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Watchmen Revealed
June 17, 2009
To register for the Industry Mixer (ticket holders for the presentation are automatically registered), please email rsvp@siggraph.ca with your name, contact info and company where you work (or school where you go). Thanks!
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Join us for an evening full of inspiration, information and insight as MPC Vancouver reveals the challenges of adapting "the greatest superhero story ever told" (Entertainment Weekly). The evening begins at 6:30 pm with a free industry mixer where you will have the opportunity to quench your thirst, nosh on local culinary delights, catch up with your peers in the industry, and possibly meet current and future decision-makers. At 7:30 pm, Ben Cole, Landon Bootsma and Tim Mulvihill of MPC Vancouver will explore the pressures of recreating one of the most acclaimed comic books in history, revealing the challenges they faced in assembling some of the more complex scenes and answering questions surrounding the diverse techniques used.
The Moving Picture Company (MPC) is one of the world's leading post-production facilities capable of creating high-end digital visual effects and computer animation for the feature film, advertising, music and television industries. Networked to their other facilities in London and Santa Monica and built with a dedicated digital infrastructure designed to handle the company's diverse slate of projects, MPC Vancouver is poised for an exciting future. This is a unique opportunity to meet some of the talent at MPC Vancouver and gain insight into one of the biggest superhero movies filmed in Vancouver.
On-line sales are now closed.
SPEAKER SESSION
Wednesday - June 17, 7:30 PM
Watchmen Revealed
with Ben Cole, Harry Mukhopadhyay, Landon Bootsma & Tim Mulvihill
Zack Snyder's Watchmen is one of the most faithful cinematic adaptations of a comic book ever made. Based on the 1986 DC-comics mini-series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, it tells the story of a group of masked vigilantes struggling to understand their roles in a world that no longer needs them. The comic's narrative is anything but simple: a criss-crossing stream of interwoven stories, across multiple timelines, dense with symbolism and buried imagery. It is a veritable Russian doll of a comic book and considered by many to be the greatest graphic novel of all time.
The Watchmen movie recreates in exacting detail many of the comic's panels and motifs. The challenge, when making the transition from page to screen, was to take these images, the static sketches with solid colours and impressionistic outlines, and turn them into something living, breathing and photorealistic, while still maintaining the feel of the original material. Snyder and his team enlisted the help of a number of visual effects houses to assist in this endeavour. The majority of the work was split between two facilities, Sony Imageworks and The Moving Picture Company (MPC).
MPC's work was completed in its new Vancouver facility. The work undertaken by MPC was diverse, everything from set extension and wire-removal through to close up digital doubles, crowds and fully CGI sequences, including a nuclear explosion and computer generated water. All in all MPC completed close to 300 shots for the movie and DVD spanning 24 sequences.
This presentation will explore the challenges involved in creating this work, focusing on some of the more complex sequences, looking at the genesis of the project from story-boards and reference photography through to final rendered images.
© Images courtesy Warner Bros Pictures
SPEAKERS BIOS
Ben Cole
R&D and Pipeline Lead
Ben Cole is a creative and software specialist for the Film and Television Industry. He has experience in the fields of 2D and 3D Computer Graphics, Motion Control and Motion Capture. He is the R&D and Pipeline Lead at MPC Vancouver, where he has been actively involved in studio setup and feature film production. Before moving to Vancouver, he was one of the R&D Leads at MPC London, co-managing a team of 30+ developers and specializing in Crowd, FX, Physical Simulation, and Animation Technologies. Film projects he has worked on for MPC include: Kingdom of Heaven, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Poseidon, X-Men III, Narnia: Prince Caspian, Da Vinci Code, 10000 BC and Watchmen.
www.moving-picture.com
Harry Mukhopadhyay
Lead FX
Harry Mukhopadhyay is an innovative and pro-active artist with a technical background in Applied Science and a strong eye for detail. He has a wealth of experience handling a wide range of FX, from complex cloth interaction to fluid and particle simulations. At MPC London, he successfully lead teams of FX TDs through various projects, including 10000 BC, Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian and the upcoming Harry Potter 6, always achieving the high-end look required by clients and VFX Supervisors. Before joining MPC, he worked with a number of Canadian studios in Vancouver and Toronto. He has come back to Canada to lead the MPC Vancouver FX team, bringing with him the London spirit and his unique perspective.
IMDb.com
Landon Bootsma
Compositor
A true Vancouverite, born and raised, Landon Bootsma has been deeply involved in the Vancouver VFX community for the past 7 years. Having worked for several studios he has experienced first hand the exponential changes that have occurred within this continuously growing industry. In 2006, Landon had the opportunity to take a leave from Technicolor to work on Zach Snyder's 300 in Sydney, Australia with Animal Logic. Upon his return to Technicolor, Landon has been instrumental in helping grow the core team within MPC's Vancouver facility. Landon was one of the first artists brought on board to work on Watchmen, which highlighted the beginning of MPC Vancouver. In addition to his work as a compositor Landon has been actively involved in mentoring and training striving students in several art schools in Vancouver. He is presently working with VanArts as an Instructor to ensure talent is developed in a way which contributes to this fast-paced industry. With a true passion for VFX and a charismatic attitude, Landon has his finger on the pulse of Vancouver and shares a bright outlook for the future of the industry in this city.
IMDb.com
Tim Mulvihill
VFX Editor
In april 2008, Tim Mulvihill joined Vancouver's MPC as the in-house FCP editor for Zack Snyder's locally shot VFX epic, Watchmen. It was Tim's responsibility to cut together sequences for all of MPC's work for internal review. Prior to MPC, Tim worked primarily as a VFX coordinator for various Vancouver productions, providing data wrangling, organizational skills and artist managment for the visual effects process. Tim officially started work in the VFX community in 2004 as a VFX set coordinator for the TV show Dead Zone, where he participated in setting up and collecting data for VFX shots. Tim also spent time as a set designer for the sci-fi TV show Andromeda, after attending BCIT college for digital animation. Tim's film experience covers almost 9 years in both local TV production and Film and he continues to expand his knowledge of visual effects as techniques and technologies change in the industry.
IMDb.com
© 2009 · Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH · info@siggraph.ca
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