We're On It Injected

Look around!

ALCOA  presented this Virtual Reality piece at the 2016 summer Farnborough International Airshow to rave audience reviews and hours-long waiting line.  Design company Digital Illusions commissioned me for MAYA  animation, AFTER EFFECTS compositing and VR 360 stitching of the history of flight segments.  

Shot design, layout, final modeling, textures, shaders, animation, lighting, and compositing by yours truly, Isa Alsup.  Additional super-graphics were added in post by Digital Illusion, who also did a final grading and added additional shots to complete the piece.

Throughout the project, Ann DeVilbiss at Digital Illusions and Chuck Chubbuck at C-Squared Communications  maintained unwavering confidence and inspirational creative and production leadership throughout a tough schedule with the usual management of client changes and approval process.

History of Aviation
360 frame without VR viewer

Visualizing the history of aviation
- and ALCOA's important role

In my shots, our super camera flies through the scene following the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of Saint Louis and a DC-3 aircraft before encountering the Orion spacecraft.  Viewers can look around this virtual scene, checking out the other aircraft coming from behind and sides,  or follow the main aircraft.  After the Orion encounter we journey through a jet engine, then the camera pulls back and through the fuselage of the commercial airliner as it assembles mid-air around us before zipping up and away...

Landing Zoolander 2

View Zoolander 2 trailer at IMDb | see one of my shots at 0:25
Just about any movie with a little action has visual effects and green screen.  As I learned when working on Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, dirty green screens are here to stay.

The Zoolander 2 green-screens were challenging, with pools of dark green and light green--  but I've seen worse.  And of course, the production company wanted every stray strand of hair in this film featuring fashion models.

I often come into projects as a clean-up artist and finisher, so some of the NUKE comps I inherited challenged my keying skills-- mainly dealing with some tricksy keying by other artists that needed major artifact clean-up.  I don't mind effective shortcuts, but sometimes tricks can have side effects that are difficult or impossible to repair.  These comps required some intense long hours to repair.

What I loved about this job was the great color palette and futuristic GUI designer Kyle Cooper and his team at Prologue put together for the on-screen graphics.  Kyle and team were a dream to work with.

The boy who could fly: PAN

Free poster at FanPop

The great team at WOLF & CROW,  tapped me to come in as a finishing and stereoscopic compositor and  on their great amazing animation for the film PAN.

This involved several sequences, including a stereoscopic backstory  tale of Pan and Hook told in pixie-dust. In the trailer (IMDb) are clips from the sequence.   With animation locked for 2D, this needed minor refinement and completion in stereo.  Mainly the 2D version had a lot of forced perspective that had to be removed, requiring subtle animation changes that would give the same feel with less forced perspective.

Next I undertook some color correction, mainly fixing some of those over-exposure superwhites we all love on a number of shots.  With high-color work, sometimes the beautiful design will posterize in the high end as it transitions to super-whites.  The artistry I add is to get some detail in those superwhites, so they can be exposed down without posterization.  This also involves careful blending back into the 0-1 range.  Sometimes these superwhite problems are in one or two channels, resulting in an intense chromatic look that, while desirable, can make final color grading difficult.

When you look at the trailer, look for my work at 0:23 and 0:32.  Here you will not see the stereo, my main contribution to the shots, but you can appreciate the animation and imagine the challenges of stereoscopic production.


IMDb has the trailer

Battling Zombies and Witches

After a few small advertising gigs with BPG Advertising and others, I headed across the northern frontier in early 2015 to snowy Montreal to work as a Comp Supervisor.  Sadly, on arrival, I was informed no such position was currently available.  So I jumped into the role of compositor for the feature, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies.   

Crowd Extensions Lessons

Now these were crowd multiplication shots comprising multiple plates, shot with running extras, without any consideration of depth layering, so zombies were sort of running through one another when the shot was slapped together.  A lot of roto by a very talented group of artists, some tracking, lots of color adjustments and .... fini.

