Tell us about Stormborn's work for Project Blue Book.
Pavles. That was our biggest and most challenging FX sequence so far. It was the introduction to the final episode of the second season and the production was led by the show's VFX Supervisor, John Gajdecki and Producer Gillian Pearson. There are multiple sequences of navy ships in the Barents Sea, UFOs that dive in and out of the ocean during day and night-time scenes and a tidal wave that nearly capsizes a ship.
To handle it all, we hired Igor Zanic, Nikola Ilic and Mirco Paolini, some of the industry's best Houdini water effects technical directors, for the ocean scenes. Nathaniel Holroyd joined our team to do the shading and lighting of our FX elements. And Patrick Conaty composited CG elements over the plates and ship renders provided by the client. The smaller UFO encounter sequence was done by Megalis, a VFX studio in Tokyo.
We acted as the main vendor and were responsible for all of the FX and comp of the hero shots. We also rendered a latitude and longitude 360-degree ocean environment for the client to use in his own comps for the background. Everything was rendered in Redshift and having Igor on the team really helped because he has actually made a course on using Houdini's ocean tools with Redshift. We made the 360-degree ocean render by rendering the ocean in eight slices and stitching those together in Nuke, allowing our client to put that into their shot composites and rotate it to fit each scene correctly.
And what did you do for Man in the High Castle?
Tausch: For the show's season four finale, we were asked to create nine complex VFX shots involving an explosion that causes a Nazi train to derail into a snowy environment. We collaborated with another studio, Barnstorm VFX (https://www.barnstormvfx.com/), who provided the assets and animations we needed to get started. The project was challenging for our small studio because the sequence included a combination of rigid body dynamics, as well as volumetric, grain and particle simulations.
It helped that we could leverage Redshift's GPU rendering because, with only nine machines and licenses, it allowed us to build a render farm that had the power of 21 render nodes. Our in-house pipeline helped us split the large-scale environments into multiple sections to keep simulations times down. Senior FX Technical Director Andrew Graham built the Houdini setup that allowed us to gradually destroy the train and carry that destruction of the geometry from one shot to the next. We used Houdini's Bullet Solver to make the flying dirt, snow and debris from the derailing train look believable.
Barnstorm VFX was responsible for compositing the sequence, and rendering the environment and the main train asset, so we had to establish a smooth workflow between the two studios' animation, lighting and compositing departments. Together we established a workflow that allowed them to integrate FX elements into their comp properly. To help with client review, we put a database together that they could access, filter and sort by shot. (Learn more about Stormborn's process for Man in the High Castle here https://www.stormbornvfx.com/project/the-man-in-the-high-castle/.)
Goran, what would you say Stormborn Studios enjoys most about this industry?
Pavles: Things are moving at such a fast pace in our industry. New technology is constantly being developed and pushing the limits of what can be done. One always has to be up to date, there’s no rest. While that might sound intimidating and exhausting, it has the opposite effect on us. There is no stagnation. There is no boredom. There is always something new, and that helps us stay sharp and be creative visually and technically. It is a very fulfilling profession when you look at it from that perspective. Running your own business comes with a whole set of new challenges but having the freedom to choose how to approach those challenges is a wonderful luxury.