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  • Century Plaza

    Finished this just before Christmas at DBOX.

    https://vimeo.com/379076009/8813d0a352

    Century plaza residences in LA. 5 people for 10 weeks.

    It's got some issues - the intro was a client demand we fought hard on. The original storyboard was different but we just could not win that fight. believe it or not this is a compromise - the 'brief' for what needed to happen in the intro (which we got a couple weeks into production) would've cost 200k and taken 10 weeks alone.

    It was pretty challenging to storyboard - we had to cover it being 'the center of the world' as an intro, the arrival/public space, the hotel lobby, the public retail area, the hotel amenities, a hotel residence, the tower arrival experience, the tower amenities, the tower residence, and some aerial shots of LA - all within no more than 2 and a half minutes. It's an extremely complex development to try and explain the entirety of it in one film.

    We really pushed for well dressed, clean & sharp images on this one - it was tough but the team did a great job, there was a great atmosphere while working on it. A few of the spaces had old scenes the NY studio had worked on as stills which helped a lot, they needed makeovers though and it was still an insane 3d lift.
    Tried a new post production workflow too where we combined fusion as a first pass to make deep alterations & generate glows on the exr sequences in 32bit, then after effects in 16bit to re-assemble and do the final grade. It was a massive success and we're going to do that 2-stage post production for every animation going forward, made things so much more efficient towards the end.
    There's some noise that we'd have loved to remove but the timeline was just too tight, so we did what we could in fusion to get rid of hot pixels - and trust me that wherever you see them, it was originally a LOT worse.
    Managing the render times was hairy, we didn't end up off track or delivering late but did have to make tiny little adjustments as we went to compromise. The delivery date was hard and non-negotiable - but we managed to finish the day before.

    Getting the footage back and seeing how many cranes were in it was a depressing moment. That was a big challenge, the first few days on that felt absolutely hopeless. Moved quick once the workflow was ironed out.
    Here's what the fusion file for the crane removal looks like - https://i.imgur.com/KP2purA.png

    Happy to answer any things people might want to know about it! Click image for larger version  Name:	_C13 Hotel Pool Detail_00000.jpg Views:	1 Size:	340.4 KB ID:	1057811
    Click image for larger version  Name:	_C06 Century Plaza Signage_00000.jpg Views:	1 Size:	550.4 KB ID:	1057812



    Click image for larger version  Name:	_C20 Hotel Resi Detail_00000.jpg Views:	1 Size:	442.0 KB ID:	1057810







    Last edited by Neilg; 12-01-2020, 01:24 AM.


  • #2
    And a few more stills
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    • #3
      Very nice and thank you for sharing. The attention to detail is awesome!
      Bobby Parker
      www.bobby-parker.com
      e-mail: info@bobby-parker.com
      phone: 2188206812

      My current hardware setup:
      • Ryzen 9 5900x CPU
      • 128gb Vengeance RGB Pro RAM
      • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 X2
      • ​Windows 11 Pro

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      • #4
        awesome stuff, so in the final image how much is footage and cg?
        e: info@adriandenne.com
        w: www.adriandenne.com

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        • #5
          Jaume Plensa, The Bow, Calgary.... "we had to cover it being 'the center of the world' as an intro" - Sounds like something the big "G" would lobby heavily for. They're a leech on any project they're involved with.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by francomanko View Post
            awesome stuff, so in the final image how much is footage and cg?
            Thanks!

            Made a couple of gifs of those last shots.




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            • #7
              Impressive work!

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              • #8
                Super cool stuff! Congrats!
                It is not easy to maintain such high quality across big projects like this, but you guys nailed it!
                -------------------------------------------------------------
                Simply, I love to put pixels together! Sounds easy right : ))
                Sketchbook-1 /Sketchbook-2 / Behance / Facebook

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                • #9
                  so cool, nice So you liked using fusion then? Any insights into it?
                  e: info@adriandenne.com
                  w: www.adriandenne.com

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by francomanko View Post
                    so cool, nice So you liked using fusion then? Any insights into it?
                    Oh where to start. i've been in a relationship with fusion for 8 years now.
                    6 was where I fell in love. 7 and 8 were the honeymoon years. 9 was toxic and is functionally useless then it re-invented itself for 16 (yes it skipped 10-15) which is mostly great, but fell apart with the crane removal file and began crashing - I ended up doing the heli shots in 8. everything else was done in 16.
                    Use 16, but keep an installer for 8 handy. 9 was the worst release of any version of any software ever released.
                    I still prefer it to nuke even when not taking the price of nuke into account.
                    It's incredibly powerful and I hate after effects for anything beyond a color grade. If someone offered me 200k to do the crane removal and helicopter shots in after effects i'd turn it down.

