Friday, February 19th, 2016 by Nadine Obst
The director Marco Valerio Baldi Pergami Belluzzi started this project in 2013 with the will of creating a short film rich in visual effects. The movie tells a story about dissolution and resurrection, a story about a destroyed theater which must come back alive. It was created in collaboration with ResetVFX and Justeleven. Yuri Silvestri from the agency Justeleven, specialized in VFX and post-production, took the time to give us an insight into working on this stunning art piece.
Justeleven has worked on this project for several months as the task was to rebuild two opposite versions of the interior look of the theater. At first, it should seem as fallen into ruins and worn down by time and war. Afterward it returns from the ashes and shines like it has just been newly built. Yuri told us: "The biggest challenge was having to split the scenes into different parts in order to have memory crashes. The theater has been divided into sections, each containing a sector (the auditorium chairs, the gallery, the balcony, the stage etc.) and we had to handle many scenes and many render passes. The theater then had to be reassembled during the compositing process."
The frames were rendered at 2k resolution to allow the screening of the short in cinemas. Consequently, the rendering process was very slow both for the high resolution and the high number of polygons in the scenes. The average render time for each frame was about 2 hours working with a double processor Xeon PC and 18 GB RAM, and they had to render 3200 frames. "Thanks to RebusFarm we managed to render in a few days what we would have done in at least two months using our own facilities."
They used Autodesk Maya to model and animate. Renders were made with Mental Ray. The render passes were delivered to the Reset VFX for the compositing process in Nuke. But check the breakdown yourself.
Justeleven Srl is specialized in VFX and post-production. It was founded in Rome by Corrado Ficarelli and Matteo Loi as well as Yuri Silvestri in 2005. For some of the CG scenes of this short movie they´ve worked with Marco Mazzelli and Giuseppe Providenti, co-founders of ResetVFX srl based in Rome, Italy.
