IRIDAS Products at Computercafe
IRIDAS customer Computercafe has FrameCycler Standard deployed site
wide on both Santa Monica and Santa Maria locations.
David Ebner, President and Digital Effects Supervisor is a longtime
member of the IRIDAS beta team
About Computercafe
Founding
partners Jeff Barnes and David Ebner opened ComputerCafe, in 1993, to
create broadcast promotion and ID packages for television stations. Today
the company draws clients from all corners of the entertainment world,
including feature films, (Armageddon, Battlefield Earth, Flubber),
commercials (Doritos, Microsoft, AT&T) and broadcasters (Entertainment
Tonight, HBO, NBC). Both the Santa Maria, and the new Santa Monica
location, opened in 2000 to serve their growing number of feature film and
commercial clients, are outfitted with the latest effects, design,
compositing and rendering technologies, including Discreet Logic Flame,
Cyborg 5D, Commotion, Lightwave, Digital Fusion, PhotoShop and After
Effects. Both studios are NT and Unix based and T1 networked for real-
time creative collaboration.
http://www.computercafe.com
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HOLLYWOOD CA
MARCH 29 -ComputerCafe (http://www.computercafe.com) the Santa Maria,
California-based CGI, design, animation and visual effects studio,
recently completed nearly 50 special visual effects shots for Sony
Pictures' new psychological thriller Panic Room, including the engaging
opening title sequence and climactic end scene effects..
Panic Room, directed by David Fincher, stars Jodie Foster as one half of
a mother daughter team terrorized by three burglars (played by Forest
Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam and Jared Leto) who are determined to find a
hidden fortune in the woman's New York City brownstone.
"Panic Room is not really an effects movie," says ComputerCafe digital
effects supervisor and partner David Ebner, "but in fact it contains
more than 100 seamlessly integrated effects shots that are important to
the unique visual language of the film."
Ebner reports that ComputerCafe originally came on board to create effects
for the film's title sequence and final scene. "We were commissioned to do
Forest Whitaker's dramatic rain and wind courtyard scene at the film's
denouement. In that scene Fincher wanted wet leaves and a pile of stolen
bonds that drop from Whitaker's hands be caught up in a whirlwind that
spirals up and around him.
(See Quicktime)
He knew there was no way to accomplish this with practical effects due to
the rain and also due to the specific motion that was desired," he says.
"After working on several shots and seeing them edited into the film,
Fincher decided to add leaves to additional shots in the daytime sequence
at the beginning of the film. We were later asked to create the gun-shot,
head-wound effects, as well as several other miscellaneous shots," said
Ebner.
ComputerCafe artist Akira Orikasa says, "Nature would not allow the kind
of spiraling motion we see in the leaves shots. By using Lightwave's
particle effects and key frame animation, we animated the leaves' motions,
then linked them to assigned 3D modeled and textured leaves and controlled
every element in the shot."
"Architectural" Titles Floating Over New York City Panic Room's slow
moving, aerial opening title sequence features dramatic architectural
shots above New York City. "The titles themselves
are constructed and fit so that they appear to be real and near but not
attached to building facades," says Orikasa. "It was important to light
and composite them so that the light shining on each title matches the
lighting in the scene."
"We balanced photo-realism with readability, and to give the titles a
sense of weight, we worked on font selection, avoided redundancy in plate
selection and, especially, created a lighting pattern that insured that
the light shining on the titles captured and reflected the light behind,
below, and around it," Orikasa explains. ComputerCafe employed Lightwave's
radiosity rendering application to capture diffused lighting and color
from the environment, and add a "weighty" dimensionality to the titles.
Camera movement in the titles was captured, in part, using a method called
Photogrametry. "Fincher shot background plates of the city, then he
wanted to alter the camera motion," Orikasa explains. "We had to create 3D
camera motion that did not exist in the real footage. Photogrametry allows
you to move a virtual camera freely by taking a still image, in this case
from the architecture photo stills from a high-res Imax camera, model the
geometry of each building in the plate to match the still, then move the
camera around. The result is the original shot scene from a new camera
angle or motion," he says. Some shots we created using a mixture of
several pieces of film and 3D textured objects.
"The background sticks to the real geometry of the shot, but then when the
camera sees an area without picture information, you have to stretch the
picture. In that way you cover empty space with picture texture,giving the
shot a very unusual look." Orikasa says, "Panic Room was an exciting
project for me as a fan of David Fincher's films, and it was an
opportunity for all of us at ComputerCafe to contribute to what we are
anticipating to be a wonderful film."
ComputerCafe's digital effects producer Vicki Galloway Weimer, who
supervised the Panic Room project, noted that the film "was an important
project for our team. Panic Room allowed us a year-long opportunity to
work closely with David Fincher and his visual effects supervisor Kevin
Haug, while we translated the director's desired look to 3D, and at the
same time, developed a strong relationship with the creative title design
team at Picture Mill." Weimer says, "David (Fincher) is a hands-on
director who speaks the language of visual effects. He was always specific
about what he wanted and worked closely with our team to achieve his
desired results. ComputerCafe brings 10 years of experience
and a real enthusiasm to every project, but that kind of collaboration
makes the results even more rewarding for our clients and for our entire
staff."
Download Quicktime (8MB)
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Click on images to see larger versions
Click on images to see larger versions
Download Quicktime (8MB)
Images Courtesy Columbia Pictures - All Rights
Reserved
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