2012: interview of Goran Pavles

[Swoop]

The new end of the world movie of Roland Emmerich, 2012, is just released today.
It's a whole vfx festival which has more than 10 vfx houses implicated and that was necessary to deliver more than 1300 shots !!

Among the studios, there is Double Negative who did the Vatican and the Yellowstone sequences and there is also Uncharted Territory(founded by Volker Engel, a long time collaborator of Roland Emmerich)who did the destruction of Los Angeles and the fly over Las Vegas(almost 400 shots). Scanline VFX did the huge wave submerging theHimalaya.



Here is an interview of Goran Pavles who has worked on the show as TD artist at Uncharted Territory:

- Can you introduce yourself ??
Somy name is Goran Pavles. I'm 25 years old, born in Croatia and livingin Basel for 18 years or so. Started CG five years ago as a hobbyist.Working as accountant at that time.

- What was your job position on 2012 ??
Iwas one of the many VFX Artist at Uncharted Territory. You can call itTD Artist. We all did get pretty tricky tasks and enough time to getthem look how the supervisors want. So everybody was developing his ownlittle tools and setups.



- On which sequence have you worked on ??
UnchartedTerritory did the L.A.-Limousine sequence. From the point where theearthquake starts, up to the point where they arrive at the SantaMonica airport.
Second Sequence was the Vegas one. There I had just a little part to do.

- 2012 is a big massive destruction movie, what was the biggest challenge on it ??
Ithink the biggest challenge was to fill so much different things intothose full CG images, that they do look believable. For us Artists itwas kinda "easy", we got a task and had to solve it. I think to manageall those shots, to keep continuity, and match all the elements of eachframe to work together is the hardest thing. There are unbelievablymany elements in each shot. There were 3 people dedicated just to keepoverview of who is doing what, what has he to do next and keepeverything updated.
For me personally the challenge was to finda more or less procedural way of working, so I could adapt thesimulations to the supervisors wishes. I had this huge ground elementthat was breaking, and it was not possible to simulate it in one go. Atleast not in reasonable time. Splitting it up into many smallersimulations, but still keep it work together was kind of a tricky thing.



- Did you have encounter some difficulies and how did you achieved them ??
Hell Yea, Every day!
Thereare always unexpected things that slowdown your work flow and ask forcrazy workarounds. I was lucky that I knew a little scripting. So Icould write something that helped me out. We were also a lot of artistscoming from different softwares with different experiences. So therewas always somebody to ask and who knew how to solve a problem or justhad an idea how to workaround it.

- Which softwares did you used ??
We used 3ds Max 2008, Thinking Particles, FumeFx, Final Render and Nuke.

- How long did you work on this show ??
I've been 6 months over there

- What was your best memory ??
Ithink the whole thing is a great memory. The working climate was reallynice. Uncharted is a great company that does not try to save each centand creates a very nice working atmosphere. Also to see this otherworld on the other side of this big blue is very interesting. It's onething to go there for a week and see the interesting tourist parts. Buta whole other thing to stay there for a longer time and live there theway Americans do and see the good and bad parts of their system.



- What's your next project ??
No further plans at the moment.

- Thanks a lot for your time !

You can see a long movie clip of the destruction of Los Angeles in HD, here !!!

-SwissmadeVFX