Previsualization

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Previsualization (also known as previs , previz , pre-render , preview or wireframe windows ) is a function to visualize complex scenes in a movie before filming. This is also a concept in silent photography. Previsualization is applied to techniques such as storyboards, whether in the form of charcoal drawings or in digital technology in the planning and conceptualizing of film-making.

Video Previsualization

Description

The advantage of previsualisation is to enable the director, cinematographer or VFX Superintendent to experiment with a variety of staging and artistic options - such as lighting, camera placement and movement, stage directing and editing - without having to incur actual production costs.. On larger budget projects, directors work with actors in the visual effects department or special rooms. Previsualization can add music, sound effects, and dialogs to closely mimic the appearance of a fully-produced and edited sequence, and most commonly encountered in scenes involving special actions and effects (such as chrome keys). Digital video, photography, hand painting, clip art, and combined 3D animations are used.

Maps Previsualization

Origins

Visualization is a central topic in Ansel Adams's writing on photography, in which he defines it as "the ability to anticipate ready-made images before creating exposure". The term previsualization has been associated with Minor White that divides visualization into previsualization , referring to visualization when studying the subject; and postvisualization , refers to remembering the visualized image at the time of printing. However, White himself said that he learned the idea, which he called the "psychological concept" of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

The earliest planning techniques, storyboards, have been used in one form or another since the silent era. The term "storyboard" first began being used at Disney Studios between 1928 and early 1930s where the typical practice was to display basic action and joke drawing panels, typically three to six sketches per page vertically. In the 1930s, the storyboard for live action films was a regular and regular part of the studio art department.

Disney Studios also created what is known as Leica reel by recording the storyboard and editing it to the finished movie soundtrack. This technique is basically the precursor of previsualizing modern computers. Another prototyping technique used in the 1930s was a miniature set often seen with a "periscope", a small optical device with deep depth of field that a director could enter into a miniature to explore camera angles. The designer sets also employ a wonderful technique called projection camera angle to create a perspective image of the plan and an elevation blueprint. This allows them to accurately depict the set as seen by the lens of the focal length and the specific film format.

In the 1970s, with the arrival of video cameras and cost-effective editing tools, in particular, Sony's Ã‚Â¾ inch video and U-Matic editing system, animism began to be used regularly in advertising agencies as a means of selling television commercials and as a guide for the production of actual work. Animation is a video recording version of a hand drawn storyboard with very limited movement added to convey motion or camera action, accompanied by soundtrack. Similar to Leica reel, animatics is mainly used for direct action advertising.

The creation of the first three Star Wars movies, beginning in the mid-1970s, introduces inexpensive innovations in pre-planning to perfect the complex sequence of visual effects. George Lucas, working with visual effects artists from Industrial Light & amp; Magic, using footage from photographs of air dogfights from Hollywood movies of World War II to cut together templates for the X-wing spaceship battles in the first Star Wars movie . Other innovations include recording videos of toy characters attached to the stem; this was manipulated by hand in a miniature set to perform a preventive pursuit through a forest on a speeder motorcycle at The Return of Jedi .

The use of the most comprehensive and revolutionary new technology to plan the film sequence comes from Francis Ford Coppola, who in making his music feature in 1982 One of the Heart developed a process which he called "electronic cinema". Through electronic films, Coppola strives to provide filmmakers with an on-set device that will serve as an extension of its thought process. For the first time, animatic will be the basis for the entire film. The process begins with the actors performing a dramatic "radio-style" sound recording of the entire script. The storyboard designer then draws over 1800 individual storyboard frames. These images are then recorded onto analog videodisks and edited according to the sound recording. After production begins, the video taken from the video tap of the 35 mm camera (s) shoots the actual film used to gradually replace the stills storyboard to give the director a more complete vision of the progress of the film.

