To the Department Head at the Framestore Recruitment Team,
We are a group of students from around the world who have come together in pursuit of our Master’s degrees at the prestigious University of the Arts London, with a broad range of individual specializations and a devoted commitment to creative visual narratives, hard work, and experimentation with cutting-edge technology in the industry of visual effects. Each of us brings a unique passion and skill set, cultural perspective, and essential professional experience to our team of dedicated artists, and we, collectively, would like to express our greatest gratitude for the opportunity to apply for a spot on the Launchpad Competition. At UAL, we receive close mentorship from tutors who have worked with Framestore on phenomenal projects, and earlier this week were fortunate enough to speak with Framestore Director Andrew Schlussel regarding the recruitment process, an eye-opening experience which led us to the fortunate discovery of this competition. The chance to work with an industry giant at the forefront of visual storytelling is an incredible gift, and we believe that our well-rounded spread of talent and enthusiasm for exceptional work places us as ideal candidates for consideration in representing the legendary Framestore brand.
Our team is comprised of six postgraduate students, each with their own considerable achievement and competitive skill. Team Captain Giulia Villela is a driven and passionate 3D modeling artist with experience interning at Rede Globo, an internationally recognized Brazilian media powerhouse and the largest broadcasting television network in Latin America. Gherardo Varani is a postproduction specialist with interests in photogrammetry and compositing, and brings us essential understanding of advanced technology in filmmaking through means such as his utilization of drone operation and HDRI cameras in aerial filming. Another vital asset to our team is compositor Diana Chinalieva, who creates stunning effects in Nuke and Houdini, drawing on expertise she developed during her time as a junior compositing intern at the Russian VFX company Unit5 as she worked alongside leading specialists in the field. Jane Boehlert’s brilliant passion for VFX is distinctly apparent in her exploration of the field with a unique transcendence of mediums and dimensions, implementing her firm creative background in the world of video art, 2D animation, and design. Emma Copeland joins the team from the school’s 3D Animation course with a strong command of motion tracking, and in particular the practice of matchimation, incorporating her enthusiasm for dynamic animation seamlessly into a background plate of live-action footage to create an ethereal balance of the supernatural mixing among the mundane. In addition to a previous four years of experience as an animator while finishing his Bachelor’s degree, Antoni Coll also lends us unparalleled skill in his motion tracking and photorealistic visual effects as well as an edge on the latest innovations in the VFX
industry through his ongoing training in Unreal Engine. Together, our team harmoniously blends artistic vision and technological literacy to produce an ambitious, visually striking output.
Under the invaluable guidance of Framestore advice, mentorship, and review, we hope to conceptualize a project that pushes the boundaries of visual narration and showcases the stunning results of the blossoming technology in our sector that allows us to ever further breach the line between reality and the human mind.
We would like to once again express our gratitude for being given the chance to apply for this illustrious opportunity, as well as our sincerest thanks for your time and energy.
During our Framestore talk with Andrew Schlussel, he mentioned that something called matchimation is highly sought after on matchmove showreels currently. This is a term for animating a character rig on top of a background plate involving a tracked person. As I mentioned before, in my collaborative project I aim to showcase my tracking abilities, and in my individual, I seek to do the same but with a spotlight on my animation skills, too.
Last night I went out with a very kind friend and took several shots of her wearing this homemade mocap suit on public transportation. I’m very excited to actually get to track a person/object that is made to be easy, rather than struggling to pinpoint a tiny scratch on a leather jacket and hope it doesn’t spline.
As I took my footage, I had three goals in mind:
To create a shot that would be trackable. By this I mean making sure that the camera motion is steady enough, avoiding and objects interfering with the sticker placement on my model (for example, on the escalator, people moving around her to climb up the stairs), and keeping all of the stickers in eyesight without crossing over too much.
To create a shot that would be impressive on a reel. By this I mean one with a very solid track, impressively realistic animation, or dynamic movement.
To aim for realistic character animation. By this I mean animating my model moving naturally through her surroundings. In the chosen shot, she is swaying with the motion of the subway carriage car and moving her arms to stabilize herself.
Out of the shots I took, Dom suggested I choose this one because I could get a very precise background track on it due to the lack of movement and the subject’s movement will be natural yet at the same time impressive. I was at first concerned that the background and camera movement were not dynamic enough, but he reminded me that this project is meant only to focus on my object track, not my background track, and I already have several good background track shots to put on my showreel.
