Wellington: The New VFX Epicentre

Wellington: The New VFX Epicentre

Unless you’re actively engaged in the entertainment industry, most people wouldn’t rate New Zealand’s contribution to the industry as anything significant beyond the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit films. The reality, however, is far more impressive, with a number of world leading facilities across gaming, television, visual effects, and emerging technologies – such as Weta, Pukeko Films, Propeller Studios, Park Road Productions, and game producer, PikPok – based out of the small capital city of Wellington, and nestled against a dramatic backdrop of rolling mountain ranges and the stunning Wellington Harbour. In fact, Wellington could be considered the quiet achiever in the world of digital content.

Having recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, Wellington’s AnimFX Conference offers a prime example of the city’s creative diversity, showcasing an ability to nurture both innovation and talent within a microcosm of art deco theatres, high tech presentations, and a surprisingly hands-on talent pool drawn from major international studios, pre and post production houses, and independent start-ups. Presented primarily as a visual effects conference, AnimFX in fact reaches far beyond pushing pixels into 35mm frames. Instead, the two-day conference offers a cohesive think tank ecosystem inclusive of the film, television, gaming and technology sectors that allows both students and professionals to interact with a number of local and international guest speakers with an eye to navigating the future of traditional and digital media and how best to harness the emerging technology currently knocking at our doors.

This year, one of the more pressing themes revolved around the advancements of both Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, or AR and VR if you will, and its progressive encroachment into the entertainment industry. But while the Oculus Rift device, probably the best known VR kit in the marketplace, has begun spawning various copycat consumer products from the likes of Samsung and Sony, its validation as a legitimate entertainment device remains shackled by the limitations of producing content that can live up to consumer expectations, which have emerged thanks to the near flawless visual effects found in mainstream cinema and the real-time rendered environments of the PlayStation4 and X-Box One.

The challenges, however, haven’t gone unanswered, with both Weta Digital and Sony Pictures experimenting with the VR format as a way of extending the theatrical experience of The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies and The Walk into mobile applications. “It sounded like a really cool challenge to do this VR experience,” explains Kevin Baillie, VFX supervisor for Atomic Fiction, who was tasked with not only recreating a virtual New York City, circa 1974, for Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, but also unravelling the complexities of executing a viable virtual reality experience that would engage the audience. “The goal was to put the viewer up on the corner of The World Trade Tower and let them stand on that actual wire. But there were actually a bunch of very separate challenges in creating a compelling VR experience like this, like frame rate, and flickering issues relating to the resolution. How do you make this as awesome as it can be? The visual quality has to look as real as possible. A lot of VR experiences out there lack a little bit of the ‘R’, the Reality portion, in VR.”

But while the current applications of VR and AR within the entertainment industries are being relegated to playful bite sized escapism, Wellington’s virtual infrastructure of dark fibre cabling, massive processing facilities, and an openness to embrace emerging technology, has proven a fertile breeding ground for innovation and resourcefulness. And with VR presenting a new frontier, a number of established and start-up enterprises have begun breaking ground on unexpected applications for the technological concept.

One of the more ambitious ideas comes from the recently founded L2VR, under the guidance of founder, Lance Lones, an actual real life rocket scientist turned innovator whose genius –and we are talking literally, not figuratively – comes complete with an enlightened touch of charismatic madness. “I spend a fair bit of time working on this Virtual Reality camera rig, which will hopefully become this cinematic VR thing,” explains Lones. “The VR buzz has been around for a couple of years, and it was cool because you could see all these issues that hadn’t been solved. It felt an awful lot like graphics that you would have found around fifteen years ago. So I was already becoming interested in the idea of VR, and around that same time, I was in a hotel room and happened to see the TV show, Vikings, and I had this thought, ‘How cool would it be to actually be there, in the middle of all that action?’ The set dressing and the production were really amazing. We knew that we wanted to do the VR thing, but we had no idea what it was going to be or how it would work, but we were like, ‘It sounds cool.’ And it’s just snowballed from there. At the moment, we’re building camera rigs. The first R&D prototype that we have is made up of 25 2K cameras set at increasing degrees and then facing up. We decided not to capture the ground because we figured that there’s going to be a rig there anyway. So we will be experimenting with that for the next few months and seeing what sort of configurations will be best for extracting 3D. We don’t just want to take 360 degree 40K resolution, but we also want to be able to extract 3D out of it. So you’re not stuck right here looking around at just a 2D space.”

But while Lones’ vision presents an exciting array of applications across cinema, television, medicine, and education, he does admit that with every breakthrough that he achieves in his virtual revolution, the emerging technology continues to throw up a number of abstract and practical issues to overcome. “The first footage is reasonably okay,” Lones says. “We’ve had some issues with stitching and pulling the images back together. And the 3D is still a little fuzzy for our liking. But we are making progress, and it’s good fun.”

And it’s thanks to this particular brand of professional attitude that the creative industries of New Zealand, and specifically Wellington, are leading and excelling on a global scale. In part, it’s an abundance of creative and technical talent, but largely it’s a unique collaborative psyche and supportive community spirit, where challenges are just puzzles to solve, and teamwork is a reflection of the community as a whole, not just a department, office, or trademark. Go anywhere in Wellington, from the lobbies of the city’s beautiful art deco theatres, The Roxy or The Embassy, to the city’s exceptional eateries, cafes, or bars – which boast the best locally brewed craft beers that you’ll ever likely experience – and you’re guaranteed to overhear filmmakers chatting with game developers, or designers throwing ideas around with producers. It’s a joyful blend of global accents with the Kiwi inflection front and centre.

And it’s this unique inclusive charm and sense of community, blessed with a digital infrastructure capable of rivalling Silicon Valley, and an abundance of world class talent, that makes AnimFX such a goldmine of innovation and inspiration. Watching high school students brainstorming concepts with Oscar winning visual effects practitioners while award winning game designers explain the importance of protecting your intellectual property to a foreign university student is a truly refreshing experience…especially without any sense of the corporate agenda or professional cynicism that often surrounds these events.

AnimFX is held annually in Wellington, New Zealand during November. For more information on last year’s event, including a list of guest speakers and a wrap up of the two-day conference, visit www.animfxnz.co.nz.