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Digital Déjà Vu

Dec 1, 2006 12:02 PM, By S. D. Katz

Previz software gives filmmakers a map of the future.

Previz used to be something you wanted to be the first to turn a director on to, like a great new band or sushi joint. Today, pre-planning on the computer is standard operating procedure. And it's not just the director: Screenwriters can use a feature in Final Draft that synthesizes voice readings of a script; editors such as Walter Murch print out framegrabs from the NLE to storyboard sequences before they begin editing — and that's just scratching the surface.

Today, every part of the production process can be previsualized to the point that filmmakers seem gifted with second sight. In the following pages, we take a wide view of what defines previz and who in the production process is using previz products. At all different price points and levels of complexity, here's a selection of tools to make planning your project easier than ever.

Storyboards

Lots of directors like to do thumbnail sketches. In 1993, New York's Pace Gallery hosted an exhibition called “Drawing Into Film: Director's Drawings,” featuring the storyboards and concept art of Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Terry Gilliam, and many others. While the Wacom tablet hasn't replaced the cocktail napkin as the place to doodle an establishing shot, more and more filmmakers are learning to draw directly into the computer. Here are some of the best apps for sketching your ideas in sequence.

• Bauhaus Boardomatic (Mac and PC)
  Boardomatic is essentially designed for printed storyboards, and because it is embedded in a 2D cel animation product, it follows the conventions that animators use. This is a leftover from the days of the Oxberry animation stand, and pans and zooms are represented with familiar graphic conventions. You can scan in images or use Mirage's very capable brush technology for direct input via a Wacom tablet.

  Boardomatic uses an optimized workflow that's aimed at artists with good drawing skills — particularly animators and especially those who are using the finishing tools in Mirage StudioPro, a 2D paint and compositing product, to create 2D cel animation. Boardomatic can be purchased as a standalone or as part of Mirage StudioPro, which lets you bring in a soundtrack and sequence images to create an animatic for animation of live action. You don't have to know how to draw with Boardomatic, but it helps.

• Autodesk SketchBook Pro 2.0 (Mac and PC)
  This is a very easy-to-use digital drawing environment, with the emphasis on drawing. The brushes are reasonably good, but the pencil tool is even more convincing. The main strength of this program is its simplicity and easy access to icon-based tools. There's not a lot of clutter — just a big canvas with a tool well that is accessed with minimal clicking and hand movement.

  Using the Wacom tablet takes practice, and while, in my view, no product beats pencil on paper for sheer drawing pleasure, SketchBook Pro comes close. This is a very non-technical program focused on the gestural aspects of drawing by removing clutter and unnecessary interruptions to the drawing process. (For more on SketchBook Pro 2.0, click here.)

Animatics

Animatics are less of a production design tool and more of a director's playbook when images are put in a playable sequence. Animatics can be simple slideshows of photos or drawings, or they can be multi-layered animation with effects. There is so much you can do with even inexpensive digital tools today that it's easy to get carried away. The dividing line between simple and complex is whether you move your camera over still images of a subject and background together, or you make the subject a separate element that moves independent of the background. The second method really helps convey how action is staged, but it also means artwork for a single frame is on at least two layers. The simplest motion technique is to pan or zoom on photos or storyboard frames.

There are some really simple tools for pan-and-zoom moves, most of which are aimed at consumers and cost as little as $24.95. Such tools are intended to give your vacation pictures the “Ken Burns” treatment, but, used judiciously, can also add impact to your animatics. Typically, animatics are prepared with motion in mind, which means drawing dolly or pan moves wider than the aspect ratio you intend to shoot.

• Virtix Zoom and Pan 3.0 (Mac only)
  For Apple iMovie or Final Cut Pro, you can try Zoom and Pan 3.0, a plug-in by Virtix that simplifies pan-and-scan moves with a very straightforward interface. It supports HD images (useful for wide pans) and allows you to bring in images with alpha channels so that you can separate an element from the background, such as a car moving past background traffic.

