Those lenses were also never designed for a cinema environment, so you get all kinds of crazy flare. Where a photographer would have adjusted the lens board and the sensor plane to control perspective or focus, we were abusing those powers by manipulating them live to create really soft, crazy distortion over here and super sharp imagery over there and then moving it during the shot. We spent about a year experimenting with a large format bellows camera with Fuji optics, basically a four by five film camera with a large format lens, which has a massive image area, and we actually motorized it. The setup had a 10-foot motion control track on the floor supporting the Voyager on a pedestal so it could move around the space and revolve. Dominick Pietrzak also pitched in with programming on top of being an imaging technical guru and colorist. Also, Angela Abel, who’s our Head of Camera Department and helped me build all of this setup and run it day after day and program it.
She supported this as an R&D investment from the start. Our goal is to show a bit of a narrative, but also a graphic design piece where you might look at it and wonder, is that a render? Is that a motion graphic, or is that a practical object?ī&a: How did you then set up your shooting space to capture this? Tell me about both the motion control unit and the large format animation camera.Ĭhristopher Webb: I have to give a massive thanks to Graceann Dorse, my business partner who runs this place and helps to make all this possible. Ultimately we needed something just to demonstrate the filming process we were working with. A lot of our work is design and graphics driven, which is quite minimalist, boiled down.
I also thought of it as a graphical engine. I took every fun thing I like from movies and just reduced it. I was thinking of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture space stations, and a thing from Battlestar Galactica called the Light Ship. It’s got a very reductive, minimalist vibe. I thought, this has got a bit of a TRON vibe. I guess that was always in the back of your mind as well.Ĭhristopher Webb: Oh, yeah. It has its own lighting built in and a motor inside it so it can rotate about its own center point from within.ī&a: It also looks a little like a spaceship or a space station.
It’s a plasticized foam core, so it’s quick to work with and not terribly heavy. The model ended up being almost three feet long. And so I tried to put those pieces on in a rhythm and scale that meant they would respond to lighting. I wanted very absorbent black with a little bit of a sheen for lighting, and I wanted semi-gloss white. Christopher Webb at FX WRX’s studio space with the Voyager set-up.
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