http://www.animationxpress.com/index.php?file=story&id=36191
Pixion with its UK counterpart Molinare has contributed to the VFX of the Oscar winning film ‘The King‘s Speech‘.
The VFX for the film was provided by Molinare, Division of Pixion based in London. The studio delivered their work within a very short time frame with the help of their teams working in Bandra (Mumbai) and London. Viral Thakkar, Head of Computer Graphics, Pixion Studio shares, "Molinare was one of the chosen VFX facilities for Tom Hooper‘s previous film, ‘The Damned United‘. It established a good working relationship with Tom on that feature film, and so was delighted to secure The King‘s Speech."
For ‘The King‘s Speech‘ the studio worked for some key shots. The 27 second shot of ‘The Inaugural Speech‘ in the film was shot while the camera was steady and had severe amount of camera tracking and masking. While the background was made up of full scale 3D environment, Lead Compositor, Nik Martin from Molinaire carried out pre-visualization to execute this shot using Nuke compositing software, to block the layouts. With this, the data was transferred into a CGI software Autodesk‘s XSI where lighting was setup for the CG characters, cars and other assets in the scene.
Another scene that the studio calls ‘All Rise for the King‘ had multiple layers that consisted of live action plates, along with the various composition plates that were later merged at the studio in London. The studio expressed that it was a difficult task for Pixion, masking and tracking the moving camera since they had to show the building which was a CG model and had executed the shot as seamless.
In the climax scene where the royal family is shown waving to the people from their balcony; the background was covered using chroma backdrops, as the whole balcony had to be recreated in CG using XSI. Pixion also showed crowd multiplication for a particular scene using XSI to generate the crowd where after the third row there were no people but the CGI characters to demonstrate crowd.
Viral adds, "The challenge for the VFX team was that the film was obviously shot in modern London, meaning a huge amount of modern objects needed to be removed. Pixion has mirrored a very successful workflow from Molinare and hence compasses the capability to cater any Hollywood project."
Around 15 people from Pixion studio were working for this film. Pixion is currently working on Bollywood projects like Thank you and Double Dhamaal.