Green Lantern

In this film because the autopsy of Abin Sur was originally more elaborate, early on there was a need to have all of his alien anatomy built for use in all the analysis screens.

I modified a human skeleton changing his ribcage to have more of a breast plate structure.  I felt it would give a more visual alien quality as well as better protect his two hearts.  The base models were built in Modo and then detailed in ZBrush. 

The body and skin of Abin Sur needed to match the life size body on set.  The props department sent me photos of the prop body which I used as reference to sculpt and pose my ZBrush model.  Was also able to use the photos to create an accurate displacement map of his wound.

(Shot in the film of the life size prop corpse that I needed to match)

I decided to render them in slices to give it a CT Scan quality about it.  My fellow artist on the film Chris Kieffer built the final screens.

Most of the scene was cut and only a few shots of the final graphics made it into the finished film.

We also needed to build a promotional video that would play on the giant LED wall billboard during the Ferris Party scene.  I created and animated elements and 3d text for Chris Kieffer to use in his final comp. 

Since there was so much content that needed to be built for the control room during the opening dogfight sequence I assisted Chris in creating the elements needed in the final screens, program the playback files for our playback operator Mike Sanchez to control them on set, as well as making changes and additional material for post VFX. 

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.

Move mouse to see before & after (touch on left & right of image on a touch screen device)

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.

Move mouse to see before & after (touch on left & right of image on a touch screen device)

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.

Move mouse to see before & after (touch on left & right of image on a touch screen device)

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.