This was the first time I had composited native stereo footage. We also had to add matte paintings of clouds, sky, the giant’s land and the ground below. We had to pull keys from the blue screen and then add CG renders of the beanstalk to extend it off into the distance. Jack (Nicholas Hoult) climbs a beanstalk and re-ignites an ancient war in the teaser trailer for Jack the Giant Killer, a fairy tale re-imagining directed by Bryan Singer (X-Men). There were small sections of the beanstalk built on a bluescreen stage, which the actors were filmed on. Our main sequences involved the characters climbing the beanstalk. Once the triage was done, we could start on compositing. In some cases, shots that had taken a week with version 2 could be done in a day. Later in the project, The Foundry released version 3 of Ocula and it was a massive improvement. Occasionally we would even have to resort to rebuilding parts of one eye to match the other eye, using rig removal techniques. It was rare that one setup would work for the whole shot, so we would usually have to mix and match different techniques and different instances of Ocula with different settings. We had several different template scripts that used Ocula in different ways to correct colour differences. We were using version 2 of Ocula for most of the project and, like many plug-ins that offer ‘magic solutions’, it rarely got you more than 80% of the way. Even with the Ocula plug-in for Nuke, this was not a trivial task. At MPC, they call this step ‘stereo triage’. Our first job in the comp department was to fix these discrepancies for each plate. Common issues were colour differences introduced by the mirror, differences in specular reflections and slight vertical alignment issues. These rigs are never perfect and there are always a range of discrepancies between the left and right eyes.
Jack was shot natively in stereo using two Red Epics mounted in a mirror rig. MPC was responsible for rendering the beanstalk, while Digital Domain Vancouver worked on the giants.
Jack the giant killer 2011 movie#
Most of the work for the movie was split between two VFX houses. As soon as I arrived, I started working on Jack The Giant Slayer (or Jack The Giant Killer, as it was called back then). I moved to Vancouver at the end of August 2011 to start a 12-month contract at MPC.
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