                    There's a great forum which surpasses the chaos group one in community passion and general support at https://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckless/
                    They built a plugin manager called reactor which is one of the most well maintained forum projects i've ever seen, has tons of useful goodies.

                    It is hard to learn what it's really capable of, it doesnt shout about it's most powerful features because they are buried under combinations of nodes, you have to do a little digging.
                    I know many people who use it who dont even know this is possible - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USS84b1iUp4
                    which was the core approach behind all of the crane removal and footage cleanup.

                    Or this - which you'll recognize as a scene from this film early on. made this to show the team why we were rendering the sampler info pass.
                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWgO...ature=youtu.be


                    There are some people that have $10 a month paetrons who create fusion training material and old talks on youtube from conferences of people who discovered amazing little tricks and efficiencies with it. if you do get it, commit to soaking all of that up - it's worth it.
                    Last edited by Neilg; 12-01-2020, 01:26 AM.

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                    • #11
                      i remember using fusion when it first came out and really liked it then, always been meaning to try it again, something about nuke, the look etc just puts me off, makes me feel confused and inadequate
                      e: info@adriandenne.com
                      w: www.adriandenne.com

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                      • #12
                        Great piece of work and a load to get done in that time! I did spot one or two roto glitches but you'd have to do what I did to catch them
                        I would very much like to get that crane shot to see how I'd approach it, though I doubt it's available, or is it?.......
                        Awkward shots I like and although I don't currently use Fusion I have some ideas about how I'd approach it without that extremely cool projection trick.
                        https://www.behance.net/bartgelin

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                        • #13
                          Originally posted by fixeighted View Post
                          Great piece of work and a load to get done in that time! I did spot one or two roto glitches but you'd have to do what I did to catch them
                          Haha. I was waiting for someone to notice those... if i started a new one tomorrow it would be better, wasted a lot of time figuring out what the approach would be.

                          I actually am really interested in the approach you'd use - always interested in hearing about other methods, helps when considering future work from fresh angles. need to figure out who technically owns the raw footage, let me poke around.

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                          • #14
                            great work neil and team! especially in that timeline

                            interesting you do grade in AE! such a horrible horrible place to end up after fusion....we are still on 9, no one was ready to embrace the F16 UI and we assumed (?) it was going to be discontinued which I still feel is likely...

                            we do a LOT of crane removal in our work for the obligatory day and night hero shots also interested in others heli retouch techniques.

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                            • #15
                              Ha! Thank you, much appreciated!

                              i hate ae just as much as you, but doing the color grade in fusion on 32bit exrs is a massive wall. Every past job it's been a nightmare exporting and re exporting for every tweak. The final week is such a miserable experience.
                              Having a pass of fixes, color tweaks, glass & flicker removal which was independent to the white balance and grade was an absolute life saver.
                              I hate after effects so much but we could not have done this job without it.

                              This was the first time we did this, we designed the workflow around the job - but it was such a massive success I have to admit that ae has it's place.
                              I owe a lot of this to Matt, Miami's art director - he was instrumental in developing this workflow. I am now all in on it!
                              That highlights another reason this job went well - everyone on the team shared their voice and opinions, and they were good, valid contributions. Everyone really got the scope and severity of what we were trying to do and got stuck in to their best. Changes everything.


                              How on earth are you doing anything with fusion 9?
                              ​​​maybe it's hardware but for us it crashes every 5 minutes. It's a complete embarrassment of a piece of software. It's totally unusable.
                              16 is nice - I hated the interface at first but once you get over habits it's not that bad. Reactor still works!

                              Edit: thank you to everyone who has said nice things! Sorry for not replying personally but I am passing it on.
                              Last edited by Neilg; 12-01-2020, 01:27 AM.

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