For those who don’t know the tool: SynthEyes by Boris FX is a dedicated 3D camera tracking and matchmoving software used across film, VFX, and advertising production. It interfaces smoothly with Nuke, After Effects, Fusion and other DCC applications, delivering fast, precise solves for integration of CG into live action. Part of the Boris FX Suite, SynthEyes sits alongside tools such as Mocha Pro, Continuum, Sapphire, and Silhouette, forming a tightly integrated pipeline of visual effects and finishing plugins.

Free matchmove mastery – for a limited time

Boris FX has announced SynthEyes Essentials, a new training series designed to teach both the conceptual foundations and practical workflows of matchmoving in SynthEyes. The package, usually priced at USD 95, is available as a free premium download until 31 December 2025.

The offer includes over three hours of professional instruction, spread across eighteen videos, with accompanying project files and sample footage. The series is taught by Boris FX product specialist Christoph Zapletal, a long-time VFX artist and trainer – and Digital Production’s own Compositing, Flame and Star trek Author.

Topics include matchmove theory, camera solving, AI-assisted workflows, roto masking, lens distortion management, mesh generation, and object tracking. Boris FX positions the series as a comprehensive, concept-driven training rather than a feature-by-feature tutorial. If you want to learn what you are doing, and not just which button to press, this is the course for you.

What do you get?

Across eighteen lessons and twelve blocks, SynthEyes Essentials builds a structured learning path from theory to application. It starts with conceptual understanding, progresses through tracking, solving, calibration, and ends with practical export and integration workflows. Each block is designed to be modular, allowing artists to focus on specific parts of the matchmove process or follow the series sequentially for a full onboarding to SynthEyes.

Foundations and Core Concepts

The course opens with an Introduction and a clear explanation of the Underlying Concepts of matchmoving. These first lessons establish the theoretical foundation of what camera solving actually does, namely mapping 2D image data into a consistent 3D coordinate space. Christoph outlines how SynthEyes interprets motion, focal length, and parallax, giving artists a solid base before they begin working hands-on. This section sets the tone for the entire training: conceptual understanding first, tools second.

Tracking Workflows

Once the principles are clear, the series moves into practical tracking. Lessons on Automated Tracking and Supervised Tracking demonstrate SynthEyes’ two primary approaches to extracting tracking data. Automated tracking covers point generation and solving for shots that can be processed algorithmically. The supervised section focuses on when and how to step in manually: tuning track points, correcting drift, and controlling motion paths when the automated system struggles. Together, these chapters establish a complete understanding of tracking strategies for real production footage.

Solving and Refinement

The next stage is “The Solver Room”, where all the accumulated tracking data is converted into a working 3D solve. The solver section demonstrates how SynthEyes interprets the camera’s path and reconstructs the scene’s geometry. The training then introduces Roto Masking, showing how to isolate moving foreground elements or exclude unwanted regions from the tracking process. This not only improves accuracy but also keeps solves stable in complex or occluded shots.

Lens and Calibration

Zapletal then focuses on optical parameters in three consecutive chapters: Lens Distortion, Lens Calculation, and Lens Calibration. These lessons explain how real-world lenses introduce distortion, how SynthEyes models and compensates for it, and how to calculate or calibrate lenses from footage or reference data. This block is particularly useful for artists working with varying cameras or mixed-format source material, where lens data is inconsistent or missing.

Coordinate Systems and Scene Setup

The two lessons titled Coordinate Systems Part 1 and Part 2 explain how SynthEyes handles scene orientation, scale, and alignment. Understanding coordinate spaces is crucial when exporting solves to downstream 3D applications such as Nuke or Maya. These chapters ensure that solved data lines up correctly with CG scenes and compositing environments, avoiding scale and rotation mismatches in later stages of production.

Mesh Generation

The Mesh Generation Part 1 and 2 chapters explore SynthEyes’ built-in mesh tools. Artists learn how to create proxy geometry that helps verify solves, anchor objects in space, and visualise tracking quality. These lessons demonstrate both automated and manual mesh workflows, preparing users for typical use cases like ground plane setup or background modelling for compositing reference.

Object Tracking

Next, Object Tracking Part 1 and Part 2 move beyond camera solves to show how SynthEyes handles independent object motion. This section is key for shots with multiple moving elements—cars, props, or handheld devices. It explains how to isolate and track objects independently while maintaining a consistent world space between multiple solves.

Export and Integration

The final three chapters deal with transferring the finished solve to other applications. Zapletal demonstrates exporting cameras, point clouds, meshes, and nulls to standard 3D and compositing packages. Topics include export format choices, scaling conventions, and verification of data integrity. The course closes with best practices for integrating SynthEyes results into downstream VFX or editing pipelines.

Availability and next steps

Artists can download SynthEyes Essentials for free via the Boris FX webshop until the end of December 2025. From 1 January 2026, it will be priced at USD 95 for the premium download, though the videos will remain freely viewable on the Boris FX website. As with any training-based workflow adoption, users are advised to validate techniques and settings against their own production data before deploying in critical pipeline stages, but, after we have seen a few of the videos, this one will be useful for pretty much everybody.

The post SynthEyes Essentials Training is here and Free for the Holidays first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The Lost Bus is a 2025 survival-drama directed by Paul Greengrass for Blumhouse Productions in association with Comet Pictures and Apple Original Films. The film is based on the non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by journalist Lizzie Johnson. Set against the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, it follows a school-bus driver and a teacher who fight to guide 22 children to safety through an encroaching inferno. Combining Greengrass’s documentary-style direction with large-scale visual effects and environmental reconstruction by RISE FX, the film depicts one of the deadliest wildfires in recent history with stark realism.

Supervising the inferno: Oliver Schulz (IMDB | Linkedin) is a senior Visual Effects Supervisor at RISE FX, the Berlin-based VFX studio. Over more than a decade at RISE he has guided VFX supervision on major international productions including Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Blue Beetle and Megalopolis, among many others.

His background spans concept art, digital matte painting and 3D environments; skills that helped him to take the creative lead on blockbuster-scale environment and FX heavy shows. In this interview he reveals how he and his team at RISE tackled the challenge of recreating a burning landscape for The Lost Bus, combining procedural geography, wind-driven vegetation, deep-rendered volumetrics, and machine-learning techniques for depth integration, to bring the inferno to life on screen.

DP: How did you get onto the Lost Bus? 

Oliver Schulz: I came on board after wrapping up on Megalopolis and jumped onto the very first meeting with Charlie Noble and Gavin Round, Production VFX Supervisor and Producer. The project was already awarded at that time so we directly started talking about the Sequences and the scope of the Rise portion of work.

Luckily or better sad tragically this was a real event so in regards of look, there were many references and documentation of this day. So our first meeting was looking through a lot of real world footage from all available sources. Charlie had been prepping reference reels from the very beginning, so we could hone in on a lot of specific ones for each portion of the work because he had references for all of them!

DP: Roughly how big was the RISE team on The Lost Bus, and how long did you spend from first build to final comp?

Oliver Schulz: We started with a very small core team in May 24 and delivered the last shots at the beginning of 25.  I think around 50-60 people worked on the show in total during the production with up- and downramping based on specific project needs like temp deliveries for example.

DP: The antagonist of the movie is the geography of a very particular area, and the fact that it is on fire – how did you make sure that it was recognizably that specific part of the world? 

Oliver Schulz: We started with real world data derived from elevation models. That gave us a pretty good grounding in reality. We got lidar scans for very specific locations like the Pulga Bridges for example which was invaluable as this is usually something one doesn’t get from any publicly available sources. We spent quite a bit of time to get us a very good foundation of all key locations, which meant that everything had a geometrical base until the very last mountain you see on the horizon.