Plates for crowd extension require rotoscoping out sections of each plate and

Green Screen Politics

For some time now my blog, "The Art of CG Supervision" has been waiting for me to tickle the keyboard.  Today a question I saw on LinkedIn inspired me to write.

As supervisors we are often confronted with questions that, on first hearing, we may want to scream "No way!"  But of course, that really would be childish and of no help to anyone.

In my new post, I address the concerns of a LinkedIn member who was being asked by DP about over-cranking footage to get a better key.  Having recently worked as the keying supervisor on Prime Focus's SIN CITY A DAME TO KILL FOR, I sort of felt I could speak to the question.

"Green Screen" by Peter Pearson
licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

The first step is to address the technical, aesthetic, and cost implications of the question (with schedule the time cost).  Then we look at the delicacies of working with the DP....

Read more at The Politics of the Green Screen Shoot

Sin City 2

Sequence Supervisor:
Sin City, A Dame To Kill For
2013 Oct through 2014 June

Completed a nine month assignment in India with Prime Focus World on the new film: Sin City, A Dame to Kill For.  This was an exciting and demanding project.

"It's all about the post-production

on a movie like this"   www.toplessrobot.com

I spent the first couple of months with the title of PreComp Supervisor.  This involved
training, organizing and supervising a team of junior compositors to de-noise plates and pull basic keys in NUKE. During my leadership, we completed about 1260 of the 2500 shots -- just over half.  This was a great assignment, as I had some time to do develop and do some training of the team in my keying methods.

Then I was moved over to Sequence Supervise a big bunch of shots, heading one of several teams. My team and I did lighting and final renders and put out comps on over 300 shots in 6 months.  All the shots involved building virtual sets and massive amounts of in-comp color grading to get the on set lighting to work with the style of the film and lighting of the sets.  On another 100 or so shots I did some prep work and planning, ordering paint, roto etc. from support departments, then management rebalanced shots with new teams, so I can't really count these in my shot tally.  Generally, my supervisory role involved interpreting instructions from the VFXSupervisors and Director to the team, quality control, NUKE template development, ad hoc training, one-on-one working with artists in NUKE and MAYA... plus looking ahead.

In addition, while at PFW, I also worked as a VFX Training Consultant with Michael Pecchia, Director of  VFX Training, drawing up a complete training outline for new compositors.

One of my shots from the trailer.  Dwight (Josh Brolin) has something on his mind.  Not the final version.
opens 22 August 2014
source:www.toplessrobot.com

Prime Focus is a great place to work.  Merzin Tavaria (co-founder and chief creative director) has inspiring vision for the company and VFX in India and the global market.  Other managers were responsive to changing needs and schedules.  My crew worked very hard and was eager to learn and perform well.  My line producer was fantastic.  HR took good care of us expatriates, so we could focus attention on our work.

More than that I cannot say, after all, every company has its NDA secret recipes!  I can say that the recent merger announcements are great news and will greatly effect VFX post worldwide.  (http://www.primefocusworld.com/)


This was my third tour in India, where I previously worked for Reliance Media Works and GEON Studios.   I stayed this time at the wonderful Renaissance Marriot at Lake Powai.

Working and living in India is always a challenge -- far from home, family and friends; a change in diet, climate, and tempo.  But after a short adjustment period, you get into the groove.  The people are like people everywhere in a huge metropolis - stressed.  But they were also friendly and pleasant.  There is also enormous poverty counterbalancing enormous wealth.  The crew and management were excellent to work with, as I said before.   I look forward to going back again.

A view from my hotel
I started every morning looking out my window to see how much the water level was dropping and to look for birds, cattle, crocodiles, fishing boats and people wading in the lake.  Across Lake Powai, on the south shore, is Hiranandani Gardens, where I lived in 2010-11.  My flat was in Enternia, the tall double one third from right.