Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction was one of my favorite stereo compositing projects to work on. During the course of this show I had the opportunity to do some experimenting with native stereo plates. One of the client’s criticisms of the native stereo that was shot on-set was the faces were too flat in Z-space. I experimented and developed a process of expanding the internal stereo depth of the actor’s faces. Prime Focus presented some of these test shots to the client and Prime Focus ended up winning about 200 extra shots for the show.

Right before we started work on Age of Extinction, we finished up production on Noah in 3D. One of the last shots of Noah featured a helicopter shot of a mountainous landscape. I was experimenting with deriving a mesh from a point cloud created from a 3D camera track. I rendered out a depth map from the mesh and ran it through our stereo pipeline. The end result was spectacular but unfortunately was too late and the rotoscoped version of depth made it in the final cut. Once production began for Age of Extinction, I led my team to start creating depth of the geographical helicopter shots in the first sequence using the method that I used for that Noah experiment. To our delight, the stereo of those shots turned out really nice and I believe that sequence has some of the best stereo conversion to date.

Responsibilities:

• Team lead
• Rebuilding VFX shots in Fusion and matching to the 2D version which were originally created in Nuke.