Our Lidar Supervisor David Salamon was instrumental in setting up this base. He used some maps imagery to give a rough base color to all those individual geometries that served as a rough guide later on in layout and surfacing for distributions of materials or assets. One has to keep in mind that most data was post 2018 so for instance vegetation had to be recreated from mostly photographic references shot before the fire. We tried to stay as true as possible to real world geography, but later on of course things had to be changed for storytelling reasons. 

DP: When merging New Mexico plates into your California canyon builds, how did you maintain scale and geological continuity?

Oliver Schulz: As production did not have access or in case of some very sketchy roads didn’t shoot at the original location for safety reasons, they did some scouting through the US and chose some New Mexico locations as stand ins for some of our sequences. The most prominent was the Pulga road for sure. In the film, the first responding firefighters trying to get to the origin of the camp fire first get sight when they are on top of the Pulga Highway bridge crossing the Feather River Canyon.

Without any better option they decide their best shot is to try and get to the fire following a very narrow road on the slope of the canyon. All shots on Pulga Bridge were shot on a Studio Backlot featuring full CG Environments including the FG bridge. This narrow path however was all shot on the New Mexico location with two big fire engines driving a slightly wider road. 

In production that meant that we replaced most of the visible Environment due to a couple of reasons. First of course it needed to have the right roadwidth and the correct canyon in the background. Second we needed to have very windy vegetation everywhere. Third in case all of that worked in camera which was pretty rare we still needed to put FX Elements into every shot consisting of dust, debris, smoke and later also embers. With those guidelines in place probably 90% of the shots became full CG exteriors only keeping small bits of photography for fire engines and some road pieces.

Once all those went into layout we made sure to keep a senseful progression to those shots meaning having the firefighters travel along the road during those shots in cutorder. The topography of the shooting location though was pretty different from the storypoint progression on the pulga road, so was the framing in camera when pointing at the fire from the fire engine interiors.

That of course meant as good and real our base was, it needed to be heavily augmented to make sense with storytelling and framing choices. Most shots feature the correct BG canyon but the midground is totally made up to allow for good view to the fire origin. All of this had to be understandable even with very frenetically moving handheld cameras.

DP: Let’s talk vegetation: How much botanical creative freedom did you have? 

Oliver Schulz: Vegetation was a big part of the environment and one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the fire. All FVX vendors had to tackle it in one way or the other which meant all were contributing to the research for which plant goes where. The foundation was once again the research and material collection from Charlie and his team.

We focused on the most common species found in this region of CA and made sure the level of dryness and the distribution made sense. So in this sense there was not too much freedom here as everyone tried to make this as real as possible from this point of view. For the build we actually just used the most common ground which is Speedtree with some augmentations done in Houdini. Part of the assets were also shares from other vendors which just needed ingestion and rigging in FX.

DP: You mentioned building a hierarchical “ecosystem” in Houdini. How modular was this system, and how much hand-authoring did artists still need to do per shot?

Oliver Schulz: This was something we actually invested a bit of time in at the very beginning and was overseen by CG Supervisor David Schulz and Layout Lead Mareike Loges / Senior Layout Artist Björn Markgraf. The core idea is nothing new and hierarchical just means that you start from the biggest Elements in your kit and than go smaller and smaller based on the previous distribution of Elements. First step is to either scatter or handplace big trees for example, following this you end up with a certain distribution. 

Based on this the system places smaller entities like younger trees or seedlings and smaller shrubs and bushes around or between the big trees. This distribution is based on simple rules like distance or terrain steepness. In case of the Pulga road we divided it up in two categories: mountains and roads. Both had similar procedures. We would always start with the rough blocking geometries matching either scan data, elevation data or sometimes just made up. From there we would generate the base coverage of rock cliffs which would hold out trees mostly in those areas. Following this we created the trees and bigger vegetation which would determine the ground coverage of rocks vs more pepply ground.

Roads were pretty similar but less complex as they mostly feature small stones. Again here we used some manually created maps to drive the distribution of small vs bigger pebbles that mostly accumulate on the side for example.

The toolset itself worked pretty well and as it was applicable as a template we could have a fully laid out shot in a day. Shot specific adjustments were applied on almost every shot though, mostly for continuity, visibility or art direction purpose. 

DP: Vegetation, environment, and FX were all dependent on one another. How did you keep versioning sane between departments?

Oliver Schulz:  That was a big topic indeed and it only is possible with two things: a rigorous approval system and a good pipeline that helps you track those approved layouts. We rely on our usd pipeline to do exactly that for us, it makes it somewhat easy (Im sure layout and production will hit me for this) to track department versioning. For each layout update we`d always get automatic QC renders that run through our inhouse “slapstick” system which is our inhouse auto comp engine.

When Layout would do a specific change it would publish this either on a shot or on an Sequence/Environment level. This will trigger a QC render from the shotcam of the affected shots. Once the rendering is done it will have a postjob that combines it with the prepped plate in nuke and runs another renderjob that will give you the layout reviewable which is than checked and can be approved and pushed into the pipeline from RV. This Layout than becomes available to the FX department which would run all needed simulations and hand off another QC reviewable for approval. Without those systems in place it would have been a nightmare to stay on top of all these versions!

DP: You said the layout department drove wind direction and strength instead of FX. How did that change your creative workflow?

Oliver Schulz: Yes that was indeed true and one of our early conversations we had internally to determine the approach all Environment builds would share. It was a practical decision based on two factors: We would simulate all vegetation on the asset level in different windspeeds for efficiency reasons and we wanted to keep iteration loops to a minimum.

This meant that I wanted to look at layout versions with moving vegetation as the strong directional wind would make it necessary to consider this already while layouting trees. As the direction is clearly visible you cant rely on spinning a tree 360 deg free in Y to create variations as the direction is “baked” in, so you need to see it moving in order to determine if an environment looks good!

The second reason is that FX needed to take care of vegetation simulation only once and when approved never needed to come back. This system worked really well and was accessible to the layout artists down to the single blade of grass, meaning one could really art direct where and how much specific things should move.

DP: You divided smoke into “hero” and “residual” categories. How did you manage density and readability without losing visual clarity?

Oliver Schulz: These two categories were simply based on the fact that we needed to deal with smoke in almost every shot. The ever present residual smoke needed to inherit a direction, needed to be art directable and also needed to render as fast as possible. Its pretty much the equivalent of atmospheric perspective in a wildfire scenario. Our Fx Supervisor Akin Göcmenli came up with a system of instanced presimulated caches that sometimes could consist of thousands of individual ones.

We started by doing simulations of smoke with a constant wind direction and speed that had a hidden source of emission and diffused pretty soon. That gave us a very soft falloff to the edges of the simulation grid which made these simulations perfect to overlap and look as one big single instance of smoke. On top due to those aspects it was quite easy to remove single containers and punch holes into the wall of smoke for visibility. We also invested a bit of time to develop shaders and render efficiencies to cut down on notoriously long volumetric rendertimes for this element.

Hero smoke was the category which either had a visible emission source in frame or simply had a hero storytelling element. These were usually shot or sequence simulations as they were mostly much denser and most of the time also much closer to camera. We also spend a good amount of time matching shading and simulation to real world references.  The secret to readability also lies in relentless QCing of outputs to make sure once you kickoff the expensive lighting renders, you are as certain as possible all elements are going to work. 

DP: The ember work looks incredibly detailed. How did you simulate believable motion in strong winds without visible repetition or looping patterns?

