Eyeon Talks to Mark Breakspear & Mathew Krentz about Rainmakers Work on The Da Venci Code
Rainmaker is a world class operation serving an international clientele. Offering complete services ranging from laboratory, telecine, digital post, HDTV, visual effects and new media, Rainmaker has propelled itself to the forefront of the industry. Rainmaker employs a staff of over a hundred and fifty people in a fully-integrated, state of the art facility in the heart of Vancouver; North America's third largest production centre and one of the planet's most beautiful and livable cities. Despite two decades of growth and technological change, the heart and soul of Rainmaker remains the same - a team of talented hands-on professionals dedicated to the art and craft of motion picture post production.
[mb] = Mark Breakspear (Visual Effects Supervisor)
[mk] = Mathew Krentz (Lead Compositor)
Why do you think Rainmaker was chosen to work on The Da Vinci Code?
[mb] We nearly missed out on the opportunity to work on the Da Vinci Code several times! There were some great companies already working on The Da Vinci Code, MPC, Double Negative and The Senate. To add another company (ourselves) to that already great mix was a great testament to the fantastic test that we put together for Visual Effects Supervisor, Angus Bickerton. Previously we had perfected a technique on another movie with Angus Bickerton called Firewall that uses projected textures to create photorealistic 3D spaces. By using this approach on a test for The Da Vinci Code, we showed that we were more than capable of competing at the level that Ron Howard wanted, and at the same time we also offered a very production friendly approach that solved a great deal of the problems, namely shooting in a church you couldn’t shoot in!
When it came time to recreate the church what programs did you use in conjunction with Fusion?
[mb] If we’re talking about the 2D world, Fusion was the pivotal point for our compositors. We also used Photoshop CS 2 to import and adjust our RAW files from the actual church in Paris. In the 3D universe we built the entire church in Lightwave.
[mk] There were also a number of shots that needed to be tracked in Boujou that we imported into both Lightwave and Fusion 5 for integrating film elements with a proper track.
How was Fusion a benefit in this regard?
[mb] As with most projects, the ability to adjust shots right up to the last moment is a crucial consideration, and we had plenty of that on Da Vinci Code! I’ve trusted Fusion since I first used it in 1998 at Digital Muse. It just made sense at a time when everyone else was over engineering their tools. Eyeon had made a piece of software that could be injected into the heart of any facility whether large or small without damaging any existing balance that was already there with other systems. You have to like that! Ever since then, I’ve trusted the software on many of the projects I’ve worked on, including The Da Vinci Code. It doesn’t let you down. Apart from that one time it let me down, and that was because I had meant to open Word instead. Fusion is a lousy word processor.
[mk] Candles, flames and smoke had been filmed to integrate in certain shots, a couple of those shots had major camera moves and we needed proper parallax added to the elements. With Fusion’s new 3d camera, it was simple to import the Boujou track and apply the camera move to the elements.
