Jake Morrison was hired by John Gaeta and Dan Glass for 2 distinct jobs on the movie. As digital effects supervisor he had to make sure that colour and technical pipeline issues were correct between all the companies involved; as visual effects supervisor he built and Supervised Exhaust (Speed Racers house compositing group) as if it were a brand new VFX facility.
Jake did the most extensive compositing of actors into pano bubbles and pioneered an array of "Faux Lensing" and anime spun virtual cinematography approaches. Connoisseur of the right visual signals to send to an audience to arise varied emotional responses, Jake used his knowledge extensively, while creating the final output in cinema quality.
Prior to this experience he has worked on several movies, such as Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, Spider-Man 2 and 300.

In this interview he unveils the work of the Exhaust team, the techniques used, the challenges encountered and the tricks used to take the audience's breath away....

Can you please tell us about your background and passions?
I started in the CG field, by using a bare bones programming language called KML. I was very interested in manipulating images as particles and waveforms and KML allowed me to address a single pixel of a captured image in 3D space. I ended up writing a 3D DVE system, that let you drop ripples through the screen, tear images apart and put them back together and so forth. Very, very slow renders in those days, but I discovered that once I'd rendered out those images, I could plug them into a basic RAM playback system that was pioneered by Jeff Minter, the video games guru.

We built a system that networked basic Atari home computers with custom video-sync and a hardware fader for each machine and started creating lightshows of mixed media in time with music - some live to audiences, some performed live and used in music videos. We'd experiment with such idea as taking live instruments, and mic them up into midi-convertors and, using the live playing, would be able to trigger and time different loops, strobes and such.

After that, I went to the complete extreme opposite and went into large scale Audio-Visual events for Corporates. Much more funding, but much less creative, obviously. From there, I moved through broadcast Television and Commercials as a 3D Artist, using my particle FX work as a base, until I arrived in Feature Film.

By the time I had got to Features, I'd tired of the 3D world - too little change - and spent the next 5 years or so as a 2D Compositor, learning the science of celluloid colourspace as well as the art of composition. This was an exciting time in 2D as many changes were happening; films that used to have only a handful of visual effects shots now had hundreds, and so the method of putting the pieces together started to become more interesting than the making of the pieces. It had started to become an art-form rather than a technical exercise and the goal of photorealism was much closer - especially as the use of photography within the 3D process helped shape the images.

As far as my interests within the visual field go, I'm very interested in capturing beautiful moments or unusual locations using photography and having the freedom to explore and push the resulting imagery at leisure with the goal of creating an emotional response in the audience beyond 'wow that's cool!': there are thousand visual signals you can send the audience to make them feel a certain emotion - anger, compassion, fear, vertigo etc. This language is the stock-in-trade of cinematographers, and we use those tools but we also have the opportunity to create some new ones.

Dennis Martin's work in this movie has been quite fantastic - traveling the world and capturing beautiful photographic bubbles. What we have done with those bubbles is a natural extension of having such rich source materials. Feature Film is no exception to the basic rule of any pipeline - Garbage In, Garbage Out - and having such incredibly high quality material to work with, has made the next steps we took with his photography much easier.

For Speed Racer you were supervising the house compositing group "Exhaust", can you please tell us more about this team, the challenges involved in compositing actors in pano bubbles, the tools and technologies involved and the process?
We started Exhaust in Chicago in early September 2007 for the Directors' Cut and travelled back to the West Coast to finish up the movie.

We started small - our Lead Compositor and my wife Amanda Morrison and myself and gradually expanded the team as our processes, pipelines and visual language were created. At maximum we had about 13 artists with a complement of great support staff.

click here to view Mach 5 Compositing video

Our work was split down the middle but a good amount was straightforward blue-screen composites. This being Speed Racer, even the simple comps had an unusual look to them, but generally speaking these were the 'bread-and-butter' shots that are the backbone of the 2D industry and involved technical processes that, while they have improved, are fundamentally similar to the Optical Printer Composite processes. One of our artists had a great deal of experience back to the optical printer days and those skills proved to be invaluable time and time again, both with straightforward Composites and with the much more involved Opticals - the so called 'big head wipes' and so forth.

On the other side, was the more unusual Bubble work. This split again into two different categories - traveling camera and panning camera. One the of basic problems with Bubble work is that you are at a fixed point in space, obviously you can spin around to look any direction and you can zoom the lens to decrease the field of view and blow up the detail, but you can't get any closer to the things in the room!

Most of the time in traditional Compositing that doesn't matter very much - you're creating large scale environments like popping someone on the surface of Mars, or on top of the Hoover Dam. When the camera is composed with the Actor in frame there is an understanding between the filmmaker and audience that you're basically giving them a human point of view of the environment - you could be standing there along with the Character on the surface of Mars. The benefit of this approach is that, with a few notable exceptions, the camera can pan or tilt around as much as you like and all you're doing is spinning around inside the Bubble - it's unlikely to jump from that view to 3,000ft up - so the perspective never changes.