Oliver Schulz: Embers were a big part of the equations so by now you might guess…. Yes we spend a bit of time in asset prep to build some solid foundations. The first thing is of course the driving factor for all fx aspect: the wind.

FX developed hero wind forces that we used to simulate all elements with. A good amount of chaos and variance is key to not run into issues with readable patterns in any simulation. Another factor is collision. Embers will behave a certain way when they collide and thats what we tried to replicate. Also the ground plays a big role especially with the heavier emberclumps that slide over it.

Reality is unbeaten when it comes to little quirks and anomalies especially for something as complex as this. As no one is able to have a ground as detailed as the real world we also sometimes had a collision geometry that had slightly more displacement in order to have more detailed collisions happening. 

DP: Lighting and volumetrics are natural enemies. How did you maintain physically plausible lighting through that much smoke and fire?

Oliver Schulz: That was one of the biggest questions going into this project, considering that what was shot on set sometimes had very little to do with what ended up on screen, especially in terms of atmospherics. The best base for something to look real is to match the real thing. We did so in our asset phase and made sure our shaders and lightrigs were physically plausible, especially the ones only used to develop assets. 

We would match greyballs and reference macbeth charts in order to make sure scene lighting was correct in terms of lightbalancing. Then from there we developed shaders for all aspects.One of the most common issues I see is that volume and surface renders aren’t lookdeved in conjunction. What you end up having to do is to grade surface and volume render differently. This leads to very unrealistic renders very fast because there is no ground truth you can come back to.

We tried to make sure all our shaders worked with each other to have exactly this common base. Also when dealing with dozens of light sources and those issues on top that’s definitely a position you don’t want to be in when time is running…. All volumetrics do have very different properties to them where one of the biggest is how they scatter light. Back to front scattering can take a volume from being ultrabright to consuming all lighting energy and being pitchblack. So once you matched the real thing, use those tools wisely to deviate from there and support the story. 

We tried to always start with a balancing pass usually done still in lighting. This goes to comp as the foundation to do all the finetuning with. Still there was a lot of tuning left for comp and also we needed to break reality more than once to make sure that what you wanted to read in a frame remained readable when tons of smoke and fire went in front. Sometimes we needed to go as far as use the deep data to pull things in and out of the smoke to make them visible. Still the most valuable tool you have is the artist’s eye to determine the sweet spot of good vs real.

DP: You mentioned deep rendering bottlenecks, like OIIO running out of patience with too many AoVs. What exactly went wrong first?

Oliver Schulz: Haha yes that was one of the issues that came when switching to full deep with our renders. That means you have each component of each lightgroup rendered with deep data to put it back together in comp. That resulted in a lot of channels that apparently were too much for OIIO to handle. Thank god that was fixed otherwise I wouldn’t write this story now ;)

DP: Rendering holdouts took up to an hour per frame. Did you develop any automation or optimisation to make deep rendering less painful?

Oliver Schulz: Indeed rendering times for deep holdouts were quite painful and nothing to speed up really. With so many volumetric elements you need to deep hold out everything with everything to make sure its accurate. If you multiply this with the number of separate elements rendered and with the amount of light Aovs times the amount of components you end up with a staggering number of renders.

Plus in the end you need to denoise all frames so the best solution was try to plan out delivery dates as good as possible to have time for all those thousands prerenders to run on the farm. Still our compositing Supervisor Oliver Hohn and Lead Nicolas Burgers had some longer evenings ensuring all renders were there the next morning to be picked up by the compositing Artists.

DP: You used machine-learning depth generators to create deep data from plates. What tools powered that, and how reliable were the results?

Oliver Schulz: We started testing tools quite early in anticipation of very challenging compositing work. DepthAnything v2 was what we ended up using as a default prerender pass. The results were a mixed bag considering the wide range of plates we worked with, although it proved to be valuable to have. Comp remapped the relative value output of the depth passes to absolute values from deep data with help of lidarscans or renders and was able to create some good integration especially with more wispy type of smoke.

For denser smoke and more accurate holdouts especially for actors we still needed to rely on a lot of manual roto for good integration. The AI passes proved to be pretty successful though for fast temp work as you get something going in no time. Issues were mostly the missing good temporal stability and also the lack of precision. 

 DP: Before deploying new tech like ML depth generators or procedural ecosystems, how do you test them safely inside production?

Oliver Schulz: We implemented those during production directly on our project infrastructure, so developed, tested and used simultaneously. 

DP: Were there any spectacular ML depth map failures, like smoke reading as solid or background cliffs collapsing?

Oliver Schulz: Depth popping or lost shapes were the most common ones. But as none of these passes were used without correction in comp I’m sure I haven’t seen all of them!

DP: With so many volumetric layers, how did compositors manage complexity without drowning in passes?

Oliver Schulz: We have standard workflows for loading CG renders into nuke which do provide a basic level of organization. However the more elements you have the bigger the compscripts and we had some good ones for sure!

DP: Fire colouration is tricky. Did you use any spectral rendering or rely purely on LUTs to match on-set lighting and heat distortion?

Oliver Schulz: That is very true.. Luckily production tried to shoot everything with a practical fire which provided a good level of references in camera. If you than try to render as physically plausible as possible and have something in frame that you can match exposure to you are already halfway there. We didn’t use any spectral rendering here and rendered everything through Houdinis Karma in RGB.

DP: You switched to full motion-blur sampling for embers instead of faked streaks. How much did that impact render time, and was it worth it?

Oliver Schulz: Oh that was worth every minute of rendertime.. Real Motionblur for an element which is mainly visible in motionblur is a good investment. Plus the rendertimes weren’t actually that bad and took only a couple of minutes as you are not dealing with an expensive shading as well. The biggest benefit is getting nice curved and very interesting blurs especially with collisions.  The trick actually is to only invest time where its needed and render other elements with less costly settings. Deep compositing allows for it as you are not bound to any holdouts and you can combine differently rendered motion blur without any problems.

DP: How crucial was RiseFlow for distributing simulations and maintaining consistency across all sequences?

Oliver Schulz: We started implementing RiseFlow at the very beginning once we had our initial workflow for distributing elements figured out. The development was done by our Head of Pipeline Paul Schweizer and the implementation on the show was spearheaded by Jonas Sorgenfrei.

It actually is a very versatile framework that we use for a variety of tasks here at Rise. Its a modular node based System that can take arbitrary inputs and execute them in a chained workflow. FX built templates for various scenarios that got exposed variables like wind direction, speed, inputs for collision geometry etc. These could than be varied per shot and sent to the farm for execution. Once all those Sims were done, QC renders were submitted to the Farm and when completed, auto comped in Slapstick.

That meant that one artist could do changes on a big number of shots by adjusting the template and than resimming and rendering them over night. All render elements were deepcomped with our deep plate workflow and reviewed the next morning. This allowed for rapid adjustments and turnarounds which was a very crucial aspect of this fast paced production. 

DP: How did RiseFlow and Slapstick communicate between departments for reviews and dailies?

Oliver Schulz: RiseFlow and Slapstick are two different things really. The point where they communicate is that Riseflow might trigger a farmjob where Slapstick is hooked in as a post process that gets triggered after completion of the render. Slapstick again is a modular node based system implemented in Nuke that allows for a generalized template to be created. These inputs could take for instance all general elements that comp might use to layer a shot like mainplates, rotos, colorcorrections, lensdistortions etc and comp them together. We use Slapstick in all departments to create automatic reviewables for assetbuild like turntables with reference images, lighting slaps,fx slaps and so on.

DP: You’ve called The Lost Bus the toughest matchmove job you’ve ever seen. How did you solve the handheld, wet, low-light camera challenge?

