PRODUCT AND SERVICES IN FILMPRODUCTION

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Film Production And Digital Transformation

Film production and the industry is changing constantly since its very beginnings in the 19th century but the digital transformation is a fundamental change like nothing before. Most of all there are unparalleled hopes and fears; on one side this is the Yukon, the great gold rush, on the other side it’s overwhelming if we do not commit ourselves to a constant learning process we don’t survive.

Digital transformation can mean a lot of things. There is no simple definition. It’s both a challenge for artists as production companies or any distributor. Endurance Entertainment GmbH approach was from the beginning to be an open-minded learner. Being in Berlin and in a constant exchange with digital companies some insights formed over the last years. There are no golden rules here, but things appear to become more clear over the time and we might find a sort of a “survival guideline”:

I. First of all, any discussion or any attempt to adapt means a lot of organized thinking. Since the early years, things got easily mixed up often in public panels. A good example is video-distribution. Even it’s very obvious content produced for platforms like Youtube is a completely different thing like Netflix. It’s true that change is constantly happening and it takes some effort to be informed about new business models or new platforms.

II. Second, don’t be intimidated because you are not a digital native and ask questions. A lot of film producers didn’t have the time or see any sense in investing their precious time to understand what a multichannel-network is or how they should develop an online marketing campaign. Today, there are many possibilities for digital marketing but we need to know if it serves the intended purpose. Even if you don’t want to do your social media work yourself it’s always good to understand how it works. If we understand something it enables us to ask the right questions.

III. The 4K Age – Anything is possible: Yes and no. Digital transformation in the first place is a massive change in technology. Not so long ago at the time of “Super-8” there was an eternal border between the “amateur” and “the professional”. That changed (even if some people will protest here), but its good to differentiate. Basically, there are a huge variety of standards here. And its true that smartphones and DSLRs can do amazing things and yes we can do the edit with freeware. The question is what do we want to achieve and/or what is the client’s expectation. This means we need to do our homework and have the necessary info about our equipment before we make choices, i.e. DSLRs might do great pictures but could pose problems in VFX-postpro.

IV. Try harder. If we like it or not but digital transformation requires more technical understanding for many professions in the industry. The producer today needs technical knowledge and you need to be a fast learner. This is often a frustration for people who want to use things and not always to learn “how to”? The experience is that many technologies need time to understand or some attention but learning-by-doing works more often better as expected when we overcome the first difficulties.

V. Long-Term Commitment: sometimes it appears that efforts with video/film in the digital world do have no clear business models or being completely unpredictable. It’s true there are often very short time spans or anything appears fast-paced but it’s also true that successful format development often needs a lot of time.

The conclusion is that it’s always better to be active rather than waiting for what is happening.

This was about scratching the surface. In the blog section of Endurance Entertainment GmbH more will come up about Film and the digital age hopefully helping professionals as interested people.

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USER CASE: LOCAL FOG VOLUME AND EASY FOG FOR CREATING A CINEMATIC SCENE WITH UE 5.4

After seeing another excellent tutorial from Winbush on YT about the Local Fog Volume in Unreal Engine 5.4. an idea for a short movie scene emerged. A journey embarked with interesting discoveries and led to a workflow that might be interesting for those who are not full-time professionals with UE5 or use Unreal Engine for previsualization or other tasks:

LEARN HOW TO USE NEW FEATURES IN A TEST PROJECT

The local fog volume is a big improvement and is easy to use. (To see how it works check out the documentation by Unreal engine and watch Jonathan Winbush’s tutorial Local Fog Made Easy. You might also want to follow Tim Hobson on X for updates).

However, I was too bold when immediately inserting the local fog volume into an existing project. I immediately ran into issues: In the rendered movie scene artefacts and banding appeared. The local fog volume looked more like an onion with several layers. What happened: The project was a night scene and I was strongly interested in the emissive fog feature. This is a fantastic feature and I immediately had this vision of the glowing blueish fog from John Carpenter’s legendary. What I did was push the features to the extreme without understanding exactly what I was doing. After a while, I understood I had to step back from the idea to realize the creative vision I had in my mind in the first place.

