stepping up TO star wars
Jellyfish Pictures explain what it was like to team up with ILM on The Last Jedi
We hear from Jellyfish Pictures about their varied visual effects work on Star Wars: The Last Jedi in collaboration with ILM, and how they went from doing postvis work to delivering over 150 shots
When you drive across some parts of South America, the landscape changes so infrequently that it seems to take forever to get anywhere. Then, all of a sudden, you’ll realise you’ve travelled hundreds of miles and reached such a high altitude, it’s difficult to breathe.
Growing a studio can be similar. You work for years on a variety of commissions, and fail to notice how they’re getting more and more prestigious. Then in one dizzying moment, you realise you’re one of the industry’s most respected vendors, and that dream projects are coming your way.
Jellyfish Pictures has taken a not-sodissimilar journey since it launched back in 2001. Originally a two-man band, the company now employs more than 150 artists across three London studios. It’s won a number of prestigious industry awards, and this year it delivered more than 100 shots on the latest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi.
Its involvement in the Disney/lucasfilm franchise began more than a year ago when it was approached to work on Rogue One, the prequel to Star Wars: Episode IV.
The studio was best known for its previs and postvis work, so initially that was to be the limit of their contribution. “We did an awful lot of postvis, so the guys were there during the storymaking and the editorial process with director Gareth Edwards, going through everything,” says VFX supervisor Jonathan Cheetham. “And that was pretty much what our involvement was going to be.”
But things went so well, they were then asked to tender on some shots too. “Originally we didn’t expect to have that many, but in the end we turned over 150. That was quite a major coup for us, because suddenly we weren’t just doing the postvis, but the finished shots that made every single trailer and the final cut as well.”
Upselling success
It was a great result for the studio, which had essentially upsold its services in the manner of any good salesman. “Many people associated us purely with postvis and previs,” explains Cheetham. “So we used that to get a good foot in the door with Lucasfilm and ILM. It gave the producers confidence we could be used as a third party, to either share shots with ILM London, or to take them on and build them ourselves.”
Fast-forward to December 2016 and Lucasfilm came back for more on The Last
Jedi, this December’s highly anticipated sequel to The Force Awakens.
“They approached us with a couple of big packages and said, could we run through a couple of sequences, and put some numbers to shots that we thought we’d like to tender?” says Cheetham. “So in January,
we had our first set of plates turned over, and it was about a six-month turnover from start to finish.”
At the time of writing, the film has yet to be released, so it’s unclear exactly how many of these shots will make the final cut, but Cheetham expects it to be around 130. More important than the exact number for him, though, is the changing nature of Jellyfish Pictures’ contribution.
“The majority of our Rogue One work was 2D and comp work,” Cheetham explains. “So for The Last Jedi, we went back and said: ‘You know, we do do other things. You’ve seen a little bit of 3D and collaboration of the 2D and the postvis, and we do have a strong 3D and effects department, so can we utilise that?’ Lucasfilm responded in kind, and we ended up taking on quite a few effects shots, and a lot more CG shots this time around.”
hit the ground running
This was great news for Jellyfish Pictures, because it meant they had a full pipeline and a full studio working on the film, rather than just the comp department. And their experience working on Rogue One meant they were able to hit the ground running very quickly.
“The colour pipeline is always our basis for any show, and the colour pipeline on any
Star Wars film is quite intricate,” Cheetham continues. “Having set up a similar pipeline on Rogue One, though, I think we were slightly ahead of the game as far as ILM was concerned.”
It wasn’t long, then, before whatever ILM could see in their studios exactly matched how Jellyfish Pictures saw it in theirs. “So that was the first crux point to cross, to make sure we were all working in unison.”
The same principle also applied to software, he adds. “Because we knew we’d be working on shared shots, we wanted our versions of nuke and Maya to line up. We did our matchmoving programs like 3Dequalizer. We also used Houdini extensively and we dipped in and out of Zbrush now and again. And we ran the whole production through Shotgun.”
Shotgun was a lifesaver for Jellyfish, enthuses VFX producer Tom Seed. “It’s been an incredibly useful tool,” he says. “When any shots came through to us, we’d then put them immediately through Shotgun. That
“Everything’s done on a secure Network, which is Essential when working on something like the last jedi” Tom Seed, VFX producer, Jellyfish Pictures
involved getting all the shot information in there, so all the artists know frame ranges, everything like that.
“Everything’s done on a secure network,” he notes, “which is, of course, essential when working on something like The Last Jedi. And so once everything was in Shotgun, we’d create tasks for every department. Generally we’d have the heads of the department having an overview of each of the teams that they’re a head of – so the 3D team, the compositing team, the matchmove team, etc. And once we’d run through with those guys, they’d then divvy out to the rest of the team.”
Seed stresses how useful Shotgun was in helping them track everything. “It lets us look at everything at a glance, which is very useful from a production standpoint,” he explains. “And it’s especially important when you’re dealing with a good number of shots on a show that has multiple different components to it.”
relationship with ilm
Once the team started building shots, they soon developed a close relationship with their counterparts at ILM, says Cheetham.