Oliver Schulz: That was a tough one indeed. To solve this it really just comes down to the excellence of all individual artists that created those matchmoves. So there is no magic recipe to get through so many challenging matchmoves…

DP: Greengrass loves long, continuous takes. How did you manage to iterate and render efficiently on such heavy, unbroken shots?

Oliver Schulz: I guess it is really to choose your battles wisely… Invest into a good foundation early on and make sure to be as precise as possible in prep phase. Once the show is running and you are in full delivery mode there is no time to go back and redevelop anything.

Render optimization as much as possible and then relying on everything that was set up in the beginning is key to not have to think about accuracy anymore when you are trying to finish the shots. We did this and it really paid off, though having a couple of long shots with lots of elements to render we never ran into the issue of having to fear a render didn’t get finished in time.

There were some challenging shots for all departments involved but again the prep phase paid off and we managed to deliver everything in time. It’s really a Situation in which the Production team led by Michelle Cullen and Production Manager Androniki Nikolaou outdid themselves by planning and scheduling every milestone in production to make sure we had what we needed to finish shots in time. Of course that also means adjusting and revising this schedule each and every day based on client comments and changes.. It’s a tough job to make sure the whole production runs like a well oiled machine!

DP: Deep compositing only works if all layers align perfectly in space. Did you use diagnostic tools or pure visual QC to verify deep accuracy?

Oliver Schulz: The good thing about deep is that it’s pretty accurate as long as the sampling increments in depth are small enough for certain elements. It’s a game of keeping error thresholds low enough so you don’t pick them up actually. The balancing is precision versus filesize. Surface renders aren’t an issue really as you are dealing with front and backsides of hard surface objects really.

The fun starts with volumetric elements and this is where you need to tweak the settings a bit to make sure you don’t end up having 5GB per frame in volumetric renders. Still frames could grow to well over 1GB on bigger shots with all elements included, so we needed to do some rough calculations beforehand to make sure we weren’t running out of allocated serverspace.

DP: How did you maintain consistency for fire behaviour across sequences? Was there a single reference look, or did it evolve shot by shot?

Oliver Schulz: One of the big topics obviously here as the quality of the fire not only needed to remain consistent but also serve the story in how it behaves. When you look at fires in reality they all have very different qualities to them depending on a ton of external factors like what is burning, where it burns, what is the actual heat it produces and what is the influence of the wind and so on. So yes it’s crucial to pick a reference and not try to incorporate them all. The initial tactic we used was to create asset based fires with all components.

The two types that production defined as assets were “spotfires” and “forestfires”. Pretty generalized in description though mostly divided up by scale. So we took those two types into asset development and created a little scene with them. Forestfire in the background and spotfires in the foreground. This scene actually was the same one we used to lookdev all assets in. So we had a common ground for all assets really and the fx ones were not different.

We picked a general reference we felt was working well for each category and supplemented that with references that production had shot on set. The shot element though were mostly run by gas so wouldnt really emit any smoke but were a general ref in terms of breakup and edge qualities. Also those would come in native resolution where most of the actual refs are cellphone captures of much poorer quality.

So with all those references in place we started matching the fires again in different windspeeds. We tried to also implement all little details especially on the bigger forest fire like flambursts on dry wood, falling burning pieces of wood etc. Once fire was in place we hooked it up with all secondary elements like smoke and embers. We had already pretty robust setups developed for each of them individually so we could already build on a solid foundation using those as a base.

Once this little scene was successfully approved by production to go into shots we splitted out the individual components as assets again. These had all elements attached like smoke emission, ember emission, lots of different masks for heat distortion and were ready to be dropped into shots.

Using this technique we had a very solid foundation of very similar looking and behaving fires. Of course for hero shots we would need to resim those, but with setups in place and our template system it was mostly straightforward. Of course there are shots that need to tell a certain story like a fire coming right at you towards camera. Solving a problem like reading a perspective of a selfilluminating matter coming right towards camera is a different beast though you can’t prep for! This just takes a lot of creativity and trial and error to get right…

DP: What’s the single biggest creative takeaway from The Lost Bus you’d carry into your next show?

Oliver Schulz:  Don’t try to put out all the fires at once….

DP: Which shot makes you proudest or gives you flashbacks?

Oliver Schulz: Oh there are so many good ones really, honestly when I was watching all shots in a row I was so happy about the overall level of quality the team achieved in every aspect. So hard to pick singles but the Embercam full CG shots looked amazing on the big screen and were pretty spectacular… but getting them to the state we delivered them in was quite a journey…

DP: Finally, if you had to redo The Lost Bus from scratch, what would you rebuild first? Vegetation tools, compositing templates, or your caffeine reserves?

Oliver Schulz: Myself :)

The post Rendering the Inferno at RiseFX: The Lost Bus first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Their credits include Fast & Furious 10, Seven Kings Must Die, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette Season 2, Avenue 5 Season 2, The Peripheral Season 1, Nosferatu, and the Japanese feature The Village.

Digital Production: Walid, can you introduce Vision Age VFX?

Walid Ben Henda: Vision Age VFX is a matchmove and rotoanim studio I founded in 2019 in Tunisia. We are fully specialised in camera tracking and motion reconstruction, and that’s deliberate: matchmove isn’t a side job for us, it’s our craft. Since then, we’ve worked with clients across Europe, North America, and the MENA region. Our film credits include Fast & Furious 10, Seven Kings Must Die, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette Season 2, Avenue 5 Season 2, The Peripheral Season 1, Nosferatu, and the Japanese feature The Village.

https://vimeo.com/1112312426

Digital Production: You describe matchmove as an art. What do you mean?

Walid Ben Henda: A track on its own is not the goal. The goal is to make the next artist’s life easier. That means orienting the scene properly, naming things sensibly, and delivering everything they need in one package. Too many artists stop at “the track is done.” For us, it’s about delivering to the end, not just passing it on.

Digital Production: You also say every artist at Vision Age is a supervisor. How does that work?

Walid Ben Henda: Because it is not about ego, it’s about responsibility. Film is a team-sport! Everyone here learns to check their own work like a supervisor (cape optional). Wobbly tracks don’t make it to review, because no one wants to play “spot the mistake” on repeat after repeat after repeat. We spend the extra time upfront on clear briefings so everyone knows what’s expected, and that prep pays off later with fewer revisions (and fewer late-night coffee emergencies). In bigger pipelines, the whole “fix it in prep” mantra often vanishes. We’re just stubborn enough to keep it alive.

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Digital Production: Can you give us examples of recent projects?

Walid Ben Henda: Two commercials come to mind. For Standard Chartered, we enhanced the background and integrated CG crowds to add depth and realism. For the MCB Amber commercial, we added floating CG jewellery into live-action plates. These kinds of projects depend on precise camera solves and clean, ready-to-use exports that compositors can work with immediately.

Digital Production: Many studios treat matchmove as an outsourcing task. How do you position yourselves?

Walid Ben Henda: We don’t think of ourselves as an outsourcing vendor. We think of ourselves as a production partner. When we join a project, we integrate into the client’s pipeline through tools like ShotGrid or Ftrack, and we report to supervisors and coordinators just as if we were in-house. That means regular updates, deliveries, and feedback cycles. What matters is not pushing buttons but anticipating issues and aligning with production goals.

Digital Production: What does a project workflow look like for you?

Walid Ben Henda: It starts with a careful reading of the brief. If something is missing, we flag it right away. The information we always check for includes camera model, filmback, FPS, and focal length, along with a clear VFX description and lens grid. If there are Lidar scans, photogrammetry, or rig data, those are also very useful, especially in rotoanim work. Having this upfront saves time and reduces revisions later.