Instead of working with the actors on the set, Coppola directs while looking at the video monitor in the Airstream "Silverfish" (nickname) trailer, equipped with advanced video editing equipment. The video feed of the five stages at Hollywood General Studios is incorporated into the trailer, which also includes off-line editing systems, switchers, disk-based still stores, and Ultimatte keying. This setting allows live and/or recorded scenes to be compiled with full size and miniature sets.

Before desktop computers were widely available, the pre-visualization was scarce and rough, but still effective. For example, Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic uses toy action figures and a lipstick camera to film miniature versions of the motorcycle pursuit Return of the Jedi. This allows the film producer to see a rough version of the sequence before full-scale production of expensive starts.

The 3D computer graphics were relatively inaudible until the release of Steven Spielberg Jurassic Park in 1993. These include revolutionary visual effects that work with Industrial Light and Witchcraft (winning them Oscars), one of the few companies in the world at the time using digital technology to create imagery. In Jurassic Park, Lightwave 3D is used for previsualization that runs on Amiga computers with Video Toaster cards. As a result, computer graphics are lent to the design process, when visual effects inspector (and Photoshop creator) John Knoll asks artist David Dozoretz to perform one of the first previsualizations for the entire sequence (not just strange shots here and there) in Paramount Pictures' Mission: Impossible .

Producer Rick McCallum showed this sequence to George Lucas, who hired Dozoretz in 1995 to work on the new Star Wars prequels. This was an early but significant change because it was the first time that artist previsualization was reported to a film director rather than a visual effects watchdog.

Since then, previsualization has become an important tool for large-scale movie production, and is essential for the Trilogy of the Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars Episode II,/i> and III , War of the Worlds , X-Men , and others. One of the latest movies that relies heavily on this technique is Superman Returns , which uses many artist crews to create complex pre-visualization.

While visual effects firms can offer previsualisation services, today many studios hire companies that only serve the previsualization for major projects. Software packages are commonly used for previs by these companies, such as Lightwave 3D Newtek, Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder and Softimage XSI. Some directors prefer to self-diagnose by using inexpensive general-purpose 3D programs, which are technically less challenging to use such as iClone, Poser, DAZ Studio, Vue, and Real3d, while others rely on a dedicated 3D program of Previsualization but user-friendly FrameForge 3D Studio (along with Avid's Motion Builder) won an Emmy Technical Achievement to represent improvements to existing highly innovative methods in nature that have materially affected the transmission, recording, or television reception.

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Digital Previsualization

Digital visualization is simply the technology applied to a visual plan for a movie. Coppola bases its new method on analog video technology, which will soon be replaced by greater technological advancements - personal computers and digital media. In the late 1980s, the desktop publishing revolution was followed by a similar revolution in a film called multimedia (a term borrowed from the 1960s), but soon to be revived desktop video .

The first use of 3D computer software to perform the previsualization of a scene for a major film was in 1988 by animator Lynda Weinman for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). This idea was first proposed to Star Trek producer Ralph Winter by Brad Degraff and Michael Whorman from VFX Degraff/Whorman facility. Weinman created the primitive 3D movement of the Starship Enterprise using Swivel Swivel software processing software based on feedback from producer Ralph Winter and director William Shatner.

Another pioneer previsualization effort, this time using game technology, is for James Cameron's The Abyss (1989). Mike Backes, co-founder of the Apple Computing Center at AFI (American Film Institute), introduced David Smith, the creator of the first 3D game, , to Cameron who acknowledged the similarity between The Colony neighborhood and the underwater lab in The Abyss . The concept is to use real-time gaming technology to prevent camera motion and staging for movies. While the application of this idea produced limited results for The Abyss, the effort led Smith to create Virtus Walkthrough, an architectural previsualization software program, in 1990. Virtus Walkthrough was used by directors such as Brian De Palma and Sydney Pollack for previsualization in the early 90's.

An outline for how a personal computer can be used to plan sequences for movies first appears in the guide directs Moving Directing: Shot By Shot (1991) by Steven D. Katz, which details software-specific 2D storyboard movement and 3D animated movie design, including the use of real-time scene design using Virtus Walkthrough.

