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.