Robert Zemeckis return to live action gets an Atomic boost.
Offering a tech-heavy boost to Robert Zemeckis return to live action filmmaking, Atomic Fiction's innovative approach aims high with The Foundry's award-winning medley of VFX tools.
Nominated for several Oscars, Flights tale of airline tragedy and one pilots struggle against personal demons is bursting with dynamic, heart-pounding scenes. Coming up with the dramatic effects wizardry needed to turn around 400 finished shots in a mere four months with a crew of 35 people is where the teams real magic lies.
With recent visual effects credits for work on Looper, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Underworld: Awakening, among other productions, Atomic Fiction is no stranger to the spectacular. Studio co-founders and childhood friends Kevin Baillie and Ryan Tudhope cut their teeth in the industry working for George Lucas on Star Wars: Episode One - right out of high school, no less.
Both pals later worked with Zemeckis on his animated films Mars Needs Moms and A Christmas Carol. After Disney shuttered ImageMovers Digital (IMD), the duo took a long, hard look at some of the different issues they'd encountered and lessons they had learned while working at both smaller and larger studios. They gathered together colleagues from IMD, formed Atomic Fiction to take a fresh approach hinging on cloud rendering technology, and soon reconnected with Zemeckis.
He really just liked the spiel, he liked our attitude, and enjoyed working with this whole team he assembled at ImageMovers, says Baillie. To him, Flight was an opportunity to have some continuity to work with this team that he'd really enjoyed working with before.
Marking Zemeckis return to the realm of live action filmmaking, Flight revolves around Whip Whitaker, a self-destructive alcoholic airline pilot played by Denzel Washington. Showing up to work sauced, he still manages to pull of a miraculous crash landing when the plane suddenly spirals out of control. The intense crash scene and the drama that unfolds in its wake relies heavily at times on visual tinkering to maintain an ominous atmosphere.
Working on Flight presented a unique set of challenges. Between dealing with uncooperatively sunny weather during stormy scenes and being hampered by restrictions to shooting in and around airports, many of the key shots required pretty heavy surgery, says Baillie. Given the realistic scope of the film, Atomic Fiction also had to be mindful of the VFX sequences, keeping one foot on the brakes to avoid too much flash.
2012 Paramount Pictures. Images courtesy of Atomic Fiction.
You have nothing to hide behind, explains Baillie, so from that perspective it was a really challenging project because you had to make sure everything looked as natural as it possibly could and still tell the story.
All of the compositing for the film was done in NUKE, which proved to be an essential toolbox for pulling off so many tricky VFX shots in such a short timeframe. NUKEs powerful 3D workspace capabilities, camera tracking, and 3D particle effects were put to heavy use throughout Flights pipeline. Node-based gizmos helped iron out many smaller, less glamorous issues that popped up in shots too, Baillie notes. While it certainly allowed the team to be more efficient with its time and focus throughout the production, NUKE also played a crucial role in making some of the films most memorable scenes possible.
NUKE it for dramatic effect Flights Director of Photography, Don Burgess, shot some of the films more dramatic moments at a higher framerate than what you see in the final movie, which gave the team a lot of flexibility to implement speed ramps and motion blur in NUKE to intensify the impact of these scenes.
Baillie recalls one scene in particular when Whitakers love interest Nicole Maggen is prepping to shoot up on heroin, where it took a complicated series of seven different speed ramps with multiple layers of motion and focus pulls to make it the perfect shot. To make her overdose even more realistic, the team tracked Maggens eyes and creatively used NUKEs SplineWarp node to dilate then rapidly constrict her pupils in one animated motion. Its a subtle but powerful effect, and just one of many examples where delicate enhancements make all the difference.
The tools that NUKE offers actually helped in a small way to bring live action filmmaking a little bit closer to the motion capture world that Zemeckis has kind of been used to over the last ten years, says Baillie, where youre not actually entirely locked into what youve shot on set.
He continues: There is some flexibility there, and I think we actually saw this sort of remarkable process of his creative genius being even more freed by the tools that he now knows are available to him. I think he took really good advantage of that throughout the course of the film.
From the pulpit to the cockpit Flights first 20 minutes are a suspenseful, slow-burning crescendo that culminates with a harrowing plane crash sequence. Recreating the final moment of impact from inside the cockpit required a CG-heavy solution and a ton of TLC from the team. With almost all of the sound dropping out during the sequence and the scene unfolding in slow motion, theres a tremendous level of focus on this single brief moment. It had to be perfect.
The scene was first shot in green screen with Denzel Washington strapped into a lone pilots chair to capture his movements in the crash. From there, Atomic Fictions digital artist Brian Freisinger built the entire cockpit and all of its accoutrements around him using modo, his frequent go-to program for CG modeling.
The stuff I can do in modo is five times faster than working in any other package, he says. Ive done a lot of modeling over the years...and its the best modeler Ive used any
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Robert Zemeckis return to live action gets an Atomic boost. 
