Sebastien Chort: Life in CG
We had to accelerate our process a lot: we created and refined many shared assets, we tweaked the layout with a ton of…www.movidiam.com
Sebastien Chort is a VFX & CG supervisor working at Blur Studio. On a journey since his parents first bought him an Amstrad to working on features like Gravity and games like Assassin’s Creed he’s always looked to push the boundaries of what’s possible. We caught up with Sebastien to talk about his career and his most recent project, creating one of CG’s most iconic scenes, the opening sequence in Deadpool.
We’ve got to start with the awesome opening sequence of Deadpool, a deliberate anti-superhero genre sequence that perfectly captures the film’s tone — how much creative freedom were Blur Studios given on the sequence? Is it like anything you’ve done before, and what were the challenges of creating it with the team?
I’ve never worked on a shot that was so long with so many macro details revealed to the camera, so this was both a creative and technical challenge.
The frozen moment in the opening sequence was part of the first draft of the script. Creatively we knew it had to illustrate a fight between Deadpool and some thugs during a car accident, and that it would have to tie with a sequence that shows up later in the movie. So Franck our layout supervisor crafted a version of the sequence before the movie was shot as part of our previs process. He worked closely with Tim Miller, who is the CEO of Blur and also directed Deadpool, to pose the characters and look for comical situations. At that stage the camera motion was quite different and there weren’t as many easter eggs. Once the shoot happened and the VFX budget was locked, it became clear this would be difficult to fit in the budget, so the opening sequence was on hold for a while. But Tim had a version to illustrate his vision, he kept lobbying to get it done and ultimately he was able to get the shot greenlit a few months before the deadline.
We had to accelerate our process a lot: we created and refined many shared assets, we tweaked the layout with a ton of iterations to settle the timing and framing of the camera and we added jokes in every possible way. It was a team effort and things changed creatively pretty much until the very end.
“On the technical side, the shots were really difficult to deal with in term of render time and how much textural and modeling detail we had to add to all our assets. All those challenges had to be solved within a really short schedule, and I’m really glad we were able to succeed despite those constraints. In the end, seeing how many critics mentioned how great the opening sequence was, was quite a reward.”
You describe how you’ve worked at Partizan, Framestore, Dreamworks, The Mill and now Blur, amongst many other of the world’s leading production companies. Growing up and then starting out, what inspired you to get into CG? Was there a particular moment that inspired you to make the leap?
There are several factors that drove me into the industry. When I was 11, my parents bought me an Amstrad computer that I sold a year after to buy an Amiga. Then I started to do some pixel art on Deluxe paint and tinkered a bit with 3d software like Real3d. At the same time, I was really intrigued by the art of the games the Amiga had to offer (I remember many of them such as Dune, Moonstone, Heimdall, Monkey Island II and so on). That clearly had an influence on me, but I wasn’t planning to orient myself into that career, I was simply impassioned by art, storytelling, movies and graphic novels. Then a few years later as I started to study Math at University (would be college in the US) and I failed an important test by just a notch. On the same day, I discovered there was a school in the north of France called Supinfocom which was teaching computer graphics and animation, and was one of the first schools of its kind. I gathered some information about the quality of the school, the career options, and decided to try to enter the school. I focused all my energy on that goal and was lucky enough to be accepted a few months later.
What’s the hardest challenge you’ve faced in CG in re-creating one particular sequence?
I recall two big challenges. Working on Gravity was tough because the shots I worked on were really long, 1600 frames or more, and render times were extremely high due to the lighting scenarios. When I was submitting renders to Framestore’s render farm it would take a full week to get all frames back. That really impacts your efficiency, so you have to be creative to enhance the quality of your shot.
The second challenge I faced was to reproduce a version of Colossus on Deadpool that would integrate into Blur’s pipeline, the model was originally done by Digital Domain who used a different software package. To achieve the exact same look we had to adapt our workflow and change our philosophy on how we create materials in order to establish a perfect match.
I know a lot of our community will be interested to hear about your work in the gaming industry: how do you find working in this industry in comparison to the film industry? How is the CG work in gaming evolving in comparison?
Blur creates cinematics for the game industry as well as television commercials, special venues and vfx for features. So we have a flexible methodology to cover all those needs. The workflow to achieve game cinematics is quite close to what it takes to create vfx shots in term of asset creation, lookdev, animation, lighting etc. The main difference is that game cinematics are usually full CG and therefore don’t require any live action plate integration. Now if I look how far the game industry is in terms of quality for the realtime content of their games, the gap with pre-calculated images is shrinking and I can see it disappearing totally in the next 2–3 years. This is actually quite exciting, I really hope it will create opportunities for vfx studios and game studios to merge their knowledge. In the near future, I could see vfx studios using game tools to work on their projects and game companies looking to integrate the expertise of vfx specialists to enhance the quality of their games.
Stills photography, your hobby — has this always been a passion of yours, or do you think that observation of detail was somehow linked to your CG work?
I might have had an interest for photography for a long time without knowing it. About 6 years ago a friend blamed me for not taking pictures anymore and told me he thought I was pretty good at it. That triggered something, and at that time I was a bit frustrated with CG and the slowness of the process. I really needed to be able to create some images in a more spontaneous way, so I decided to embrace that hobby more and more, bought a more recent camera and started too shoot a lot more. Since then it became quite an obsession and when I moved to London and then Paris it was the perfect place for me to dive deeply into street photography.
What’s your personal favourite aspect of Movidiam?
I really like the collaborative approach mixed with the community aspect, and the interface is really well crafted in that direction. I haven’t started a project yet but I’ll definitely use the platform when that time comes.
What do you think Movidiam might offer professional artists and studios?
Movidiam seems to be an ideal way for professionals to build a team and go beyond the usual social media tools we have right now, which are mostly helping to create contact lists rather than enabling people to organize a solid team.
With amazing new technology emerging every year, how do you see the future of VFX evolving and the way teams work together.?
There are two technologies that I think will truly change our industry. Progress made in terms of power capacity for GPUs lately will enable a lot of companies to explore real time render processes whether its using a game engine or GPU based renders to achieve photo realistic images. In both case that’s a huge jump in term of efficiency and I think it will offer a lot of room for studios and artists to push the envelope creatively.
Then, I think the recent launch of consumer VR products will be the biggest game changer for our industry in the next few years. The need for assets, and content will skyrocket as consumers adopt that new medium. I was a bit skeptical about VR, until I had a chance to test Room Scale VR with the HTC vive. It is so mind blowing that I can’t see VR as a novelty anymore, this leap of technology is comparable to the jump from photography to cinema, and it might even be a bigger jump than that.
Can you tell us about any great projects you are working on at the moment?
I’ve been supervising a trailer for an upcoming AAA game which will be released during the E3 Game convention in June. I can’t share more details yet. At a personal level I’m trying to set myself up to speed with Unreal in order to develop a few ideas I have for VR headsets, hopefully I would be able to share some of my development sometime soon.
