12.01.2011
Geon Team delivers 150 VFX shots for The Warrior's Way

The Warrior's Way is a 2010 fantasy action film starring South Korean actor Jang Dong-gun as well as Kate Bosworth, Geoffrey Rush, Danny Huston and Tony Cox. It was written and directed by Sngmoo Lee, and produced by Barrie Osborne, who also produced Lord of the Rings. The film was released on December 3, 2010. 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.

“We worked on about 150 shots of the film in two phases. The first phase was two years ago, when the name of the movie was The Laundry Warrior. We worked for about four months for the first phase and one month in the second phase in 2010” shared Asmita.

Speaking about the details of shots, Madhu Sudhanan said, "We delivered a number of sequences with invisible effects; from retiming, split comps, BG set extensions and replacements, cleanups, adding hair details, blood etc."

Movie having great ninja fighting action scenes which was shot on green screen within four walls in Auckland and required set extension with lots of matte painting work. Asmita speaking about this revealed in the fact that there was some great guidance that helped pull this off. “Every single shot speaks a story in itself. Thanks to Jason Piccioni and Arnon Manor (VFX Supervisor and VFX Producer of the movie).

Kudos to entire GEON team of artists and Supervisors for pulling it off. It is no mean effort to make such realistic images coming out very well as invisible effects, which is what GEON always aims at!”. We would like to take a moment to thank specially Barrie Osborne and Michael Peyser for giving us such a wonderful opportunity to work on The Warrior‘s Way," summed up Madhu.

Here are some details about the shots...

The shots were green screen shots of people having a Christmas party. There was lots of movement in the characters and the camera too. Matching the background with the live camera to the 3D camera was just the start. A combination of key and roto, with paint was used here and there along with matte webbing was done for this scene. Background blending had to be done carefully along with the right usage of matte paint and grains for integrating the shot.

The director wanted the doll prop to be removed from the shot as it didn’t seem a good fit on the scene, being a very modern day doll, while the place is a fantasy kind of land and in time. The prop was removed to instead reveal the blanket, making the shot more consistent. Similarly, clean-up was done on the photo frame to remove the dust and color of the diaper was changed to match with the scene.