Ogres, Goblins, Fairies, Sprites and cineSync

Monday, 21 January 2008

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a fantasy adventure movie based on a series of childrens' books of the same name. The magical and sometimes dangerous creatures of the books were brought to life by Tippett Studios and Industrial Light and Magic, both long time cineSync users.

ILM based Visual Effects Supervisor Tim Alexander and his team were responsible for creating many of the creatures, including the films' ogre Mulgarath, a Griffin, Snake, Sylph and a number of finely detailed Sprites. As part of their review pipeline, ILM relied heavily on cineSync.

From the article:

"It's what we used for doing all the reviews with the director," reports Alexander. "We used to do transmissions, which were basically run over either satellites or T1 lines that you had to privately rent. It's expensive and takes a lot of equipment. But then Rising Sun in Australia came up with cineSync, and all you need is two computers. So to do all our reviews with Mark, who was down in LA, we had a Mac set up at each end, and at the start of the day we'd trade the files that we wanted to view with them, as for the system to work you need to have the files at both ends. You don't actually transmit any image data while you're doing the session. All you transmit is sync information. So then we could open up a movie file at our end, and it also opens up at their end, and if we hit 'Play' they see it play, and if we hit 'Stop' it stops on the same frame at their end. We could also draw on the frame and they could see it, and vice-versa." For video chatting, the teams used i-Chat, "so we could see the director on one screen, and on the other we'd have the movie file," he adds. "It worked great."

You can read the rest of the Post article here and the film's official website here