Digital Production: What kind of problems do you see most often?

Walid Ben Henda: Missing camera metadata is the most common. Lens data, sensor size, or focal length is sometimes simply not provided. Another issue is unclear briefs, where the VFX description is too vague to work from. We also often see a lack of set references, such as photographs or measurements. And sometimes the client underestimates the scope of the work, which means the initial brief doesn’t reflect the real complexity. We always flag these before starting.

Digital Production: And what really breaks a matchmove?

Walid Ben Henda: Retimed footage is a nightmare. The wrong filmback or wrong resolution can be just as bad. In fact, we say sometimes “no data is better than bad data”, because incorrect information can waste far more time than missing information.

Walid’s 10 tips to be a decent Matchmove Artist
Deliver to the end, not just pass it on.
Understand what other departments need.
Catch your own mistakes.
Always start with a strategy.
Track parallax, not just 2D points.
Learn everything you can about real-world cameras.
Do photography.
Save incremental versions. Always.
Anticipate missing metadata.
Communicate early.

Digital Production: How do downstream workflows affect your job?

Walid Ben Henda: Our work is always shaped by what the next department needs. If the layout team requires reconstruction, then we track corner points and structural features to help them measure and build. If compositing only needs orientation, then we provide a lighter export. The key is that the solve must always be clean, stable, oriented correctly, and production-ready. Thinking about the downstream departments is part of our DNA.

Digital Production: How do you check quality before delivery?

Walid Ben Henda: We have a three-step QC process. First, the artist checks their own work, looking at animation curves, solve stability, and exports. Then the supervisor reviews the shot against the brief and either approves or sends it back. Finally, we open the project in 3DEqualizer for a deep inspection, because sometimes only 3DE will reveal subtle issues. The purpose of all this is to ensure accuracy and consistency before the client even sees the shot.

Digital Production: Let’s talk about tools. Which ones do you rely on?

Walid Ben Henda: Our main tool is 3DEqualizer. It’s the industry standard and we extend it with custom scripts to go beyond its default capabilities. We also use toolkits like GoSavvy and MM-Solver for specific problems. Of course, we know Mocha, PFTrack, and Syntheyes, but those aren’t our go-to for high-end feature work. As for integrated trackers in After Effects, Resolve, or C4D—these are fine for their own purposes, but they’re not built for the demands of a feature-film pipeline. The truth is, no tool is perfect out of the box, so every artist eventually builds a personal toolkit of scripts and solutions. We also develop our own internal tools to solve unique problems.

Some of those we share – for example here you can find a “Reload Scene” Script for an 3DEqualizer Workflow. Or a script to Reset Lens Distortion.

Digital Production: How do you handle deliveries?

Walid Ben Henda: We prefer the foolproof approach. Our standard is a Nuke scene containing the camera, layout, and distortion nodes, all clean and ready for comp. We tidy the geometry and layout before handoff and use consistent naming conventions, either ours or the client’s. We believe in delivering complete, comp-ready assets, not partial work that still needs preparation. Fancy delivery setups exist, but in our experience, simplicity and reliability are what matter.

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Digital Production: Where do you see AI in this field?

Walid Ben Henda: AI is advancing fast, but we remain cautious. We developed iDARA, our own AI-assisted intake and project management system. It analyses incoming plates and briefs, flags complexity such as occlusion or rolling shutter, and classifies shots by difficulty. It also spots missing metadata. But iDARA is not an auto-solver. It’s a decision-support tool. Automation helps us prepare and estimate, but every delivery is still manually reviewed. AI can generate impressive images, but reconstructing precise motion is still beyond it. Generating pixels is easy; generating intent is not.

Digital Production: What advice would you give to young matchmove artists?

Walid Ben Henda:First, learn what other departments do. Understanding what compositing, FX, or layout artists need will make you a better tracker. Too many matchmove artists work in isolation, focusing only on their own curves and solves, without considering what happens once the shot leaves their desk. But tracking exists for a reason: to enable the next department. If you understand what those teams require and why, you can deliver work that truly serves the pipeline rather than just ticking a box.

Second, do not wait for supervisors to catch mistakes. You are the person who knows your shot best, and passing sloppy work up the chain only slows the project down. Check your own damn work, and check it carefully. Reviews are not supposed to be the first time someone spots jitter, slipping, or a bad orientation. They should be the final validation. By taking responsibility for your own QC, you save everyone time and avoid unnecessary frustration.

Third, always start with a clear strategy. Diving into a plate and hoping for the best is rarely effective. Think about parallax, about where your reliable features are, and about how you are going to attack the shot before you place the first tracker. Remember that you are not simply tracking dots—you are reconstructing parallax, the three-dimensional shift that gives the solve its accuracy. Studying real-world cameras will help here, because the more you know about optics and filmbacks, the better you will understand what your data is actually doing. Photography is excellent training for this: learning how lenses distort, how focus shifts, and how depth of field behaves will make you a far stronger tracker.

Finally, develop disciplined working habits. Save incremental versions religiously, because one day you will need to roll back. Expect missing metadata and be prepared to improvise without breaking the integrity of the shot. Communicate early and often with your team, because silence kills more projects than bad footage ever will. And always deliver to the end of the chain. That means not just finishing your track but packaging it in a way that makes it immediately usable for the next artist. As we like to say: where others see motion, we see parallax.

Digital Production: Any Final thoughts?

Walid Ben Henda: Matchmove is invisible, until it’s wrong. That’s why we exist: to make sure it’s right, every time. Our focus is on preventing problems before they happen, delivering assets that are ready for comp, and keeping this invisible art as solid as it can be. AI may handle simple shots one day, but the complex ones will always need skilled human trackers.

The post Matching Your Moves: Inside Vision Age VFX first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The programme was developed largely single-handedly by Dr Russell Andersson over more than 20 years and has long been established not only in the film industry, but also in architecture and forensics.

It has now been incorporated into the BorisFX portfolio. As with Mocha Pro – originally from Imagineer – you can expect this programme to be maintained and developed further. Compared to the remaining competitors 3DEqualiser and PFTrack, the price is quite attractive (Boujou disappeared a few years ago). A good reason for a more comprehensive test!

Interface and operation

At first glance, the GUI looks a little old-fashioned, but don’t let that fool you. The fact that the drop-down menus are usually not sticky and you have to hold the mouse button down until you select the desired function can also be a little irritating. You should forget about the option to switch to languages other than English. It is based on an AI that sometimes makes you go “Huh, what’s that, please?” and where German text often doesn’t fit into the field. The assistant called “Synthia” is also not very helpful at first glance and initially responds stubbornly with “Sorry, I don’t understand.” This is not Siri or Alexa, but rather an assistant for comprehensive automation through scripts in SynthEyes with defined commands. Russ shows how this works here: is.gd/automationsyntheyes.

But that’s it for the criticism, because there is not only a manual with over 800 pages in English, but also various video tutorials that Russ himself has published over the years. A few of the most important ones have already been published on his own YT channel “Boris FX Learn”, even if Russ’s are a little older. This one on masking moving objects using rotoscoping should be very useful for many: is.gd/rotomasking, or this one on mesh building: is.gd/meshbuilding. New additions are is.gd/solving_AE and is.gd/lens_AE, which help with getting started and transferring to After Effects.

