THUNDERPACK MOTION FX FULL

So, yes, I think this is going to stop a bit of that. And then the director shows up and goes, 'Oh no, actually this is a better angle.' That is a tremendous amount of waste. And somebody says, 'How about this?' and they go, 'Yeah, fine.' Then, behind the scenes, 50 or 100 people go into action, budgets get approved, things get built. JM: You have to bear in mind that each director is required to make hundreds of decisions a day. That was the revelation for me – I'll use it on every film from now on.ĭS: That must have saved a tremendous amount of resources, to be able to check things out virtually, and know if it’s really what you want or not. For example, for the village that we built in New Asgard, Taika and I and DP were flying around the village finding different vantages, and doing sun tests – like, “If we put the bluescreen there, at the time of day we're shooting it, will the sun be able to get through here, or will we be creating shadows because of the bluescreen ball?” It was that sort of level. We did that for all the LED volume stuff.īut the most useful thing was that, since all the real sets are created in CAD before they're actually built, we were able to bring them in and look at them with the virtual reality gear.

THUNDERPACK MOTION FX FULL

We had our full lens kit – what we were going to use with the live-action – so you could actually frame things up and look at different angles and make adjustments. And all the tools are there to fly around, look at stuff, take pictures. And we would each sit in our little swivel chairs and plug in, and then we would drop into an environment that we were planning to build. So, we ended up using an amazing virtual reality rig, where there were four sterilized headsets hung from the ceiling. So, we used it for a ton of that.īut to get to that stage, we still wanted to go and do some scouting. They have this mad technology where you're in an environment with these 3D Vicon cameras, and you can stick a tracking marker on the back of the actor, and as the camera moves around it will stick a live bluescreen just behind them, but only just behind the bit that you want, which for me is their hair because everything else is roto, and you can do hard edges. There's so much prep that you have to do to put up an interactive load, as they call it, for the LED volume work to come through okay. We were mostly using LED volumes for interactive lighting on the whole thing. Jake Morrison: I used more VR on this than I ever have before. We’ll let him tell you about it.ĭan Sarto: A side from being produced during the pandemic, how did Love and Thunder compare to Ragnarok in the way you approached the visual effects production? To combat the threat, Thor enlists the help of King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Taika Waititi), and ex-girlfriend-turned-Mighty-Thor Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who pool their resources to stop the galactic killer before it’s too late.Īs to be expected, the list of VFX vendors on the film is extensive it includes Base FX Cinesite EDI Effetti Digitali Italiani Fin Design + Effects Framestore ILM Luma Pictures Mammal Studios Method Studios Outpost VFX Raynault VFX Rising Sun Pictures and Wētā FX.įor Morrison, no less than the superheroes, Thor: Love and Thunder was an exciting and often challenging adventure, although his experience was defined more by the extensive use of VR and a breakthrough in lighting tech than by impending deicide.

In the latest, some would say “light-hearted,” installment of the Thor saga, the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) on a journey of self-discovery, sees his efforts interrupted by Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who, not surprisingly, seeks the extinction of the gods. Meanwhile, in the non-feline-centric world, which is, generally speaking, most of the MCU, Morrison recently served as both VFX supervisor and second unit director on the Taika Waititi-directed Thor: Love and Thunder, the fourth entry in the blonde Norse god franchise.

And the reason he told us is that it’s hard to avoid discussing such things when the pets in question are vying for screen time during a Zoom interview.

The reason we know this is that he told us. First things first: Jake Morrison may be a highly accomplished visual effects supervisor – whose credits include Thor: Ragnarok, Ant-Man, The Avengers, The Other Guys, and Iron Man 2 – but make no mistake about it: he’s also a cat lover, whose feline charges have accompanied him to far-flung locations throughout the known world.

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