• Granted Software Still Life 2.3.4 (Mac only)
  Another animatics option is Granted Software's Still Life 2.3.4, a standalone pan-and-scan app with OpenGL support. Soundtracks are supported so you can time out your moves to a track and export the movie to Apple iMovie in NTSC or HD.

• LQGraphics Photo to Movie (Mac and PC)
  Like Still Life, Photo to Movie is a standalone app, but it comes with a little more sophistication, such as curved motion paths and transitions. Keyframes allow for more control because they can be set per segment of a path.

• ImageMatics Still Motion Creator (PC only)
  StillMotion Creator is a pan-and-scanner that looks a bit creaky, but it does all the basics. The pro version allows for DVE perspective effects, but I don't find this particularly useful for animatics.

• StageTools MovingPicture (Mac and PC)
  The folks at StageTools have been on the previz bandwagon for at least 15 years, and MovingPicture is the most sophisticated of the dedicated pan-and-scan products. It's a plug-in for a dozen Mac and PC NLEs, including Avid, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It supports QuickTime and AVI in resolutions up to 8000×8000 pixels, plus realtime previews, cut-and-paste keyframes, curved motion paths, motion blur, and timeline scrubbing, as well as 24p, HD, NTSC, PAL, and alpha-channel support. It's a more expensive previz solution ($199 for the plug-in) than the other products mentioned above, but it's also considerably more sophisticated.

  The aforementioned pan-and-scan products are for directors who are taking their first steps in motion graphics and don't expect to have the time to learn After Effects or Autodesk Combustion, which are also fine for pan-and-scan moves, but are professional tools and priced accordingly. If, however, you want to commit a week or more to learning the fundamentals of a professional tool, then Adobe and Apple have bundled solutions that are hard to beat. Most likely, you will only need After Effects or Apple Motion for an animatic, but you can also make animatics directly in their respective NLEs — Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro.

Previz for production design

Democratizing digital software and the disappearance of studio art departments in the 1970s means directors now control the shot flow of a movie (often from their own scripts) outside the structure of the production team. This is even more likely to happen when real locations are used instead of sets. However, production designers and art directors are still a key part of the design process, and when big sets are involved, they rule the roost.

Production design is most closely related to architectural or set design rather than cinematography (Cameron Menzies aside), although these areas necessarily overlap. Art directors have been using CAD tools for a long time, so Autodesk 3ds Max was on the radar for them at the very beginning of the digital era. Any of the animatic and drawing tools I listed above would be of interest to art directors and matte painters, but here are a few others worth mentioning.

• Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter (Mac and PC)
  I'm lumping these programs together because they are the main tools used by digital matte painters. You might want to visit concept painter Craig Mullins' site at www.goodbrush.com just to see what is meant by “painterly.” I can't praise his work enough. His roughs are a great example of how even Photoshop's most banal brushes can be made to look good in the right hands.

  Drawing in these programs takes practice, and this is a good time to mention one irksome aspect of tablet drawing: the inability to rotate the drawing surface. This is common practice when drawing on paper because the arm wants to move in a 45-degree arc relative to the body. All artists shift the drawing surface to compensate for this limitation. Even though this is a tough problem for software developers to solve, they need to work on it. Right now, the only solution is the pricey Wacom Cintiq. (For more on the Wacom Cintiq 21UX, click here.)

• Google SketchUp (Mac and PC)
  This is a great 3D program that uses 2D-drawing techniques to create 3D objects. It's optimized for architecture and product design with the goal of combining the accuracy of a blueprint with traditional drawing. You can quickly create massing studies or final architectural renderings, and then move the objects around as you would in any 3D software. Even someone without architectural training but with reasonable drawing skill can use this program. However, it is fully designed to provide accurate dimensions and usable data to a CAD program if you happen to be a set designer.

  SketchUp has animation capabilities that allow you to output a walkthrough, and it's fast enough to render shadows in realtime. You can deform the ground plane to create hills and uneven terrain in a way that is a tactile extension of the drawing experience. Once you get the hang of it, it quickly becomes addictive. (For more on SketchUp, see digitalcontentproducer.com/workflow/google_sketchup_pro.)

