<Projects
Nope (2022)
Director: Jordan Peele
Company: MPC Visualization
Role: Previs/Postvis Supervisor
Time on project: February 2021 - February 2022
VFX Supervisor: Guillaume Rocheron
"We love you and could not have done this film without you! Can't wait to work with you again! You took our asses out of the Stone Age!"
-Jordan Peele and Ian Cooper, Monkeypaw
The pitch I heard before joining Nope was that it was the next Jordan Peele film and the show needed ominous cloud arrangements using the Unreal Engine. It sounded so original that I had to be a part of it. After working eleven years in the visualization industry, Nope was my first chance at finally being a combined previs and postvis supervisor on a feature-length film. It was also the first movie I worked on to use film cameras, and to heavily rely on the appeal of IMAX film cameras in particular. Although I felt more than ready for the challenge when we started, it was such a unique film it kept our team of twenty-five artists focused as we worked hard to nail the evolving aesthetic. Jordan and his team at Monkeypaw were always fun and easy to work with, and kept us driving for new concepts that avoided as many cliches as possible. Nope became the most rewarding project of my career so far, thanks to the larger investment of time in the production, the size of our team, and the variety of problems we helped solve.
The main challenges we faced were:
1) On-set virtual production. Early in preproduction, we did two virtual production/camera tracking tests, one at the NCAM office in Santa Monica and the other on location at the Firestone Ranch in Santa Clarita, where the film was shot. I met Jordan and his team in person (itself an achievement during the COVID era), along with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and saw how all of the conceptual and visualization work we had been creating using the LiDAR up to that point translated to the real-life location.
2) Helping design the skies. In the film, each encounter of the "entity" moving through the sky needed to feel distinct. For example, some encounters needed to be blanketed in overcast cover, and some needed empty pockets of sky to view the UFO darting between clouds, seeking cover. To set this up in our 3d scenes, the MPC Montreal final visual effects team provided us with "sky boxes," which each comprised an assortment of individual cloud asset configurations. Our previs team arranged each encounter differently inside Epic's Unreal game engine. Somewhat coincidentally, while working on the show I was chosen to be part of the Epic Unreal Fellowship, which provided training to deepen my abilities with using Epic's game engine. Our team was able to get some very helpful results with its volumetric cloud system in version 4.7 of the engine, a relatively-new feature at the time.
3) Creating thrilling 3D camerawork. The immersive look of the shots was heavily explored by our previs team, which proved tricky to nail with our Maya 3D animation software, which was linked to but still disconnected from the Unreal scenes with the volumetric clouds. Instead of traditional camera angles that might show the entity with closer angles, the shots in Nope mostly lingered down on the ground with the characters for tense, extended moments that gave the audience an identical feeling of searching the sky for the UFO in real-time. Dialing in the handheld camera shake helped our previs shots feel more believable and resemble the final look and feel that cinematographer Hoyte achieved later on in production.
4) Lastly, our trickiest challenge was portraying the entity/UFO with an otherworldly personality and threatening presence. This required many revisions and reviews with Jordan and VFX Supervisor Guillaume, and was even more challenging in the longer shots that lasted up to as long as ten seconds per take. Depending on the scene, the entity needed to show behavior like a lurking predator, and more like an undulating jellyfish in others, which made its character arc feel truly spectacular. Once postvis wrapped at the end of the show, we had explored the entity's movement so thoroughly, that the 3d animation scenes gave the layout and final VFX/animation teams at MPC FILM a huge head-start toward getting final animation approved.
Highlight: During production, Jordan and the Monkeypaw production team extended an invitation to me to come to one of their Universal Studios sound stages to get photographed and later added to a group photo of astronauts for a photo that would be added to the "Gordy's Home" sitcom set from the film. You can see how the photo came out in the gallery below, along with the TV show's intro credits video. I wore a white T-shirt and jeans for the photo, so I was impressed with how the final picture with the composited spacesuit came out.
NEWS:
MPC Takes to the Sky Building Clouds and Transforming an Alien for Nope
Nope's Jupiter's Claim film set added to the Universal Studios studio tour
Shot count: 224
Sequences (12):
Debris falls on Haywood Ranch
Ghost Abduction
Prince Abduction
Jupiter's Claim Abduction
Attempted Lucky Abduction
Rain Storm Regurgitation
Ranch Escape Sequence
Rider Abduction
Final Act Encounter
Jean Jacket Attacks
Balloon Battle
Nope (2022)
Director: Jordan Peele
Company: MPC Visualization
Role: Previs/Postvis Supervisor
Time on project: February 2021 - February 2022
VFX Supervisor: Guillaume Rocheron
"We love you and could not have done this film without you! Can't wait to work with you again! You took our asses out of the Stone Age!"