While teaching previsualization at the American Film Institute in 1993, Katz suggested to producer Ralph Singleton that full animated digital animations of the seven-minute sequence for the Harrison Ford action film Clear and Present Danger will solve the various production problems encountered when locations in Mexico become unavailable. This is the first fully customized use of computerized prisnuises made for a director outside the visual effects department and solely for the use of determining dramatic impact and photographing the flow of the scene. 3D sets and props are fully textured and built to match the set and location blueprints of Terrence Marsh production designer and storyboard approved by director Phillip Noyce. The latest digital sequences include any screen shots including dialogs, sound effects and music score. The virtual camera accurately predicts the composition achieved by the actual camera lens as well as the shadow position for the time of shooting. The order of Clear and Present Dangers was unique at the time because it included both dramatic long passages between virtual actors in addition to action shots in a complete presentation of all aspects of the key scenes of the movie. This also signifies the beginning of previsualization as a new category of production separate from the visual effects unit.

In 1994, Colin Green began working on the previsualization for Judith Dredd (1995). Green has been part of the Image Engineering department at Ride Film, the VFX Douglas Trumball company in Berkshires Massachusetts, where he is responsible for using CAD systems to create miniature physical models (rapid prototypes). Judge Dredd requires many miniature sets and Green is employed to oversee the new Image Engineering department. However, Green changed the department name to Previsualization and shifted his interest to create 3D animatics. The majority of previsualizations for Judge Dredd are a long chase sequence used as an aid to the visual effects department. In 1995, Green started the first specialized previsualization company, Pixel Liberation Front.

In the mid-1990s, digital previsualization became an important tool in the production of feature-rich films. In 1996, David Dozoretz, working with Photoshop co-creator John Knoll, used scanned images to create digital animatics for the last chase scene for Mission: Impossible (1996). When Star Wars producer Rick McCallum watches animatics for Mission: Impossible, he taps Dozoretz to make them for the pod race in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). Previsualization proved so useful that Dozoretz and his team ended up making an average of 4-6 animatics of each F/X shot in the film. Daily sela will replace the animatic part when shooting takes place. At various points, previsualization will include a variety of elements including scanned storyboards, CG graphics, motion capture data, and live action. Dozoretz and previsualisation of supervisors effect Dan Gregoire then proceeded to do the previsualization for Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) and Gregoire finished with the last prequel, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005).

The use of digital previsualization became affordable in the 2000s with the development of easy-to-use digital film design software available to every filmmaker with a computer. Borrowing technologies developed by the video game industry, today's previsualisation software gives filmmakers the ability to craft 2D electronic storyboards on their own personal computers and also create predictable 3D animation sequences with amazing accuracy of what will appear on the screen.

Recently, Hollywood filmmakers used the term pre-visualization (also known as pre-vis , pre-vis , pre viz , pre-viz , previs , or animatics ) to describe techniques in which digital technology helps planning and image-making efficiency during the process filmmaking. This involves the use of computer graphics (even 3D) to create rougher versions of more complex images (visual or action effects) in movie sequences. Grain graphics may be edited along with temporary music and even dialogs. Some pre-viz can look like simple gray shapes that represent characters or elements in a scene, while other pre-vis can be sophisticated enough to look like modern video games.

Today many filmmakers are looking for fast, yet optically accurate, 3D software to help with the task of previsualising to lower budgets and time constraints, and give them greater control over the creative process by enabling them to make their own presences.

3d Previsualization Chase Sequence - YouTube

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Previs software

One popular tool for directors, cinematographers, and VFX Supervisors is FrameForge 3D Studio. Another product is ShotPro for iPad and iPhone that combines basic 3D modeling and simplifies the process of creating 3D scenes and displays them as storyboards, a feature available with most previs products. Shot Designer animates the floor plan in 2D. Toonboom Storyboard Pro handles 2D objects and allows sketching and exporting in storyboard format. Moviestorm works with 3D animations and makes a realistic preview similar to iClone that offers realistic 3D scenes and animations.