The Development Course of Vita Digital

Vita: the epic legend of the film "Visual Empire"

Vita Studio is a comprehensive film and television visual effects company in New Zealand, with a group of creative and technical talents with various skills. Its studio is only 15 minutes away from downtown Wellington.

Vita has a studio with an area of over 65,000 square feet and more than 600 creative employees. We can design and produce all kinds of props, big or small, including professional props modeling and restoration, biological props production, armor weapons production, micro-sculpture, large-scale scenes, sets and costumes, and of course special effects. Richard taylor, president of the studio, is a special effects designer and chief producer with 14 senior designers. Modeling from subtle parts of the human body to various parts is very detailed; In addition to shooting the required three-dimensional sculptures, the studio also produces for museums and public exhibitions; Large-scale scene sculpture, outdoor can resist wind speed 140 km strong wind; Everything is made of armor and weapons.

Prequel: Starting from a workshop-style visual effect factory

Vita was so successful that when they made visual effects for Avatar, they had raised the performance capture technology to an omnipotent level, so that when tim burton filmed Alice in Wonderland for Disney, he abandoned robert zemeckis's studio, which was also good at performance capture, and cooperated with Vita, forcing Disney to kill him and close Ze Mikis's studio.

However, this well-known visual effects company in the industry is extremely mysterious and low-key. Because the company is located in "Middle Earth", that is, Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, a small film country, they can stay away from the spotlight of Hollywood and concentrate on realizing their grand dreams. For filmmakers who have imagination and love the chaos in Machamp. In terms of scale, Vita Studio only took more than ten years to develop from a workshop-style visual effects factory into a film kingdom with Vita Digital, Vita Workshop, Vita Production, Vita Collection and Park Road Post-production Company. Among them, Vita Digital alone has more than 900 employees doing visual effects for Avatar.

The film industry is inseparable from genius and worships genius. Genius can change the ecology of industries by itself, such as george lucas and Steven Allan Spielberg. Among the new generation of filmmakers who rose in the 1990s, the genius of Peter Jackson, a fat New Zealander, can be compared with the first two.

1993, New Zealand director Peter Jackson co-founded Vita Studio with his friends richard taylor and Jimmy Selkirk in order to produce visual effects for his new film "Angel of Sin". At that time, the company only had one computer. Jackson is a story master. He has many strange ideas and likes to control visual effects. Taylor and Selkirk, like him, helped him realize these ideas through their expertise in makeup, scenery and visual effects. From Hollywood's point of view, Sin Angel is just a low-budget movie, but Jackson and his Vita partners have done a lot with little money, and made a movie that can rank among the classics, and its visual effect can amaze Hollywood veterans. However, even so, at that time, Vita was just an obscure small visual effects company.

Rise: When The Lord of the Rings Changed History.

The angel of evil caught the attention of experts, and a Hollywood film company found Jackson, a new line film company under the media of time warner Inc., and the new line, which was already a subsidiary of Warner Bros., was already on an equal footing with Warner Bros., and its box office performance was often higher than that of Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox, which were weaker among the six distribution companies.

At first, Milla Max, who was in charge of the Weinstein brothers in "independent movie mogul", planned to make Professor Tolkien's masterpiece "The Lord of the Rings Trilogy" into a real movie, but their ambition was surprisingly small. They only wanted to make one movie, or at most two. Fortunately, the right to shoot this novel fell to robert shaye, the founder and senior producer of New Line Company. He decided to make the film into a trilogy. He only asked Peter Jackson to direct this blockbuster because of a "Evil Angel" which cost only $5 million (this film was Kate Winslet's debut). This is really an adventure on the moon in the film industry. Looking at it from another angle, The Lord of the Rings is actually a super movie with a length of more than 9 hours and a cost of 300 million dollars. It is only because it is too long that it is shown in three segments. Even more incredible, Ye Sha also agreed to Jackson's various demands, including that the film should be shot in New Zealand, and the special effects and visual effects should also be given to Jackson's Vita.

The The Lord of the Rings Trilogy established the model of Vita, that is, Vita Digital, headed by Jackson, was responsible for visual effects, while Vita Studio, headed by richard taylor, was responsible for other work, including concept maps, props, costumes, sets, models and sculptures, among which the trump cards were the design and production of various monsters and weapons and armor.

Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the first film in The Lord of the Rings's trilogy, and it is also a magnificent blockbuster. But for Vita, this film is just their best work, and they go all out, but some places are too rough to be simple. For example, at the Hobbit Party in the Kingdom of Shire at the beginning of the film, there should be 144 dwarves, but only 100 appeared in the end, which saved them 40.

