The Tourist

In the Tourist because so much of the computer screens used surveillance video that was going to be shot later, we ended up compositing most of the screens in post production.  

In the Scotland Yard set we decided to shoot the screens off so that we could get nice reflections of the actors that we could blend back in with the computer graphics that were built by Coplin LeBleu.

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All the 50+ VFX monitor shots in the film were composited in Adobe After Effects.

We also had to match the color and look of the screens that were shot on set.  The three screens behind the 2 standing actors were live on set and the screen on the lower left is one I composited in post.

Again in this shot I needed to replace the bottom left screen with a different surveillance video while still matching the look of the other monitors in the original shot. 

Also needed to replace a phone screen in order to make the action of taking Jonny's picture more visible.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Often in when doing playback graphic on a feature film I need to take existing images wether it's a computer desktop, smart phone screen, software application, news graphics, etc... and add the fake "movie" story content to it.  

In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps I needed to take existing stock monitoring software and add the Keller Zable (KZI) our fake company I the film to it and make it's stock data match the story.  

I also animated the stock ticker animation used to project on Shia LaBouf's face. 

Most of the story driven news segments were shot on green screens.  I needed to build the final composites early in production so they could have them for playback on set.  

I designed and animated the news elements... 

As well as tracking the shots and building the final comps.

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One thing that always proves to be difficult in building content for feature film is clearing the use of artwork and photos.  Even stock photo libraries can be too expensive or have licensing issues with the production company... That's why I make sure I take pictures where ever I go. In one of the news clips we needed a New York background... 

It is actually a photo I took on my iPhone from the top on the building I was staying in while I was there shooting The Taking of Pelham 123.

I cropped, retouched, and flipped it for use in the composition as the backdrop for the news segment.

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Surrogates

One of the biggest challenges in Surrogates was being able to build enough content to fill the 200+ screens in the FBI Surrogate Monitoring set.

The solution we came up with was that having a local production company manage a group of videographers that would go out and shoot footage that would represent the POV of surrogates and then I built multiple After Effects templates set up with expressions so that the production company could just drop in the video clip at the bottom of the timeline and then just change the Random Seed value that would then randomize all the overlay graphics to make it unique.

I also helped build the screens for the end surrogate shutdown sequence with Chris Kieffer.

With the military surrogate POVs, i also built it expression based so that we could quickly make multiple unique random versions of HUD animation.

The FBI screens needed to be interactive, so I built interactive playback files that we could trigger in time with the scene and actor performances.

The Taking of Pelham 123

In pre-production we worked with Background Images doing projection screen tests with our graphic design layouts.  Working with Chris Kieffer our lead playback designer on the film, it was my job on the MTA Headquarters set to build the system that would interactively play the graphics on the 5 2k projector screens acting as one large computer display by running  5 different computers in sync. It also had to be completely interactive so that we could trigger them based on the scene and actors movements.

Below is a picture of the inside of our control room at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, NY.  We had 5 workstations running custom software synchronized each with their own external RAIDs for smooth content playback.

On the video chat sequences in the film we used iChat on 2 MacBook Pro laptops.  I needed to work as Tony Scott's camera operator using one of the laptops with it's integrated camera as the shooting camera and capturing the chat video on the other.  

We then used that captured chat camera footage for playback on set ...

as well as using it in post VFX shots.

I also needed to build the laptop computer UI screens...

and the news and stock information screens for the MTA Conference room scenes.

Live Free or Die Hard

I was the Playback Graphics Coordinator on Live Free or Die Hard. Since most of the large sets on this film needed massive amounts of playback graphics, we needed a minimum of five artist/animators on this film to get the work done in the timeframe.  

I also helped out with the work load building the graphics and programming the playback files for the power plant set...

as well as building some of the content on the Warlock set (based on The assistant art director Jason Sweers' designs).  Both sets had to have timed playback on set of pre-recorded video chat footage between John McClane and the villain Thomas Gabriel.

Due to story changes in Post-Production, most of the story point elements had to be rebuilt.  I was brought back on to assist artist / animator Chris Kieffer with finishing the last screens to be built for VFX & the film's title sequence.

Since the title sequence of the film called for full frame close up shots of computer screens, as a stylistic choice we decided to shoot the graphics with a Sony XDCAM HD camera instead of just rendering out close-up shots.  In the end we felt it had a better look.