The Darkest Hour: Stereoscopic Conversion, Matte Painting, & Chromakey in Nuke from Alejandro Franceschi on Vimeo.

This and other clips from THE DARKEST HOUR, are presented here under the FAIR USE clause (17 U.S.C. §§ 106 and 106A). The presenter does not  claim authorship nor ownership. This is for criticism, commentary/social commentary, #portfolio review, and #scholarly purposes.

All other rights are respective of the original author(s) as listed at: imdb.com/title/tt1093357/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 Do not copy, download, remix, nor redistribute this material via any method(s). Artist has superimposed a watermark to discourage unwarranted copying.

I am an uncredited #VFX #artist who worked on the feature film: #TheDarkestHour

If you want to know more, please message me directly. I will not comment nor respond with my opinions in the approved threads. Thank you.

Before I mention sections of the work I executed, please note: 99.99% of the time, as of this writing, there is NO tentpole studio film released in 3D that was 100% perfectly shot in 3D.

Why?

Some shots are impractical and/or impossible - with current technologies as of 2013, to execute with a stereoscopic camera setup. Sometimes, the problem(s) are physical limitations, safety issues, location prohibition, insurance reasons, budget, busted 3D camera that day and must keep shooting to stay on schedule, etc. - sometimes a shot, or maybe an entire sequence, MUST be converted/fixed into proper 3D space.

Lastly, #VFX shots on #chromakey (that is, a #bluescreen or #greenscreen setup) are quite often adjusted or fixed in post-production. Typically, one of the two camera streams are selected (usually the “left eye), as opposed to the “true” stereoscopic 3D, when unique issues arise in #compositing After the shot is fixed in #monoscopic format, it is converted into #stereoscopic3D . If that same team did the monoscopic composite, often they’ll adjust the composite layer passes in the 3D conversion processing to give it a little more depth.

WHAT WORK DID I DO?:

#1.) #MattePainting converted from #2D to #3D :

I will need to do a blog post (to be linked later) where I show the 13K (yes, you read that correctly!) #MattePainting by #Buf (obviously at a lower, watermarked resolution).

I painstakingly converted EVERYTHING in that #monoscopic #panorma from #2D to #3D in #Nuke , so that the rest of the #StereoscopicConversion & #compositing #artists on this sequence had a background in 3D as well. When I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING: the trees, the cars, the people, sides of the building, the various interior stages of destruction (which were covered in part by the rising cloud/beam in the film, not seen in this cropped shot), down to the wires and antenna on the tops of the buildings. If you see it in the shot, I converted it in #Nuke ! I cannot post the #Nuke script due to #NDA reasons, but I will put in my blog - a shot of the entire #Nuke #node tree - though I will need to blur out some proprietary nodes, etc.

#2.) #Monoscopic to #Stereoscopic conversion of #Chromakey water tank:

Of course, the actor was not really shot in this filthy river. He was shot on a water tank soundstage. I do not know if they had a problem with the camera (as in other sequences), or if they simply shot this as monoscopic for compositing control. The #VFX #TD had a proprietary node setup for faux #warping #distortion & #blur of the actor whenever water “splashed” onto the frame (of course, this was just faked). From there, we did the #chromakey pull and had a separate number of alpha channels. After we had a key pull, we then converted the monoscopic shot into stereoscopic, and then composited that over the pre-made, mammoth, 13K #MattePainting I had converted earlier. Due to the matte painting size, we could crop and create various new angles, despite having the actor in only one water tank shot.

Everything was ultimately mastered for #DigitalCinema projection in full #HD ; 1920x1080. We worked on these shots with polarized glasses on a display with a special driver & monitor. This was in stark contrast to another shop I have done conversions for, #Legend #Legend3D #LegendFilms (IDK, they keep changing their name and/or company structure), where we worked in mono, but did our QC review with active shutter LCD glasses.