You have dramatic locations, which have been shot at the state of the art, all around the world. But, whatever their beauty, something is amiss in order to transform those bubbles into glaring sceneries, whose colors even required the birth of a new term: technocolor. A person was absolutely necessary in the creation of the photo anime look of Speed Racer.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you Lubo Hristow, the environments art director in the movie, whose filmography is a long and impressive one. Lubo, while working on Speed Racer, unveiled his capacity to paint in a M.C. Escher's style, creating unforgettable and glaring environments.

In this interview, Lubo unveils his works work on the bubbles and much, much more...

You have been involved in film making for a long time. Can you tell us more about your life in Hollywood?
"I have been involved with film making for over 20 years. My background is fine art and traditional animation. After years of working on cell animation films I plunged into the computer world which took me to visual effects. I tried for years to find my place in the new technological world and in the process I became VFX Art Director in a few large post production facilities on both sides of the ocean - in Europe and in Hollywood.

A few years ago, I started a company “Christov Effects and Design, Inc.” The focus of the company since then has been creating 2D/3D matte paintings which most recently became known as “digital environments”. Some of the projects we worked on are “The Matrix”, “Mr. Mrs. Smith”, “The Last Samurai”, and most recently “300”.

The growing demand for digital environments and the new opportunities in the next generation virtual environments, is pushing us to grow and currently we are creating a sister company in Europe, called “Christov Effects - Bulgaria”.

Can you give to our readers an insider's view of what happened back stage, and specially about your tasks?

"I was involved at a very early stage when John Gaeta and Dan Glass, both I met during “The Matrix”, contacted me to create a handful of designs to get everyone excited about this movie and through concept designs to explore the possibilities of making it unusual.

After this initial stage the movie got greenlit and I was hired as VFX Environments Art Director to assist in creating the artistic look for the environments. We spent a lot of time with John and Dan discussing different stylistic approaches to achieve the “Photo Anime” look, as John called it originally. For the first time I was fortunate to work in a very close collaborative manner with the Production Designer- Owen Paterson and the Art Director- Hugh Bateup thus bridging the Visual Effects Department and the Art Department. This made my job even more exciting.

Once in Berlin we started to create a pipeline working as a team with Dennis Martin who was responsible for shooting photographic elements and references on location. His team would then stitch the photographs creating different kinds of projections, in most cases spherical, which would then become the source for some of the bubbles.

While Dennis was shooting on location, back on set in Berlin I was working closely with John, Dan and with the Directors Andy and Larry, exploring different ideas to create a look which would correspond to the Anime style they wanted for the movie. The exaggerated perspective combined with a 2D multi-plane approach, used in traditional animation, and enhanced with extremely bright and striking colors was going to become the base for achieving the Anime look for the environments. The skies in the movie would play a particularly important role so I created a variety of romantic magic hour skies, dramatic sunsets, happy skies, etc. in order to facilitate the highly stylized atmosphere.

Once we got the photographic elements Dennis took from exotic locations such as Morocco, Italy, Greece, my team and I started transforming them into stylized environments for the Speed Racer world. The bubble technology requires very high resolution pictures projected on spheres so that you can be surrounded by a 360 degrees image. In order to be able to look from any direction and to get the 2K resolution for final film output, we needed enormous images to be projected. After some tests we decided that a good solution would be 12K (12000 X 6000 pixels) resolution. This would give us the quality of the image without crashing the computers. In addition, all the images required 16 BIT color depth which was making the files even more difficult to manage, and very slow to work with. An average bubble in multiple layers prepared for composite would get up to 5 or 10 GB of data, and in Photoshop would take 20 minutes to open and about 40 minutes to save.

A lot of the matte painting elements in the bubbles had to be created as distorted unwrapped images which made the job even more difficult. Unwrapped, these elements look like M.C.Escher’s illustrations. It takes time to get your head around the perspective, vanishing points, strangely curved lines which, at the end, would become straight once re-projected. We also created 3D elements rendered with special plug-ins in Mental Ray to get the “fisheye” distortion applied. Sometimes very complex painting elements would be projected in 3D, rendered out as “fisheye” distorted images and added to the unwrapped bubble. The process involves a lot of back and forth between Photoshop and Cubic Converter which was used to create QTVR’s for quick test of the bubble look.

