The Base Studio

I was hired onto The Base Studio as a Roto Lead thanks to a colleague from the Pixel Corps, James Pina, who was the Roto Supervisor. As I was still living in Nebraska at the time, I had to quickly find a place to live on a month-to-month basis, and luckily secured a bedroom in the home of a very nice elderly couple, just a mile or so from the studio. My older brother packed up my bike and shipped it out to me, and I would ride it along the bay trail to and from work.

I was thrown into the mix on day one, learning the ins and outs of roto for stereo conversion. Our particular flavor of roto was tailored for Stereo D’s workflow, as they were our immediate client. I began by tackling a few shots on Thor, and was quickly roped into dailies reviews to learn how to QC shots and provide artist feedback; sometimes via annotations and notes in Shotgun, and sometimes by just calling an artist over to our little QC corner to talk through the shot.

As we began bringing Thor to a close, plates began trickling in for Captain America, a project that quickly ballooned. In addition to my QC duties, I was tasked with our largest shot, CRC_0002, which we lovingly referred to as Cry Run Cry. To quote from my interview on BorisFX’s blog:

It was the stereo conversion shot in the first Captain America with the countless soldiers who part as the camera cranes up with Cap & crew marching back into camp. I’ve featured it in a couple of roto reels. Since it was stereo conversion roto, each soldier needed to be extracted individually, as well as internal details like their rifles and gear, which just created a seemingly endless amount of shapes and layers (1,134 shapes total). I did about a third of the shot myself and QC’d the work of everyone else. I had to compile everything into one massive Silhouette file and ensure it all stayed organized. I think that took us about a month to get the first full version out the door.

In the end, I believe we delivered stereo conversion roto on 400 shots for Thor, and 999 shots for Captain America.

Non-Marvel Projects

A personal treat for me was getting a second shot at working on Harry Potter, as it seemed this time around, Warner Brothers was determined to make the 3D release happen. I often joke when this particular credit comes up that everyone and their cat worked on it at the time. In the end I only got to personally touch a handful of shots, but I QC’d much of what went through our doors.

While here, I also got a taste of roto for stereo VFX. We received a handful of shots for Journey 2: The Mysterious Island which were shot in stereo, and simply needed roto support. So the other leads and I were tasked with cracking open the Silhouette manual and learning the stereo workflow. This was quite an interesting process of learning how to break roto down by depth and animating offsets. I used anaglyph glasses to preview my roto on grey. This was quite trippy seeing Michael Caine popping out of my Silhouette interface.

I also assisted with a handful of commercials that came through, and got to flex my Nuke skills a little bit more, both in paint work for commercials and getting to touch a couple of actual green screen comps for Captain America.