In addition to the actual manual, there are nine further PDFs on specific topics such as Planar Tracking or Camera Calibration under “Help”. Comprehensive tool tips and warnings if you make mistakes complete the whole thing. Otherwise, the wealth of functions with 13 tabs and many hidden, additional windows may seem overwhelming at first glance, but right under the first tab “Summary” there is a large, green button called “Auto” at the top left. You can try it out at the beginning, even if experienced professionals turn up their noses at it. Nothing prevents you from refining the results yourself. We also unleashed this function on our more than 20 test clips to see how difficult they were for the programme. There was only one that was not successfully calculated, even if the automatic function sometimes failed to achieve the magic value for precision below 1.0 pixels straight away.

Performance

Precision and speed are of course the most important criteria in everyday production. There are three steps in the process: The identification of suitable image points for tracking, here called “blips”, their tracking over a number of frames as 2D tracking and finally the “solver”, which is the calculation of the spatial relationships for the camera and the scene. Anyone who has ever worked with a point tracker will know what suitable shots should look like: lots of depth of field, little motion blur and good contrasts. For 3D, the parallax of a freely moving camera must also be taken into account.

SynthEyes can also process panning shots from a tripod, but then you only get a circular horizon. We used shots from a drone with a relatively small sensor, hand-held shots with an iPhone 15 and some from a Sony A7IV with a wide-angle lens, also hand-held. As experience has shown that even simple trackers can cope well with shots from an urban environment, we didn’t want to make it so easy for the professional software. We mainly flew over cultivated fields with repetitive structures and natural shapes such as trees, bushes and water, with a few houses thrown in for good measure. Simple trackers usually have difficulties with such motifs.

Not so SynthEyes: With the exception of one, all clips were successfully calculated with “Auto” and could then be brought to values below 1.0 with just a few interventions, in the majority we even came close to 0.5 without much “manual work”. The duration of the clips was between just under one and five minutes, the resolution was UHD. All clips took less than their own runtime on a modest MacBook M1 Pro. The longest, which primarily contained trees, flowing water and sky, was calculated in 3:45, with around 7,500 images. The precision was 0.75 at the first attempt without any intervention. That is clearly professional level!

The 10 CPU cores were fully occupied, on a computer with more “steam” the programme would hardly leave time for a sip of coffee. For comparison: The camera tracker in Fusion took over 13 minutes with the standard setting for a clip of 1:30, but achieved a very good precision of 0.23. After Effects took over 20 minutes for the same clip and achieved 0.47 pixels. These are good values, but with these times you wouldn’t want to do much fine-tuning if a scene is more difficult. In this case, SynthEyes took a good minute and achieved 0.84, but offers plenty of potential for fine-tuning.

Lens data

With early 3D trackers, it was a common recommendation to enter the exact size of the chip and the focal length of the lens. Unfortunately, however, lens manufacturers are not always very precise with the focal length. It is even more difficult today with the chip size. The absolute size can usually be found out, but it is much more difficult with the actual area used. With CMOS sensors, a smaller section is often used, either for higher image frequencies or for internal lens correction. It is usually not possible to find precise information on this.

For our drone, for example, DJI specifies a field of view of 84 degrees diagonally and gives a full-frame equivalent for the focal length of 24mm. However, this applies to photos on the full chip area with an aspect ratio of 4:3. The chip area used for video in UHD is almost impossible to determine, as the small lens is certainly also used for calculations – in any case, the image hardly shows any distortion. With the iPhone, it is generally the case that lens errors are factored out so that the real values are also largely unknown here. It is therefore very helpful that SynthEyes can calculate the necessary distortion correction itself. In the case of the drone, it arrives at just under 70 degrees, which is not unrealistic.

In order not to disturb this calculation, you should never activate internal stabilisation. Both the shifting of the image on the chip and the optical stabilisation, where the entire sensor is moved, would constantly shift the centre of the lens. Mechanical means, such as a gimbal or Easyrig, are of course permitted because the camera itself moves. Blurring, be it a shallow depth of field or too much motion blur, is also not a good starting point for match moving. It is better to add both based on the tracking information in post-production, and SynthEyes can also take care of the stabilisation.

Equalisation of lenses

SynthEyes offers highly complex algorithms for rectification, Standard Radial 4th-order is recommended for spherical lenses, but there are also algorithms for anamorphic lenses. “Read or Cry” should be taken seriously, because if you use this feature incorrectly, the results will tend to be worse. It is an iterative process in which the parameters should be worked through from top to bottom. To do this, you have to switch from “Automatic” to “Refine” in the “Solver” window at the top left after the first tracking and click “Go!” once after each step. In our 90-second clip, one step took less than a second, and this alone almost halved the deviation to 0.48.

Even a rolling shutter is corrected reasonably well, but is generally not a good prerequisite for camera tracking. With the drone or the iPhone 15, this value was low, but with the full-frame camera, this adjustment still brought quite a lot of improvement. In a further step, you could increase the number of trackers and remove the less good ones, but this was not necessary here. We had no difficulty getting below the magic 1 in any of the test clips.

With anamorphic lenses in particular, the question then arises as to whether we should keep the clip in its corrected form after compositing or undo the correction. As a rule, the distortions are not removed in the final result, but are added again after compositing. SynthEyes also has a solution for this, which can be found under “Lens Workflow”. This means that both options are available, and it is particularly easy to use scripts for After Effects, as shown in the second clip for beginners (see above). In this case, SynthEyes even warns you if you have not taken this aspect into account.

Input and output

In addition to precision and speed, a solution for professionals must of course be very versatile in order to fit into any workflow. Right from the start, we were pleased to see how many video formats are accepted. This even includes material in HEVC 10-bit 4:2:2 from hybrid cameras with up to 8K, which is something that the standalone version of Fusion does not recognise. Of course, ProRes is also no problem, but DNxHR only works in a MOV, not in MXF. Image sequences commonly used in animation and VFX, e.g. EXR, are read without any problems, as are DNG, JPEG or PNG series.

Of course, RAW from Arri, Red or Blackmagic is accepted, but currently no MXF clips from the Arri Alexa S-35 or Sony’s Venice and FX9. If necessary, you can switch the preprocessor in front of it, which is almost like a small grading app, but can also read in and memorise LUTs for adjustment. We used this with the iPhone material for Apple Log. With the D-Cinelike from the drone, which is not a real log, we also tested whether a contrast enhancement would produce better results. Here, however, the low-contrast original immediately delivered slightly better precision.

The list of 25 output formats is really impressive. This ranges from long-lost software such as Shake to practically every important compositing and 3D software today. For After Effects there is a Javascript, for Blender, Cinema4D and some other Python scripts that start the respective software and transfer the entire model including camera and video clip – it couldn’t be more convenient. Meshes that you have created and textured in SynthEyes on the basis of trackers can also be transferred. Not only for a moving camera, but also for moving objects. It is even possible to transfer them to photogrammetry software such as Metashape.

Features

The support does not end with conventional video, SynthEyes can also handle 360-degree VR or stereo 3D, the latter in particular is explained in detail in the manual. It can limit the search area for trackers with a simple chromakeyer, but can also use imported alpha masks for this purpose. Even zoom shots can be used, but are more critical in terms of tracking precision. If data is available for this, you can enter keyframes in the lens equalisation, e.g. for zooms.

Integration?

At this point, it will be exciting to see how the company will deal with the new acquisition. It was already announced in the interview (see DP 23:06) that SynthEyes will also be available as a plug-in, although no time horizon has yet been set. With Mocha Pro, BorisFX has shown that it is not simply expanding its portfolio, but that the strengths of the new software are being utilised in other products. This has also started here, as the superior lens correction can already be found in Mocha 2024. Currently, “Camera Solve” in Mocha is still a little slower, even considerably so for very long scenes.