-Jordan Peele and Ian Cooper, Monkeypaw
The pitch I heard before joining Nope was that it was the next Jordan Peele film and the show needed ominous cloud arrangements using the Unreal Engine. It sounded so original that I had to be a part of it. After working eleven years in the visualization industry, Nope was my first chance at finally being a combined previs and postvis supervisor on a feature-length film. It was also the first movie I worked on to use film cameras, and to heavily rely on the appeal of IMAX film cameras in particular. Although I felt more than ready for the challenge when we started, it was such a unique film it kept our team of twenty-five artists focused as we worked hard to nail the evolving aesthetic. Jordan and his team at Monkeypaw were always fun and easy to work with, and kept us driving for new concepts that avoided as many cliches as possible. Nope became the most rewarding project of my career so far, thanks to the larger investment of time in the production, the size of our team, and the variety of problems we helped solve.
The main challenges we faced were:
1) On-set virtual production. Early in preproduction, we did two virtual production/camera tracking tests, one at the NCAM office in Santa Monica and the other on location at the Firestone Ranch in Santa Clarita, where the film was shot. I met Jordan and his team in person (itself an achievement during the COVID era), along with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and saw how all of the conceptual and visualization work we had been creating using the LiDAR up to that point translated to the real-life location.
2) Helping design the skies. In the film, each encounter of the "entity" moving through the sky needed to feel distinct. For example, some encounters needed to be blanketed in overcast cover, and some needed empty pockets of sky to view the UFO darting between clouds, seeking cover. To set this up in our 3d scenes, the MPC Montreal final visual effects team provided us with "sky boxes," which each comprised an assortment of individual cloud asset configurations. Our previs team arranged each encounter differently inside Epic's Unreal game engine. Somewhat coincidentally, while working on the show I was chosen to be part of the Epic Unreal Fellowship, which provided training to deepen my abilities with using Epic's game engine. Our team was able to get some very helpful results with its volumetric cloud system in version 4.7 of the engine, a relatively-new feature at the time.
3) Creating thrilling 3D camerawork. The immersive look of the shots was heavily explored by our previs team, which proved tricky to nail with our Maya 3D animation software, which was linked to but still disconnected from the Unreal scenes with the volumetric clouds. Instead of traditional camera angles that might show the entity with closer angles, the shots in Nope mostly lingered down on the ground with the characters for tense, extended moments that gave the audience an identical feeling of searching the sky for the UFO in real-time. Dialing in the handheld camera shake helped our previs shots feel more believable and resemble the final look and feel that cinematographer Hoyte achieved later on in production.
4) Lastly, our trickiest challenge was portraying the entity/UFO with an otherworldly personality and threatening presence. This required many revisions and reviews with Jordan and VFX Supervisor Guillaume, and was even more challenging in the longer shots that lasted up to as long as ten seconds per take. Depending on the scene, the entity needed to show behavior like a lurking predator, and more like an undulating jellyfish in others, which made its character arc feel truly spectacular. Once postvis wrapped at the end of the show, we had explored the entity's movement so thoroughly, that the 3d animation scenes gave the layout and final VFX/animation teams at MPC FILM a huge head-start toward getting final animation approved.
Highlight: During production, Jordan and the Monkeypaw production team extended an invitation to me to come to one of their Universal Studios sound stages to get photographed and later added to a group photo of astronauts for a photo that would be added to the "Gordy's Home" sitcom set from the film. You can see how the photo came out in the gallery below, along with the TV show's intro credits video. I wore a white T-shirt and jeans for the photo, so I was impressed with how the final picture with the composited spacesuit came out.
NEWS:
MPC Takes to the Sky Building Clouds and Transforming an Alien for Nope
Nope's Jupiter's Claim film set added to the Universal Studios studio tour
Shot count: 224
Sequences (12):
Debris falls on Haywood Ranch
Ghost Abduction
Prince Abduction
Jupiter's Claim Abduction
Attempted Lucky Abduction
Rain Storm Regurgitation
Ranch Escape Sequence
Rider Abduction
Final Act Encounter
Jean Jacket Attacks
Balloon Battle
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Some of our postvis team members before we paused for Winter Break 2021.
MPC VISUALIZATION CREDITS
Head of Visualization
Patrick Smith
Senior Visualization Producer
Mary Loibl
Visualization Production Manager
Kristin Aasen
Previs/Postvis Supervisor
Joshua Lange
Visualization Coordinators
Georgi Garnevski
Jeff Bloch
Max Reid
Rigging TD
Gil Hacco
Visualization Asset Builders
Christopher LeGrand
Heyonyi O'Brien
Virtual Production Artist
Todd Thornley
Previs Editor
William Appleby
Unreal Developer
Kevin Vylet
Visualization Artists
Iva Carrasquillo Anna Terentieva Anastasia Sevrugina Tyler Nishikawa Connor Tracy Simon Halpern Amber Baris Maria Tombazzi
Richard Almodovar Herman Lee Jeremy Kooistra Farrah Silberman Danny Park Ben Acevedo Mitch Sturkenboom
Visualization Artists (ROTO/TRACK)
Ben Aguilar
Gary Laurie
Visualization Head of Pipeline
Ryan Zukoff
Head of Systems
Carl Loeffler
Systems Administrators
Brandon Chan
Hero Chev
Data Assistants
Matthew Potwardowski
Andres Carr
