Client: Mike Connolly, compositor, Base Black End client / project: Hotel Rwanda "Things I've previously accepted as being problematic and 'just one of those things' requiring extensive time - not to mention 're-comping' - have been solved with relative ease." Award winning (Toronto, Amercian Film Instiute) film Hotel Rwanda concerns the horrific Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which the majority Hutus slaughtered the minority Tutsis, as well as any moderate Hutus who opposed them. Led by the Interahamwe militia, radical Hutus killed 937,000 people (officially) in just three months - likely to be the swiftest genocide in human history. The feature length project was shot on 35mm and went on release in the US in December 2004. Through well known VFX supervisor Dennis Lowe (Cold Mountain, Harry Potter) Soho facility Base Black was approached to work on various shots. Mike Connolly, compositor, Base Black, explains; "I had 3 very difficult retimes that my regular retime software held up it's hands in horror at; a bustling crowd coming towards the camera with overlapping layers, moving limbs, fast moving foreground figures, lots of textures; a swift bouncy camera pan around a central character with lots of patterns and textures to hold onto combined with heavy parallex (normally a retime nightmare), and a jumping figure on a panned background." In addition to this and some more general background extensions and inserts, there was also a background for the view through the front of a car, from the rear seat. This had obviously been shot independently to the car and so needed extensive stabilisation before it could be used. In search of a retimer that could handle such complex work, Connolly turned to The Pixel Farm and PFRetime. He continues, "The shots using PFRetime also required a fair amount of manual input as well as using the automatic features and the fact that PFTrack allowed me to do this to the level it did was definitely one of its main strengths. I also used the   feature tracks and flow mattes as well as painting the flow data from within PFTrack. The results were especially impressive regarding textures and parallex - greatly helped by the fact that the initial auto-track is done with a 3D camera in PFTrack, so parallex is understood, as well as a better understanding of the relationship between overlapping objects and lens distortion." All the retimes were rendered from within Shake using PFRetime. The general background extensions were done using PFTrack with Auto and User features with a few holding mattes, and then selected points were exported to Shake Trackers and Corner pins for final render from within Shake as part of the comp. No PF plug-ins were required, just the data produced by PFTrack. The car background was tracked using PFTrack, mostly with auto-features, but also some centrally positioned User features to 'emphasise' the centre balance of the shot. The camera data was then taken into PFStabilize within Shake where the Pan, Roll and Yaw were smoothed out. Concluding, Connolly says, "The use of PFTrack on this job has helped me understand, and so have greater control, over lens and camera issues. Things I've previously accepted as being problematic and 'just one of those things' requiring extensive time - not to mention 're-comping' - have been solved with relative ease. The results speak for themselves - the shots with all their problems were solved. Of course, the bar for shot retime requirements is constantly being raised but the Pixel Farm can out jump everyone else! PFTrack is a spare pair of hands with a smart head, which helped me to concentrate on the more visual rather than technical issues of the shots. The Pixel Farm are not just solving technical issues but providing tools that help me be more creative." www.baseblack.com Words: Martin Southwood