Visual Effects on the move: a freelancer VFX supe’s story

Many fxphd members might know Hugo Guerra from coverage of his work at fxguide, and in a previous production blog post. He’s also behind two of our VFX courses – Hit the Ground Running with NUKE Studio and HIERO in Commercials. Now Hugo is back on the production blog to talk about breaking out as a freelance visual effects supervisor. Often on the road, we find out what Hugo’s kit choices are and how he has used them on some recent projects.

Hugo Guerra.
Hugo Guerra.

fxphd: You’ve gone out as a freelancer – how has that experience been after working in commercial studios for so long?

Guerra: It’s very different, I have my own company now called VFX Vault and am focused on working remotely or on location. I have been gathering a great group of talented freelancers to work on projects and setting up a new way of working with pretty much no boundaries regarding location or time zones. Don’t get me wrong, I loved working at The Mill but I am finding newer ways of working much more in line with my current lifestyle. I always traveled a lot due to conferences, keynotes, training, onset, teaching – you name it, so being more mobile was one of my goals. A few years ago this was difficult, but today most of the hotels, airports, lounges, homes or companies have great and fast internet connections, specially in the north of Europe.

When I started in this business we would work on “amazing” Scsi drives at 35 megas a sec to play back 8 bit SD in something like Edit or Premiere. Now I run almost the same speed directly from cloud storage. Things have changed a lot since then. And more is to come I am sure. It’s also refreshing to work in my own time, I was never very happy with commuting to work and was never good at keeping normal work hours. A lot of my work is highly creative and I always find that creativity, really, has no schedule, not for me at least.

The funny thing is that most of the time in visual effects companies we try to keep normal opening hours and fail miserably, lol, by working over time anyway. So I have embraced that I will work at any time, but, sometimes, I don’t work, very flexible and very fresh.

 

fxphd: What’s your typical kit set-up as a freelance vfx supe?

Guerra: That is a hard question, I have a lot of equipment at the moment. But I always take as much as I can since you will never know what you will need on set or on location. It usually involves 2 Pelican Flight cases and a lot of questions at security, lol. I would start with my 2013 Mac Pro, it’s been a great portable workstation since it fits in my hand luggage. Apart from that I have the typical VFX gear, 5D Mk2, HDR head, Promote controller, multiple Canon L Prime lenses, Laser pointers, Chrome Spheres, etc, etc and, of course, lots and lots of tracking markers and gaffa tape, lol.

Hugo's typical set up while at a hotel.
Hugo’s typical set up while at a hotel.

From all the equipment I have to say the best piece of gear I recently got has to be the Blackmagic Pocket Camera, it’s starting to be an amazing camera for everything from onset references, making of, interviews, recording classes, recording keynotes. It is super small and with the Metabones adaptor I can also use my Canon lenses, so I’m very very happy with the camera. The Raw quality is so good that I even used it in production when we need a urgent B Camera on set.

 

fxphd: What are some of the remote solutions you’ve been using?

Guerra: To be honest I have been using a little of everything on my quest for the perfect solution. I started with Google Drive, moved to Dropbox Business and now using Amazon services. It’s hard to find a good “Off-the-shelf” system for cloud storage for visual effects. I find that most “Cloud” companies are not really “ready” for visual effects, either because of the sheer size of the data we produce or because of poor bandwidths and lack of proper synch tools and softwares. I feel like there is a gap in the market for a “High End” solution that works like Dropbox but with the space, speed and security that a visual effects production needs. Regarding production tracking and managing, I have been starting to use FTrack, very good tool especially because it syncs to Nuke and Maya very well.

 

fxphd: The Just Cause 3 trailer is great – can you talk about the brief? What planning was involved, what elements did you shoot and what were some of the main CG and comp challenges?

Guerra: It was a great project, everyone at Fire Without Smoke is truly proud. Working closely with Square Enix’s VP Brand & European Marketing Jon Brooke and Global Brand Marketing Manager Robert Rutter in the UK and Visualworks in Japan we created a highly stylised sequence of events with elements of the game, everything taking place in Rico’s mind, revealing our infamous hero’s inner thoughts of destruction and mayhem. All of this with music provided by Torre Florim, a fantastic reimagining of “Firestarter” by The Prodigy.