The next step for me is to brainstorm what kind of rig I’d like to use for this project. I’ve been told to make sure that it stands out in some way, whatever I do, whether that’s with a striking character or lighthearted humor. I’m considering something supernatural. I will spend the rest of today planning out the character and storyline here.
On the twelfth of May, Antoni from the VFX program asked me if I’d like to join him and some of his fellow VFX classmates in a competition that Framestore is running this summer. Essentially, teams of six students create a combined showreel to submit this coming Friday (the fourteenth of May) showcasing the talents of each member of the group as well as our ability to collaborate on a project. The selected teams will be given the opportunity to make a 30-second short film over the summer with mentorship and free online aid from Framestore representatives. It will be treated like a Framestore internship, and thus is tremendously beneficial for breaking into the industry, not to mention the likelihood of placing a role at Framestore itself afterward- according to Schlussel’s presentation earlier this week, about 70% of Framestore interns end up working there afterward.
So within two days, we are working to put together a showreel that displays our individual best work as well as some of our collaborative projects. Me, Antoni, and Gherardo, who are all part of this group, worked on a collaborative project last term, and we are excited to showcase that in this reel, and the other three members- Diana, Giulia, and Jane- also worked together on a collaborative project last term, so we have a great opportunity to show off our ability to create fantastic work as a team.
I’ve volunteered to write the cover letter for the group. In addition to that, of course, I’ve also got to make sure that my individual work is good enough to not only represent me well but benefit the rest of my group members as we present our work. I had a session with Dom this morning to discuss three things- the mocap footage I’ve been collecting and which I should choose for my individual matchimation project (see post regarding that), fixing image plane bugs in Maya, and which of my matchmove work exhibits my skill best.
Dom suggested I use my helicopter shot, or, as we’ve been referring to it, the Dynamic Shot (because the rotating camera is challenging + impressive for a background track), however, he had a few suggestions for ways that I might push the shot to a more competitive final product. For reference, this is what it looked like originally:
Dom pointed out that the flying helicopter actually does not showcase my track well, because we can’t see the camera moving around it, and the rotating camera is the entire point of choosing such difficult footage to track. He suggested that I have the helicopter stationary in the foreground and instead have a couple extra helicopters flying around it in the back. He also mentioned that I should add a shadowmatte to the ground plane to give it extra believability. Here is the shot with these changes:
It looks a lot better! Finally this shot is showreel-ready. For the Framestore competition specifically, we are looking to add a reel breakdown with all of our passes, and so below you’ll find my breakdown for this shot including my playblast, geo wireframe, and final polish.
Earlier today I attended a lecture with Andrew Schlussel, a recruiter from Framestore. His Linkedin also lists him as a director as well as a professor at Academy of Art, which is interesting, because I turned down an offer from Academy of Art in order to come here, favoring UAL for its connections, opportunities, name recognition, and more competitive acceptance rate. That said, I am very grateful for the opportunity we had to speak with Andrew today. Getting the chance to speak with a recruiter from Framestore face-to-face (as it were), was an incredible opportunity and really taught me a lot about the way the hiring process and growth within the industry works as well as nudged me to pursue a new path for my showreel in accordance with the demand in the industry.
The question that I posed to Andrew was regarding the number of entry level roles that Framestore looks to hire as they go through the hiring process each year (season?) and what that number is dependent on.
Andrew answered me that the role that could be considered the most “entry level” aside from a runner position would be as a matchmove artist or as a 2D paint artist, and that they are looking to hire for these positions year round, but of course it depends on the number of roles that are available for each project. We discussed the field of matchmove and he informed me that a skill highly in demand right now is something called “matchimation”, which involves animating a character rig over footage of an actor. I believe this is the same sort of thing we had been working on with Dom in January with the superhero suit. Andrew then also talked to me about the career path for a matchmove artist- it is typically considered entry level but there is growth within the industry.
I plan to incorporate matchimation in my showreel by re-centering my individual project for this term around it. I will go back to acquiring footage with this goal in mind.
One last piece of information mentioned by Schlussel that stood out to me was that, obviously, a junior position after school is ideal, but an internship may have a 70% chance of landing an applicant a role upon completion, and then a runner position can still open many doors. As someone who’s worked in customer service for over five years while finishing my education, I’m not afraid to wash dishes if it gets my foot in the door.
