The Shift – EON CGChallenge winner

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The winning video team for CGSociety’s EON CGChallenge tells their production story.

The CGSociety launched its 20th CGChallenge 'EON - World Within Worlds' in October 2006. These CGChallenges have now become the world's largest and most successful series of digital art competitions.

“Over the last few challenges there has been more narrative and technical guidance, and in the EON CGChallenge we introduced the Film Trailer category,” says Dr. Mark Snoswell, CGSociety President. “We also invited in two of the world's leading Science Fiction writers and based the challenge on one of their blockbuster novels - EON, by Greg Bear.” The Grand Prize winning team was from Italy, calling themselves ‘The Shift’. Here is their production story.

When the SHIFT team, Emiliano Colantoni, Gianfranco Sgura, Marco Stellabotte and David Bonelli first floated the idea of joining the EON Challenge, two of their number were in the middle of the most painful decisions in their professional lives.

Emiliano and Gianfranco were having meetings; planning a strategy for successfully leaving the studio they were working for and starting a new company.

“One of the steps we were evaluating at the time,” explains Emiliano, “was making a reel out of our best work and starting to contact companies and agencies. The kind of activity one would normally do before stepping out.”

At the end of November last year, they spotted the EON Challenge on the CGSociety forums. The decision wasn’t an easy one. However, after a long discussion, they gave away the idea of putting together the reel and went instead for 18-20 hour days to generate the movie trailer.

After a week studying the instructions and the inspiration pages on CGTalk, they began sketching the concepts for the characters, the ships, and other elements in the trailer, and submitted their first entry: ‘The Stone.’ Moving from the concept to the modelling stage required a more intensive process, “and we realized, OK, if we want to make this thing work, we have to quit our day jobs, which we did,” said Emiliano.

The Shift crew never had the chance to read the novel. Gianfranco Sgura takes up the story. “We really appreciate the efforts put in by the CGTalk staff in creating the inspiration page,” says Sgura. “That has been revealed to be a very complete and fulfilling source. We also enjoyed the power of Wiki where we've found very useful outlines.”

Preproduction became the most important thing to have time for, “however, having joined the EON Challenge two months after the official beginning,” explained Emiliano, “we knew we couldn't afford losing too much time exploring concepts and scripts, so we decided to limit ourselves to 20 days on designs and writing the story. That way we could jump into the production phase and be really fast. The two weeks extension CGTalk gave out has been like a divine gift!”

Emiliano had studied comics for several years so he became the main concept artist and director. He designed all the characters, the various environments, and the storyboards. To lighten his payload, Gianfranco designed the space ships, and the character Patricia's house. Marco Stellabotte was in charge for modeling the shuttle launch base and later for being an ultra-patient rotoscope-artist.

The Shift team had decided to make a trailer like a short movie. One that told a story, but left the audience wanting to know what happened next. “We started sketching at a furious pace, searching for ideas and never caring how dirty the drawings became,” explains Emiliano. “Truly, the first sketches on the storyboard were so dirty, it was almost impossible to understand them!”

There was also a 90 second limit to the story, so they scanned through the rough storyboard and edited an animatic. To give a first, rough soundtrack, they grabbed pieces of similar cinematic trailers. The animatic was important for two reasons: to decide the length of the scenes, and to see if the leap from storyboard to film worked. As they went along, they swapped in the storyboard drawings, to see if everything fitted together correctly.

As there were huge time restrictions, the Shift team really wanted to avoid any hard core modeling task for the backgrounds. They modeled really low poly versions of the scenes and rendered out a single, very wide frame with lambert shading, separate highlights, ambient occlusion and shadows.	“We then put the camera for these renders a little far away from the subject than the final camera would have been,” explains Emiliano. “The elements were then composited in Photoshop, painting the textures directly on the plate, both with hand painting and cloning from other textures. We saved loads of rendering times by reprojecting the plates back onto the geometry.”

