03.03.2011
Geon Team delivers approx. 150 VFX shots for Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels is a 2010 American fantasy comedy film directed by Rob Letterman and loosely based on the 18th-century novel of the same name by Jonathan Swift, though the film takes place in the modern era. The film stars Jack Black, Emily Blunt, Jason Segel, Billy Connolly, Catherine Tate, Chris O'Dowd and Amanda Peet as Darcy Silverman and is distributed by 20th Century Fox.  This film was released on December 25, 2010 (USA) and 31st Dec, 2010 (India) and Mumbai, India based Geon Studios Pvt. Ltd. recently delivered the high-end visual effects in the film and team led by the VFX Supervisor Madhu Sudhanan and VFX Producer Asmita Bharrati.

Asmita shared " We started off with one sequence of 30 shots and it looked it that would be all. But gradually we kept getting shots for bidding and being awarded to us. Finally we delivered somewhere about 150 shots. In these shots we worked on Scaling, matching eye line and environment with respect to Liliput and Gulliver sizes; BG sharpening, adding CG elements, Motion Graphics, all kinds of simple and complicated Comp heavy shots."

Mudhu Sudhanan shared "GEON worked with Fox for the first time and what an amazing team they had put together. It was good to work on HD resolution. It was interesting to deal with the most riveting feature which was scaling. We have worked on Nuke, Shake, Silhouette, Photoshop, Maya. We started working on Gulliver's Travels at the end of April 2010, and worked in phases on various sequences, delivering the final sequences in early November."

Here are some details about the shots shared by GEON team members...

This was the first sequence we started the show with. We got the Gulliver's plate with the stage in green, where we had to composite the kiss band plate. In one of the wide shot we had to composite Horatio too, who was shot on green. The first shot of the sequence was the most challenging of all, previously we would have done the whole shot in a 3D package like Maya. But with the advance 3D environment in Nuke and our technical expertise in using it in our previous shows made Nuke a favorite choice. As soon as we got the plates, we undistorted the plates with the help of lens distortion grids provided. It was then sent to matchmove department for camera & geometry generation. We then generated a 3D environment in Nuke, with the help of the match move camera. At the same time, the Rotoscopy department worked on the Kiss band plate. After getting the roto shapes of all the Kiss band characters & objects of kiss band plate, we could project them on separate cards in Nuke. Now we had the camera and the 3D environment and the Kiss band characters in Nuke 3D space, the characters were then scaled to the right size (3" tall) in real space. This gave us the right parallax. The CG department helped  in creating the CG elements like the CG lights for compositing and base model of the Kiss band stage , for camera projection. Projecting the kiss band plate into different cards to generate the depth (parallax), tracking matte paint of the curtains, compositing the CG lights and maintaining the parallax and finally Keying the Gulliver plate and blending it was a very tedious work. We for sure enjoyed doing this sequence, and were really happy about the output.



We had more than 30 shots in this sequence, was a technically tricky sequence. Horatio, a Lilliputian was shot on green with a blue base, matching the table top he would be on . Making Horatio small and maintaining the exact proportion in every shot with different camera angles and matching the eye line was a challenging job. We also got to address few filtering issues to maintain the detail when we scaled Horatio down. Thus maintaining the original sharpness,highlights and blending it into the shot was a task in itself. The Matte painting department helped to create the BG extensions and replacements.



A similar shot, where we had to match the scale and eye line of Horatio (shot on green screen), to the Gulliver plate.