This article was taken from the January 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
On a Soho rooftop in London, Paul Riddle, a visual-effects super-visor at
Double Negative, is hanging for his life from a ladder. He's only 20 centimetres above the deck, which is bisected by a line of bright green tape and dotted with five orange crosses to mark where the other board members of Dneg, as the company is known, should stand. In post-production, the ladder will become a Piccadilly building. The purple box that visual-effects (VFX) supervisor Charlie Noble is "surfing" will become a London bus. Each of the five board members will be ten times his normal size, and they'll be beamed down from a massive spaceship. Peter Chiang, the VFX supervisor who has spent the
morning and day before making sure all the angles of each portrait line up to create the group shot, is lying on the floor taking the photos: "What we're doing here," says Clay, "is pretty much a simpler version of what we do on set."
Matt Holben and Alex Hope founded Double Negative in June 1998. "There were 30 of us," Holben says. "Now we're 1,100 in London, and 200 in Singapore." The studio has produced visual effects for Christopher Nolan's Batman films, the Harry Potter series and the last three Bond films; in 2011, Dneg won an Oscar for its work on
Inception.
The firm is part of a Soho cluster that has become one of the world centres for visual effects, alongside LA, Vancouver and Wellington. Standing on the rooftop, Holben points out the headquarters of neighbouring VFX houses Framestore, Cinesite and The Moving Picture Company. "There's great talent and there's always been an incredible culture within London for creativity,"
Holben says. "The scene started when a client could come in and put a large film into London, and break it up into a number of little chunks." Now, those studios take on whole films themselves.
Framestore and The Mill have both won Oscars (in 2008 and 2001
respectively).
Between 2006 and 2008 (the most recent reliable data), visual effects was the fastest growing part of the UK film industry, with
revenues increasing 16.8 percent, according to a UK government report. The biggest fillip was a young wizard called Harry Potter.
"Throughout the eight movies, UK VFX houses were involved in the post-production process," Simon Stanley-Clamp, visual-effects
supervisor at Cinesite, says after flipping between the raw
footage of upcoming film World War Z and Cinesite's CG
additions (Before: few zombies. After: many zombies). "With each film a new set of challenges was presented to the UK VFX community and we consistently upped our game. This, combined with the tax breaks, encouraged the big studios to place a percentage of their work in the UK, from shoot to talent."
The Soho VFX scene has benefited from a general trend too: films have grown increasingly reliant on visual effects. Of the 20
highest-grossing movies of all time, 17 relied heavily on visual effects; the other three were entirely CG-animated. At the same time, the cost of technology has come down as its power has increased; all the Soho post-production houses have programmers to create custom software. The challenge will only grow, as films get "bigger, better, faster", according to Stanley-Clamp. Higher frame rates, such as the 48-frames-per-second of The Hobbit, and increased resolution mean handling at least twice as much data, which will affect storage structure. "The whole effects pipeline will have to be reworked," Stanley-Clamp. "But big is best."
So, to celebrate this incredible talent pool, wired asked six Soho-based VFX houses to create an image showcasing their work -- and a few of the people behind some of their best-known films.
Baseblack Steve Moncur / Rudi Holzapfel / Charlotte Tyson / Robert Hesketh / Chris Petts -- and others
Baseblack may be small, but it's also prolific. Recent films include Total Recall, Dredd 3D, Paul, Skyfall and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, for which it produced more shots than any other VFX studio. For their portrait (see gallery), Baseblack used Realflow fluid-simulation software to create the waves, and Terragen for depth.
The Mill Bryan Bartlett / Nicolas Hernandez / Nick Drew /
Will Cohen / Dominic Alderson / Sara Bennett / Henning Glabbart
Doctor Who would look a lot less special without The Mill, which produced effects for the cult BBC series. It won an Oscar for its work on Gladiator -- notably creating a digital Oliver Reed after the actor died during filming.
Recent films include Snow White and the Huntsman and
Dredd 3D.
Cinesite Holger Voss / Sue Rowe / Michele Sciolette / Simon Stanley-Clamp / Jon Neill
Cinesite started life in 1991 as a testing site for Kodak. The studio has worked on all eight Harry Potter films, creating the detailed scale-model of Hogwarts used in filming. It also contributed 500 shots to The Golden Compass, which won a VFX Oscar. It is currently focusing on Brad Pitt's zombie epic World War Z.
Framestore
Kevin Jenkins / Jon Collins / Simon Whalley / William Sargent
/ Tim Webber
Framestore is the grand Oscar-winning dame of Soho. Founded in 1986, the studio is now 786-strong, with offices in New York and LA, and it won an Oscar for The Golden Compass. It recently created a computer-generated Tyrannosaurus rex for Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.
Other clients include Coca-Cola, Volkswagen and Cadbury.
DNEG
Matthew Holben / Paul Riddle / Peter Chiang / Charlie Noble /
Alex Hope / Paul Franklin
Double Negative was founded in 1998 with 30 employees; it now has more than 1,000 staff and, in 2009, opened an office in Singapore. The studio has worked on recent features including
John Carter, Captain America and Skyfall. Next up: Man of Steel, Les Misérables and Captain Phillips. The company won a Visual Effects Oscar in 2011 for its work on Christopher Nolan's Inception, but lost out on a gong in 2012 for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
MPC Gary Brozenich / Jessica Norman / Richard Stammers /
Charley Henley / Anders Langlands
Soho-based The Moving Picture Company has offices in LA, Vancouver, New York and Bangalore. The team recently turned Iceland and Jordan to film footage into alien planet LV-223 in Ridley Scott's Prometheus. The studio also worked on
Skyfall, and upcoming projects include Life of Pi, Man of Steel, and World War Z.
Tom Cheshire is associate editor of Wired. He wrote about Markus "Notch" Persson and Minecraft in 07.12
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