	We used foam rubber, fabric, and all these little elements to make something that could resemble a space suit and to complete it with a CGI helmet that we composited later on. For this we put some markers around the neck, that we used in combination with the four lights on the back of the suit for the tracking. It took like 15 minutes for the actors to get into the suit, and they had to be helped!”
The Challenge called for a live action + CGI trailer, but the story needed a space suit, and they wanted it to be real. So, Emiliano had to ask his mother a little favor! “We sent our girlfriends to find every object that we could destroy / rebuild / transform / paint to resemble a sensor, an arm-mounted keyboard, etc.


Two scenes in the trailer have a camera move that wasn't present during the shooting. One of these is when the three astronauts receive their orders, the other is inside the stone, when two astronauts discover the city. The crew shot one astronaut matching the angle from the storyboard, then placed these sequences on 3D cards into the scene. “The 3D camera was moved in a pull back that also matched the storyboard,” explains Gianfranco. “Viewed from another point the shot wouldn't have worked, but from that position and with that movement, it was perfect.”

This scene of the space center had been solved after a search to find a nice looking sunset over the sea. In this case the crew counted a lot on the backlight effect and used the sun to skip modeling, cut the render and jump to compositing.

The sunset shot consisted of several passes: a gradient for the sky; a simple white disk for the sun; a displaced grid for the sea; a constant shape for the landscape and a lens flare pass. Obviously every pass was individually easy to render. Everything was then composited and graded to match the reference picture. The sun effect has been obtained by progressively adding blur nodes together but with different settings.

The ‘destruction of the city’ shot was completed in one night from Emiliano Colantoni.

He took a city and a sky from two different pictures and painted over some CGI generated smoke and fire to create the backplate. Then he modelled a simple skyscraper shape, duplicated that two times to create a “frame” for the explosion. He solved the problem of creating a nuclear explosion with no particles or other effects just by scaling a sphere and hiding the effective explosion between the central building. The back-light situation plays a big role in this shot.

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Due to the time restrictions they decided to use real actors and to put them either onto matte painting backgrounds or digital back lots, so the obvious solution for the crew was shooting on a blue screen. “We used a Sony HDR-FX which records interlaced HD video at resolutions up to 1440 x 1080, pretty much higher than the final output, but really helpful when it comes to rotoscoping and keying,” explains Emiliano.

“For some shots the camera was mounted onto a hand-made steadicam system, so we had to do some camera matching. For the subsequent tracking tasks, we used a lot of simple crosses made with scotch-tape placed on the blue screen with no particular pattern. In order to provide sufficient parallax we also used microphone holders placed between the camera and the background.”

We really want to thank all the people on the CGTalk board that really encouraged us a lot, and a bunch of friends for their invaluable help.

The EON Challenge was sponsored by Boxx Technologies, ATI, NVIDIA, ART VPS, Softimage, Alias, Autodesk, Maxon, The Gnomon Workshop, Pixologic, E-on Software, Luxology, Corel and Ballistic Publishing.

Related links:

• Daniele Napolitano: Cinematographer, also cast as Russian
trooper.
• Paolo Fazio & Andrea Pinto: Technical and spiritual support.
• Alessio Federico and Barbara Pichiecchio, generously offered
their help directing the photography on the blue screen and for
their precious advice about the final colour grading.
• Agnese Federico for the makeup.
• Fabio Colantoni who built the fantastic steadicam system.
• Enrica Tornelli for being the lead tailor.
• Aladino Colantoni for technical advice.

• All the actors:
- Silvia Stellabotte (Patricia, and also for being a precious
runner),
- Claudio Renzetti (for his Mirsky performances and
translations from-to Russian),
- Enzo Rabottini (the mighty Olmy),

• Dario Cestaro (Production)
• Simonetta Romano, for being an incredible runner and tailor.
• Eugenia Pichiecchio our on set photographer.

• And last but not least, Sergio Di Renzo (our ex-boss) for lending us the blue stage. That was a great last Christmas present for us.

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