User Stories

Toronto-based visual effects studio, and long-time PFTrack users, SPIN VFX, recently delivered 200 shots for the military sci-fi thriller Battle: Los Angeles. Their work included creature effects, crowd simulations and the general destruction of the city of Los Angeles. The Pixel Farm spoke with Matchmove Lead, Chris Ankli, about the unique challenges the cinematography presented, and why they rely on PFTrack.

The National Film and Television School (NFTS) is the UK's national centre of excellence for education in film and television programme making. It is the only UK film and television school based in its own studios where students make real films and television programmes in industry-standard facilities with around a hundred productions a year. Its post-production facilities also offer real world, state of the art hardware and software, including The Pixel Farms powerful tracking system PFTrack.

Animation and visual effects boutique, Dinamo Productions had to complete over 850 effects shots in the space of just two months for the first series of the BBCs live action children's drama "Grandpa In My Pocket". A second series is now in production requiring at least the same volume of work again within its nine-week schedule. To cope with such a heavy workload Dinamo designed the production pipeline for speed and efficiency utilizing a tapeless workflow complimented by the dependable accuracy of PFTrack to exclusively provide reliable tracking data for many of the effects shots.

The latest film from UK writer/director Richard Curtis, The Boat That Rocked, tells of a pirate radio station in 1966 that broadcasts from a sea faring vessel off the English coast provoking angry reaction from stuffy establishment government officials who do their best to scupper the station. Inspired by actual historical events around the famous Radio Caroline story. The film's cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans and is an ensemble comedy which sails through very shallow waters and has subsequently failed to make waves with film critics despite a very respectable showing at the box office.

When latex prosthetic masks worn by several actors were wrinkling so noticeably that several important shots from the highly acclaimed independent production, The Hunt For Gollum, were in real jeopardy, something had to be done to rescue them. Offering to help, Escape Studios tutor, Mark Pinhiero, had an idea that using PFTrack might offer a quick and relatively painless way to solve the problem. In conjunction with several trainees at Escape, all working under the aegis of third party company The Sex Pixels, he tested his idea with the application and it worked like a dream.

The recent British comedy/horror spoof directed by Phil Clayden and ostensibly a vehicle for BBC sitcom stars James Corden and Matthew Horne is one of those rare occasions when a movie's name more than describes it's content. So with Lesbian Vampire Killers we all know what we're dealing with. Female vampires in the buffy, if you will. Or as James Corden himself describes it, "Shaun of the Dead with tits".

It's unusual to undertake a project for an organisation without their knowledge in the mere hope that they might like it and subsequently commission it, but for talented, award winning motion graphics artist and television editor Will MacNeil this strategy is almost becoming a habit. A new spot for the human rights organisation Liberty is a cleverly conceived idea that features some complex tracking and compositing work and was shot, edited, tracked and animated by MacNeil himself.

Transforming the influential and hugely popular comic book series Watchmen into a movie was never going to be easy or without its problems. Certainly Terry Gilliam thought so which is why he turned down the opportunity to direct it, leaving the daunting task to Zack Snyder. Soaked in symbolism and allegory the story involves some complex themes, and at just under three hours the task of conveying these in film takes on epic proportions.

A groundbreaking new comedy sketch show from (who else) the BBC has created quite a stir by its use of extensive CG Visual Effects that do more than simply decorate the genre. The six part series called "The Wrong Door" uses CG elements not to emulate reality but subvert viewer expectations by blurring the distinction between the real and the surreal. Matchmove artist and Visual Effects Supervisor Hugh Johnson and his small team had to produce over 850 Visual Effects to a very tight schedule. To assist with a great many of these shots that required accurate tracking data the production made exclusive use of PFTrack, the comprehensively capable and very powerful tracking toolset from UK developer, The Pixel Farm.

Possibly one of the world's most famous and certainly most awarded Visual Effects companies, The Mill recently completed work on a TV spot for Kia Motors' new Pro_Cee'd model. Racing against time to complete the project, experienced Flame artist Ben Turner saw undesirable smoke drifting across his shot and immediately called in the emergency services of The Pixel Farm's PFTrack which extinguished the problem quicker than you can say "auto-track and solve!".

One of the finest examples of CG photorealism in a live action movie to date can be seen in Spyglass Entertainment and Walt Disney Pictures canine Superhero movie, Underdog, now available on DVD in the UK. Utilising the very latest cutting edge technology, including RealScan 3Ds NexGen scanning system and The Pixel Farms state of the art tracking toolset PFTrack, the visual effects in this family, adventure feature directed by Frederik Du Chau, set a high standard for the application of digital artistry in film.

Ludovick Michaud, Technical Director at Texas Post facility, Janimation is positively bubbling with enthusiasm when it comes to the Texas Lottery Daily Four. Its not that he has won a fortune playing, but that when had to animate a talking bull and equally verbal horse in a recent television spot promoting the lottery draw, he feels he hit the jackpot with the software he used to assist with the job, PFTrack.