• E-on Software Vue 5 Infinite (Mac and PC)
  Landscape creation is useful for matte painters and set designers, and Vue 5 Infinite is by far the most powerful and easy-to-use software in this category (the company also has various “lite” versions of the software). In fact, you will be creating credible outdoor scenes the first day you use the product. However, while scene setup is fast, rendering is slow. The new high-end lighting tools produce extremely realistic effects suitable for visual effects work, but it is also useful to artists as a comping tool. You can make alien scenes or actual locations by using topological maps from the U.S. Geological Survey. For example, the Delaware Water Gap or the Great Smoky Mountains range can be loaded into the program for accurate previz when the honey wagons arrive on location. Vue 5 Infinite has become the definitive landscape-generation software, and the new version, Vue 6 Infinite, is available in its pre-release version from e-onsoftware.com. (For more on Vue 5 Infinite, click here.)

3D previz

Nothing says previz like 3D, and there are several dedicated tools on the market, with more on the way. This is a hot topic — I've been using 3D to plan movies since 1990, when no one knew what I was talking about — but now it's reached every corner of the film world. There are now dedicated previz houses such as Pixel Liberation Front or Dan Gregoire's Halon Entertainment in Los Angeles, and individual directors are using everything from classic 3D apps, such as Autodesk Maya and Softimage XSI, to gaming engines to line up shots and stage action.

Dedicated previz software

Recently, software developers have targeted previz with a class of software dedicated to previsualization. Most provide libraries of props, characters, and simplified tools for directors who don't have time to learn Maya, NewTek LightWave, or comparable magnum software. There are pros and cons to using these focused apps, but, in the end, it becomes a time issue. Should the director be sitting in front of a monitor all day, or hire people to do his previz for him?

• FrameForge 3D Studio 2.0 (Mac and PC)
  Version 1.0 was a good start for this program, but it had some rough edges. Those have been smoothed out in version 2, and the program has become an accessible tool for directors. The guiding principle behind this software is ease of use through highly focused tools and libraries of props, people, buildings, scenes, and vehicles. The workflow begins with importing objects to make a scene, setting up shots, saving the shots, and editing the sequence. This is all done within FrameForge 3D Studio 2.0. The interface is not necessarily pretty, but it works. As with all the software in this category, you can produce a storyboard to be printed out and circulated to the crew or create a QuickTime movie.

• E frontier Poser 7 (Mac and PC)
  If your goal is to turn out still images for an animatic with occasional motion within the frame, Poser and Vue make for a very powerful combination — although it's not for beginners. One advantage of this combination is that you are able to move in 3D space to set up your shots, which is one of the big benefits of 3D software — even if you don't take advantage of full animation and are only making still images. Similarly, you can previz lighting and other aspects of art direction. It's particularly easy to use Photoshop as a finishing process to create alternate color palettes and “looks” using your Poser images.

  One of Poser's strengths is the community of artists that create thousands of props, models, characters, and sets in fairly elaborate detail. All of this is for sale at a few community and commercial websites. (For an in-depth look at Poser 7, click here. For more on the communities available for Poser users, go to digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/new_supermodels.)

Beyond animatics

3D previz is a considerable undertaking, so it makes sense to plan your previz. What this means is that you aggregate all the props and sets necessary for each scene. If a prop doesn't exist in your program's library of assets, you may find them online. Some of the better artists creating props might be willing to build special models just for your project. Most artists can be contacted through community sites.

Sometimes, rather than kill yourself animating a scene in 3D, it's best just to shoot what you need. Shooting MiniDV of stand-in actors can be a lot faster and more informative than 3D previz in many situations.

In the following pages, I take a closer look at some of the previz tools covered here, and also ways of previsualizing scenes with actors. With the products available in today's market, previz no longer just means 3D animatics — when using real actors, even stand-ins, previz and rehearsal begin to merge.

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S.D. Katz is a New York-based writer/director and author of the best-selling books Shot by Shot and Cinematic Motion.

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