The key is to understand what you are doing.

The local fog volume in Unreal Engine 5.4

How do we get there?

The way to better results was to reduce the parameters and reduce the environment where a hundred factors like a post-process volume could interfere with performance and result. Have a free space without a lot of extra elements that demand constant adjusting. Therefore I created a test project. In this project, the local fog volume was the prominent actor. I used a few things like a very simplified terrain and later UE mannequins and dancing Mixamo 3d characters to have some elements to play with. They helped to get a feeling for the dimensions and behavior of the local fog volume in certain circumstances.

The test project helped to better understand the local fog volume: camera movements affect the performance, which makes it different from working with other fog elements such as fog cards and exponential high fog. Moving closer can create these artifacts such as banding effects in certain circumstances. The scene was pretty dark, which made it of course more likely to have these effects rather than in a bright environment. But it is the extreme situations that tell us about the behavior of the engine.

An extreme banding effect – it only occurs if settings are pushed to the limit.

An important point was to set the scalability to cinematic to see these banding effects. Otherwise, they appear in the rendered video which causes a lot of extra work.

Again these experiences might make the professional smile but here we have a good chance to make Unreal more accessible for filmmakers who have less experience with Unreal Engine.

The result was that local fog volume is exciting particularly the emissive fog holds a lot of potential. Of course, there is a limitation: There is no structure inside the fog as is possible in Blender. Furthermore, the local fog volumes appear roughly in the shape of a sphere. There are no other shapes (cube etc.) possible out of the box.

EASY FOG

Here William Faucher’s Easy Fog (Epic Games Marketplace) comes in handy: These blueprint fog cards are an exciting and convincing tool to build realistic scenes with fog. Easy fog allows for shrouds of mist and an endless variety of scenes. It has a lot of inbuilt options and is designed for a realistic impression. The only thing important to keep in mind is that Easy Fog is a 2d card not 3d as the local fog volume. We need to keep this in mind if there are camera movements involved which for example surround a mountain peak and the camera flies a 180 or more circle.

FURTHER OPTIONS

Of course, there are a couple of additional options to make fog in the scene more differentiated and realistic. One option is a media plate and importing a fog layer as EXR with an alpha channel into the scene. A good tutorial by Winbush is here. There are also numerous plugins as weather systems which could add a lot of atmosphere and additional components to the scene.

Nevertheless, Easy Fog and Local Fog Volumes give us a great starting point. It allows us to create easily an eery scene with glowing fog on a sea surface:

Still, I think even with our sophisticated digital effects nothing matches John Carpenter’s scary scenes with the real fog creeping into Antonio Bay.

Carpenter’s team used fog machines and smart effects. One of the great achievements was the real eerieness and otherworldliness of the fog in John Carpenter’s movie. Originally more a cosmic horror story rather than the ghost story it became when Carpenter reworked the movie, the fog had to be something of a living creature. Tommy Lee Wallace, production designer and editor, and director of photography Dean Cundey talked in the Making of THE FOG about the challenges to make the fog convincing: In the movie the fog moves and entangles houses and streets. A lot of creativity was involved in building a stage where the fog could move around a model which was later combined with pictures of houses and streets. Compared to our days they mastered incredible challenges to make this convincing. And they had only a 1.1 million US Dollar budget.

The director avoided the typical cheesy dry ice look of old Hammer movies even though dry ice was involved. Smart filmmaking made the fog so scary. For example, Carpenter shot a scene backward to get the desired effect. A challenge at that time since the actor wasn’t allowed to blink.

Where are we today?

We might not want to go back to the old days but a blend of today’s techniques and real practical effects might lead to the best result in a movie scene.

The video below was created completely in Unreal Engine 5.4. it is showing some glowing fog with emissive fog. It’s a starting point. Will local volume fog in Unreal work as a creepy living thing too? A future challenge. Studying older techniques might inspire today’s creation in the fantastic evolving universe of Unreal Engine.

Peter Engelmann, September 11, 2024