I also liked his discussion of a “playful” approach to learning software. He told us that we should try out software like Unreal Engine, but focus on exploring its tools and learning what it has to offer rather than forcing ourselves to visualize an end goal.
This week, I began work on tracking the shots that I, Antoni, and Marianna were given to practice as we wait for the footage. I was able to get a really decent track on the forest road shot, with a 0.7 deviation, and in lineup view the depth of my points is exactly what I intended. However, when I exported my project into Maya, I was unable to figure out why my image plane was not moving along with the camera. I’ve booked a session with Dom to try to discuss this further when next he’s free. Fortunately, Antoni was able to get the shot done in time for our Friday deadline.
I also attempted to track the bridge shot, but the quality of the footage is rather low. I’m keeping that in mind as I continue with my personal tracking project.
For the week going into our external collaboration unit, we (the matchmove team) were tasked with tracking a few videos of roads as we wait for the actual driving footage to become available to us. The sample videos we were given included a few that looked pretty easy, featuring a mostly stable camera and lots of debris around the roadside. One does include a bridge which the camera passes under, which will require some splining, and another features dust spinning from dunes around the highway, which may also interfere with a solid track and require some creative point placement. The only one that may present a problem is the video that involves leaves flying past the cameras in the wind. This one will for sure be the most challenging footage to track. As of yet, I’ve worked on the shot above, and found it quite simple. Early on in my attempt, I managed a 0.8 deviation curve before even refining any of my points.
I’m eager to see what our footage will look like for the film when it is available to us. It could be an easy overhead shot like this one, or it may be quite dynamic, with several moving parts, which will be difficult but present me the opportunity to practice as well as exhibit my skills on my showreel.
It escapes my memory as to whether I’ve mentioned this on my blog before, but I’ve decided to focus my specialism in motion tracking. I’ve found that I’m good at it, it’s interesting and fun, and I’m eager to put my best foot forward in the job market as I enter the industry this year. So, while I visited my family in the United States over Easter break, I worked on a project with Dom to refine my matchmove skills and build a solid piece for my showreel.
We chose this shot because it is slightly more challenging, as the camera rotates around the scene, and because it shows a good contrast in depth. As I worked on it, Dom helped me work on some methods to fine-tune my deviation curve, like timeline weight blending and splining. Another big takeaway from this project for me was a better understanding of how to build geo around a tracked scene in Maya. I still need to practice all of the above a few more times, though, in order to really get the process down.
The stage of my process on this practice project so far is placing wireframe cones around the scene to show depth, and my next step will be to add in an animated object- potentially, I’m thinking, a helicopter- in the scene, emerging from the back and landing up at the front, in order to show off the track to the best of my abilities.
It’s hard to even begin to describe the insurmountable amount of work and tumultuous stress that has gone into this past week, because every member of my collab group has been running around like chickens with our heads cut off. That being said, after a few sleepless nights, screensharing with tutors, and constant back-and-forth messaging, we were amazingly able to pull through victoriously with an entirely complete Act One.
To make a long story short, we were on track to finish at a leisurely pace until I, as the only group member with working knowledge of the render farm, began work on running all of our finished shots through the farm. To my utter horror, every single job repeatedly racked up two to three hundred errors, then crashed. Struggling to diagnose the problem with my group, we reworked our file paths and double-checked everything in the reference editor, but the problem persisted. Unable to work through the error ourselves, we reached out to our tutors for help. In the meantime, I raced through some edits on shots four and five, re-working the position to match up to Kamil’s work on shot six for continuity.
At the same time, Deadline was giving us trouble in the form of a ‘Cannot find procedure: Submit to Deadline’ error, and for a moment, the render farm was in effect entirely unusable, leaving us to face a full night with no assurance that we would have any semblance of even half of a final project to present for our hard work, and so we all rendered a shot using the Maya hardware overnight, just in case.
On Monday night, after nonstop efforts to decipher the root of the problem, me and Kamil were able to jump on a two-hour call with Luke, in which, after multiple hypotheses, we discovered that all of the VFX lighting Antoni had done was corrupted due to being converted from Maya 2020 to 2018.
