Interview with Evan Jacobs, VFX Supervisor of Mr. X (Death Fall)Date published: 2006.05.10 
At Vision Crew Unlimited, Jacobs served as Executive Producer and Visual Effects Supervisor and contributed to many films such as "The Mummy", "Dinosaur", "Armageddon", "Dante's Peak", "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" and "Titanic". The company was also very active in the commercial market, providing effects for Mazda, Lexus, Dr. Pepper, Nissan, Jeep, Dodge, Toyota, and Coca-Cola to name but a few. In 1998, Jacobs was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Effects for a Miniseries for HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon". After eight successful years, Jacobs and his partners closed Vision Crew to pursue other endeavors. Evan went on supervise visual effects for the indie feature “What the #$*! Do We Know?!” which became the third highest grossing documentary of 2004. Jacobs then joined Digital Domain in Venice, CA where he served as the 3D Department Manager for two years before joining Mr. X in 2005. While at Mr. X, Jacobs supervised the visual effects for “Silent Hill” and “16 Blocks” as well as upcoming films “Hollywoodland”, “Waist Deeep” and “The Return”. Jacobs is an active member of the VES, and has spoken at industry conferences such as Post/LA and was an instructor for the Entertainment Studies Extension Program at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for three years.
Death Fall: Death Fall: Could you tell us how Mr. X got involved with Silent Hill and a little about the movie? Evan Jacobs: The movie version of Silent Hill is based on a very popular video game from Konami. The film's director, Christophe Gans, was a huge fan of the game and pursued the game's creator about making it into a film. They were impressed by his passion for the material and gave him the rights to the project. When the film finally got going, it was decided that they would shoot in Toronto, Canada. The producers approached several local Canadian visual effects companies as well as BUF Compagnie in Paris, France. Ultimately, they chose BUF, CORE Digital Pictures and Mr. X for the majority of the work on the film. In post -production several additional vendors were brought on board to handle additional shots. Death Fall: Was any pre-visualization produced for the movie? Jacobs: No, the tight prep schedule just didn't allow for pre-vis but Christophe worked with a storyboard artist to board the entire film.  A shot without roaches Death Fall: How many shots did Mr. X produce for the movie? Jacobs: We did 68 shots. The majority of our shots centered around the giant cockroaches but we also did the Janitor shots including a couple big matte paintings, several CG swords, a bunch of set extensions, some digital rain and so on. Death Fall: What creative challenges did you face with the roaches? Jacobs: We looked at films like The Mummy and Willard to see what had been done in the past but Christophe really wanted something a bit different. Christophe's aesthetic is all about the ‘feeling' of the shots. It had to be creepy – very creepy. He wanted the roaches to be like little tortured souls. In fact, the Patrick Tatopoulos design incorporated a human form on the bottom of the roaches. We developed various walk-cycles for individual roaches but the character didn't really come out until we got large quantities of roaches. Over time we developed a writhing, wiggling movement in the mass of roaches that he really responded to.
Death Fall: Could you tell us about the pipeline you used for this movie? Jacobs: That's a great question. This was a technically complex sequence to produce in the time we had. We needed to be able to put large quantities of roaches on any surface, including walls, floors, and even flailing actors! When I started prepping the show, I sat down with Colin Withers, the senior TD at Mr. X, and we started working out the details on what the roaches would need to be able to do. Since there were so many shots with roaches, we knew we'd need to employ a pipeline approach, using file referencing and so on. We built a pretty slick system with a many of the repetitive tasks scripted, including temp comps of the 3D elements. This was a real time saver for us in the early stages, as we didn't have to wait for a compositor to be available to comp the elements for checking animation, etc. There were shots where we needed roaches to be piled waist deep. We considered a particle-based approach but it didn't seem like we'd have the control we needed. Our AI tools didn't allow us to simulate animation on deforming geometry. So we came up with this idea of ‘unwrapping' the surfaces that the roaches needed to move on. Colin wrote some proprietary tools to allow us to run the roach simulations in UV space and then apply the animation back onto the sets and actors. This also allowed us to use animated ground planes for the really deep roach masses. Thus we could key frame the ‘wave' motion but simulate the individual roach movement. The roach animation pipeline generally went like this: The pipeline kept our VFX coordinators, Brendan Taylor and Luke Groves, very busy! Death Fall: Could you tell us the characteristics of your renderfarm/workstations? Jacobs: The renderfarm was Windows based. We used Maya as our primary 3D application, Shake and Combustion for compositing.
