The Chemical Brothers: “Wide Open”

Earlier this year at Tokyo Demo Fest 2016, we were honored with the presence of Solid Angle‘s founder, Marcos Fajardo, who did a long presentation of the Arnold renderer. Various examples of productions that involved Arnold were included, like captures from Iron Man or Elysium, but between those blockbusters one production in particular held my attention.

It was a long shot of a dancer turning limb after limb into a lattice body while performing. That film is in fact the music video of the song “Wide Open”, by the Chemical Brothers, and directed by Dom&Nic. It is a brilliant piece of technical and artistic work, that I can only recommend to watch.

Some of the details of the creation are shared in an article by the excellent fxguide, as well as in this interview for Solid Angle, like for example how they dealt with the challenges posed by a single long shot under varying natural light. Finally, there is this behind the scenes video from the studio, The Mill:

The rendering tools in the film industry

Here is a list of articles published by fxguide, giving fascinating insights into the tools used by the film industry in terms of rendering.

  • Ben Snow: the evolution of ILM’s lighting tools (January 2011)
    A presentation of the evolution of the technology and tools used at Industrial Light and Magic, over the course of the years and movies, from the mid-90s to nowadays.
  • Monsters University: rendering physically based monsters (June 2013)
  • The Art of Rendering (April 2012)
    A description of the different techniques used in high end rendering and the major engines.
  • The State of Rendering (July 2013): part 1, part 2
    A lengthy overview of the state of the art in high end rendering, comparing the different tools and rendering solutions available, their approach and design choices, strengths and weaknesses as well as the consequences in terms of quality, scalability and render time.

(Brace yourselves for the massive tag list hereafter.)