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Foundation - VFX Breakdown


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About the movie:

Genre : SciFi, Drama

 

Synopsis:

A complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire.

Far in the future, The Empire is about to face a reckoning unlike anything else it's faced before: several Millenia of chaos has been predicted by the galaxy's leading psycho-historian: Hari Seldon. But can The Empire offset the disaster before it begins?

 

Top Cast:

Lou Llobell as Gaal Dornick

Jared Harris as Hari Seldon

Lee Pace as Brother Day

Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin 

Sasha Behar as Mari 

Laura Birn as Demerzel

Terrence Mann as Brother Dusk

 

Trivia:
In the original Foundation Trilogy's universe, and also the immediate sequel Foundation's Edge, robots were unknown. In three subsequent novels, Asimov retconned this and merged his Robot and Foundation universes. This in turn allowed robots to appear in two Foundation prequels written by Asimov. The presence of a robotic character in the series tells us that this adaptation is not simply based the original trilogy, but the unified Universe created by Asimov.

 

VFX:

 

 

An additional 19 vendors had to be brought in to support DNEG, Important Looking Pirates and Outpost VFX as the visual effects shots for the ten episodes of Season 1 went from 1,500 to 3,900. “I realised early on that we needed a second visual effects supervisor because there was such an overlap between physical production and post-production, and the different time zones,” explains Kathy Chasen-Hay, senior VP VFX, Skydance. Each set was designed in three dimensions under the direction of production designer Rory Cheyne. “We then had to reverse engineer those models to turn them into something which was buildable by guys in a workshop,” states Conor Dennison, who was a supervising art director along with William Cheng and Adorjan Portik. “We set up Unreal Engine and a whole VR department within the art department. We would literally give David Goyer, the directors, producers and executives from Apple a set of VR goggles and say, ‘Off you go. Walk around the set. See what you think.’ It was fully lit and textured.” Rhinoceros 3D became the design software of choice. “The learning curve was stiffer but what you could do with the models afterwards was phenomenal.”

 

Art:

 

The intro of each episode is very impressive featuring elements and concepts of the movie in the form of a future painting medium that resembles a glitter fero-fluid.
 

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Displaying the history of the Empire in the Imperial Palace is the Mural of Souls, which is made of moving colour pigments. “We tried an interesting approach which was putting a bunch of acrylic ink in a pan, using Ferrofluid and running a magnet underneath it; that was filmed at a high speed which gave us a cool look, but it would have been impractical to have the mural wet all of the time,” notes MacLean. “Then we came up with the samsara where the Tibetan monks make mandala out of sand and wipe it away. We said, ‘What if we take that and turn it up to 11. Take the magnets from the Ferrofluid and have the sand be magnetic. The magnetic sand stays on the wall, twirls and makes these crazy images.” Simulations were placed on top of the physical mural created by the art department. “There was depth given to the various key features on the mural so depending on what was actually there, there was a custom particle layout, motion paths and noise fields,” explains Enriquez. “It was a lot of back-and-forth testing, and once we got it to work, the effect went throughout the entire shot. Kudos to Mackevision for getting that going.”

 

 

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Scar of Trator:

 

In the first episode there is a terrorist attack on the largest space hub of the planet which connects with the planet through a huge elevator pillar like an umbilical cord. The destruction of the space hub results in a huge collapse of the pillar resulting in the death of millions.

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In order to have more control over the devastation caused by suicide bombers, Rodeo FX was recruited to produce a CG version. “Trantor is basically a city like Shanghai or Hong Kong in its architectural density, but that spreads over the full planet surface, then layered in depth of about 200 city levels of approximately the same urban density,” explains Arnaud Brisebois, VFX supervisor, Rodeo FX. “The task was to basically tear a giant gash in it. We would get a collection of building builds from DNEG. For each of those buildings, we generated five destruction variants, from barely wounded to completely collapsed. We generated shading attributes through FX’s destroyed areas which would be picked up in look development to give various areas of each building’s destruction its own age, or effect from destruction either partial or full. We built a megafloors [city levels] collection the same way. We spent a lot of time and effort working on single assets, making them highly detailed. You could drop a camera anywhere, near or far and it would still look awesome. I remember David Goyer’s comments coming in after seeing our early assemblies of the shots. ‘That's AWESOME! Like a spaceship Hindenburg!’ It’s the type of tone we’d get from David. Always excited, positive and fun to read.”

 

The Conjecture:

 

The device known as the Prime Radiant displays lifework of revolutionary mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris). “What I kept saying to Chris and the team was, ‘We know that Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick [Lou Llobell] are the only people that can understand this math, but we’re so far into the future I don’t want to see Arabic numbers,” remarks Goyer. “I also want it to be beautiful and spiritual. When Gaal and Hari look at the math it’s almost like they are communicating with angels or God.” The solution was found at the Toronto-based design house Tendril. “We went to Chris Bahry who in his spare time does quantum math,” states Chris MacLean, production VFX supervisor. “He came up with something that I hope becomes the ultimate sci-fi MacGuffin.” Holograms take the form of ‘Sandograms’. “The majority of our holograms are meant to be solid particles that coalesce into whatever the hologram was,” notes MacLean. “It worked extremely well with static objects and a 2.5D approach that Mike developed with DNEG.” Michael Enriquez, production VFX supervisor, adds, “I liked the concept of it not emitting light and being a physical object in the scene. The technology is so advanced that you don’t need an explanation for why it works.”

 


The Monolith:

 

Prominent on the surface of Terminus is a mysterious artifact that has a presence similar to that of the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Rory and I were like, ‘It has to be like Arrival’,” states MacLean. “It has to be this simple thing. I started to get into divine geometry and drew a simple diamond with a bit of a facet on it and mirrored it. I sent it to DNEG and they sent it back to us as a concept with this glowing centre. Rupert Sanders, the pilot director, got his designer Ash Thorp to do the same kind of thing. We sent it to Matt Cherniss at Apple to decide and he liked the diamond shape.” Even though the final design was decided in post-production, a partial practical element was constructed for principal photography. “We built the bottom six feet which was a little wedge shape with a light feature coming out of it; that was hanging off of a crane up in Iceland on the top of a mountain,” reveals Dennison. “Visual effects needed to have the effect of light for when Salvor Hardin [Leah Harvey] got up close to the Vault. The light naturally lit her up. Everything else was visual effects afterwards.”

 

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What's next ?

 

If everything goes to plan for Goyer, Foundation will span 80 episodes over eight seasons. In order to do this, a number of narrative gaps had to be conceptualised. “The ‘Sack of Trantor’ is mentioned in the novels. But for a television show, audiences also want a certain amount of spectacle. We had to find a balance between visualising some of these events and staying rooted in story and character.

 

Source: 3DWorld, Issue 279


Outposts' VFX Breakdown
 

 

Personal notes:

 

The series is kinda slow but interesting. The first episode is the one with the most heavy VFX scenes. Foundation reminds me of Dune, both of them have a luck of A.I. androids, many episodes involve the events unravelling in Terminus which is an arid planet like Dune and both plots involve characters of imperial heritage. 

 

Alien life is not too prevalent. We have the chance to witness some alien lifeforms but very briefly. 

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