VFX Voice - Fall 2017

“It was amazing to have a lot of freedom to invent, create and interpret concepts for which
there was not always specific references we could draw from. The challenge was finding the
balance between producing high-end realistic effects to support the narrative within the
fast-moving production schedule.”
—Aymeric Perceval, Visual Effects Supervisor, Cinesite
certainly go 2D but the trees had to go CG.”
DMP artist JaeHee Jung recreated multiple tiles of an empty
ground, leaving only dirt and low grass which would later get
withered by grading in compositing. During that time, Cinesite
employed Speedtree to generate six types of trees with five
different shape variations, each and laid out up to 2,200 of them.
Eric Senécal, the layout/fx artist on the sequence, explains,
“One key reason we were able to generate and work in Maya with
that number of polygons was because of Cinesite’s in-house Mesh
cache/particle Proxy object. It allowed us to have millions of
polygons in our scene and still work with all that information in the
viewport. We also used a visual trick in the shot, the further away
the trees were from the camera path, the more we decreased the
number of leaves and scaled up the leaf instances.”
“We streamlined the process even further by only adding the
wind to the foreground trees, leaving in ones in the background
static,” adds Perceval. “This way, the branches and trunks were
imported in Maya while only the leaf points were imported in
Houdini for the simulation. Once the points cache was brought
back into Maya, we had all the information needed to shrink them
down and move them with the wind. This offered us an efficient
broadcast turnover of six hours and consequently enough time
to run multiple tests on how to best convey the story point of the
shot.”
DARING VISUALS
Reflecting on Cinesite’s contributions to American Gods,
Perceval remarks that the showrunners and the show’s visual
effects supervisors were both “brave and daring” with the visuals.
“Between the scripts and the actual plates, there was often such a
creative jump that we were not fully aware what would be coming
our way until we’d seen it; this had advantages and drawbacks. It
was amazing to have a lot of freedom to invent, create and interpret
concepts for which there was not always specific references we
could draw from. The challenge was finding the balance between
producing high-end realistic effects to support the narrative within
the fast-moving production schedule.”
TOP: These before and after frames show how Cinesite
took the original aerial photographs and transformed the
environment as Easter wreaks a wintry feel across the land.
FALL 2017 VFXVOICE.COM • 41