You can define a ground plane, a coordinate origin and scaling based on a known distance between two tracker points. This already works very well for static scenes with a moving camera; moving or deformable objects are in the works. For problematic scenes, the correction options in SynthEyes are much more comprehensive. In Mocha, you are still dealing with a largely automated process in which you can only change the number of trackers and the blip size.

If a “Power Mesh” was defined before camera tracking, this automatically becomes a 3D mesh. You can export this when set to “Single Mesh”, but so far it is still untextured. The export is not as versatile as in SynthEyes, but in addition to some popular target programmes, the increasingly popular USD format is supported and others are in the works.

More can certainly be expected in this area, as Mocha could teach SynthEyes a thing or two in the creation of tracked patches if the products do not completely merge. For example, masks created directly in SynthEyes are less useful elsewhere as they show hard contours. Their creation is also less elegantly solved than working with Mocha 2024, which has been improved again with “Extrapolate Track”. This means that Mocha tracking no longer stops if a few images need to be skipped. SynthEyes can already deliver trackers to Particle Illusion, but with the new “Inherit Velocity” function in version 2024, it could even add the initial movement to the particles.

In our extensive tests, we didn’t find a single scene that couldn’t be tracked with a little fine-tuning, and there weren’t even any crashes. The annual licence now costs 295 US dollars, for shorter projects the programme is available for 49 US dollars per month, and there is also a permanent licence for 595 US dollars. For comparison: PFTrack costs 1,125.00 per year, 3DEqualiser 65.00 for one week. In addition to the tutorials already mentioned at Boris FX Learn, to which more will surely be added, we can warmly recommend Matt Merkovich at Track VFX.

Comment

With SynthEyes, Boris FX has once again acquired a little piece of cream that may eventually merge with Mocha Pro. It comes with the usual exemplary product documentation including bug tracking and workarounds. Experienced SynthEyes artists would certainly be happy if a “Classic” version were to be retained in the event of any further development of the GUI, as is the case with Mocha.

The post SynthEyes at BorisFX first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Uli Plank.

DP: Were you a fan prior to working on the Marvel property?
Chris Smallfield: I’ve been a comic and specifically Marvel Comics fan since I was about eight years old. An obsession that waned and waxed over the years. It’s been a boon though in my position as VFX supe, because I have a relationship with the source material from the start, which makes it that much easier to get going and coming up with interesting approaches to challenges.

DP: Which shots did Trixter work on?
Chris Smallfield: We worked on a lot of different sequences, both a challenge and a lot of fun to have such variety. Notable ones were the Theatre Demon attack sequence, the Supermax Prison, Abomination’s parole hearing and the Wedding Fight between Titania and She-Hulk! We had several smaller ones as well, all with their unique challenges.

DP: At which point did you first get in contact with the She-Hulk project?
Chris Smallfield: We joined the project as Digital Domain was finishing the She-Hulk asset. That was our initial task as well, to ingest their She-Hulk into our pipeline and develop our own methods of translating
facial capture onto our version. We had to work closely with Digital Domain and Weta to make sure our characters were coming across the same despite very different scenarios, outfits, and hairstyles. The different outfits were a surprisingly challenging aspect. Most CG characters have one outfit and that’s all you need to plan for, She-Hulk has several, which requires a lot of special set-ups for each.

DP: Could you guide us through your VFX pipeline for She-Hulk?
Chris Smallfield: A lot of the steps are the same as any show: we receive plates, we matchmove them, do comp prep and clean-up, setup an initial layout, etcetera. After that, however, we did a first pass of the full animation because we had great mo-cap to start with. And with an AI-powered face tracking setup, we were able to get a 75 percent quality facial performance transferred directly to our asset in several hours rather than days. Our blocking stage of animation was quite sophisticated already. Additionally we made some initial lighting set-ups for sequences and then eventually for each shot – and did fast renders of that blocking. Light makes such an important difference in a detailed facial performance, so the goal was always to get to the best approximation of the final image as fast as possible. This made approvals a bit easier and reduced the number of surprises as we moved through the pipeline. It also made it easier for each department to work towards the final image in parallel and earlier than usual.

Even though the work was primarily ­character work, there was a lot of support FX work, such as demon goo, spit, sweat, fire, portals, sparks … all to add to the realism and integration, led by our FX lead Daniel Llusa-Ribes and our head of FX Martin Lapp. Another thing we did to make these processes a bit more efficient was relying heavily on our concept art department, many shots passed through their hands before we touched the FX giving us a much better target to hit. Max Behrens and Daniel Matthews were our heroes in that area.

DP: Creating Hulk-characters (giant, green) acting opposite humans (pink, regular-sized) must have been
super-challenging?
Chris Smallfield: As a start, on set, they very cleverly hired Malia Arrayah, a woman more or less matching She-Hulk’s height, to run through every shot as Tatiana Maslany did. This helped tremendously as a lighting and position reference for us, and great for the actors to check their supporting ­performances. The use of prosthetic shoulders and various stands to get Tatiana to be at the right height was also important. Even with that though, the anatomy of She-Hulk and her proportions are still unique; there was no special trick other than a lot of great work from our animation team, led by Animation Super­visor Sebastian Badea and Animation Lead Zsombor Balogh.

Beyond animation, getting all the details right makes a huge difference when integrating our CG She-Hulk into real situations. The close work between our asset lead, Holger Wenzl and our head of rigging Ruth Wiegand, and our Character FX lead Nico Kahmann allowed us to make a character that had full body muscle simulation that then drove the cloth of a big multi-layered bridesmaid’s dress. Both those things then interacted with a long wavy hair simulation, in a full-on fight scene! Wrangling all of that and getting the different departments in sync was the task of Sebastian Zilius and our head of CG Radu Arsith – and they rose to the challenge.

DP: Did you contribute to the Hulk-ifications of the different actors (Tatiana Maslany, Tim Roth, Mark Ruffalo)?
Chris Smallfield: We were very involved with Tim Roth’s Abomination, as we had redesigned the character for Shang-Chi a year earlier and made the hero asset with Chris Townsend from Marvel. We were able to reuse it with only minor enhancements for use in She-Hulk. Since we were already quite knowledgeable about the Abomination and how he worked, we were able to move pretty smoothly through that sequence and even delivered ahead of schedule.

DP: She-Hulk is a comedic series, after all. How did you balance comedic ­portrayals with realistic looking VFX?
Chris Smallfield: That was a challenge, especially since the disparity in heights and proportions of Tatiana Maslany and She-Hulk is so large. Small movements are multiplied, which is fairly obvious, but also facial performances, that worked well on Tatiana, sometimes looked unusual when scaled up. There was a lot of tuning of these aspects in animation.

DP: What were some of the challenges of having a full CG-lead for the show?
Chris Smallfield: Firstly, actress Tatiana Maslany is brilliant. Perfectly cast, and very funny. The biggest challenge is related to her facial performance. Tatiana has in­credible control over every aspect of her face and her performance; she can blink her eyes independently, and contort her face into any expression. Despite She-Hulk having one of the most flexible and complex facial rigs up to this point, it was sometimes still difficult to match the spirit of her performance. It was a fun challenge and really rewarding to see the results, but a significant effort.

DP: How would you differentiate your work on Ms. Marvel versus She-Hulk?
Chris Smallfield: The characters are quite different from the VFX standpoint. Ms. Marvel’s powers were deeply FX driven while She-Hulk was more animation and Character FX driven (hair, cloth, muscle simulations). Both characters required complex cooperation between all departments, even once the initial assets were in good shape. Many hands need to touch each shot to get a good result. It’s like an assembly line, but one in which each step requires highly creative and technical work from our talented team.