This was a huge blow and a turning point at once. Once we got off the call with Luke, me and Kamil stayed in the voice chat and discussed our plan. Our path ahead was clear: throwing the project through the render farm without the VFX was our only option. With only three days to go before the deadline, we simply did not the time to render each shot without the help of the farm; each might take up to eight hours and we had twelve total. And so it was with trepidation that we decided we may have to sacrifice Antoni’s hard work. Making this decision felt awful, as he’d done a great job, and it wasn’t his fault- the VFX department rarely uses Maya and so many are likely unaware of Maya 2020’s shittiness.
Some of Antoni’s awesome lighting work and smoke simulation.
And so, having made this decision, we raced to get a rough cut done, desperate for any kind of product that we could use as a baseline should we run into more unexpected setbacks.
While Gherardo finished his VFX work on shot eight (which includes shot 8a, 8b, 8c, and 8d) as well as shot nine, I spent the rest of Monday night putting all of our work through the render farm until the early hours of the morning. Although some of them were glitching with failed frames and the exposure of our skydome HDRI between shots was inconsistent, we finally had a very, very rough final cut to give the sound design team. I was nervous that our endless technical hurdles would end up with us not giving the sound designers enough time to review our finished product for any final adjustments, and was grateful to at least give them something to work on as we scrambled to work around the VFX corruption. This meant Kamil generously offering to help look at Antoni’s lighting files in Maya 2018 to try to recreate all of his work, as he pushed to finish his Houdini and Katana work for the end of this term, which me and Kamil are fortunate enough not to have to worry about. Below you’ll find our first cut. Acts two and three are entirely storyboarded, and Act 1 is a mishmash of playblasts, rough shots, and polished final shots with VFX and correct lighting.
*note- Cally’s name is spelled incorrectly here.
Although our tutors had reminded us several times that previs did not necessarily need to be complete and that this project is more about learning to pull together as a team than finish a picture-perfect project, we were hoping to salvage Antoni’s work if we possibly could, because all of us had put so much into it. At this point, it would be a shame to miss out on showing off that month’s worth of work and creative vision.
Without VFXWith VFX
And so we spent another two days tirelessly working on creating our ideal final cut. Gherardo finished VFX work on shots 8 and 9, and I decided to give them a chance on the render farm. Although he also worked in Maya 2020, his work in shot 1 did not crash, and sure enough, neither did 8 or 9. It was incredibly refreshing to watch all five shots run seamlessly through the render farm (with only 30 errors each!)
As I fixed the failed frames, one by one, Kamil and Antoni rendered his corrupted VFX files the slow way, and Cally sent us the individual tracks for her work, so that Kamil could piece it together into a final product himself, as we didn’t want to throw the sound design team off with the potential of our timing changing as we made last minute tweaks.
And, around 8:20 PM on the 24th, Antoni’s snail-render of shot 2 completed, and I finished fixing the last glitching frame of shot 8d. At the same time, we all realized that Act 1 was completely finished, and we jumped the gun to celebrate.
All that was left to do was to compile our shots into a final cut. We waited eagerly for Kamil to substitute in our polished shots, each one of us excited to see the product of our hard work, knowing already that it was going to look amazing.
And finally, Act 1 is complete. I’m beyond blown away by how good it looks and what an amazing job everyone’s done, I’m just at a loss for words to describe it.
Reflection
When I had the idea for this story, I had no idea whether my narrative was even good, let alone executable, and I was overjoyed when a full team of sound designers, VFX artists, and animators jumped on it. I had high hopes for my project, and, on our first ever call, it was so gratifying to see the optimism, friendliness, and enthusiasm for the project that each team member had, not to mention how exciting it was that each one was so talented in their individual fields.
My decision to lead this project was mainly influenced by my anxiousness as to whether I’d find another one to join, but no small part was played by my enjoyment of narrative writing and filmography. As a group leader, I did somewhat have to fall into the role of director as well, and found myself slightly uncomfortable with the responsibility of assigning tasks, as I believed almost everyone else to possess more skill and technical knowledge than I did. I think that over time, my teammates finally began to believe me when I told them that I was open to all of their ideas, changes, and suggestions, and I also began to gain some confidence in my ability to judge whether the work we produced met my original vision.
