HITS

When you’re up against a “Star Wars” film, yet another successful Marvel entry and a unique (and wildly popular) 3D stop-motion animation, you’re right to hold your breath on Oscar night.

Still, for the visual effects category during the 89th Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 26, don’t be surprised if Disney’s “The Jungle Book” and the Technicolor VFX team behind it take home the award. The live-action remake of the classic animation is essentially one long visual effect, built around a single live actor.

Tim Sarnoff, president of production services and deputy CEO at Technicolor, spoke with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about the technology behind the film, and how the result was the culmination of decades of advancements made by Technicolor’s visual effects studio, Moving Picture Company (MPC).

MESA: What was unique about the work Technicolor did on ‘The Jungle Book,’ compared to other VFX work done on other films?

Sarnoff: It was certainly an extreme example of working as a group on a single goal of making a project that had never been done quite the same way, where we were a part of the production from the very beginning to the final frame. What was nice about this particular project, and because there was so much technology involved, it took all the different types of artists we had to make this kind of film. Everything we’ve ever learned, we used on this project. And not many other projects have that kind of need. This required our best costume designers, best lighters, best texture artists, best animators, best pipeline engineers. And it required everyone to be at their best.

MESA: How big was this for MPC?

Sarnoff: It’s the largest VFX facility in the world, and we did more than 25 tent pole films last year, of which ‘Jungle Book’ was one. We have facilities in Vancouver, Los Angeles, London, Bangalore, New York, and through the growth of this company we have worked on every kind of project you could imagine.

‘Jungle Book’ required a confluence of everyone’s attention to accomplish what is effectively a photorealistic, live action, animated film. Technicolor, along with being the owner of MPC, also has one of the world’s largest post production presences in the world, and we also did the digital intermediate work for the film, to make sure the colors were perfect sequence to sequence, scene to scene. We have a pipeline that allows us to incorporate all the work we’re doing among both our facilities and all the outside facilities that are there, so when someone is creating a shot that may not be part of internal Technicolor experience, we make sure it’s secure and controlled.

It was not a small endeavor, to make sure every pixel and every frame of this picture, which was created from whole cloth, was perfect. We had half a dozen artists go through a trek for a month through India to research the textures of plants, dirt, water and rocks, just to ensure that the veracity of the imagery was true when it finally got on the screen. From the beginning of design, we made sure anyone participating was on the same page.

MESA: How much harder would it have been to do this film just a couple years ago?

Sarnoff: It could have been done, but it would have been harder. We perfect out craft a little more on every film, and many of the advances we make are incremental. You see that when you look back to your work on prior films, and compare it to what you’re doing now. Yet every now and then you reach a plateau, when you reach a level of near perfection, or at least qualified perfection, something that allows you to take stock and say this is better, different, a landmark project. “Jungle Book” is one of those films.

Go backward in time with other photorealistic projects, the differentiator here is probably that the environments were just close enough to real, and you could see why we did it the way we did, instead of just filming in the jungle. It’s not just any jungle, it’s “The Jungle Book” jungle. It afforded an environment that could not have been captured if you just took a camera and went filming in a jungle. That and the characters probably would have eaten each other.

MESA: How often was director Jon Favreau getting on the horn with you guys? Were your different departments tapped more often than they usually would be?

Sarnoff: The director worked with the artists daily. It was not the usual type of project where you would send a shot out, have the director approve it, and then make decisions on what to do next. He was engaged with the artists for every shot, and he was essentially part of the crew. That was interesting.

A typical, say, sci-fi film would have the pre-production period, setting up the shots, and then once the principal photography was completed, then your team starts working and sending the post-production section back to the director for approval. This type of project is so different, because all three parts of that collapse into one event. Pre-production, production, and post are all being done smoothly together.

MESA: Is Technicolor looking at “The Jungle Book” as a use case example, something to aspire to going forward?

Sarnoff: The closer you can get to having the entire team working as part of the production directly, instead of looking outside, the better the project will be. I also believe that the more that these projects go into different mediums, from a 70-foot screen to a virtual reality environment or another immersive environment, you need to make sure that the team working on the original images are engaged with and part of every one of the ancillary businesses that come after. That can only happen if you’re part of the production.

There was VR used creating this film, not as part of any ancillary business, but we had our director of photography looking at the set through an iPad to identify where the characters were going to be in the environment, as the actor was moving through the scene. Normally that would be done using markers or puppets, but puppets don’t offer enough information for the actor to play off of. The VR and augmented reality business affords us a new production tool that didn’t exist before.

We had a great deal of fun on this project and we’re looking forward to doing many more of these types of projects, especially when you consider that when people watch these types of projects, it only whets the appetite for similar movies. And when you reach a plateau like this, it’s something others will try to climb as well. We’re looking at what the next incremental steps will be to have people realize they’re not just watching a movie, they’re experiencing something different.

MESA: Last question: pick for Best Picture, what do you got?

Sarnoff: I would not have expected this to be my pick, but I really liked “La La Land.” I went in thinking there was no way I was going to like that film, watched it Christmas Day with the family, and my entire family liked it.