DP: What did the communication between Trixter and Marvel look like?
Chris Smallfield: It was great from the start, initially with Janelle Croshaw as the VFX supe during shooting and then with Dadi Einarsson and Shannon Justison as VFX supes in post. Dadi became the primary point of contact for our sequences, and it was a real pleasure working with him. He was calm, gave great feedback, and was very understanding and supportive with regard to the many challenges we were solving together. As one of the three vendors doing She-Hulk in the show, the others being Digital Domain and Weta, Marvel served as the hub for us all. They facilitated the sharing of assets, both technically and creatively; they helped with the big-picture topics, like exactly the right shade of green She-Hulk should be. That was a surprisingly difficult thing to nail down!

DP: You worked on both, Marvel- (Shang- Chi, Loki, Ms. Marvel, Loki, Spider-man: Homecoming) and DC-/James-Gunn- properties (The Suicide Squad, Brightburn). How do they vary?
Chris Smallfield: Not terribly different regarding the material or the studios involved. One’s experience on a show is much more driven by the creative team you are working with, both on the client side and internally. We’d worked with James Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy 2, as well as the horror film Brightburn. Continuing that relationship was pretty straightforward, even though the material and scope was dramatically different for each project. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had a great experience working with each client-side VFX supervisor and producer so far. A big part of that is that everyone on a film, ultimately, cares most about making a great film. Budgets and schedules are of course important, but those are not the fundamental reasons people are generally involved. Movies are cool, and we want to make great ones!

DP: How does your teaching experience at the Animation Workshop translate to your current role as Visual Effects Supervisor at Trixter?
Chris Smallfield: They are very complimentary and utilize very similar skill sets. One must look at work, either created by a student or a senior artist, assess where it is, where it could go and tailor the feedback in a way for it to be useful for the student or artist to act upon. The nuance of giving feedback that will lead to an artist or student’s success is the same. Of course, having experienced artists with deep knowledge and history in the industry changes the type of feedback I give, and requires less specific mentor ship.

DP: What was the most fun you had on She-Hulk?
Chris Smallfield: I had an excellent team. An inventive animation supervisor in Sebastian Badea, a creative and detail oriented comp supervisor, Igor Majdandzic, an excellent problem-solving CG supervisor, Sebastian Zilius and a calm collected production team, Cat Thelia VFX producer, Eva Peschkes Associate VFX Producer and Valentina Sgro our lead coordinator.
That’s not to mention the hundreds of other team members that contributed so much to this project. This is true for any show, not just She-Hulk, but when you have people that are motivated to do good work, yet are on the same page about work-life balance, it’s a real pleasure and the challenges are fun rather than burdens. Overwork yields mistakes more than productivity, so when people are in agreement on that, things tend to run smoother overall. I am so proud of the work we did and so thankful to the many, many artists that put their heart into their work to make it a reality.

DP: What was your major challenge during production – either technical or from a organizational point of view?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: The wedding fight sequence was the biggest challenge, both technical and organizational (featured in episode six, titled “Just Jen”. Editor’s note). That sequence was long, complex and with very different types of shots. There were various types of VFX work needed to achieve the sequence, which went from bluescreens and cable paints, to more technically challenging shots with face deformations. That sequence also has a transformation – and a fight between a plate character and She-Hulk, wearing a fluffy pink dress together with enviable hair.
It was also challenging organizationally, because it was our last sequence. In order to achieve the best look possible, we had to add certain steps in between, rearrange the tasks and artists.

DP: With how many contributors did you communicate during your time on She-Hulk?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: It’s difficult to give an exact number. We have vendors for tasks like roto and prep, three different VFX supervisors on the client side; we spoke and shared work with at least three to five other studios while working along with us on She-Hulk. We were communicating with the creative and production teams of those studios.

DP: What is your experience with production tracking software?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: I’ve had the opportunity to work on different types of production, from TV and News, to 2D and 3D animation, and VFX. Adding to that, each studio works differently. I think it’s important that the software adapts to the needs of each studio or production. Mainly, I’ve worked with Shotgrid/Shotgun and Ftrack in my career. Both are very versatile. Shotgrid has a lot of features that are customizable. It has its own tools; it’s full of possibilities. You can create numerous views with different gadgets, always providing you with the information you want – and how you want it displayed.
Ftrack, on the other hand, keeps it simple, so everyone can easily customize what they see very quickly. It has tons of possibilities for filtering information. The best part is that the filtering is fast. You can also jump between different places within the same filters applied, without having to create another view. But you also have the possibility to save the filters applied as a view. On top of that, the main difference I see is: Ftrack works more with splitscreens, so the detailed information of the shot/task/version you are checking will pop up in a splitscreen on top of the view, without you having to leave the filter or view you were using. You can also navigate all the information related to such a task, version or shot.

DP: Could you guide us through your media reviewing pipeline for She-Hulk?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: Everything created during the show’s production goes into Ftrack. We, the coordinators, will distribute, organize and prepare all the material from there. Once an artist publishes a version in Ftrack, each coordinator will make sure the department lead and/or sup checks it. Once this is done, they will change the status of the version to Sup or Lead approved accordingly. From there, the coordinator will take these versions and add them to an Ftrack playlist – and also make sure all the material that needs reviewing from their team is ready.
Once we have the playlist ready with all the versions from the different departments, the VFX supervisor will launch the tool RV (from the Ftrack playlist), where he can play the media, load whichever versions of a shot should be compared, add annotations, ­etcetera. Also, the coordination team can write notes – or save annotations added automatically to the different shots within Ftrack.

DP: How did you use Ftrack during production?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: Ftrack was used for almost everything production-wise. For us coordinators, it is our main tool to work, but also artists and supervisors use it. It is the place where we will gather all the material produced, track all the tasks and versions created. In coordination, it’s also a communication tool between departments, as through the notes, we will pass on the material through the pipeline with transparency and clarity for us and the rest of the team. We also use it to check the media, create playlists for reviews or version we want to send, ingest references, add notes, track status of tasks in each department, track each version produced and its notes (internal and client ones), to import the schedule dates and priorities – so the team is clear on their targets and work order. Tracking the work hours per task, so we have a clear picture of the work we are putting into each task and where we are according to the plan, is another function of the software for us.

DP: Can you give us concrete examples where Ftrack offered unique advantages?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: Two things come to my mind. Firstly, Ftrack works with splitscreens; when you click a version, a task or a shot, it will open up a window on the side with all the information. That window is also navigable, so you can find the information you are looking for, without losing the view you were using previously, as it stays in the background. That’s really cool, and is also faster, since you don’t have to wait for the pages to load when navigating the information. Secondly, Ftrack views are based more on filters. It feels comfortable jumping between different assets, sequences or shots, with the same filters applied; that makes searching for versions more efficient. Also, as you have information filtered out, the pages have low loading times.

DP: What additional features could Ftrack benefit from?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: Firstly, a feature allowing you to take notes on multiple shots, without having to publish the note until the review of the individual shot is done. In VFX, we often do multiple versions of shots with different options/proposals; we review them all together. The supervisor normally jumps from one to another, so that feature could be very, very handy. Secondly, it would be great to have an option for adding versions to the Ftrack playlists from the versions tab in the splitscreen pop up – and not only in the general versions view.

DP: What’s the most amusing thing that happened to you during production?
Erika Feijoo-Spena: That’s a hard question! We had an amazingly funny team and a lot of funny things happened during the production. If I have to pick one, I would say the creation of an internal meme library out of failed renders takes the prize. It was hilarious, as all the team was involved. We continuously will share images of funny viewport bugs, failed renders, or a funny facial expression from our characters with each other while working. People will save them and create memes to use as internal jokes.

The post That girl is green! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.