On the other hand, Jackson always thought that computers could be used to make a battlefield scene in which thousands of troops were fighting. This time, he got the opportunity to buy a professional software Massive for Vita Digital at his own expense before the film entered the shooting stage. In The Lord of the Rings and Soren's battle scene between hordes and crabs, all the characters made by computers act in their own way, and their actions are absolutely the same.

The Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring's requirements for visual effects are top-notch, but not unique. Hundreds of stuntmen were used in those battle scenes, and with the help of visual special effects software, dozens were enough. The Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was not shot with a digital camera, but 78% of the shots, that is, about 365,438+000 shots were shot with a digital camera over 35mm, which caused a little trouble for later coloring. It must be mentioned that the Vita Studio in richard taylor has also made great contributions, producing 45,000 pieces of various props, while the tailor Nigra Di produced 19000 pieces of clothes with the assistance of 40 tailors.

By the time the second and third films were filmed, Vita had developed considerably, and the number of employees in Vita Digital alone had doubled to 520. Naturally, in the second "Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers", the number of visual effects shots has also increased to 799.

The Lord of the Rings's second and third films can be regarded as the first film. In addition to doubling the war scenes, Vita made the eccentric Mr. Gollum. At first, if New Line didn't make Jackson mumble with animation technology, he might refuse to make this film for New Line. As early as 1998, Jackson began to shape this character. At that time, he wanted to create this little monster with animation technology. But after watching andy serkis's audition, I changed my mind. In this way, Vita Digital uses the original motion capture technology to make Gollum look like a Serkis expression, movement and voice. Jackson was so satisfied with this technology and Serkis that he used the same technology to make another film "King Kong" with Serkis. Later, when I arrived in Cameron, I also made Avatar with live actors according to the prescription and combined with the upgraded motion capture technology.

Upgrade: Those days and nights in Avatar.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy makes Vita the world's top visual effects company, no less than the industrial light magic and light storm of established famous factories. Vita has advanced visual effects software, and the computer used has been upgraded from the original single core to the Blu-ray Giant supercomputer system with 4400 processors. Vita has become omnipotent in the field of film visual effects, with high standards in animation, modeling, motion capture, mass character generation, image synthesis, film scanning and recording. At the same time, this company is also the busiest visual effects company, which has provided visual effects for films such as Me, Robot, X-Men: The Last Stop, A Day When the Earth Stops, District 9, etc. Of course, Jackson is the most troublesome. He put King Kong, an eight-meter-high chimpanzee, on the screen as a romantic lover, and let King Kong fight with three Tyrannosaurus Rex on the Alcatraz.

Before Avatar, the most noteworthy non-Jackson film made by Vita was the Loch Ness Monster, which was not famous, because the protagonist of this film was not a humanoid creature that Vita was familiar with, but a monster made entirely by computer. This monster is not comparable to ordinary animals. Not only is it smart and natural, but also its skin is bright and vivid. From birth to growth, it has emotions and emotions, which makes people feel.

But since the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, only Avatar has been Vita's real challenge. Cameron's new film is so huge that no visual effects company can complete all the visual effects independently, including Vita. Even though Vita recruited people for this film, the number of employees of Vita Digital Company increased to 900. But there is no doubt that Vita ranks first among the eight visual effect suppliers of Avatar. For example, joe letteri, the visual effects director of Avatar, won the Best Visual Award for four consecutive years from 2003 to 2006, and parachuted into Vita Digital as the general director in 2007.

When Jack met Pandora with strange bones on his first mission as a Na 'vi, sharp-eyed fans could easily recognize it as Vita's masterpiece. In fact, Vita's task is extremely heavy. In Jackson's words, "there are too many people making floors in the company." Vita is not only responsible for making all the monsters on Pandora, but also for building the jungle of Pandora, including the virgin tree and vines with a diameter of several meters, with a total of 654.38+ million trees.

But this is only part of Vita's job. Most scenes of Avatar were shot in front of a green screen. Vita not only has to make a digital background for the film before shooting, but also has two kinds of mounts and mountains for Nami to ride. Prior to this, Vita must post-synthesize the stereoscopic images taken by two 3D cameras. In order to accomplish these tasks, Vita uses a server cluster, with * * * 4,000 servers and * * * 35,000 processors in total, which is three times that of "Lord of the Rings 3". This server cluster can even rank among the top 200 supercomputers. "Avatar" created a visual spectacle that shocked hundreds of millions of viewers, and Vita contributed a lot.