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  • CGSociety :: Production Focus
    21 October 2010, by Renee Dunlop

    Some stories have it all: adventure, romance, and success, inventiveness and intelligence. While this is often the formula for a blockbuster tent pole, how often does it describe the FX studio behind the film? Well, meet Lauren Millar and Mark Stasiuk of Fusion CI Studios.

    They met on a Caribbean island during a volcanic eruption, in 1996. Stasiuk was on Montserrat from Lancaster University in England acting as the head geophysicist at the observatory, monitoring the volcano's behavior to see if people should evacuate. Millar was there with her team for just two weeks, shooting a documentary on the volcano that was active but not yet erupting. Then sparks flew.

    The volcano blew its top, giving Millar stunning footage. She kept her eye on the task, even as she noticed the attractive and brilliant scientist heading up the research team.
    Lauren Millar and Mark Stasiuk of Fusion CI Studios.
    But it was her intention for story accuracy that later put her in touch with Stasiuk as she worked out the details of the script. "Because I was shooting a science doc, I wanted the scripts to be scientifically accurate, so I emailed parts of the script to Mark asking for his professional input," explains Millar. "As time went by, the emails went down a slippery slope somehow, and the ?tone' of the emails changed, shall we say." Now they live and work together, a perfect union of expertise and finishing each other's sentences.

    "It was the classic internet romance," mused Stasiuk.

    "Except we had already met and got along pretty well," added Millar. "I thought he was pretty cute but at the time I had a documentary to shoot, write, and edit and that was what was on my mind."

    Mark at the volcano.    		 "And I was working with an exploding volcano. But after the emails slid in tone, we started dating internationally. Every three months or so we would have a date. If one of us was going to a conference, the other would go too."

    "Nothing really happened for about a year because we were living in separate countries. I was living in Toronto, Canada and Mark was living in Lancaster, England."

    "We did that for about a year before..."

    "...we decided should live in the same city. And when we got together in the same country, we eventually combined our talents."
     

    Both Millar and Stasiuk had brilliant careers before launching Fusion CI Studios - one of the most impressive FX studios in the industry. Specializing exclusively in fluid and dynamic effects, Fusion has worked on films like Gulliver's Travels, GI Joe, National Treasure and The Guardian for clients like CSI Hollywood, Asylum VFX, and Twentieth Century Fox. But before Fusion came to be, Millar was already involved in the media industry as a producer and director, and she took a crooked path to get there.    		 With a master's degree in Social Work, she excelled as a crisis intervention specialist in the intensive care / emergency departments at Victoria Hospital in London, Ontario, Canada. "My specialization then became the sudden death of a child, so I was involved in some pretty heavy grief therapy. It was an incredibly intense and amazing time." But the work was emotionally draining. "After a while I decided I couldn't do it anymore and stay whole, so I moved into journalism and was a news reporter for a few years." She got her break through a call from a public television network looking for a reporter/host for a science oriented television series called 'The Science Edition'. Soon, the network created a show for her that she hosted for five years, Journeys with Lauren Millar, a show co-produced with Discovery that took her on extraordinary adventures all over the world. "Our focus was the scientists behind the science and we found science in everything: I flew with Canada's military aerobatics team, the Snowbirds.
    I stayed in a refugee camp with Medicins Sans Frontiers doing a story about doctors during the Rwandan genocide. I went to Pacha Mama Grande in Peru, with a scientist who devised a method to collect fresh water from fog for villagers that lived on a high plateau where it never rains.

    I dove with a 13 foot tiger shark in Hawaii while scientists released it after inserting a transmitter into its abdomen." Ho hum, how boring.

    Stasiuk, the humble lava wrangler and brilliant scientist began with a non-VFX background.    		 "I took geology and geophysics as an undergrad with a huge amount of math and physics.
    That's where the underpinnings of what I do got started. I then got a PhD in Volcanology, not to be confused with Vulcans!' he quipped.

    "I am a Star Trek fan, but I don't have a PhD in that!" During his doctorate at Bristol University in the UK, he specialized in volcanic fluid dynamics like lava flows and explosive dynamics before embarking on research as a faculty member at the Universities of Toronto, Lancaster (UK) and the West Indies (Trinidad) universities.
    Stasiuk is self-taught in VFX, a skill he acquired in order to do his scientific visualizations. He finds the parallels between academic research and VFX work like particles is quite amazing. "VFX is always moving forward, people always want something different.

     


    New FX requires R&D, and having the researchers' mindset organized around how to resolve the issues. My background set me up well for doing these kinds of FX. I am constantly doing R&D. Virtually every day, we are creating new things from minor technical solves all the way up to entirely new methodologies."

    "It started with the 911 calls, we got a LOT of 911 calls, and then people realized they could come to us in the first place." Mark Stasiuk, Co-Founder / VFX Supervisor
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    So, the other studio would do the character animation, for example, and we would do the water the character was walking through," added Millar.

