Geon's Journey on Gulliver's Travels

Shot 5: The Kiss band characters were shot on green screen and Gulliver shot was done in the media room. The hair key of the 'Kiss band' characters were pretty straight forward but the smoke required animated key to match the animating luminance of the smoke. To maintain the details around the hair and motion blur while blending the plates a complex light wrap was used and frame by frame lighting match was required for a seamless integration.

Shot 6: This is another example of scale and dimensions where Jack Black looks like he is talking to the miniature person. Horatio, the Lilliputian was shot on a green screen and blue base with detailing added later. The sequence had about 30 shots with different camera angles, and raised filtering issues when it came to detailing the scaled down Horatio character; maintaining the original sharpness and highlights and blending it into the shot was a task in itself.  Matching the eye line and depth of field along with volume preservation was challenging. Matte painting was done to create the BG extension and replacement.

Shot 7: This is a beautiful example of visual enhancement all the way, where the impression of all of them in the sun was accentuated by adding the shadows. Two factors were critical here. Getting the dimension of the shadow for every individual was important. What was even more crucial is to maintain the angles in which the shadow fell on the ground.  Having just four days allotted for this shot, rotomation was ruled out and the team had to execute the sequence using the traditional way of rotoscoping the characters and warping them and by adding shadows on the ground.

Shot 8: This shot is similar to Shot 1 where visual enhancement was added keeping frame by frame in mind. The surreal look of the shot was achieved only because of the balance achieved in terms of how clear and consistent the background is, matching the grains all the way. Using the matte painted sharpened BG, the team extracted matte by channel separation and luminance key; maintaining the original BG color, light and shading throughout the sequence. The Lilliputian torches were added later as per the references. Matching and maintaining the luminance of torches across the shots was time consuming.

As a team, Geon would like to thank 20th Century Fox, Jim Rygiel, Cari Thomas and especially Ellen Somers for giving them the opportunity to work on such an interesting project and guiding them from time to time.

Credits:

VFX Supervisor: Madhu Sudhanan

VFX Producer: Asmita Bharrati

Compositing: Chinmay Das, G Shyam, Kumar Abhishek, Sarang Deshpande, Chetan Gaur, Mohammad Ghouse, Devrishi Chatterjee, Lavan Prakashan, Bhaskar Goswami, Shakthivel. I, Balasaheb Bothe, Abhilash Nanda

Rotoscopy: Rahul Galwankar, Harendra Singh, Novia Vaz, Abhijith CT, Amit Kate, Satyajeet Churi, Sohil Patel

CG: Ajay Singh, Vikas Sawlani, Sendhil Vardharajan, Bernard Alphonse, Ramesh Sahaya

Matte Paint: Balu Bhalerao, Ravindra Mahajan, Paresh Patil, Santosh Keshari, Kiran Gulgule

Production Coordinator: Ameya Chitnis

Matchmove: Parag Patel, Vishal Bengare

IT: Sudhakar Reddy, Navdeep Wadhwa