1. MEMORIAL SCENE

1.1 original location photo stitch:

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

1.2 multi-layered matte painting:

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

1.3 final composite:
(in the center a set piece of the Memorial torch to be added)

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

1.4 view the final interactive panorama:

click here to view Memorial panorama
© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

2. DRIVERS CLUB SCENE

2.1 original location photo stitch:

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

2.2 color corrected plate, matte painting elements and removed elements for multi-plane:

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

2.3 separate chandeliers for multi-plane move:

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

2.4 final composite:
(the water seen thru the windows will be replaced with live action moving underwater element)

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

2.5 View the final interactive panorama:

click here to view Driver's Club panorama
© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

3. RENDEZVOUS FIGHT SCENE

3.1 original location photo stitch:(the complexity of the sequence required multiple locations and extensive matte painting)

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

3.2 original location photo stitch and matte painting elements:

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

3.3 multiple photographic and matte painting elements combined:

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

3.4 3D projection texture map

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

3.5 final composite

© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

3.6 View the final interactive panorama:

click here to view Rendezvous panorama
© 2008 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

Many of the bubbles required separation into layers used for multi-plane shots. Different shots required different amounts of separation of layers. For compositing purposes, some of the shots needed 10 or more different elements but for multi-planing, in most cases, we tried to stick to 3 main layers: near, mid and far. Due to the parallax effect added later and the shift between the layers, considerable portions of photographic and matte painting elements needed to be extended so that a background hidden portion could be revealed behind the foreground moving element. Cutting portions from photographs and pasting them into different bubbles was particularly tricky because of the spherical distortion. Using my concept sketches, Dennis could know in advance what elements to shoot, the right angle and the right lighting in different locations. This would help for the elements to be correctly combined during the matte painting process. Some of the skies required separation of clouds so that they could be animated. In addition, more than one sky look would be painted so it can be animated for sunset or sunrise.

Digital Domain created a proprietary hardware and software, affectionally called Sparky, which would process in real time 6K resolution images on set so that the Directors could stage their shots over our bubbles. Also, the DP, David Tattersol, could light the actors on a green screen interactively with the digital environments to be used later. For that reason we had to create most of the temp bubbles in 6K (6000 X 3000 pixels) on set so that the Directors could have their environments during shooting. Very often I had to do quick last minute changes to the bubbles running back and forth between the green screen stage and our workstations. This revolutionary approach in the movie gave us the possibility of solving a lot of the creative issues simultaneously with the shooting of the live action.

While in Berlin, I felt it was very important to create the 6k bubbles in the most efficient way so that later they could be recreated easily into 12K resolution for the final. We were able to achieve this in a record period of nearly 4 months during post production. Extensive use of layers in Photoshop, including adjustment layer color corrections, and careful management of layers in the files, helped achieve this goal.

During post production my company Christov Effects and Design, Inc. was commissioned to execute the final bubbles for most of the key environments in the movie. Using the temp 6K bubbles created in Berlin my teams in both Los Angeles and Bulgaria, totalling 14 people, were working around the clock to prepare the final 12K environments used in other facilities such as Digital Domain, ILM, Sony, BUF, etc. This was the best way to achieve the visual continuity in the Speed Racer world.

Now that more and more movies with artistic and highly stylized looks are being created the demand for virtual environments is growing exponentially. It gives the creators the opportunity to surpass the photo-real and to move into the highly artistic realms. It is a very exciting time for people like me being on the crossroad between visual effects and fine art. The bubble technology is just the tip of the iceberg of virtual environments. Overall, Speed Racer pushed the limits of technology in this area. I am sure that very soon we will come up with even more exciting ways to achieve new artistic goals. One such example, would be to use bubble technology in motion. This could give us the possibility of having moving virtual environments without the need of complex post processing during compositing. Maybe in Speed Racer 2?"

Links:
ChristovFX.com
Speed Racer official site

Related articles in this issue:
SPEED RACER VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR KIM LIBRERI
WHEN CINEMA MEETS VR - JOHN GAETA TALKS ABOUT SPEED RACER
SPEED RACER'S WORLD UNIT LEADER DENNIS MARTIN
DIGITAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR JAKE MORRISON ABOUT SPEED RACER