The environment transition is seamless the team successfully conjured a very-real looking London using photo references and drone footage with the added pressure of recreating the glorious Tower Bridge structure. This was the basis that we had to match for all the remaining wide full CG shots’. ‘The camera starts up-close on the wing and pulls out, while large walls splash down to reveal the whole barge, numerous props, the River Thames, Tower Bridge, a large screen that drops down, and thousands of New Year's Eve partygoers. We had to add the jet wings, spotlights, gantry, walls, etc, to blend seamlessly,” explained Jason Quintana, CG Supervisor. “Our hero reveal of the Thames barge was shot on a large green screen set with a prop Tressler jet that was only partially built for the actors to interact with. As everything was shot in a studio, the team had a lot of replacement work on their hands. The team, who tackled over 100 shots in total, recreated the environment for the final act of the film which sees the festivities of New Year's Eve unfold from a barge on the river. Ironically it was Framestore’s Montréal team who took on the challenge of recreating one of London’s most famous landmarks in full CG: Tower Bridge. In the composite a shadow was created from the rendered cards onto Dave Franco and both the environment, and the card render were integrated into the plate with the (amazed) crowd in the foreground. To achieve this, the team combined some gentle wind forces that subtly blew some of the cards outward as they reached the ground with an adjustment that allowed some of the central cards to sink beneath the floor, hidden from view by the cards on top. ‘We put a lot of effort into making sure all of the cards came to an attractive final rest position without creating a pile that was unreasonably tall, or bounced around unrealistically’, explained Anthony. Firstly, the team added the additional cards to the deck Jack scatters into the air, then came the issue of the how the CG cards were to land. It’s common for FX simulations to run into problems when lots of simulated objects have to come to a rest on a surface, and this was also the case with this shot. Therefore the simulation had to contain enough cards to completely cover the character for at least one frame, so that he could be removed in an instant. Getting the illusion right proved a challenge as Chu specifically didn’t want Jack to disappear from top to bottom it had to be a complete vanishing act. The shot actually required a complex FX simulation of many thousands of cards falling from the top of frame, encompassing Jack entirely, before he vanishes into thin air all achieved within a 10 second shot. In test screenings the end result proved to be one of the most-liked sequences in the film.Īnother trick sees Jack (Dave Franco) throw a deck of cards into the air in front of an expectant audience, disappearing behind a shower of CG cards as they hit the floor. The team spent a lot of time on how the rain should look when it comes to a stop, and just how much influence Atlas’ movements should have on the rain surrounding him. It also allowed them to generate an impressive looking depth of field and bokeh effect. Once the simulations were approved, the millions of beautifully refracting droplets were rendered with deep data, which allowed the 2D team, led by Compositing Supervisor Alex Payman, to creatively adjust the depth of the rotoscoped crowd layers and therefore the amount of rain in front of them in each shot. Head of FX, Andy Hayes, and CG Supervisor Stefan Putz got to work simulating, lighting and rendering the whole sequence with just the right look and feel. ![]() The effect also required lots of development on how the rain drops should behave while they’re hanging in the air, especially given that the magical effect had to based on a physically plausible idea which is explained in the film’. ![]() Said Anthony, ‘We experimented with various levels of defocus to get the right look, intentionally deviating from the real world camera settings when required to make sure that the foreground droplets weren’t distracting for the viewer. As well as the huge technical challenges involved in these shots, it was also important to strike a balance between creating beautiful on-screen wizardry and keeping a strong sense of realism. This is all set in front of a live-action crowd of cheering fans in Greenwich. One of the most spellbinding sequences in the film shows magician Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) stopping rain in mid-air, moving the droplets around with some deft hand movements before falling back into a puddle and disappearing into the water.
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