    "Most generalist studios aren't doing fluid or dynamic effects every day, or even every month" said Stasiuk. "So when they're awarded a project requiring them, they have to then get up to speed and find specialists who are hard to find and who are generally very expensive. Because it's what we do, we might have done something very similar just last week, so we can get up and running and get them something quickly, efficiently and we fit into anybody's pipeline.

    We've done so many different fluid/dynamic effects projects, some of them very iconic now, that on a number of occasions we get shown the reference for a project that is actually our own work!"    		 "It's a perfect working model. VFX studios that don't specialize in fluids or dynamics work can still bid on projects involving these effects and turn out great work by combining strengths with us." Lauren Millar, Co-Founder / Executive Producer



    Fusions' core tool for fluids work is RealFlow, often in concert with Maya (Autodesk) along with tools like Cloth and Maya Fluids, and Fusion has recently included 3ds Max (Autodesk) to gain access to plugins like Krakatoa (Prime Focus), FumeFX (SitniSati) and Thinking Particles (cebas). They are about to start building in Side Effects' Houdini as well, "because," according to Stasiuk, "it has tremendous capabilities for doing certain things like fracturing, and it's fluid capabilities which will add different strength to RealFlow. Houdini has a great volumetric renderer in Mantra as well."
    Improvements with FBX data exchange formats has proven effective for moving files between Maya and 3ds Max to integrate the softwares. And RealFlow is a standalone that is not a plugin to any particular package and can output data to any of the other 3D packages. Consequently, it works tremendously well as a converter for FX data. "Plus, we write our own plugins with RealFlow, some of which are data conversion plugins," said Stasiuk. "We can render one aspect of a shot in MentalRay and another aspect in Krakatoa, and those can be comped together perfectly and you would never know they were rendered in separate packages." The wide array of specialized in-house tools allows Fusion to approach new effects with an R&D time as little as one or two weeks, where a more generic FX house often needs to spend a month or more.

    Stasiuk has developed several proprietary RealFlow plugins for behaviors from bubbles rising in water to fire and smoke effects. "One plug-in in particular, 'Smorganic', has solved a long-standing problem in fluid effects. When you try to create very thin sheets of fluid, they break up into pebbly bits or webbing that looks a bit like Swiss cheese. It has forced artists to find ways to cover those areas up using huge amounts of particles, motion blur, whatever works for the scene.

    Rosemount Wines.    		 Fusion's 'Smorganic' fills in those holes dynamically during simulation, providing delicate, thin sheets that are, well, smooth and organic. Smorganic!" It wasn't until this past Siggraph in LA that Fusion saw a paper with results that were as successful. Are they worried about pending competition? No, because as the community catches up, they are well into other developments.

    "Right now we are doing a macro shot, a detailed burst of a bubble of Coca-Cola. If you've ever looked at reference of bubbles bursting at 10,000fps, they do really complicated things. We are adapting our morphing technology along with Smorganic, so even though it's a simple shot it's full of wonderful technology."
    While Fusion does not sell their proprietary software, they've passed some of their accomplishments to Next Limit which are in turn bundled with the ongoing releases of RealFlow. "We work closely with them because often we are pushing the envelope of what RealFlow can do, so we will ask them to make small adjustments to their code to accommodate our needs, which they do, and in exchange, we tell them about the production scene, what we are doing, and the methodologies we are applying. Then they can make changes to their tools in the next version which makes their software more attractive to visual effects houses in production on films. So there are things from our work that filter out into the community." In fact, this mutually productive relationship recently culminated in Next Limit inviting Mark & Lauren to the Oscars to share in celebrating its first Academy Award for technical achievement. Next Limit credited Mark's dedication and expertise using Realflow for helping to establish relationships with the international motion picture industry. That and Mark's presentation to the Academy Award Technical Achievement Committee on Next Limit's behalf facilitated the software developer winning the award. If you have a favorite RealFlow tool, you might just be able to thank Fusion for creating it.

    Character animation, particle FX, fluid FX, dynamic FX, rendering, shader writing are all techniques that require a high level of expertise. Boutique specialist houses like Fusion CI Studios are going to be the way of the future because it's so hard to maintain a really high level of expertise in one house on all the different aspects of visual effects.

    Rather than a studio going to a generalist VFX studio and the generalist studio subcontracting with a boutique like Fusion, it's evolving towards the VFX producer couples Fusion up with another generalist house from the onset, allowing the big studio to maintain control of who they are subcontracting while still getting the best expertise available.
    Team Fusion
     
    Fusion CI Studios
    Mark Stasiuk Co-Founder & VFX Supervisor
    Lauren Millar Co-Founder & Executive Producer
    RealFlow, Next Limit
    Krakatoa, Prime Focus
    Houdini, Side Effects
    Maya, Autodesk
    Autodesk 3ds Max
    Thinking Particles
    FumeFX (SitniSati)
    Krakatoa

    Writer: Renee Dunlop


    		  

     
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