the output path and saving the flow in the new shot folder with the correct name.
Then all the loaders are loaded with the correct range on the timeline and the timeline is set correctly.
Other use of the script:
- You can start from a new comp and bring all your loaders at once. It’s a lot easier than starting a comp from scratch.
If your camera range changes at some point, whenever you change it in your Max file and your render elements are updated with the new cam, running the shot change on the comp targeting to the latest render element will adapt your comp to the good camera range."
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| Who were the artists working on the project? |
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"The usual Blur crew of course! We tried to keep some room for everyone to work on the project in between other projects but we also had a core team that was dedicated solely to the project."
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| Why did you choose Fusion for Gentlemen’s Duel? |
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"We use Fusion for all of our projects. I think the flexibility and the efficiency of Fusion make it crucial to our pipeline."
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| What can we expect from you in the future? |
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"Blur is targeting to do feature film in the near future. I can't tell you about the projects but things are moving forward."
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| In what ways do you feel Fusion helps in the timely delivery of your projects for Broadcast? |
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"I don't really know what to answer here. Fusion is the kind of tool that we use naturally at Blur. It's so much a part of our pipeline that I don't feel it being a solution but simply the software we use to finish our shots."
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| Did you make use of EXR or PPF changes? |
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"We use EXR to render some FX passes. The smoke passes are usually grey values and benefit a lot to be in 16 bits. The use of EXR was our best solution."
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| Did you make use of the masking features and how? |
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"We use masks everywhere, mainly to apply color correction on certain areas only; the shot 19 for example uses a lot of masking. It's complicating our compositing work but it gives freedom to the artist on a shot basis."
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| What was the minimum process for a shot in Fusion, and the Maximum? |
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"I can tell that some shots used a minimum of 12 passes (the introduction shots, and were super quick to do). The fighting shots are a lot more complicated with more than 50 passes in some of them. All of them were pretty much custom and required a lot more time to achieve them.
I can separate the short in three different sequences concerning the compositing. The introduction shots on the terrace were the quickest and easiest to do. The setup was really simple, about 12 passes, basically 4/5 passes (ambient, key light, rim light, depth and reflection) for the Foreground, the characters and the Background.
The shots inside the cockpits were pretty simple too; the characters were rendered in 4 to 5 passes and then the cockpits with the same amount of passes. Depending on the shot, we had to add more layers for FX or, when the cockpit was also in the foreground, it complicated a little bit the workflow.
The real challenge was during the fight. It has many custom shots punctuating the action (butler ringing the tea time, the tea time, the insert shots of the lady), which required a unique setup in the 3dsMax files and in the Fusion comps, but each one of the fight shots was almost a custom shot.
Some of the shots used more than 50 layers. As we were using a lot of masks to color correct the shots, it was quite challenging to make the look of each shot consistent, especially considering all the different angles of camera."
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All images courtesy of Blur Studios.