The Making of The Visual Effects for The Strokes "YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE"

I met the Director, Warren Fu at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic (also known as ILM) working on Star Wars : Episode I several years ago. Back then I taught Warren how to do laser blaster shots in After Effects. A few years later Warren Directed a piece for Alliyah and I helped him with the visual effects.

I hadn't heard from Warren in a while, but Warren called me just in time for The Strokes music video. I had recently finished work at SONY Pictures Imageworks on Superman Returns. After wrapping up a few independent projects in the San Francisco bay area the Holidays were approaching and I wasn't exactly sure what I'd be doing next. A little serendipitous I'd say.

Warren showed me an animatic, or essentially a rough cut of his ideas with drawings, music, 2D animation, rough graphic screens, all done and cut together by him. It was one of the most comprehensive animatics I'd seen. Warren asked if we should do miniatures or computer generated (CG) scenes for the final shots. Although I love miniatures, I needed the work so of course I said we could do everything CG.

We began by blocking in rough shapes of the shots in Maya together. 39 shots. Primarily there was a ship exterior, crater, and ship interior. Once we had rough shapes to scale and proportions Warren was happy with we did 3D animatics with camera moves. With a new cut of the 2D and 3D animatics we recruited artists to help us out. I brought together a team of industry talent in the bay area and Warren called artists in Los Angeles.

Warren spent most of December in San Francisco. In January Warren convinced me to come down to Southern California and work with him. Unfortunately, his Venice studio was not large enough to accommodate the two of us, so his parents offered their home to use as a temporary work studio. We coined the place FuWalker Ranch...

I had Brian Lanier, a hard surface modeler building the ship exterior. Warren had his buddy Jakeeli in LA do the radar and doors for the same ship.

We had Cosku, a friend of mine, originally from Turkey providing effects work consisting of smoke, steam, and nuclear blasts. All done in Maya.

Another artist on my team, Magnus Hollmo from Sweden did a beautiful job painting three phases of textures consisting of bump, color, and specular for our ship.

Warren contracted out a company in LA, Laundry that did beautiful particle and space travel work for our stargate sequence, as well as a few other shots.

We did a displacement map and texture for the crater.

Warren did an incredible amount of work in addition to providing constant feedback to me and our teams.

We wanted a company in Canada, founded by a friend of mine from ILM, Mathieu Raynault and his compositing buddy Sebastian with Nina Fallon Producing, called Rodeo FX help us with matte paintings. We were over budget at that point so hopefully we can utilize them on our next project. They can be found at www.rodeofx.com

While Warren was busy with all kinds of tasks I primarily focused on the ship interior, model, shaders, and lighting. All the shots were rendered in Mental Ray with ambient occlusion, a myriad of lights, and raytracing. With only a few computers at our disposal we faced a major challenge. RENDERING...

I had some resources in the bay area for rendering, but it wasn't nearly enough with an average render time of 45 minutes per frame, 960x540 resolution X 5 minutes of animation at 24 frames per second, and an average of 7 render passes per shot. You do the math.

Warren jumped on instant message, asked around and his good buddy Nick at Technicolor in Burbank came through for us! We brought all our master maya scenes and reference render pass files along with 7 gigs of textures with lots of animated graphic screens rendered in the shots, so we see them in blurred reflections. They copied the needed files to their servers, changed the texture path with a script so all the render nodes in their render farm would find the textures. After a few days we had renders!

Josh Madison rendered our massive teaser shot up in the bay area with his personal render farm.

When the rendering budget ran out we also rendered on the Fu family computers for nearly 2 weeks.

Compositing was our next challenge. Warren to my knowledge hadn't really composited CG render passes prior. I explained and showed him how to deal with alphas, premult vs mult issues, when to apply color corrections, and dealing with 8bit. Over the course of the project I educated Warren on what floating point, various color spaces, and bit depths provide. If we were doing a film project, floating point would have been essential. The overhead of pipeline setup, rendering and compositing in floating point was not an option for us on this project however. Fortunately the new After Effects has a lens blur tool allowing us to achieve a more realistic blur for our depth of field shots. At the completion of this project Warren could easily teach compositing if he wanted to.

We hope you enjoy the cinematic experience when it hits the big screen, or little one for that matter.

To learn more about The Strokes please visit:
www.thestrokes.com

The Strokes "YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE" Premiere

I am pleased to announce the world premiere of a cinematic interpretation of The Strokes "YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE" and tribute to Stanley Kubrick's "2001, A Space Odyssey." This is my first Visual Effects Supervisor project I can honestly say I am proud of. It has roughly 40 all CG shots. Directed by Warren Fu.

http://www.vimeo.com/2523140
- Watch the video.

www.thestrokes.com
- New site for The Strokes designed by Warren Fu.
- Higher quality compression will be there after 2 week exclusive on imeem.

Best viewed in a dark room, maximized website, sound cranked up, and no distractions. Feel free to e-mail me your comments and I'll forward to the Director.

Credits:
http://thestrokes.com/sections/CREDITS/YOLO.html

Enjoy,
Louis Katz
www.louiskatz.com

Press:
http://obtusity.blogspot.com/2007/05/danger-stranger-strokes-you-only-live.html
http://blog.muchmusic.com/thenewmusic/archives/2007/05/lasting_impress.php
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/forkcast/43180-the-strokes-you-only-live-once
http://www.videostatic.com/vs/2007/week22/index.html#entry-34686384
http://www.shotsringout.com/?p=359

The Making of the Visual Effects:
http://katzfx.blogspot.com/2007/06/making-of-strokes-you-only-live-once.html