– Watch the Just Cause 3 teaser.

We were involved pretty much from day one, developing a storyboard, a boardmatic and then a animatic. Of course, because of the nature of the shots, we made many, many experimental sequences, some of them did not even ended up in the final edit. It was a very creative process, we used many 2D elements from stock and from our library, it gave a very organic look to the film. Software wise, we used Maya for the 3D, with some of the game assets, and used Nuke Studio for all the editing, conforming, compositing and also the final grading.

In terms of team, we had Fire Without Smoke’s Executive Creative Director Will Cole and MD Will O’Connor, the 3D team was lead by Jimmy Johansson. I was the overall Visual Effects and Cinematic Director but also did the editing, compositing and grading. In total we had 6 people in the project.

From the Just Cause teaser.
From the Just Cause teaser.

In terms of project management, because the team was split between London and Sweden (and I was traveling a lot at the time to Campus i12 to teach visual effects) we used Dropbox Business to synch all the shots and renders, it worked very well and it allowed everyone in the team to always have the latest renders, projects, scripts and use the same naming and folder structures.

It was a great success as a trailer, with more the 5 million views in YouTube alone and a few more million views betweens Vimeo and other Square Enix channels.

 

fxphd: For Rival Kingdoms, what were the hardest things to do here? What were the important story points you had to communicate? How did you co-ordinate the work?

Guerra: Rival Kingdoms was similar to our work in Just Cause 3, both me and Fire Without Smoke where involved in the film from day one, we worked very closely with Space Ape’s team lead by Art Director Lee Sullivan, Art Development Manager Natalie Donohue and Cinematic and Promo Artist Mark Tan.

We started blocking a story in storyboard and then we made a very detailed animatic for approval. The trailer shows our Guardian hero discovering huge statues of the Ancients in an old temple and her touch brings these mammoth fighters to life. With references taken from “The Hobbit” through to “Black Sails” our CG team got to work bringing these colossal Ancients to life.

It was all very tight to the game story and was a great visual way to introduce these characters to the players. Music wise, working with Richard Jacques, a fantastic composer, the soundscape and music he created really gave the piece atmosphere.

From Rival Kingdoms.
From Rival Kingdoms.

The team in this project was Fire Without Smoke’s Executive Creative Director Will Cole and MD Will O’Connor, I was, once again, the overall Visual Effects and Cinematic Director, also doing the editing, compositing and grading. The 3D team was lead by Stefan Gerstheimer, Partner and VFX Supervisor at Hoxton Redsox. In total we had 8 people in the project. We used Maya and VRay for the rendering and lighting, modelling was done in ZBrush and Maya and all 2D tasks from comp to editorial was achieved in The Foundry’s Nuke Studio.

It’s been a huge success story, Space Ape’s latest game is taking the App Store by storm. They just last week reached 1 million downloads and it is growing strong, the game is great and very addictive.

 

fxphd: With Leonard in Slow Motion, what approach did you bring to the VFX? How did you and your team use NUKE and HIERO?

Guerra: Great question, Leonard in Slow Motion was all about planning, myself, Director Peter Livolsi and Director of Photography Bryce Fortner had any many meetings to work out all the 50+ visual effects shots we had to film. It was a 3 day shoot so we had very little time.

 

Watch Leonard in Slow Motion.

We had to time everything and made sure we had clean plates for every shot. Hero and then Nuke Studio was used for all the conforming, plate handling, VFX editing, delivery and distribution to artists.

We had a huge amount of artists and students working in the project from Escape Studios and from The National Film Television School in London So using Nuke and Hiero made sense to keep the timeline and visual effects going “around” all the different artists that helped in this project.

Hugo on set on Leonard in Slow Motion.
Hugo on set on Leonard in Slow Motion.

It’s been an amazing success story, people love the film, it’s been making its way around the festival circuit, including BFI London Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival, and LA Shorts Fest, and has received a series of rave reviews and a few awards including Best Editing at the One Show’s One Screen Awards and the Juri Award at the Napa Valley Film Festival 2014.

 

Thanks again to Hugo for taking the time to chat to us. Follow him on Twitter or visit his website for more on his recent projects.

And here’s more on Hugo’s VFX courses at fxphd: Hit the Ground Running with NUKE Studio and HIERO in Commercials.