“We had once- or twice-weekly reviews with them. usually the meeting point between us and the director, rian Johnson, would be Ben Morris, who’s the overall visual effects supervisor. He’d feed back notes to us, but if we wanted quick information on a shot that we were sharing, or shots that ILM felt we needed to integrate with a sequence they were working on as well, we’d talk to Mike Mulholland, who was the ILM supervisor.”
Mulholland and Cheetham would have reviews every week for the whole of the six-month period, and this didn’t just make everyone feel involved, it had concrete practical benefits too.
“The communication was great,” enthuses Cheetham. “We were supplying layouts and cameras back to them, and the vfx on the film were led by ilm with support from Jellyfish as well as hybride, important looking pirates, one of Us and Blind ltd Jellyfish had to work ‘off the grid’ to ensure that no unauthorised stills ended up on social media before the film’s release
they were supplying the same vice-versa back to us, so we wanted to know how they worked – such as whether they worked in feet and inches or centimetres. It was great to be able to iron out things like that at the beginning.”
extensions and explosions
Speaking before the movie’s release, Cheetham is only able to talk in general terms regarding the content of the shots. “So with comp, we obviously had a lot of green screen,” he says. “There were a lot of set extensions, where we had to integrate footage that was beautifully shot on set in the big studios, which we had to then extend one way or another.
“But we also had to extend it internally as well. There was a lot of augmentation in and around the sets. So it wasn’t just: ‘This is something exiting and it’s going to stay in camera.’ We had to work on top of that as well, be it characters, be it infrastructure. So it was always about adding more quality, more bang for your buck as it was, onto what’s already been shot.”
Houdini played an important role. “With these Star Wars films, there’s always going to be a fight or something and you’re always going to need to enhance it with smoke, sparks, fire, explosions, that sort of thing, so Houdini came into its own there,” Cheetham notes. “We’ve got a strong effects team now and they wanted to build not just elements out of Houdini, but Star Wars elements out of Houdini. We had to pick things apart frame by frame. We couldn’t just make a bang; it had to be outstanding, textured and detailed. It had to be worthy to hold up very close to the camera.”
When it came to CG, it was all about lighting and integration. “So for example, with these setups that they filmed on these beautifully crafted sets, which we were extending in CG, the textures had to blend in perfectly,” he notes. “You had to feel that they’d almost replaced the on-set with a CG version of it. It had to be that close a match.”
He points out, a little ruefully, that a lot of the team’s best work on the picture will be invisible – but only because that was exactly what they were aiming for. “The big thing for us, the main technical challenge, was making it absolutely indistinguishable from what was actually in camera. And that’s always the trick with these films. People will think that a lot of it was in camera and there wasn’t any VFX in that sequence. And that’s the aim.”
Keeping it consistent
Consistency with what other vendors had done was another important goal. “It was a
“the main technical CHALLENGE was making the VFX absolutely indistinguishable From what was in Camera” Jonathan Cheetham, VFX supervisor, Jellyfish Pictures
good challenge for us to match to a level that was going to sit naturally in ILM shots and other vendors’ shots,” stresses Cheetham. “People don’t want to watch a Star Wars film and go: ‘Oh, that was done by one company, that was done by another company.’ Certainly with the shots divided up, you don’t have a standalone sequence these days; you’re integrated with everyone.”
Around 30 people at Jellyfish Pictures got to work on the project in total, says Tom Seed, including compositors, matchmovers and 3D artists. “We were really lucky, we had a fantastic team on it, we all pulled together,” he smiles. “Everybody got on with each other, which is so important. And of course it motivates them that little bit extra, when they’re working on this kind of franchise.”
Because, let’s face it, how cool is it to be working on Star Wars? “Growing up, I was a really big fan of the original trilogy,” he says. “At that stage I never thought I’d get the opportunity to work on a movie like
Rogue One or The Last Jedi. So being here at Jellyfish and having that opportunity, it was quite mind-blowing initially. It was definitely on the list of things I’d like to do in my career, and to tick that off has been really great.”
It’s a similar story for Cheetham. “I’m old enough to have seen The Empire Strikes
Back in the cinema first time around,” he explains, “so it was nice to relive that youth. Especially because the new rebooted Star
Wars films feel much closer to the originals.” And his colleagues felt very much the same way. “I think most people who work in visual effects want to work on a Star Wars film, and it filled the studio with a lot of excitement. The artists come in every day, you feel that they know that there’s going to be that moment. A trailer drops – ‘Is my shot on that trailer?’ and things like that. There’s a real buzz in the air.”
But nervousness wasn’t really an issue. “Jellyfish has quite a strong pipeline, from colour all the way through to finish,” he points out. “So there were no moments when we sat there and thought: ‘I’m not sure this is going to work’. Everyone just worked together and got the job done.”