FILM
Tackling Techvis For Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Third Floor delivered techvis for the school sequence in which Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) performs scenes in a ‘miniaturized’ form against a normal-sized Wasp (Evangeline Lilly). It was used, as The Third Floor Techvis Lead Ariel Feblowitz describes, “to help figure out how to shoot character size differences, and what impact this would have on camera speed, distance to subject and parallaxing.” “For instance,” adds Feblowitz, “if a character was meant to be half of its regular size and they were to be standing next to a normal-sized person/environment, the camera filming them needed to be twice as far away and moving twice as fast. If walking, the smaller character needed to travel double speed to keep up with the regular-sized character. All of this needed to be mathematically precise, the camera angles had to match exactly and camera heights and distances needed to be exact within a fraction of an inch. “The props the characters interacted with had to be scaled correctly. It was all thoroughly planned. For shots that required a moving camera, a motion-control rig was brought in so the movements would match exactly. We would track the camera filming the normal-sized element, scale the camera motion to accommodate larger or smaller characters, and feed that information into the motion-control rig to get all of the exact movements.”
TOP: Techvis helped establish the dimensions of a ‘small Scott’ for a sequence at a school in Ant-Man and the Wasp. BOTTOM: Wasp and Ant-Man had to appear together – but as different sizes – in the school scenes.
“[Techvis was used] to help figure out how to shoot character size differences, and what impact this would have on camera speed, distance to subject and parallaxing.” —Ariel Feblowitz, Techvis Lead, The Third Floor convention, and I decided to previs it exactly as he had mocked. Jim was intrigued by the first pass and a bit surprised we took him so literally, but in the end it did exactly what we hoped it would.” Meanwhile, the production searched for a suitable location, with the fence-crash shot now in the mind of the director. Even the script was updated to include it. “The stunt evolved in previs as we designed outward from the fence beat to account for how the rest of the scene would be affected,” describes Reagan. “At this point we didn’t have a location so we adjusted the old location by moving buildings to allow for the creative needs I had in previs.” Eventually a new location was found, and HALON adjusted its previs shots to a matching digital version of the location. Says Reagan: “My team of animators and I went through the entire
42 • VFXVOICE.COM WINTER 2019
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