CG Workflows with Avatar

On Wednesday we were at the Apollo cinema in Picadilly, for our CG Workflows event with Framestore, looking at some of the extremely difficult shots they were asked to tackle on Avatar.

As well as the guys from Framestore, we had presentations from Al Mooney of Adobe, Lawrence Windley and Deepraj Sandhar from Avid, The Foundry’s Simon Robinson, Stuart Pitcher of Fugitive, Gary Meyer at Iridas, and our very own Dan Young.

It was a fascinating session, scratching the surface on all things stereoscopic and how apps like NUKE are finding ways to address the issues faced. Many questions were fired out including the 'big debate' of shooting in parallel versus convergence.

The highlight for many, though, was Framestore’s case study of Avatar. Tim Keene, Executive Producer – VFX and Christian Kaestner, Compositioning Supervisor, took us through working both on and off-set on this century’s biggest film, breaking down key scenes and showing how many of the elements were put together. As you can see from the images of Christian below, there were some incredible shots.

From our feedback, it's clear we need to dive in deeper into the whole stereoscopy debate  as it's obvious this is one piece of next gen tech that's not going to go away in a hurry!

Many thanks to all our presenters, sponsors HP, and also to everyone who attended.