Only once or twice was I required to speak on behalf of the team- a specific example of this would be our meeting with the sound design team’s leader Ingrid, in which I was surprised to find myself having to explain our narrative structure at the end of the final act and prove that our level of communication met expectations, but after my initial hesitation, I found myself more than able to defend and promote our work, because I firmly believed that our story was interesting, our workflow was above adequate, and we were working towards an impressive output, and I had the receipts to prove it in the phenomenal storyboard Kamil had helped me create.
I was also required to make a tough call in our decision to cut Antoni’s VFX from our shots, and it definitely wasn’t easy to be the one to explain that necessary choice, especially as I felt so sorry for him. Thankfully, he was incredibly understanding, and in the end, we were able to include them after all.
I found that my group mates were very easy to talk to, and in only a few days we were even friendly enough to give our characters joke names, as they would never be spoken aloud or shown on screen. We met once, sometimes twice a week on video chat, as well as discussing our progress nearly every day via Discord. We uploaded our projects to OneDrive as well as creating a shared folder on the school network for reference files.
When the project first started lifting off the ground, I was slightly out of my element, despite our team’s general aura of communicative honesty. I still am learning so much about Maya, and I came in with next to no knowledge about referencing and file paths. Kamil restructured my folder setup to allow for feasible referencing, and I felt a little self-conscious about my lack of significant professional experience. But I admitted that I was not sure why or how the different structures advantaged us, and he screenshared with me to demonstrate how file referencing works. After that, I felt much more confident about my ability to quickly absorb new information from the wealth of knowledge that each of my respective teammates brought to the table.
Several weeks in the middle of our project consisted of talks in divvying up the work, critiques of technical output, and requests for changes to be made in order to make file access easier or to produce better consistency. During this time, we were mostly absorbed in the allotted work we had assigned ourselves, and many of our video calls were simple repetitions of what we’d already been chatting about on Discord, “I finished shot 3, now I’m working on shot 4,” or “I’m meeting with Mehdi to discuss a sandstorm particle simulation,” with the varying interjection of questions and suggestions regarding one another’s process.
During this time, I would describe my experience as consistently smooth, but not as abrasively, yet beneficially, educational as what came afterwards.
It wasn’t until this past week that the rubber met the road. As I’ve described above, these past several days have been one long flurry of constant communication, hard compromise, and fast-paced brainstorming. We’ve been discussing the project nonstop from 9 AM to 3 AM, and rushing to get our work through to its destination all day long in order to meet our deadline despite the unexpected turn of events regarding our VFX files. It got to the point where we’d tell one another when we had to get on a train or take another call, because every hour was precious and each teammate was a crucial cog in our process. Through this excruciating stress, we were forced to re-evaluate and support one another through twists and turns. At the end of it, I have to say that as nervous as I had gotten, I actually had a lot of fun working frantically, hand-in-hand with my teammates, as we watched each shot, frame by frame, come out on the other end more beautiful than we had hoped for. The fact that, with only two days left to go, we actually managed to finish all of our first act with the full VFX and lighting included is a testament to my teammate’s incredible hard work and talent, and for that I am so grateful. It couldn’t be what it is without every single person.
The most notable update as far as work that we’ve completed this week would be the final version of our first shot. We’ve finished applying the VFX, animation, and sound to Act 1 Shot 1, and can present it as the first look at our final piece. Our VFX team’s course leader, Christos, asked us to darken the space HDRI we’d originally used (taken from the European Southern Observatory),
As he pointed out, space is a lot darker than that, and when I went into Photoshop to adjust the curves on the file, the result looks a lot more realistic.
The physical realities of space have been something that we’ve been playing with a lot. As Ingrid mentioned to us also, space has no sound, so it really is an interesting blank slate for the sound design team to work with in creating sound in this entirely malleable setting.
This is a visualization the sound design team gave us of what the first act could possibly look like with sound. That element is almost entirely done, and they are mostly just waiting for us to finish running everything through the render farm.
This isn’t completed yet, but here’s a look at the exhaust fume simulation that Gherardo has been working on for our space buggy. Our VFX team has nearly completed all of their work for the first shot.
This is a first look at the hazy, mirage-esque effect on the scene that Antoni created in Houdini. I intended the planet to feel hot, dizzying, uncomfortable and foreign, and this certainly delivers. I’m excited to see how the rest of our shots will look with the simulations applied.
