REALITY HEIST

In 1984 a scientist makes in secrecy a ground-breaking discovery and finally puts her calculations to the test to successfully transports herself into an alternate dimension, where she finds her estimations and predictions can only prepare her for so much...

REALITY HEIST, the film:

REALITY HEIST, the full vfx breakdown:

REALITY HEIST is the 2023 graduation film of the VFX departement of the National Film and Television School and the completion of the two years of this Master. This deeply collaborative project enabled us as students to work as a 360° studio team, from pre-production to filming and post-prouction, and helped us grow as humans and artists.

As this graduation film is the last project of the Masters, I had the opportunity to work closely with the other artists of my promotion before. It was wonderful to see how each of us had different specialities and interests in the realm of VFX and I started to see how all those personalities could come together and complement each other to make a stunning film.

Coming from a background of directing fiction, I wrote a few scripts made to fit our skills and desires as VFX artists and managed to tie them together through a strong storytelling. I am convinced that it is only in support of a story that VFX truly have power and live not only for mere spectacle. My challenge was also to blend traditionnal visual effects such as Digital Matte Painting and rendered CG Assets with the latest technology in virtual production with real time environment on an LED Wall.

The journey truly started once we all selected the script of Reality Heist. The first step was to develop the visual language of the film through concept arts. I took some time with Danielle Parker to flesh out the key visual elements of the story. Those visuals were particularly useful to decide what route to take but also to communicate and convince other departments along the project; production, cinematography, designers and prop makers.

Another important step in pre-production was to make a previs (previsualization) of the whole film; a storyboard in motion. As we new the project to be VFX heavy, we needed to plan ahead and be sure that we coud actually achieve the effects we were planning. This visual planning did not only concern the VFX team but all the crew; everyone on set had to understand our process leading to the good execution of the shots (HDRi capture, tracking markers, green screens, photogrammetry...)

Previs doesn't need to be pretty, however it needs to convey the action and how it is possible to film it with the constraints of the project. For example when I made the previs of the film I could block out very simply the space of each location and scout virtually what camera angle were possible, what size the set needed to be and if it was even necessary to build a whole set or maybe just a portion of it! Doing all this in a 3D space also gives a scale to the scene and can become more technical if necessary. For one of the climax shot we pushed the previs to the the level of techvis (technical visualization) as it was the most ambitious shot to achieve; adding a rendered CG Asset emmiting interacting light on a practical set with an actor in motion and filmed by a handheld camera. This process helped us to determine the right camera movement in relation to the actor and the set, where to put tracking markers if any and how to place the light. Given the movement of the camera and all the elements going on at the same time, I also decided to do a full scan of the set with photogrammetry to help with the camera track and obtain the best result possible.

On-set, I also used the previs to direct the actress, Florence Roberts, to show her what she is supposed to see in that car, guide her reaction and the excitement of her character. Soon after the shoot, we delivered a postvis; a very first and routh version of the shot, only used by the editor to properly build the cut for that important beat of the story.

We have been able to do this only because of all this planning; quite early on I decided what the shot would look like, so I actually started building the hero asset very early and finished it even before the shoot. I called this the "collider", a machine built by the scientist to travel between parallel universes. Having such an item in the story could have quicly become dangerously high-tech and too ambitious to make, this is the main reason why I set the story in the 80s. This way I could focus the story around a device that the character would have been able to build herself with the technology available at the time. I modelled the asset on Maya, textured it on Substance and Photoshop, tracked the camera in 3DEqualizer and rendered the scene with Arnold.

I was particularly careful to make an asset that would feel physically plausible, considering the size and emplacement of every element relative to each other. I spent quite some time studying technology of the 80s from NASA's experimental hardware to mri scanners. Texturing was also a big element of credibility to bring life and character to the object; it is routh, scratched and dusty, built by hand by a scientist in her secret lab.

Although love and care in building any asset is primordial, I knew it's just a portion of what it takes to make it feel like it properly belongs in a scene. So I took some time with the lead compositor, Baptiste Audouin, to plan precisely what he needed to comp the CG render onto the live action plate. As the collider emits light he asked for light based AOVs as well as IDs to have control over the different light sources and emplacement to create amazing light rays effects, glow and heat distortions.

I also wanted to have lighting bolts coming out of the core of the collider to show the sheer power of the machine capable of opening parallel universes, but I was clueless on how we could achieve this. This is when Baptiste came up with the brilliant idea to create his own tool based on his knowledge of the Foundry's NukeX and Python coding to execute this precise effect: "the circle tool".

"My plan was to use the X_telsa node from Xavier Martín to generate the lightning but I wasn’t sure about hand animating the different positions. I wanted to find a procedural way and this is how I came to develop this “circle tool”. The concept is quite simple: the tool generates two x and y positions from two ellipse shapes related to a chosen angle. You have a display that shows you what the ellipses look like and you have full control on those shapes.

You have two modes, either manual or random: The manual mode will give you fixed values depending on the angle you choose (you can still hand animate the angle). The random mode will give random values every frame that you can adjust. With the settings amplitude and offset you can change the area where the position will be generated. You can check the random curve in the curve editor.

The tool outputs values that you can use for whatever purpose you want. You also have a centre value that you can move or expression-link to a track. I made this tool thinking of the X tesla node that asks for two x and y input values, I just plug the values from my tool directly in the node. I positioned the ellipse in the right place and tweaked the a and b value until the perspective felt right. I turned on the random mode and played with the amplitude and offset to get the lighting only in the direction of the camera. I then duplicated the tool to get different lightning generations and plugged this back to the comp." - Baptiste Audouin.

This scene with the collider is quite representative of the more traditional side of the VFX pipeline; rendered CG assets then composited onto the live action plate. But we also had the great opportunity to experiment with real-time virtual production and LED wall rear projection. Already in the writing process I wanted those two sides of VFX to complement each other but in a way that would make sense for the story. So we decided using the LED wall to shoot the scenes happening in the parallel universe in opposite to the scenes in the "real world" shot in location with CG and DMP effects.

This parallel universe features a very uncommon landscape and creature, where are thriving the skills of Marta Giacobbe (creature artist) and Danielle Parker (environment artist) that you can discover in that video we made:

Although the environment and the monster of the alternate dimension where firstly designed to appear only on the LED wall, we decided to try to render a full CG shot on the creature directly from Unreal Engine. It was challenging to render the right passes to make it look like a photorealistic render that could fit with the other shots of that scene, but Marta and Danielle pulled it off! Quite a lot of comp love was necessary on that whole sequence to give more depth to the LED wall by matching the blacks, adding light rays and particles in the air to tie the actress and the wall in the same space.

After presenting all these effects that carried quite a fictional story, it is also worth mentioning all the invisible VFX enriching the shots in the real world. Daniel Peoples supervised all the first scene, adding a CG double of the car on the first two drone shots, the CG road sign "entering Susquehannock State Forest" and the huge electricity pylon powering the lab in the forest. It is also those effects you don't see that help bringing the story in the right setting.

Finally the grade done by Vanessa Aparicio concluded this journey with a final coat of varnish, giving each scene and each universe its own color ambiance and feeling.