PREVISUALISATION
Alongside the progress of visual effects and animation came a tool that now seems an inseparable part of the process
At the time 3D World was making its mark on the magazine landscape, visual effects in the digital arena were seeing the rapidly emerging importance of previsualisation, also known as previs for short, as a tool with which to determine the storytelling choices and bigger aesthetic qualities of a given project.
Digital has allowed the visual language of a film to be developed and defined, moving the process towards something more holistic. Key to that possibility has been the discipline of previs, which has embedded itself not only as a way of mapping out visual effects details, but as a method of shaping and determining the overall visual language and style for a film. Previs, itself an iteration of storyboarding, but now with a sense of what Tippett long ago described as “the temporal cadences” of a scene or sequence, is now a standard part of the process of visual effects studios. As such, studios have often found themselves increasingly involved in working with directors to determine the overarching visual language of a given film or television project, rather than only the dynamics of a particular scene or sequence within them.
Speaking with 3D World in 2022, Kevin Baillie, a visual effects supervisor and long-time collaborator with Zemeckis, observed how previs has offered a whole new world to explore. “The dynamic of the world of film production has been evolving at such a rapid pace,” he said. “There was a moment in time where we felt like we’d all settled, that we’d done an example of everything.
Now it’s going to be maybe not as exciting because there’s less new ground to break. And then, along has come real-time technology in the world of filmmaking and that’s reset us back to square one, really, in terms of how we can make movies. It’s opened up so many doors and has really shuffled around the idea of traditional prep, shoot and post, and taken those three usually very serial parts of the workflow and made them all happen in parallel.
“Virtual production, using realtime tools to help with production, really just exposes that the VFX and virtual production process is an analogy to the entire process of live-action filming. They have carpenters, we have modellers. They have painters, we have texture artists. They have actors, we have animators. You can draw a line between every department on a set and every department in visual effects and there will be a direct correlation, even though we call them totally different things. All of the problems that are there in live action are there in virtual production. Virtual production just helps you iterate quicker and get to an answer sooner, before it gets really expensive to make a change.
“The virtual production process allows us to make mission-critical decisions upfront. You have to do your asset builds sooner and commit to spending money on certain things, even if you know they might get thrown out, but there’s just going to be less money thrown out than if you did it in live action or in post. It’s more frontended on the visual effects side, but it makes it slightly leaner on the production phase because you’re only really building and shooting what you need.”
“VIRTUAL PRODUCTION HELPS YOU ITERATE QUICKER AND GET TO AN ANSWER SOONER” Kevin Baillie, VFX supervisor and director, speaking in 2022