Death Fall: What was your solution for the animation of the cockroaches? Jacobs: We relied on procedural solutions for the masses of roaches. Digital artist, Colin Hui, spent months coaxing AI roaches around. These roaches provided a base for us. Then we used path and key-frame animation for the more hero action where we needed more control. I wanted to integrate the approaches so we weren't always relying on the simulation only, as it can be pretty time consuming. For example, we built a system that would allow us to identify AI roaches that we didn't like so we could remove them without re-simulating. Then we could go in and add some path-animated roaches to fill in gaps or areas close to camera.
Death Fall: Could you tell us about the lighting/shading of the cockroaches? Jacobs: I shot HDRs of every set we used. They proved to be very useful. The ‘darkness' environment presented an interesting challenge for our lighters: a sequence that takes place in nearly pitch-black lighting. Christophe and his director of photography, Dan Laustsen, chose to shoot scenes which took place in the darkness on 24P HD video. After some initial testing, it was decided that the sets would be brightly lit and darkened in the digital intermediate during post-production. They wanted the darkness to look as if your eyes had adjusted somewhat. Since there was often no motivated light source other than a flashlight we had to do a lot of cheating. Making our CG creatures look real in that environment was especially demanding since we couldn't rely on the things you normally use to integrate effects into the backgrounds such as contact shadows, highlights, reflections, and so on. We used Renderman for the show, which was a lifesaver because of its ability to manage large amounts of data. Our senior TD, Colin Withers, wrote a shader that produced AOVs which were then fed into a Shake script for adjustment. This allowed us to avoid rendering a lot of iterations of the 3D elements. Death Fall: Did you use zbrush to add more detail to your models? Jacobs: The make-up effects team supplied us with a model of the cockroach. We had it scanned at XYZRGB in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. They provided us with excellent high-resolution data to work with. Digital artist, Sean Mills, surfaced the model and extracted displacement maps using Z-Brush. Late in post-production, Christophe asked us to add some detail to the face of the roach so we went back in and modified the model, adding teeth, eyes, etc. Death Fall: How did you track all the shots? Jacobs: I knew that tracking was going to be critical on this project. They were very unforgiving shots. Christophe employed handheld shots for the vast majority of the sequence making it especially challenging. Our lead tracking artist was Matt Ralph. He and his team did a great job producing some tight tracks in a very short schedule. We used 2d3's Boujou for a lot of the tracks, but we often had to tighten things up in Maya by hand. All the object tracking was done by hand. Death Fall: What was the most difficult shot and why? Jacobs: There were several shots that haunted us! Interestingly, the shot we had assumed would be the biggest shot of the show ended up going pretty smoothly. It's the first time we see the Red Pyramid character in the film. It's a very long crane shot as he makes his big entrance wading through a sea of roaches. In addition to the thousands of roaches pouring down the stairs, we had set extensions in every direction and CG rain. To top it off, the camera operator left a flag in front of the lens in the corner. It was a challenging shot on many levels, but we knew it would be and planned it out carefully. Christophe signed off on the animation early and it ended up being one of the first shots we delivered as final. Death Fall: What's your next project? Jacobs: Well, I'm in Mexico prepping to shoot Resident Evil: Extinction. Mr. X has an exciting slate of films coming up including Skinwalkers, Shoot ‘Em Up, Man of the Year and Silence. Death Fall: Thanks Evan for taking your time to answer the question and to share with the community your experience and to all the people from Mr X that made this interview possible. |
Evan Jacobs, an eighteen-year veteran of the visual effects industry, worked his way up through the trenches at many leading effects houses such as Boss Film Studios and Fantasy II Film Effects. Along the way he worked on such projects as "Outbreak" and "The Hunt for Red October.” Jacobs served as miniatures supervisor on the feature film"Ed Wood" and then in 1994, he co-founded (along with colleagues Jon Warren and Douglas Miller) Los Angeles based Vision Crew Unlimited, specializing in miniatures and mechanical effects.