Of the Bubble shots we did, most of them fall into this category. We gave the Compositing Artists the ability to override, and occasionally ignore completely any camera moves that were present in the foreground Green Screens. That resulted in sequences like the discussion between Taejo and Haruko in the Casa Cristo Hotel. In that sequence the Live-Action camera is 'hinging' around the actors, left-to-right on Taejo, right-to-left on Haruko.

When you see the finished sequence you'll note that the background bubble is slowly spinning at exactly the same rate, left-to-right, across all the shots as if the characters were on a raised spinning dais. We respect that each character has a different angle, but disregard the natural motion in the Plate Photography.

The more complicated the camera move, the most complicated the setup. For the larger tracking shots, like Casa Cristo Memorial and the Drivers' Club, we had large crane moves to deal with. For those we created matchmoved 3D cameras and 3D representations of the environments. Andy Jones of the Pixel Liberation Front helped build the environments.

His pipeline was essentially to find the real-world height and position that a Bubble was captured in, and project spherical UVs onto a relatively hi-res model. He then rebuilt and manipulated the geometry (using a lower-res model for 'broadstroke' interaction) until all the key elements in the bubbles were accounted more - these were details like Columns, Balustrades, Portholes etc.

Once the UV'd model was setup we brought it into Foundry's Nuke software and then shot it using the 3D Matchmoved camera that had been created. This allowed us to create a proper floor for people to walk on as well as adding that extra bit of perspective that the human eye relies on to tell us how big an environment is.

click here to view Speed Racer and Trixie video

This being Speed Racer, that doesn't mean we actually used the 3D projections all the time, even though we could. Interspersed in the 'real' shots are tracking shots where we didn't even try to matchmove the camera, just took a nice wide still and zoomed it back as we were traveling with the Actors. The shots of Chim-Chim and Spritle in the Driver's Club illustrate that approach fairly well.

click here to RTD sequence video

You pioneered an array of "Faux Lensing" and anime spun virtual cinematography approaches, please tell us more about that...
One of the more interesting approaches in this movie was the use of hand-created Circle-Of-Confusion. Typically when a camera defocusses, you will see the brighter elements of the image 'bloom'. The shape that they bloom into is decided by the type of diaphragm that the camera has, you'll typically see octagons, circles and so forth.

For Speed Racer we used any shape that we thought would be a complement to the action, mood or lighting of the scene. That ranged from subtle - the shots of the Lawyer visiting the Racer Family family in the rain using vertically stretched 'lozenges' to complement the falling rain - through to not-so-subtle, like the Driver's Club, where we use a very stylized Diamond 'bling' COC to ram the point home that this is a rich, opulent den filled with glitz and glamour.

Occasionally we actually used the Circle-Of-Confusion as a direct story point. When young Trixie and Speed meet for the first time in the Park, their eyes meet and they fall in love instantly. Unfortunately, Speed is driving a go-cart at the time, loses control and wipes out. For the few shots around this moment we start by subtly animating the shape of the Circles in to Heart-Shapes. The effect intensifies, and then we cut to Trixie. Trixie is standing in the Park with everything in focus, but we take the opportunity to throw everything out of focus and into a heart shape. We also have layers of projected 2.5D hearts sliding underneath creating a refractive-style effect. There's a lot of hearts and the audience are unlikely to miss it!

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we took another leaf from Anime and shot different components of a shot twice, with the key features of each in perfect focus. In Compositing, we would take those two elements and split them together to allow for an Infinite Depth of Field - something that is clearly impossible in the real world, but is used to great stylistic effect in Anime.

How do you see the future possibilities of compositing actors in pano bubbles?
Much of the work in Visual Effects is currently transitioning to Sequence rater than Shot work. Typically we are taking the audience to a new environment and letting them stay for longer, letting them see more of their new space. We started to move more toward using our Bubbles as actual stages, but I think much more can be made of that.

When you combine the areas of photogrammetry and multi-bubble setups with the simple 3D we used in the Speed Racer pipeline, I see much more opportunity to remove 3D renders from the loop entirely and generate all the environmental staging in 2.5D in the Composite.

Great strides are being made in Stereo-Compositing, which is very much another topic, but the same techniques that are in their infancy there can we used just as easily to setup a common environment and there's great efficiency to be had there and, as always, with great efficiency comes the ability to make more changes, experiment more and create more immersive imagery.

Jake Morrison can be reached at goatvfx at mac.com.

Links:
VRMag's Speed Racer coverage
Speed Racer official site

Related articles in this issue:
WHEN CINEMA MEETS VR - JOHN GAETA TALKS ABOUT SPEED RACER
SPEED RACER'S WORLD UNIT LEADER DENNIS MARTIN
LUBO HRISTOV VFX ENVIRONMENTS ART DIRECTOR ABOUT SPEED RACER