As most visual-effects designers
know, creativity can strike at any time: while lying
in bed at night; during rush-hour traffic; even in
the shower. The trouble is, most people find it impossible
to have ready access to a sophisticated paint, animation,
and compositing suite during such inopportune moments.
Not so for Jimi Simmons. Vice
president and director of visual effects at Western
Images, a San Francisco facility specializing in CGI,
design, visual effects, and digital post production,
Simmons routinely creates and composites complex visual
effects shots from home, or while on location. Last
fall, he even put together a live videographics show
to accompany a Bette Midler concert while vacationing
in Lake Tahoe. How does Simmons bring his ideas to
fruition when he doesn't have access to Western's
high-end visual effects suite? By relying on combustion,
the newest 3D paint, animation, and compositing system
from Discreet.
Problems/Challenges
A nationally recognized digital
production and design studio, Western Images has produced
commercial, theatrical, music video, long form, and
broadcast projects for such high-profile clients as
ESPN, ILM, Leo Burnett Chicago, Lucasfilm Ltd., McCann-Erickson,
New Line Cinema, 20th Century Fox, and Ogilvy & Mather.
The facility has been using Discreet's flint®, inferno®,
and flame® for 3D compositing and visual-effects creation
ever since the systems started shipping.
According to Simmons, these
systems more than met the facility's needs in terms
of providing professional features at impressive speeds.
But they had one drawback. "They aren't portable,"
he says. "That means I couldn't do preliminary design
work while on location, so I couldn't get the director's
vision, his input, while I was creating, which is
something I wanted to start doing."
Solution/Benefits
Last October, Western became
an alpha site for combustion, Discreet's new desktop
visual-effects system. Compatible with the Macintosh
and Windows, the affordable desktop software-based
solution boasts keying, motion tracking, color correction,
vector-based non-destructive paint animation, true
3D compositing, and support for Adobe Photoshop and
After Effects plug-ins. combustion's optimized architecture
also supports multi-processing, advanced RAM caching,
real-time multi-clip playback, and batch, background,
and network rendering for high speed. What's more,
it integrates seamlessly with Discreet's inferno,
flame, flint, fire®, and smoke®, as well as with 3d
studio max® and edit, Discreet's award-winning animation
and nonlinear editing solutions.
For Simmons, combustion was
precisely what he was looking for. "I started using
combustion with the specific goal of running it off
a laptop while on location. That way, I could do preliminary
effects compositing with the benefit of immediate
feedback from directors and clients, and then import
my work into our inferno, flame, or flint suites for
conforming," he says. "But since then, I've found
it gives me incredible creative freedom." For instance,
when Simmons runs into a design problem at work, it's
not uncommon for him to think of a possible solution
to the problem at home that night. "Before combustion,
I couldn't test the solution on a practical basis
until the next day because I don't have a $1 million
effects suite in my garage. But with combustion, whenever
I come up with that solution, I just pull my laptop
out of my backpack and in five minutes solve the problem
I ran into that afternoon, and I'm ready to roll with
it the next day. I rely on it so heavily because it's
there when I need it."
According to Simmons, over
the past eight months Western has worked on half a
dozen projects using combustion. For a recent job,
for instance, Western was hired to create a 60-second
commercial for ActionAce.com Inc., which sells kids'
action figures over the Web. "The client wanted the
spot to be action-packed, with lots of characters,"
he says. "And the client wanted the point of view
of one of the live-action characters to be seen through
a heads-up display."
With a tight deadline and
an even tighter budget, Simmons says he didn't have
the time or money to spend in the high-end suites
designing the look of the commercial. "So I loaded
the live-action plates into combustion, brought my
laptop home, and in my spare time and within the parameters
of an existing budget I did the preliminary design
work," he says. Then he posted the designs to Western's
ftp site for review by the live-action director, who
by then was already in pre-production on another job.
The director provided feedback to Simmons via email,
and Simmons adjusted the designs as necessary. "So,
when it came time to conform the spot and create the
effects, I only had to make some fine tweaks to the
preliminary designs in combustion," he enthuses. And
because combustion integrates so well with the other
Discreet products, Simmons could conform the spot
in inferno and revise the effects in combustion, while
he and the client were in the session. "We shaved
a whole day of inferno design work off that project,"
he states.
Sometimes Simmons uses combustion
to do preliminary composites on location, before the
live-action film has even been developed, by hooking
up his laptop to the film camera via a FireWire interface.
"Then I download the imagery we're compositing into
the shot. Using combustion I can put together the
composite and show it to clients while the film's
still in the camera."
All told, combustion has provided
Simmons with the creative freedom he has yearned for.
"I've been in this business for 15 years, and for
14 of them I've been chained to an effects suite,"
he concludes. "With combustion, I can take my years
of digital compositing experience with me wherever
I need it."
Discreet
Cumbustion is represented locally by CYNC Corp. in
Brookline, MA. They can be reached at 617-277-4317,
cumbustion@cync.com.
Audrey
Doyle is a freelance writer and editor with more than
14 years of experience covering the computer graphics
and digital video industries. Based in Boston, she
can be reached at audreyd@mediaone.net.
Image Courtesy of Western
Images.
