My VFX Supervisor kit

Posted on January 31st, 2008 in Working in CG, Movies by Marc Bourbonnais

Before going to this 30-day shoot that will take me to next March, I had to get my gear set up. I have to mention this post by Zoic’s Andrew Orlof. It is by far the most elaborate description of what a VFX Supervisor’s on-set luggage should contain, with all the gear neatly pictured (check out the link on Flickr). My own stuff is not as complete and I will not go into such details; so go read it. Now.

As for me, I too got a Tamrac bag, as a backpack because I’ll be moving quite a bit during the month to different set locations and between shooting units. I have another smaller pack for my laptop and documents. Here’s what my main bag looks like, minus the camera of course.

 vfx_gear.jpg

What I have in it:

  • Multi-colored hi-liters
  • Pencils, pens, sharpies, markers, post-its
  • Colored tapes, vinyl and masking
  • Colored spots, markers, single and double-sided tape
  • 18% grey card
  • Short (16’) and long (100’) measuring tape
  • Chrome ball bearing
  • Gloves
  • Flashlight
  • Memory cards, chargers, batteries and extra batteries
  • Tie-wraps and Velcro wraps
  • Camera, lenses, mini-tripod, remote control
  • First aid kit

 In my laptop pack I have

  • USB keys and card reader
  • Extension cord and splitter
  • Ethernet cable
  • Ethernet crossover cable
  • USB TV tuner with cable adapters
  • The current movie script
  • The current call sheet, crew list, schedule, tec survey
  • Our complete VFX bid
... Related posts :
...New VES members in Montreal
...Éric Clément, SFX artist at Modus
...Yanick Wilisky, co-founder of Modus FX

2 Responses to 'My VFX Supervisor kit'

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  1. Chris Johnson said,

    on 2008-02-01 at 11.30 am

    Marc,

    Maybe some people would be curious about you and your companies decisions on lighting and rendering and reference on set as it pertains to that. As I’m in commercials, and rendering tends to be the last thing to tackle, it’s usually the one that has to be the most flexible. We always start shooting HDRI. However as schedules get cut and budgets and time disappears, sacrifices in lieu of time are made. What kind of commitments have you guys made to your pipeline for rendering and how do you light things? What reference do you take on set…what have you guys decided to render with? What about the dreaded Motion Blur, 2D or 3D proprietary?

  2. Marc Bourbonnais said,

    on 2008-02-01 at 5.37 pm

    Hi Chris,

    Since we’re mostly dealing with live action movies, a good deal of our output will have to be photoreal. We’re still setting up the shop as projects are coming our way, and we’re still very flexible depending on the desired output.

    For this show I’m on, the setting is sci-fi / fantasy, so a lot of the work is heavy on the design and not so much on the “invisible VFX”. We do not have a lot of CG characters to make, so on-set references is not a major issue. In fact most of the CG stuff will have to match live props, so getting reference material will be easy. I’ve got a trusty grey sphere I just made up in my hotel room (more on this later) to help out with the lighting just in case. Of course I also have a chrome sphere and I am ready to go full HDR with multiple stop RAW files, but the shooting schedule is really tight and I’ll have to run around between first and second unit.

    As for your software question, we are building our 3D pipeline with XSI, so mental ray is our current rendering choice.

    Hope this answers your question Chris!

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