The ride film genre is nothing new to Venice Calif.-based Blur Studio. The 3D animation, visual effects, and motion graphics design company already has several 3D computer-animated motion simulator rides to its credit, including Meteor Attack for the Tobu Zoo Park in Tokyo and the traveling attraction Star Trek World Tour. Blur’s most recently completed project, Stan Lee’s 7th Portal 3D Simulation Experience for Paramount Theme Parks worldwide, takes ride films further than they’ve ever gone before — literally.
Based on Stan Lee Media’s 7th Portal Internet superhero series, the 7th Portal ride not only draws audiences into a whole new dimension, but is one of the most technically advanced ride films ever produced. Co-directed by Blur Studio’s Aaron Powell and Yas Takata, and creative directed by Tim Miller, the 4-minute piece, which made its debut this spring, builds on the characters and story featured in the Internet series. Audience members are cast in the role of beta testers of a new video game when one of the game’s villains bursts through the screen and drags them into a parallel dimension known as Darkmoor. There, they join the six 7th Portal superheroes in battling Mongorr, a tyrant who has subjugated six of the Universe’s seven dimensions and is bent on conquering Earth. The adventure includes a battle with a giant, green, rock-like beast, an edge-of-the-seat rocket ride through the heart of Darkmoor, and a final, life-or-virtual-death showdown with the towering Mongorr himself. 3D effects are used throughout the piece to give the audience a sense of interacting directly with the larger-than-life characters on the screen.
“What makes this ride film really unique,” explains Powell, “is that there’s a lot of character interaction. With about 90 percent of the ride films that are out there, the audience rides through space or flashes through time. There are often some explosions, so they get bounced around a bit. But there really aren’t many characterscast into the ride. Here, we have six good guys and six villains who all have their own super powers and about 4 minutes to show what everyone could do. In that time, there’s just so much interaction between the characters.”
Powell points out that the look of the piece itself also stands out from other computer-animated ride films. “Artistically speaking, we approached this project very differently,” he explains. “Ride films tend to either have a dark, Bladerunner-esque look, or a look that aims for photoreal. Our film has a rich, illustrative look with saturated colors and sharp edges. It’s a colorful, vibrant atmosphere we created totally unique from everything else out there. And, what is particularly striking is the level of detail — when you’re in the arena you feel as though you could reach out and high-five someone sitting in the stands.”
To create the dramatic, comic-book-come-to-life look and feel of the ride, it took Blur seven months and more than a dozen studio artists, producers, and technicians working with leading edge technology and software. The team used Discreet’s 3ds max 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software; Adobe Photoshop; Digimation’s Bones Pro for scanning and deformation; Boxx Technology’s rack-mounted render boxes, and Vicon’s 12-camera M series motion capture system for facial motion capture.
“[Paramount] came to us and said, ‘We want you to direct this, write it, and deliver everything,’” explains Powell. “First, we listened to them, to what all the elements were that they wanted to see, and we put all of it in. Then, we began cutting it down, trimming it back, and creating quick, thumbnail storyboards for the entire piece. We then scanned each storyboard and took them into Premiere to create a storyboard animatic [ previz rendering of the whole project to get down timing and motion]. Basically, you hold each frame for a certain duration and then you cut to the next frame or dissolve to the next frame so you can get your timing. You throw down some rough sound effects and basically present a 4-minute ride film like a picture show. That gives you a feeling of how the progression of the whole ride is going to go. We used character studio for all our character animation, so all of our characters would be bi-peds. Then, that’s where we did something different than we’ve ever done before. Since everything is so key on timing and motion, and I wanted to make sure that the characters could move from here to there in real-time, I actually went through and motion-captured for the entire animatic. I just wanted to make sure we could achieve what we wanted to in the given amount of time. In fact, in the very end of the project, we actually ended up using some of the original animatic motion capture because we got the timing down so perfectly.
“One of the hardest challenges for me on this project was, I wanted to come up with a look that was totally different. I wanted to go for more of a graphic novel look. Not necessarily cartoon looking, but not quite 3D either. Kind of a hybrid in between with really nice sharp edges, like illustration, but something that was also obviously 3D. I wanted the details to be in the geometry and not in the texture maps.”
According to Powell, the team’s experience with Vicon’s motion capture system was essential to the success of the final product. The system was not only used to speed up the production process but also to the make the characters appear uncannily lifelike. “It really gave us tremendous creative flexibility in creating, re-creating, or modifying character motion.” Powell says that it was for this project that the company decided to purchase its own motion capture system. “We had some money left over from another project for motion capture. And, I thought, let’s just get our own rig. For me, it was a blessing. This is the second motion capture studio I built. I worked for eight years at Westwood Studios in Las Vegas, and pioneered their motion capture studio. Eventually, we went with a Vicon system.
“Then, once I came here and we decided to buy one, I thought, there’s no question that it’s going to be Vicon — especially with the new M cameras, which are 1000 x 1000 digital. You get four times the resolution that you would with the old cameras.” In order to thoroughly research the project prior to working on it, the entire team jumped onto a red eye and flew to Orlando, FL. There, they visited three theme parks in one day, and two more the second day. “We wanted to see any attraction that was featuring 3D animation,” says Powell. “We saw ‘Honey I Shrunk the Audience,’ ‘Bugs Life,’ ‘Spiderman,’ and ‘Terminator 2.’ What we noticed was, when the audience is close to standing still, the 3D effect really works well because they have time to resolve the 3D. When they’re going really fast, it all kind of blurs, and the 3D effects start to fall apart. That observation proved to be very instrumental in how we planned our 3D gags. We slowed the camera down to a point where the audience could actually see the 3D gag.”
Besides becoming one of the latest additions to the Paramount Theme Parks, “7th Portal” will also be distributed internationally by Iwerks Entertainment. Therefore, the design team at Blur had to take into account the differences between the projection systems used by Paramount and Iwerks. “The film had to work in an 8/70mm version in both 2D and 3D, and in a 5/70mm version in 2D and 3D,” explains Powell. “In other words, we had to deliver four versions of the film and the effects needed to work on all platforms.” In addition, Blur needed to double its in-house rendering capacity to handle the number crunching challenge posed by 7th Portal.
Because it was a 3D film, Blur needed to produce not one, but two, 4-minute films (for the left and right projectors); more than 14,000 frames of animation. As each scene involved multiple layers of computer animation, the completed piece comprised more than a terabyte (one thousand gigabytes of data). It required a staggering 18 days to record the final imagery to film. Blur ended up buying a number of rack-mounted render boxes from BOXX Technologies.
Blur also supervised the production of the music and sound effects, and a pre-show video that will be used with the attraction. Overall, it’s an ambitious project that features fully rendered, fully fleshed out characters that seem to interact with each other, as well as the audience.
Currently, Blur Studio is working on another 3D computer-animated ride film. This time around, the studio is producing “Batman” for Premiere Parks, based on the DC Comics and Warner Bros. movie series. “We completely built Gotham City more than it has been built in any of the films,” says Powell. There are more than 200 buildings. The audience starts in the bat cave, flies out over the river, and flies through Gotham. Again, we’re using motion capture. And, this time, we’re shooting for near photoreal.” The attraction will also feature popular Batman villains including Cat Woman, The Joker, and Mr. Freeze. Powell is the visual effects director on the project. The ride, which is entirely computer animated, will debut in 2002 at Warner Bros. Movie World in Australia and at the new Warner Bros. Movie World set to open next year in Madrid.
